Geek Chic

Ok Lenovo.  Let’s talk.  Man to company.

I used to be a huge ThinkPad fan.  Huge.  My parents worked for IBM for a bunch of years and we used to have at least 3 ThinkPads floating around the house at any given time.  They were great, tough little machines.

I had my doubts when IBM sold their ThinkPad line to you.  On one hand, IBM’s quality control had shrunk to the point where it was basically non-existent, so I couldn’t imagine another company doing worse than Big Blue already was.  Still, I was skpetical enough to start buying Mac.

But I was curious enough to keep my eye on you.  And you certainly did come out with some little gems. Your X Tablet series with the pivoting screen that turns into a writing tablet? Genius.  Really, you outdid yourself with that one.  My brother has had one since they came out and loves it.

So what’s with the W700DS?  What the heck is that?

(more…)

Have you ever watched The Prisoner?  If yes, you’re going to love this.  If not, you’d better get cracking!  It’s amazing.  And A&E now has all of the 17 episodes up online.

Checkit:

And you can read more about it on VSL

I love The Onion:

My favorite part is the end:

“Thank you for that, Jeff.  It remains to be seen whether the MacBook Wheel will catch on in the business world where people use computers for actual work and not just dicking around.”

I’m not sure when this is from, but it’s hilarious:

Sounds like a Monty Python sketch…

via failblog

This is Dick Annegarn’s new music video directed by Michel Gondry.  And like all of Gondry’s work, it’s amazing.  And I have almost no clue how he did it:

I mean, I can guess.  It looks like stop action. But did Gondry use some sort of hocus pocus to make it look like he has stop action from what looks like several weeks of shooting?  And that he pieced it all together in the editing room?  Or is there some sort of trick?

(more…)

I just came across a couple of pages for The Arcade Fire that really impressed me.  Both are music videos (Black Mirror and Neon Bible from their Neon Bible album), but are completely interactive. And pretty amazing.

For Black Mirror, you can turn on and off the various song tracks as the music is playing, so you can hear what the song sounds like with, say, just piano and vocals.  I’ve seen stuff like this before, but the implementation is really good.

The second one is what blew me away, especially having been coding in Flash a lot more lately.  For Neon Bible, you get to control the lead singer’s various movements as he sings the song.  Granted it’s a limited set of movements, but I played through it twice and found a completely different set of actions from one time to the next.  So for those of us who really like easter eggs, this site can keep you entertained for a good amount of time.

What’s great about both is that they are on a timeline.  You have certain windows of opportunity to do something, and once they pass you’ve missed them.  So it becomes like a game (unlike most easter-eggy experiences, where the environment is static and you have all the time you want to click away).  A really great idea.

Remix Black Mirror

Play with the Neon Bible

Thanks VSL