GRK BLOG/ZINE

Some really nice graphic work by Markus Hofko.

The music tools made by Roland back in the days have been remade by Hobnox to create a kind of online Reason.

Go make some beautiful music at HobNox Audiotool

Colorful and isometric graphics are part of the brief but very strong Behance’s portfolio of russian illustrator and designer Alexandre Efimov. The freshness of his work speaks by itself.

Today the Motorola Hint QA30 is official announced. It is the Motorola’s new Motorola QWERTY slider
design cellphone, it features includes 2.5″ 320 x 240 screen, stereo Bluetooth 2.0, microSD support up to 8GB. Its slider design reveals a full QWERTY keypad when open, Cool! Motorola Hint QA30 will be available in Q4 2008. It will support CDMA calling and EVDO data. [ link ]

The sight of a dragonfly on the wing is one of the more remarkable that nature has to offer. Here, with the help of some astounding macrophotography, we take a look at the life cycle of the dragonfly as well as its remarkable and unusual physiology.

Have you ever picked up the phone to call someone, only to realize that you didn’t know how to pronounce that person’s name? Have you ever read a name but had no clue how to say it? Is your name commonly mispronounced?

How To Say That Name lets you learn how to pronounce names as a native speaker would say them. Not sure how to pronounce the name ‘Nguyen?’ Listen to a native Vietnamese speaker pronounce it.

Top Gear is an Emmy Award-winning BBC television series about motor vehicles, mainly cars. The programme is estimated to have 8 million viewers each week in the UK.

The show is presented by Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond, James May and The Stig, an anonymous test driver. It is one of the most pirated television shows in the world.

Here are the top 14 Top Gear moments.

Some people have asked me how come the embedded YouTube videos on The Presurfer are of much better quality than the ones you can find on the YouTube site. There’s a little hack I use and it goes like this.

Copy the embed code of the video you want to show from YouTube. Then add ‘&ap=%2526fmt%3D18′ at the places shown in red below.

Search millions of photographs from the LIFE photo archive, stretching from the 1750s to today. Only a very small percentage of these images have ever been published. The rest have been sitting in dusty archives in the form of negatives, slides, glass plates, etchings, and prints.

Google is digitizing them so that everyone can easily experience these fascinating moments in time. Today about 20 percent of the collection is online; during the next few months, Google will be adding the entire LIFE photo archive — about 10 million photos.

The path to modern-day computing is longer than many suspect, and strewn with interesting nuggets of information. These include:

The inventor of e-mail can’t remember when he got it working.
Pac-Man was modelled on a pizza and called Puck-Man until vandals forced a name change.
The first hard drive had a 5MB capacity and could only be moved by a fork-lift truck.
Deep Blue’s chess victory over Garry Kasparov was described as a ‘psychological triumph’.

Full details of these milestones, and other gems of computing history.

What A Lovely Name is a website for helping you find the perfect name for your baby. You can browse by tradition, or personality trait, or even check out what celebrities are naming their children.

American artist Jason Nelson created Uncontrollable Semantics. Use your mouse to pull together over fifty different sound, image and interactive environments.

Within your mouse flows all directions. Create from your wrist, your hand, a tense and sleepy world. And their shapes arrived missing and rideless in the snow. Play, oh play.

Hu Ming. She is a pioneer in her field being diverse in combining both modem and classical styles. There is a blend of exotic, strange, humorous and above all mysterious in her art. She merges a conscious sense of post modernism and element of sub-culturalism.

Discover the great work of… Jean-Baptiste Mondino

Generatus is a social networking status generator. How many hours have
you wasted trying to think of something suitably witty, funny and
original for your status on Facebook or Twitter? Let’s face it, a
status like ‘Dave is mowing the lawn’ or ‘Kate is asleep’ is not going
to impress that huge entourage of friends you’ve amassed.

Never fear! With Generatus
your days of boring status updates are over! Simply type your name,
indicate whether you are a boy or a girl, then hit Generate. You will
be served up a brand new, sparkly status all ready to be copied and
pasted into Facebook, Twitter or whichever social networking site you
like best.

What is an Otaku, a Jukensei, a Narikin or an Obatarian? Where does the name Yakuza come from, and what is special about Fugu? What exactly is Shintoism and what is Kabuki.

Japanese society is full of special expressions for certain strange, cute or funny characters. 51 Japanese Characters is an insightful collection of figurines showcasing several typical members and cultural phenomena of Japanese society.

Hey, Have You Heard?

The Pyramid lunch box by Li Jianye : Categorizes your lunch according to the food groups.

Here’s something funny to do when you’re bored.

1 - Go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random.
The first random Wikipedia article you get is the name of your band.

2 - Go to Random quotations: http://www.quotationspage.com/random.php3.
The last four words of the very last quote of the page is the title of your first album. If you want to do this again, hit refresh to generate new quotes, because clicking the quotes link again will just give you the same quotes over and over again.

3 - Go to Flickr’s ‘explore the last seven days’:
http://www.flickr.com/explore/interesting/7days/.
Third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover. Put it all together, that’s your debut album.

Here’s my debut album:

My band: Bat Hawk,
My album: Take a Long Run,
My album cover:

Things you do not need to know. Unnecessary Knowledge.