Cooper Griggs

(via togifs)

T-Mobile's latest Uncarrier announcement might lack the pomp and circumstance of a big media event, but CEO John Legere's conversation with Yahoo Tech's David Pogue is already proving fruitful. Once January rolls around, T-Mobile customers will be ab...

(via jodyrobots)

Sailing on the Sun

On a list of things I most anticipated sitting down to cover on Colossal today, the hurdy gurdy probably wasn’t in the top thousand topics, but then I stumbled onto this video and had to share it. The piece is called Omen, written and performed by Guilhem Desq, who uses an electrified version of the hurdy gurdy along with sampling to create a surprisingly contemporary composition. The first two minutes are more traditional (?) sounding, but around the 2:00 mark things get amazing. If you’re unfamiliar with this obscure instrument, here’s a little background:

The hurdy gurdy is a stringed instrument that produces sound by a crank-turned, rosined wheel rubbing against the strings. The wheel functions much like a violin bow, and single notes played on the instrument sound similar to those of a violin. Melodies are played on a keyboard that presses tangents—small wedges, typically made of wood—against one or more of the strings to change their pitch. Like most other acoustic stringed instruments, it has a sound board to make the vibration of the strings audible.

If you just can’t get enough hurdy gurdy, you can listen to more of Desq’s music on his YouTube channel, and there’s also a great TED talk by Caroline Philips, Hurdy Gurdy for Beginners. (via Colossal Submissions)

Long Live the Whale
#dtla #photoshoot #working #losangeles #california #graffiti #art #whale (at Los Angeles City Hall)

via http://www.fubiz.net/2009/04/30/stuart-gibson/

"Mythbusters fire a soccer ball at 50mph out of a cannon on a truck driving at 50mph in the opposite direction." [via]

ruinmylifewhydontyou:

this says something like "ho chi minh is with us forever" (i'm totally getting that wrong, but it's so appropriate)


presidential palace


minh's bedroom in his small apartment


minh's office, 1 of 3 rooms in his apartment


university students who are also in the military (according to d.c. likely juniors)


exit through the gift shop


mausoleum with flags

hanoi, vietnam: ho chi minh mausoleum

d.c. was our local guide for a walking tour of the city including a visit to the embalmed ho chi minh. minh died in 1969 and has been kept on ice just a tad longer than he’s been kept on display. the mausoleum was built in 1975 and he’s been resting here since.

no photos allowed in the mausoleum, but it’s much as you’d expect. he’s in a darkened room with small dim lights focused on his head and hands, the only parts of his body visible outside his dark party suit and black blanket.

our guide was great about all the questions i had, including about military service (optional only if you go to university or have a solid job at 18), the 54 ethnic hillside minorities (required to learn vietnamese, but allowed to keep their language and customs otherwise), and the one party system (he’s not a big fan).

the big yellow building is the presidential palace, which used to be the french government offices in the area. upon vietnamese independence, minh, as president, only lived there one month back in 1954, just long enough to prove the point that vietnam had won its autonomy. from there he moved to a small 3-room apartment on the palace grounds.

and yes, there was a gift shop.

It's hard to spot every possible road hazard. Mirrors and cameras will show what's behind you, but your car's roof pillars can still hide careless pedestrians and aggressive drivers. They won't be issues if Jaguar's 360-degree Virtual Urban Windscree...

(via gifini)

Here's the full list of new Netflix DVDs this week (detailed list): If I Stay, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, And So It Goes, Into the Storm, Magic in the Moonlight, The Skeleton Twins, The Wind Rises, At the Devil's Door, Stonehearst Asylum, The Devil's Hand, and Spark: A Burning Man Story. 

A video supposedly shows two hikers walking on a lake of crystal clear ice.

The federal antitrust case Apple's fighting isn't looking any more favorable for the hardware giant since we last reported on it. Former iTunes engineer Rod Schultz testified on Friday that he'd worked on a project to block "100 percent of non-iTunes...

(via lesseroceans)

This 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle contains exactly 1,000 different colors arranged in the form of a CMYK gamut and is guaranteed to drive you insane. The creator of the 1,000 Colors puzzle, Clemens Habicht, suggests the puzzle is actually easier than traditional image-based puzzles. When faced with a field of color, he says the placement of every piece becomes almost intuitive.

The idea came from enjoying the subtle differences in the blue of a sky in a particularly brutal jigsaw puzzle, I found that without the presence of image detail to help locate a piece I was relying only on an intuitive sense of colour, and this was much more satisfying to do than the areas with image details.

What is strange is that unlike ordinary puzzles where you are in effect redrawing a specific picture from a reference you have a sense of where every piece belongs compared to every other piece. There is a real logic in the doing that is weirdly soothing, therapeutic, it must be the German coming out in me. As each piece clicks perfectly into place, just so, it’s a little win, like a little pat on the back.

The 1,000 Colors puzzle ships from Australia and costs about $33 (about $58 with shipping to the U.S.). (via Boing Boing)

Here's something you can get for yourself these holidays: a 3.5-inch 8TB drive from Seagate that costs only $260 -- we didn't forget an extra number in that figure, promise. That's a lot cheaper than HGST's helium-filled 8TB disk drive, which is list...

(via allcreatures)

If you’re looking for a snappy new wallpaper/home screen/lock screen image for your phone, Aerial Wallpapers is a great place to start. The site is created by João Paulo Bernardes who scours creative commons satellite imagery from NASA and Airbus Defence and Space for the best slices of Earth which he crops and scales to fit the iPhone 6 Plus, but should scale OK for other phones too. (via Kottke)

via http://www.remodelista.com/