Basil

Have your dog's legs been feeling chilly during this extended winter? Have your pup's stems been feeling a little exposed in those mini-skirts? Don't worry, just throw a pair of pantyhose on them. Fashion meets function, people.

The trend has taken off after gaming site Kotaku realized several people on the Chinese social networking site Sina Weibo began uploading photos of their pooch in hosiery. This image seems to have been the first of the meme (note the heels, as well):

Image courtesy of Kotaku

SEE ALSO: Instagram Fawns Over French Bulldog Named Sir Charles Barkley

Others quickly followed suit Read more...

More about Dogs, Puppies, Cute Animals, Memes, and Sina Weibo

Baker Anna at Eat Your Heart Out Bakers made this astounding skull wedding-cake.

Food artist Annabel de Vetten, also known as Conjurer’s Kitchen, created this incredible skull wedding cake for the Eclectic Wedding Extravaganza in Birmingham this weekend. Her theme being ” ‘Til Death Do Us Part”.

It features solid chocolate skulls of 16 carrion crows, 12 domestic kittens, 3 Vervet monkeys, and 4 barn owls, all of which the artist sculpted by hand. Made from White Chocolate Mudcake, the cake took her over 100 hours to complete in total. There are two options of toppers: a chocolate conjoined kitten skull, or dried flowers from an actual wedding bouquet (ones shown here from her own).

The Ultimate Skull Wedding Cake (Thanks, Emma!)

As part of its "Windows Phone Challenge," Microsoft compares the camera capabilities of Nokia's Lumia 920 and Samsung's Galaxy S III in a new video ad.

Naturally, the Lumia — a Windows Phone — is portrayed as reigning supreme. The ad's "real people" who own the Galaxy S III toss it aside for the Lumia after seeing that the latter produces photos "like a professional camera."

But some YouTube viewers took issue with the fairness of the video's comparison shot, which features a dazzlingly bright Lumia pic versus a dark and blurry Galaxy one

"No one thought that the brightness of the [Galaxy] phone [was] turned all the way down? Also, the screen is dim because if it wasn't then the soft keys would be lit up just like the Nokia," said YouTuber Kenny Hudman

The Boxee TV cloud DVR box and Internet app player just got a firmware update, giving it new tricks and hopefully fixing many of its various flaws

The set-top box was rolled out last October, and so far, it's been a work in progress.

The update's biggest enhancement is the addition of DLNA, that network magic that lets you view videos, photos or listen to music from any computer on your local network. Boxee has enabled DLNA to work through its File Browser app

Keep in mind that while DLNA is useful, it's not quite as versatile as the ability to share a variety of video file types over your network via SMB. That's a trick Boxee's previous product, the artfully shaped Boxee Box, performed so well.

For years now, Google has offered its Google Maps Engine to enterprises that want to visualize their custom geospacial data. Starting today, anybody will be able to use a subset of this functionality, thanks to the launch of Google Maps Engine Lite (beta). This new tool, Google says, will allow any mapping enthusiast to “create and share robust custom maps using this powerful, easy-to-use tool.”

Maps Engine Lite allows users to upload small spreadsheets with locations and visualize them on a map. They can also compare up to three different data sets for, the company stresses, non-businesses purposes.

These custom maps can have multiple layers, and users who don’t have spreadsheets to upload can also manually draw lines, mark specific areas and set place markers. Google offers a total of nine base maps, including its usual satellite and terrain maps, as well as styles that emphasize city boundaries, political boundaries and highways. Maps Engine Lite also offers about 150 different icons that can be used to mark specific places.

To help new users get started, Google also published a tutorial that offers a few sample data sets and a step-by-step guide to publishing a custom map.

Google says it will still offer My Maps, its earlier custom mapping tool, for the time being and My Maps users can import their maps into the new Maps Engine Lite. Over time, however, Google product manager Beth Liebert writes in today’s announcement, My Maps will be “incorporated into Google Maps Engine Lite.”

For now, Google is officially labeling Maps Engine Lite as a beta, and it’ll only be available in English for the time being.

Artist Shanell Papp has a project called "Bawdy," which is about bodies and textiles. The centerpiece is "Lab," a yarn skeleton with a complete set of organs.

Lab (skeleton) (via Making Light)

Filed under: Aftermarket, Etc., Videos, Land Rover, Middle East, Luxury

Conspicuous consumption is a vice that wealthy Americans have down to a science, but it's safe to say that the richest members of the Middle Eastern elite have elevated it to an art.

The latest example that we've seen of said artistry is a Range Rover that has been elaborately festooned with coinage from some of the most oil-rich nations of the region. The work has been done by an outfit called Coins Car - we're hoping there's some witticism there that just doesn't translate into English - and has seen some 57,412 coins adhered to the surface of the SUV. Following the flag markers, we see that coins from Qatar, Kuwait, Bahrain, Oman and Saudi Arabia have all been represented, and with United Arab Emirates getting more real estate than the rest of the crew.

Scroll down for a 360-degree video look at the Coins Car Land Rover, or take a moment to browse the gallery of images plucked from the company's Facebook page.

Continue reading Range Rover covered in coins is so money

Range Rover covered in coins is so money originally appeared on Autoblog on Fri, 22 Mar 2013 14:58:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Now that Google Keep is officially out in the wild, how does Google's note-taking and syncing service compare with longtime favorite Evernote?

From the moment Google Keep was accidentally leaked, it looked like Google was building an Evernote clone. In the wake of the official release, its name, announcement video and aspects of the user interface all evoke a certain Evernote-like quality.

I spent some time over the past few days comparing the latest Evernote mobile app and web app with Google Keep on the web and on Android

Here's what we found:

Basic Features

Evernote and Google Keep are both services that let users create and store audio notes or voice-to-text dictated notes, memos, checklists and images. Both offer up a way to seamlessly sync this data with the web — and in the case of Evernote — other clients.

Technology can be pretty great. It can also wreck our posture and turn us into hunched-over Richard IIIs if we aren’t careful. The 21st century has not been kind to backs and necks.

Gesture is a new office chair that takes an interesting approach to bad posture. The worst part of bad posture is that our bodies are kinda hanging out in space without proper support, or don’t fit with more rigid chairs ergonomically. Gesture takes a pragmatic approach, creating a chair that will move and adapt to support the different kinds of positions you take when using different kinds of devices, instead of encouraging traditional good posture.

The latest from The Slingshot Channel: an Oreo Separation Pump Gun.

It's a basic human desire to destroy an OREO cookie with a pump action crossbow. Some men simply love neither cookie nor creme, so sometimes a man just needs to invent a badass crossbow to do the hard work of shooting the two from a powerful homemade weapon. Today, that man is meat lover and cookie-destroyer Jörg Sprave. Watch him operate the repeating 14-shot weapon he created that separates OREO cookies into very fine (but separated) crumbles.

(Thanks, Matthew!)