The history of Eldridge Street

November 18, 2009 @ 1:32 am

Zach van Schouwen pieced together this extensive look at the history of Eldridge Street between Rivington and Stanton Streets on the Lower East Side in Manhattan. The video above is a shortened and quick version of a much slower slideshow currently on display at THE BLOCK. [via]

The Google Story

October 28, 2009 @ 9:08 pm

Google UK shows us this animation that covers the past 11 years of Google technologies, advancements, and innovations. Nicely done!

The Whipple Flag

July 6, 2009 @ 2:13 pm

the-whipple-flag

I have never seen this version of the American Flag before, but after reading this short entry about American Flags at MeFi, I have learned that the American Flag never really had any strict standards concerning its design until about 1942 when the Federal Flag Code went into law. Because of this lax design criteria, many people used the 13 stripes (red and blue) in many variations and the stars were laid out in any pattern and shape (so long as there was one star per state).

Anyway, the flag above is called the Whipple Flag, named after its designer Wayne Whipple, and designed sometime in the first decade of the 20th century. The 48 stars seen here are arranged in a “Great Star” pattern with two outer rings of stars — the first of which represents the states added before the centennial and the outter ring with space for any future additions after the centennial.

I actually like this Whipple Flag design very much!

Internet Explorer 8 goes over the history of the internet

March 20, 2009 @ 9:59 am

ie8-brief-history-internet

To celebrate the launch of Internet Explorer 8, the team at Microsoft have put together this funny video of various comedians and internet celebrities talking about what they think of the internet.

Watch it in HD below.

The Blockbuster Video Living Museum: how movies were rented in the past

March 2, 2009 @ 3:41 am

Another video parody gem coming from The Onion News Network. This time, they report on “The Blockbuster Video Living Museum”, a tourist attraction that shows how Americans rented videos before iTunes and Netflix.

With online services like Netflix becoming popular, it’s no wonder that video rental stores like Blockbuster are feeling the heat. I honestly cannot think of a single benefit of a physical video rental store over an online one.

Twistory puts our Twitter history in your calendar

February 13, 2009 @ 1:35 pm

doobybrain-twistory

Twistory is right. I didn’t know that I wanted to view my Twitter history in my calendar. And now that I can, I don’t think I’ll ever go back to not having it in my calendar.

There’s something very neat about viewing all of your tweets in one place by date. I can immediately see what days I used Twitter more than others and bring up individual tweets with timestamps if I wanted. Twistory allows you to export your Twitter history to several popular applications (on the web and on the desktop) via an iCal feed. I chose to import it into my Google Calendar because I can easily turn it off and on if I wanted and it’s available to me anywhere I can get internet.

I don’t see a huge use for this other than a different way to display tweets. But if that’s all I find useful about this, I don’t really care.

You can view my public Google Twistory Calendar here.

Note: Twistory says it can display all your tweets all the way back to your first one, but at the moment, I’m only being showed the month of February. Glitch?