Transformers Test Film #1

Produced by Vimeo user Alexander Vladimirovich Semenov, this short transformers fan film was entirely shot in just two hours on a Canon 550D and a Nikon D5000. Post-production then took him around a month. Enjoy!

[Via Vimeo]

New Norton Ad Campaign Features The Hoff and Dolph Lundgren

I haven’t used Norton security products for home use in years (Anyone here knows if they improved recently?), but even though if I’m not a big fan, I have to admit that the company’s last marketing campaign made me crack a smile. This week, following the same formula as their previous ads, Symantec released 2 new commercials, one featuring David Hasslehoff, and the other one, Dolph Lundgren. Enjoy!



Chattanooga Choo-Choos to Gigabit Broadband

The city of Chattanooga has beaten Google to provide a 1 gigabit broadband service. But while Google is planning to one day offer such services at rates comparable to “regular” broadband, the Chattanooga deal is available today for an eyewatering $350 per month.

The service comes from the publicly owned Chattanooga Electric Power Board and will come through a fiber-optic network. The super speed service (which also comes with enhanced TV, phone and internet services) is part of a longstanding wider project to build a smart electronic grid that manages demand for electricity in the area, for example by better coping with local surges. That project received a major boost with a $111 million grant from the Department of Energy.

All 100,000 homes and businesses in the area will be able to access any of four high-speed packages: 30Mbps for $57.99 a month, 50Mbps for $69.99, 100 Mbps for $139.99 and 1 Gbps for $350. Unlike ADSL broadband, the speeds are for both downloading and uploading.

While it’s fun to daydream about sitting in your bedroom with near-instantaneous downloads, it’s clear that the real target is going to be businesses. If you’ve got 50 employees using computers in an office, the top-tier service will effectively give them all 20Mbps internet connections (provided that they all use it at the same time) for $7 a head per month. That’s not necessarily a positive if they are simply goofing about on YouTube, but for something like a graphic design company it could be a benefit.

Judging by several reports, though, it appears the board isn’t all that sure how much a gigabit service should cost subscribers, so prices may change depending on demand. It certainly appears the top speed package is there mainly because it was technically possible rather than a purely commercial operation.

Earlier this year, Google announced plans to test a 1 gigabit service in several smaller cities. It says it has received applications from “hundreds of communities and hundreds of thousands of individuals.” They include Topeka, Kansas, which officially changed its name to “Google, Kansas” during March, prompting an April Fool’s joke from Google, which claimed to have returned the gesture.

Ninjamoped – 8-Bit Trip [Music Video]

Yep, those are all read Lego pieces, and it took the group about 1,500 hours over 8 months to complete the video. Enjoy!

Holy Crap that’s Awesome: Geek & Gamer Girls Music Video

Yeah, this is another one of those Caligornia Girls parodies… but this one is really, really cool. Apart from starring the four sexy geekettes from Team Unicorn, the video also features a rapping Seth Green, Battlestar Galactica’s Katee Sackhoff, and legendary comic book writer Stan Lee. Check it out:

Journalist publishes the 12,000th draft of history

A tech writer has put together a five-year history of the Iraq war. But James Bridle’s publication does not cover the military conflict: instead it’s a complete record of the Wikipedia page on the topic.

The idea of the project, which Bridle describes as a “historiography”, is to highlight the effects caused by the fact that live web pages can be edited over time, unlike printed materials. Speaking at a design and creativity conference recently he argued that writing and editing of web pages is as much a story as the final page itself.

Wikipedia was the ideal source for such a demonstration as, unlike most sites, it has an accessible complete history of every revision. In this case, there are 12,000 changes which, printed out, make almost 7,000 pages: enough for a twelve-volume set resembling an encyclopedia. (The set isn’t for sale and was used merely as a physical prop.)

Being a complete history, the project doesn’t make value judgments: it covers everything from thoughtful debate about the precise way to word the record of events with disputed accounts to, well, edits such as this:

According to Bridle, Wikipedia acts as a subset of the entire Internet, which in turn is a subset of human culture. He argues that the format of Wikipedia means its shouldn’t be seen as merely a collection of information, but also an insight into the process by which information is collected, verified, disputed and refined. He also puts the case that we should do more to look beyond the mere “facts” of history and discover the viewpoints and debates that led to facts becoming established as the “true” account.

(Images credit: James Bridle via Flickr)