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Dedicated drinker Adam Cadamally turned 1,050 bottles of beer into an amazing lighted Christmas tree; hit the play button to see the eye-popping construction video. [via]
Quicksilver isn't the only Mac launcher on the block: in this eight minute video, Macworld's Rob Griffiths does a nice demonstration of what's possible with the free Butler.
Windows only (with PowerPoint 2007): SlideShare, the YouTube-style sharing and embedding service for presentations, has released an Office 2007 plug-in that lets creators directly upload and control web presentations from inside PowerPoint. The plug-in, which requires the very latest .NET Framework 3.5 SP1, adds basic "Open/Publish/Manage" buttons to a new SlideShare tab, as well as buttons for finding related material on the sharing site (for design inspiration, perhaps?) and letting you see how many co-workers, or general surfers, have checked out your shared stuff. Check out SlideShare's own embedded presentation on installing and using the toolbar, and a video demonstration of its features, below.
You must hit the play button on this: Video guy Matthew Belinkie has cut together 40 inspirational speeches from classic movies into a two-minute montage.
With a little Javascript ingenuity, a new service called Pastebud aims to bring the long awaited copy-and-paste functionality to the iPhone and iPod touch. Pastebud's copy and paste only work between Safari and Mail (or Safari tabs), but since that's where most of us are looking to do copying and pasting, it's not a bad start. Check the video for a full demonstration. Pastebud is slated to launch this week.
Mozilla Links reports that the latest development release of Firefox 3.1 includes a new feature called tab tearing. As you can see from the video above, tab tearing allows you to pull any tab out of your Firefox window into a completely new window or pull any tab into another window. This functionality will look familiar to any Google Chrome users, but when Firefox 3.1 drops, Firefox users will be enjoying the same handy feature.
Google asked productivity blogger Merlin Mann to visit their campus and share some insights into getting things done. His presentation covers several interesting aspects of time management and productivity including renegotiating your commitments, controlling who has access to your limited resources like time and output, and qualifying how your commit yourself to tasks to create a more sane work environment. The video is thirty five minutes and worth the watch for a solid set of productivity principles to help you start this week on the right foot.
Choreographer (and author of The Creative Habit) Twyla Tharp briefly discusses the roles of failure and money in creativity in a short video interview below. There are several good tidbits here, but in the instant-publishing internet age where everyone seems to be competing for the most YouTube views or highest web site traffic, I especially love the bits about how being creative for the sake of admiration and recognition is different than being creative simply because you want to make something. Here's the three-minute, 22-second clip.
The Pacecar bookmarklet makes reading web pages with distracting graphics or a lot of crammed text easier by highlighting the section you're reading and dimming out the rest. Once you've saved the bookmarklet, you can visit any page, click to activate the bookmarklet, and get a mask attached to your mouse pointer to deprecate any visual information you want to avoid on the web page — helping you focus on the textual or graphical facts. It works best if you have a key command, mouse scroll wheel or other way of scanning down the page as you read. A simple contextual menu pops up if you right-click, allowing you to limit the width or expand the depth of the highlighted area. Double-clicking turns the tool on and off. Auto-scroll and auto-zoom on text would make the tool an even better accessibility aid. Check out this screencast of Pacecar in action.
Windows only: Like the look of BumpTop but not part of the invite-only beta? Free application Shock Desktop 3D is a lightweight BumpTop alternative that turns your Windows desktop into a 3D environment where you can interact with your documents in a physical space. The video above—put together by reader y0himba<—demonstrates some of Shock Desktop 3D's interface in action. If you like the look of BumpTop, Shock Desktop 3D looks like a nice alternative. With either option you'll need a decent video card and be willing to sacrifice a little memory (Shock Desktop 3D eats about 35MB on my system), but if the 3D desktop seems more intuitive to you (or you just want to have a little weekend fun), it might be worth a try. Thanks y0himba!
With a little Javascript ingenuity, a new service called Pastebud aims to bring the long awaited copy-and-paste functionality to the iPhone and iPod touch. Pastebud's copy and paste only work between Safari and Mail (or Safari tabs), but since that's where most of us are looking to do copying and pasting, it's not a bad start. Check the video for a full demonstration. Pastebud is slated to launch this week.