Bing.com/gallery has magnificent photos. The world’s greatest monuments and Nature’s wonders are breathtaking and there is a new one every day, going back to 2009. If you want a new one to show up on your computer screen every day, search on the phrase “Bing Desktop.” It’s a free download.
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Blog.Petflow.com has some of the most remarkable videos we’ve seen. We especially liked the Ukrainian artist using black sand for finger painting; you can find it by Googling “She walked out on stage and blew everyone-away.” In another a fat man gets on the dance floor with his partner and moves as well as anything we’ve seen on “Dancing with the Stars.”
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A little fitness tracker, about the size of a thick quarter, arrived in a package that looked like a spaceship. It was somebody’s really clever idea, and what we’ve noticed over the years is that people who make these clever packages have never tried to open them.
After only a half hour’s work we were able to open the $100 package from the purple planet and inside we discovered an orb. Very fitting. The orb was labeled “Misfit Shine,” a name that might put someone off at first, but we’re dogged.
There were almost no instructions but we finally figured out it was something you wear on a wristband, a necklace or in your sock. The tell-tale clue was there was a pair of socks in the box. From there we were hot.
The Misfit Shine tracks walking, biking, swimming and sleeping. This is a crucial difference from most other fitness trackers: Very few register biking or swimming. And as for sleep, the long struggle to open the box left us exhausted and we hit the sack early. Joy’s sleep pattern was 62 percent “deep sleep,” according to the gadget enhanced socks; twenty-five percent is average. (Earth to Joy: Wake up, Joy.)
The instructions said the Shine disc works with an app in the iTunes App store but we couldn’t find it when we went there. So we Googled it and a link took us straight to the app. (This has been a problem with other apps as well; they don’t show up in the App store but they can be Googled.) You don’t have to carry your iPhone or iPad with you; you only need one of those when you want to check your progress.
Set a fitness goal and you’ll see a trophy image on your chart when you reach it. (We read about a woman so addicted to getting these little prizes on another device that she’d wake up in the middle of the night to climb stairs.) It was nice to get credit for our biking and swimming, something our regular pedometer doesn’t track. Joy ignored the fact that it didn’t count yoga or weight lifting.
All worked well with our iPad Mini, but the device was not compatible with our Android phone, the Samsung Galaxy S3. No radiation worries: It emits less than 1/10,000th of the energy of the average cell phone. In October, Apple is coming out with a new fitness watch, and Withings has one that also tracks your pulse, but the Shine is hard to beat.
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Gadzooks! The first thing Bob thought about while watching the YouTube video on
“Solar Freakin’ Roadways,” was not, “let’s be an investor in this new kind of road,” but
“let’s invest in the Canadian guy who made the video.” Very cool video; nearly 14 million
people have seen it.
The Solar Freakin’ Roadways kickstarter funding campaign at IndieGoGo.com has raised
over $2 million, twice the company’s goal. The company is a husband and wife team, who
met when they were toddlers, and a handful of volunteers.
Nevertheless, the town of Sandpoint, Idaho, population 6835, has contracted with Solar
Roadways for a parking lot outside the town’s visitor center, followed by sidewalks and
train station parking. Click “videos” at Weather.com and search on “Solar Roadways” to see
it. It may be worth a visit to Sandpoint just to see streets that light up at night and in patterns
that can be changed to reflect the traffic, though it’s hard to believe Sandpointe has any traffic.
The panels in Solar Roadways are heated by solar cells, preventing freezing and the
consequent pot holes. So salting in winter would be unnecessary. (Angry protest by
salt spreaders to follow.) If it’s used for driveways, no more shoveling driveways.
(Angry protest from snow-plow truckers to follow.)Each panel has LEDs that can be
programmed to deliver warnings when there’s a deer in the road,
or some other obstruction. Traffic lanes won’t have to be painted, just programmed.
Basketball courts can be changed to hockey in a few seconds.
A cable trench replaces the need for telephone poles or underground cables. Another
trench funnels run-off water into a treatment facility or is treated on the spot, eliminating
a big source of pollution. The roads are strong enough to hold 125 tons at any point and
have enough traction to stop a car from sliding at 80 miles per hour.
If all U.S. roads were solar powered in this manner, they would generate three times as much
electricity as the entire country needs. (Angry protests from utility companies to follow.)
In short, the Solar Freakin’ Roadways is freakin’ awesome, as the video puts it. Joy contributed
$40 to their funding campaign, and will get a cap. (But will we get our own solar powered
parking space, with our name in lights?)
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Factsie.com delivers odd facts. We learned that Adolph Hitler’s nephew
fought for the U.S. in World War II. And that Ghengis Khan killed an estimated
eleven percent of the world’s population. And a guy named Poon Lim, survived
133 days on a raft alone in the ocean by fishing, drinking bird blood and killing a shark
with a jug of water. At least that’s what he told the newspapers.
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ClassicShorts.com has great short stories from great authors, like “Shooting an Elephant”
by George Orwell.
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AcademicEarth.org has free video lectures on a huge range of topics, everything from literature to video game design and systems
engineering, from colleges such as Yale and Oxford.
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Ranker.com has some odd lists, like “46 Celebrities Who Killed People.” Matthew Broderick,
for example, was driving the wrong way on a one-way street in Ireland with his then-girlfriend
Jennifer Grey when they struck and killed a mother and daughter. Grey said she never got
over it, and ended her acting career at age 27. Another list: “25 celebrities you didn’t know
are still alive.” Maureen O’Hara is 93, Dick Van Dyke is 88, Doris Day is 90.
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If you’ve seen the movie “Clash of the Titans” or remember the old TV series “Gumby,” you’ve seen a kind of animation called “stop motion.” In stop-motion, you make a movie frame by frame, moving the objects a tiny fraction each time. There’s new software out for Mac users who want to make their own animations.
“iStopMotion 3.6,” $50 from Boinx Software, now works with DSLR cameras from Nikon and Canon. It now has a feature called “onion skinning” which allows animators to make tiny adjustments before capturing a frame. Other features let animators use another movie as a guide to improve animation, make a scene look like a miniature, or put an actor into an animated scene. The “Stop Motion Handbook,” by Craig Lauridsen, $25, shows you how to do it.
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For reading books and articles, or watching videos, Joy loves to hold her iPad. But if the urge to write a long letter strikes, there’s nothing like a physical keyboard.
Our favorite is the new “Wired Keyboard for iOS devices,” $60 from Griffin Technology. It’s about three-fourths the size of a regular computer keyboard, but still easy to type on and small enough to carry in a tote bag. We found we had to press a little harder than usual to make capital letters, but otherwise it felt as good as other keyboards.
Having a wired keyboard can be better than going wireless. You don’t have to pair it with your Bluetooth connection, or worry about batteries. It’s especially handy in classrooms where new rules require the use of keyboards not connected by Bluetooth during standarized tests. It’s hard to believe but some people might use a wireless connection to get the answers from an outside source.
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