Tropfest is the world’s largest short film festival.
Founded at Sydney’s Tropicana café in 1993, it now has an attendance of over 150,000 in Australia each February, and thousands more in other cities through out the world at other local Tropfests.
This year, the $20,000 first prize at the Tropfest in New York went to a film called “Mankind Is No Island” which was shot entirely with a cell phone camera.
The music is perfect, the effect is simple yet powerful, and the end result is a very emotional film that challenges the way we look at the world.
The Draganflyer X6 “is a remotely operated, unmanned, miniature helicopter designed to carry wireless video cameras and still cameras”.
It’s also one of the most bad-add R/C copters ever made.
Features include a six rotor co-axial configuration that makes the Draganflyer X6 compact, stable, and powerful, a full carbon fiber folding frame that also makes it light and easy to carry, and 11 on-board sensors that make the X6 the easiest copter to fly in its class, including three gyros, three accelerometers, three magnetometers, one barometric pressure sensor, and one GPS receiver.
Loose radio connection?
No problem; the Draganflyer X6 simply lands itself and waits for you to return.
Loose an engine?
Again, no problem. The Draganflyer is able to continue flying, even with one engine entirely out of commission.
With camera options that range from anti-vibration mounts and digital still camera holds to HD video, low light, thermal infrared and micro video cameras, there’s even a payload option to match every need.
Gazeta Mercantil created a fantastic series of arted out bills for ads about their financial coverage titled “Understand the real value of money”.
The Dollar, Yen, and Euro were all featured, and each included powerful reminders of the host country’s history, and what went into the creation of each currency.
Delicious (the social bookmarking site formerly known as del.icio.us that calls itself “the tastiest bookmarks on the web” and was also the father of the strange domain name), launched its long awaited redesign yesterday to help move the site beyond its late ‘90s style.
Though the underlying functionality is still the same, the new look and feel is designed to make it faster, easier to learn, and hopefully more desirable.
Speed: We’ve moved to a new infrastructure that makes every page faster. This new platform will enable us to keep up with traffic growth while ensuring Delicious is responsive and reliable. You may not have noticed, but the old backend was getting creaky under the load of five million users.
Search: We’ve completely overhauled our search engine to make it faster and more powerful. Searches used to take ages to return results; now they’re very quick. The new search engine is also smarter, and more social: you can search within one of your tags, another public user’s bookmarks, or your social network. Now it’s easier to take advantage of the expertise and interests of your friends, not to mention the Delicious community at large.
Design: Finally, we’ve updated the user interface to improve usability and add a few often-requested features (such as selectable detail levels and alphabetical sorting of bookmarks). Our goal has been to keep the new design similar in spirit to the old one, so all of you veterans should be able to jump in without any confusion. At the same time, we’re hoping that newcomers to Delicious will find it easier to learn.
I’m a big Delicious user (http://delicious.com/cory411), but since I use the Firefox plugin, I rarely if ever visit the site.
However, with looks like this, I just might have to give it a second chance.
Moodstream is a fantastically powerful “brainstorming tool” from Getty Images that is “designed to help take you in inspiring, unexpected directions”.
By tweaking the sliders, you can choose between images, footage, audio, or just a stream of fresh ideas that will bring a whole new creative palette straight to you.
The concept is actually pretty interesting, and the end result is inspiring and interesting in an advanced screensaver sort of way, so it’s definitely worth a look.
“My Name is Lisa” is a short film about the Alzheimer’s Disease.
It’s also the winner of Best Short Film in the 2007 YouTube awards, and for good reason. It’s a powerful and emotional (and sad) short about a daughter’s struggle to deal with her mother’s Alzheimer’s, and gives you a glimpse into the lives of those that live with conditions that most of us can’t even imagine.
Sure, the Asus Eee PC is small, and the MacBook Air is powerful, but what about making your very own lightweight portable computer out of an old Palm Pilot a keyboard, and a copy of the Guinness Book of World Records?
It might not be small and powerful, but it is cheap, and the DIY factor alone should give you plenty of bragging rights at your next Starbucks laptop spec shootout.
The new Dodge Challenger is the heavy artillery of the modern muscle car war.
It’s big, it’s powerful, it’s only offered in the high-performance SRT-8 trim level, and you can have it in any color you want, as long as it’s Hemi orange, silver, or black.
Unfortunately, the interior suffers from a severe case of rental-car-itis, but when it’ll do this all day:
Who’s really going to look closely at the seats anyways?
For a full rundown, driving impressions, and big, bold and beautiful pics, check out Motive’s coverage of the new beast.
How do fake fire extinguishers help prevent forest fires?
Simple: The medium is the message.
By installing these wooden fire extinguishers in the Table Mountain National Park, Animal Farm hopes to show that “it is almost impossible to stop a wild fire once it has started”. Thus, “using a real fire extinguisher on one would be as effective as using the wooden one” and “the only way to stop the fires is to prevent them”.
In addition to being a powerful message, the extinguishers were also carved by The Carpenters Shop, a “Non Governmental Organization set up to teach woodwork skills to the homeless and unemployed”; meaning this is an all-around feel good project.
Each year, the Inupiat Eskimos of Barrow, Alaska are allowed to hunt 22 whales for their yearly supply of food.
To document and preserve this experience, Jonathan Harris tagged along and took 3,214 photographs over the course of seven days, showing everything from his taxi ride to the Newark airport to the butchering of the second whale caught by the hunters.
Photos were taken at five-minute intervals (even while sleeping with the aid of a chronometer), though this “photographic heartbeat” was quickened during moments of high adrenaline.
The end result is a beautiful and powerful tale of a people’s fight to survive using techniques developed by their ancestors long before there was any other way to eat.
