Interesting sight on my walk to the Glenmont Metro station.

DIYLife.com has a great feature all about film rigs for scrappy independent filmmakers. DIY Film School consists of links to instructions on building tons of great film tools for a fraction of the price of buying things new. I have made some of these and of course they take a lot of time and the quality is a little low. But hey, you get what you paid for but just don’t expect Hollywood results from this stuff.
The list of things you can build includes:

• $14 Steadycam
• Body Brace Steadycam
• $60 Camera Jib
• Backseat View Car Mount
• Exterior Car Mount
• Bike Mount
• PVC Pipe Fig Rig
• and an Underwater Camera Housing

If you’re itching for more of this kind of stuff then check out Home Built Stabilizers for tons of homemade movie-tool goodness. So much for your free time this weekend 🙂

Every color has a name but up until now it has been quite a task to separate the Periwinkles from the Mischkas from the Thistle Green. Name That Color lets you select the a color via RGB value, HEX number, or a simple color picker. From there, the handy little web app will let you know the appropriate name for that certain hue. Feeling a bit lazy? Then use the drop down menu to sort through the zillions of names and find ones like Rangitoto, Wattle, or Hot Toddy. Seriously those are all valid color names.

Apparently this guy has been spending way too much time over at COLOURlovers.

(via DownloadSquad)

At a Chipotle in Falls Church, Virginia. I hate Virginia.

Today I was looking at game footage from EA’s upcoming skateboarding game Skate. This is a game I have been waiting for since Thrasher Skate and Destroy came out on the PS1. Tony Hawk games have been a lot of fun but recently they have gotten more and more absurd. Skate aims to be a more realistic skateboarding experience right down to the controls which require you to actually flick the directional pads to do tricks. If there was ever a game that would push me over the edge into going out to get an Xbox 360, this would be the game.

But I’m holding myself back because of my previous history with video game systems. I would usual play the system for about a month and then lose interest. I already have a Wii which I barely use due to lack of time and limited supply of interesting games. It’s not like I have all the time in the world to play videogames either and deliberately buying something that I know will distract me even more is a little daunting.

So should I get an Xbox 360?

Browsing New Egg I stumbled on two quad core HP desktop PC’s for under $1,500 which left me in a state of shock. This HP Pavilion m8150n comes with a quad core 2.4ghz CPU, 3GB of RAM, 2x 320GB hard drives, a HD-DVD Rom drive, and a tuner card for recording TV signals.

I occasionally eye PC’s checking out specs and pricing. One day I will replace my 17″ desktop-replacement laptop with a true desktop that I can gradually upgrade. I don’t know when I will take the plunge and plunk down a couple thousand dollars on a new system but since I spend most of my time at work, it seems rather trivial to get a big honking system with all the trimmings.

Still, this system on New Egg sounds like a great deal. I would need to upgrade the graphics card so I can run dual-monitors and the case looks too small for adding extra hard drives. Even with these upgrades, the price is still lower than custom building your own.

Alas, this deal is too good to be true since it is currently out of stock. I guess I’ll keep looking.

Getting started with making videos can be a tough proposition. First, you need some equipment mainly a video camera and editing software. Second, you need other people around to help either in production or as actors. There is only so much you can do by yourself.

Brian Shaler from CrappyGraphs.com feels the same way and decided to illustrate it with a crappy graph.

Some other notable crappy graphs include Aethetic vs. Utility, Make the Logo Bigger, and Productivity vs. Time Spent In Meetings.

Coming up and out of the Friendship Heights metro stop. This thing is long, dark, and slighty creepy.

Don’t worry, I wasn’t driving when I took this picture.

Twitter has been pumping out new features these past couple of weeks. Their latest, which just launched this evening, is Blocks.

This is what it looks like and so far all I can figure out is blue squares are you, orange are your friends, and gray are um.. gray. You can click on squares to see the tweets of others. What is the point? Beats me.

Twitter Blocks was created by Stamen Design, the same folks who brought us those neat Digg visualizations.

Twitter also launched something a little more useful. Have you ever wanted to see a list of all the third party twitter apps in existence all in one spot? Then check out the Twitter Fan Wiki which categorizes apps into distinct categories for your exploration. I guess that is why they launched everything mentioned in this post at http://explore.twitter.com