As if it weren’t cold enough already at the moment, some friends and family gathered last week at my brother’s place to make ice cream. Not being advocates of the Slow Food movement, though, we did it with liquid nitrogen…
Category Archives: Videos
I’m on a horse
The real interest of the Superbowl is not, for me, the sport, but the creativity that goes into the phenomenally expensive commercial breaks. The most famous example is Apple’s 1984 ad that introduced the Macintosh, but there have been many others.
This year’s most talked-about ad was from Old Spice, and I think it’s brilliant.
These days one immediately assumes that it’s all green-screen and CGI, but in fact there is almost no ‘trickery’. Isaiah Mustafa maintains this running commentary while bits of scenery move around him, and it’s a trolley, on which he sits part-way through, that transports him and deposits him on the horse. And he maintains this focus even though they eventually used something like the 57th take…
Leo Laporte interviewed the guys behind it, if you’d like to find out more….
Up periscope
As a small puppy, our English Cocker Spaniel, Tilly, used to like running through long grass, and occasionally through crops.
But the grasses grew faster than she did, which left her with a navigation problem…
Literal Videos
Many thanks to Andy Stanford-Clark for getting me searching YouTube for ‘literal music videos’. Some of them are brilliant, and your appreciation for each one probably depends on your generation… Here’s the best I’ve seen so far. Bonnie Tyler tells it like it is. Update 2012: you can now find it here . Here’s Penny Lane, for even older readers…
Telling it like it is…
I loved the Homeopathic A&E sketch from Mitchell & Webb. Dara O’Briain makes some similar points rather nicely here:
The joy of vortex
Know what a vortex cannon is? I didn’t, but it sounded interesting when my friend @Phil_Boswell mentioned it on Twitter.
So I did a search and found this on YouTube:
Fun, eh? But…call that a cannon? This is a cannon:
Homeopathic A&E
Another lovely Mitchell & Webb skit.
Thanks to Ian Yorston for the link.
Invisible drum kit
Hadn’t seen this one before. Rowan Atkinson is just superb.
From Concepts to Companies
A couple of weeks ago I gave a talk entitled ‘From Concepts to Companies’ at a conference in Katowice, Poland, organised by the Polish Information Processing Society (PIPS) and sponsored by DisplayLink. The talks are now online here – mine is below, in case you’re interested.
You can right-click here to download a smallish MPEG4 (H.264) version.
FPV
On the one occasion, many years ago, when I tried to fly a radio-controlled plane, I found it extremely difficult. It was OK when the plane was flying away from me, but when I wanted to bring it back towards me, the left/right controls were reversed. It was most counter-intuitive and the landing was far from elegant.
Recently, though, I’ve been thinking that it ought to be straightforward to mount a wireless camera on a small plane. A view of the transmitted video signal ought to let you fly the thing as if you were sitting in the cockpit of a real plane, something I know how to do.
I haven’t, alas, had a chance to try it, but it turns out that lots of other people have. It’s called FPV (for ‘First-Person View) and there’s lots more about it on this site. Here’s a nice example:
Understanding subprime mortgages and strategic investment vehicles
John Bird and John Fortune explain what’s being going on in the world of finance for the South Bank Show…
🙂
Many thanks to Hap for the link
LucidTouch
A nice demo of a new interaction mode. I can’t quite decide how useful it is yet, but they get points for innovation! (And for a good video)
Thanks to Claes-Fredrik for the link.
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