Entirely shot on a RED camera for a USC graduate thesis, Turbo is a high-adrenaline 20-minute short featuring Hugo Park (Justin Chon, Twilight), a misspent youth whose only outlet for angst is a 4D fighting video game called “Super Turbo Arena”. Check out the official trailer below.
[Via Gizmodo]
AT&T is trialling sales of a netbook for just $49.99. But the catch is that buyers must subscribe to a two-year internet plan which may wipe out any savings.
The deal is currently only available in Philadelphia and Atlanta but will be expanded if it’s a success. The lowest price machine offered is the Acer Aspire One, which comes with 1GB of memory and a 160GB drive – not too shoddy for an ultra-portable machine. Under the deal, it will cost $49.99, a $400 saving on the regular price charged by AT&T.
The deal is only available to customers who sign up for at least two years to a data plan. The cheapest available is $59.99, so you will be paying more for your first month’s service than for the machine itself. The way the numbers add up, you’d only be saving cash if you couldn’t find an equivalent or better data plan elsewhere for $43 a month or less.
It’s also worth noting this data plan isn’t particularly generous. It offers both a home DSL connection and mobile broadband. However, the DSL is only 768k, which barely qualifies as ‘broadband’. The mobile connection limits users to 200MB of data a month, meaning you won’t be able to do much more than occasionally check e-mails on the move.
Another option is to get a mobile data only plan (no DSL connection) which gives you a more generous 5GB data allowance, though that’s still not enough if you regularly stream video or play online games. (Insert “World of Warcraft/Never leaving the house” gag here.) This has the same monthly cost but puts the purchase price up to $99.99.
Such pricing plans are a growing, if fledgling trend. Radio Shack already runs a similar deal, with Verizon apparently working on such offers. At the moment it’s tough to see how most people would benefit: it might be useful for people on tight budgets who can’t afford to pay the full cost of a netbook upfront, though in those cases sixty bucks a month for a data plan might also be too high.
It might make sense to combine such deals with cellphone service so that users pay a single charge for both phone and netbook usage. However, the risk there is that anyone on more expensive phone packages probably has such a feature-packed smartphone that a netbook becomes virtually redundant.
Produced by Reza Rasoli, Greg Gunn, and Casey Hunt, Humans! is a 60 second global awareness PSA sensationalizing the excessive, all-consuming nature of the human race. Check it out below.
[Via Neatorama]
By Casey Lynn
Contributing Writer, [GAS]
One more April Fool’s joke to add to the fray – I had a feeling that a few of you might enjoy a good pun as much as I do. Or, you know, tea. Because I do love tea. And QWERTY. It’s just fun to type.
Online tea store Narien introduced for a limited April 1 engagement a line of NovelTeas, featuring QwerTea, “an eco-friendly blend made with black tea and 100% recycled keyboards.” Also in stock: Financial SecuriTea (black tea and loose change), CaviTea (black tea, chocolate chips, gummy bears, caramel… etc.), ElasticiTea (black tea and rubber bands), and ElectriciTea (black tea and battery cells).
Unfortunately, they all appear to be out of stock. Darn. So might I make a few suggestions?
– InsaniTea (black tea and anti-psychotics)
– UniversiTea (black tea, beer, and $500 worth of texbooks)
– AcidiTea (black tea and litmus paper)
– ChastiTea (black tea and a copy of World of Warcraft)
– InteroperabiliTea (black tea designed to be spilled on your iPod)
More ideas, dear readers? This could be big business!
As for the rest of the site’s wares, I’ve never tried their tea so I can’t vouch for it, but in general I’m a big fan of Dragonwell. I drink a lot of loose tea and I’ve kind of been wanting one of these lately.
As all you regulars should know by now, we’re really suckers for well made 3D animated movies here at GAS. So when French filmmaker and longtime GAS reader Sebastien Laban wrote to us today to tell us about his upcomming 3D flick, Meet Meline, we just had to share it with you guys.
After two years of intense work on an independent 3D animated short film called “Meet Meline”, Virginie GOYONS and Sebastien LABAN made the teaser/trailer to show you a little bit more of the short film. We’re proud to present you the 46-seconds-video with the official music of “Meet Meline”, composed by Guillaume ROUSSEL!
As soon as they’re done with the full 6-minute movie, we’ll be sure to post it here on gas!
Merci Sebastien!
Why has no one thought of this before? WANT!
This high-quality sleeping bag looks just like a Tauntaun, complete with saddle, internal intestines and glowing lightsaber zipper pull. Now when your kids tell you their favorite Star Wars movie is “Attack of the Clones” you can nestle the wee-ones snug in simulated Tauntaun fur while regaling them with the amazing tale of “Empire Strikes Back”.
Use the glowing lightsaber zipper pull on the Tauntaun sleeping bag to illustrate how Han Solo saved Luke Skywalker from certain death in the freezing climate of Hoth by slitting open the belly of a dead Tauntaun and placing Luke inside the stinking (but warm) carcass. If your kids don’t change their tune on which Star Wars film is the greatest ever, you can do your best Jar Jar impression until they repent.
I, of course, clicked the BUY NOW button. Color me disappointed. Like the Personal Soundtrack T-Shirt from last year, this will be the in-demand product Think Geek will actually have to produce sooner or later.
[via Unique Daily]
We’ve shown you Woz on his disastrous first week on Dancing with the Stars, now here’s Steve on his second and third week, dancing the Quick Step and the Samba respectively.
Produced by Reza Dolatabadi as a graduate film project, Khoda took over two years to complete and was made using 6,000 different paintings shown at 20 frames per second.
What if you watch a film and whenever you pause it, you face a painting? This idea inspired Reza Dolatabadi to make Khoda. Over 6000 paintings were painstakingly produced during two years to create a five minutes film that would meet high personal standards. Khoda is a psychological thriller; a student project which was seen as a ‘mission impossible’ by many people but eventually proved possible!
[Vimeo]
Time travel can be confusing. Every time someone steps into a time machine, it changes everything. However, that can be convenient for writers piecing together new movies -it explains every continuity goof and every great new idea that would be hard to explain otherwise. io9 lays out ten different timelines that work in one part or another of the Terminator movie series (and TV show).
I’ve mulled it over some more, and I still believe there has to be a timeline where someone other than Kyle Reese is John Connor’s father. When The Terminator was a standalone movie, you could read it either way. Either there’s a circular causality, where Kyle is “always” John Connor’s father, or Kyle’s time travel creates a new branch. But Terminator 2 pretty much establishes that time travel always creates new branches, because there’s no fate but what we make. And the Connors, with their friendly T-800, are able to stop or at least delay Skynet. But of course, your mileage, even backwards and forwards through time, may vary.
Whether they make complete sense or not, reading these may help prepare you for Terminator Salvation.
I use SpiceWorks 3.5 to document and manage a lot of functions on my network. The best part about it is that it is free! I don’t know why so many administrators refuse to document their networks.
Maybe they feel it helps their job security, but in the long run, this can become quite a problem. You need to have documentation on all your systems and equipment — just in case!
Spiceworks will help you document, map and find out about what is going on with your network. I am talking about drives with no space left, full event logs, security issues and much much more!