Dear son, this is called a "cassette tape" and this is how I listened to music during my youth...

Oh and in these ten tracks are examples of rap/hip-hop instrumental tunes I used to listen to.

This is the state of the internet right now...

...according to The Oatmeal, that is. Check it out at this ad-sponsored link: http://j.gs/tvk. While we're at it, let's wax nostalgic about the state of the internet back in 2011 and in 2010.

Thanks to my buddy RB for sharing this link!

Watch Taxi Dave's rap song, "You Know Who I Am"

This guy Schmoyoho, takes existing (dull) videos and converts them into these songs - he "songifies" them. Yesterday's "I love cats" song was one example. It was annoying, I know. But this one's a little bit more cool. If you're curious, this is the original video:



Schmoyoho now also has a popular iPhone app, "Songify," on iTunes: http://j.gs/sxU. Coming soon to Android, he says.

Do you love cats like this girl "sings"?

Yup, just get "Auto-Tune" or "eHarmony" or stuff like that, and you can sing like her. Now, what would be the subject of your song?

Google Dropbox, errr Drive, is here!

It's actually more like SugarSync or iCloud in that it offers 5Gb free on the onset. Like Dropbox, SugarSync, and oh, yeah Microsoft SkyDrive (that Microsoft says is the best out of all these services), basically you can access all your files from practically all your devices, including through the web (i.e. on someone else's device or computer), and share any one or all of them with anybody you want to share them with. Hoe-lee moe-lee, SkyDrive probably is really the best, what with 7Gb free on the onset! Anyways, unlike the others though, Google Drive has Google Docs built-in. Essentially, if you sign-up for a Google Drive account, Google Docs forwards to Google Drive. You lose the measly 1Gb space for your Docs but gain the 7Gb for your Drive. Oh, but probably the greatest good news from this announcement from Google is that Gmail now has 10Gb space! Yahoo! For corporations signed-up for Google Apps, collaboration is possible within your organization and with clients and anyone from the outside as you wish. Sign-up for Google Drive at http://drive.google.com/start.

P.S. Apparently, as of today, I still cannot sign-up for Google Drive just yet. What's up with that, Google? That's really stupid! They've also not yet released an app for iPhone and iPad. Which is under$tandable. Hey, let's give the Android Fanbois something to brag about, right? Like that Google Wallet thing, and like how the next version of Android, Jelly Bean, is already rumored to come out just when its current version, Ice Cream Sandwich, is just now being rolled out to more people robots since it was announced last October. Am I too biased? Of course not. I know that Siri is still on Beta. But you know, it's on every iPhone 4S since October as announced back then.

P.P.S. By the way, my Dropbox now has 7Gb space. All for FREE. You do that by spreading the word, and you and your referral friend get a quarter of a Gb free. So sign-up now, using this link: http://db.tt/8wdZfs9.

What if your name was Michael Jordan?

Check out this very, very funny commercial from ESPN.

Can you collect one million of something?

This guy collected one million (drawings/artworks of) giraffes. Check it out: http://j.gs/rKt.

New rTV documentary channels!

I earlier announced the launch of rTV, our very own "virtual TV set," TV-on-the-web service. It already had 39 channels back then, including "original" programming on the [R] Originals, RAW TV, and R2 channels. From today, we are starting to launch new full-length movie channels, ala HBO. The first three movie channels being launched feature full-length documentaries: the MovieTube Documentaries, MovieTube Hope & Nature, and the MovieTube Unforgotten channels.

"MovieTube" is so named because these are (free) movies hosted on YouTube. For now we started with documentaries, but we will be having Romance & Comedy, Action-Mystery-Suspense-Horror, Kids, Classics & Drama, and Sci-Fi & Fantasy channels as well.

The MT Documentaries is the main documentaries channel, while the Hope & Nature channel features documentaries related to inspirational stories, religion, and nature. The Unforgotten channel features documentaries related to war, including a few martial arts-related documentary films.  The main Documentaries channel includes 88 films spanning over 98 hours (more than 4 days). The Hope & Nature channel has 60 videos spanning over almost 69 hours (almost 3 days). The Unforgotten channel hosts 61 videos spanning 62 hours (more than 2.5 days).

Many of the documentaries are by PBS, an American broadcast network that creates original documentaries and educational content, and we thought, why not include a PBS channel on rTV as well. So we did.

Have fun watching TV!

Turn your Facebook Timeline (i.e. activity history) into a video

Read this article about it here: http://adf.ly/7TKQe. Then you can try it for yourself here: http://adf.ly/7TKfX.

P.S. I've tried this, apparently a video was created using elements from my FB Timeline, but it doesn't seem to work exactly on one of my computers; I can't view the video. Any success from your end?

Why are people from the future not traveling to our period?

Read this interesting thread on Quora.com on why people from the future are not traveling to our period.

Found out about this through parislemon.

"Sign Language," a short film

Nice.

Virtual TV Set / Announcement

If you've been following this blog, you would have noticed my obsession over "online TV" recently, brought along by the fact that I'm in a country where there is no free TV in English or in my native language. So what I did was I turned to the web. But then, I wanted all my favorite shows all in one place. Right now, some are on Vimeo, some on YouTube or UStream, and so on. And sometimes, I don't want to even think of what to watch next. You know, like watching actual TV. And so I made my own "virtual" TV set that, as of today, already has nearly 40 channels! And I call it rTV. Check it out on ronjie-tv.blogspot.com today.

Additionally I put all videos I linked to here on RAW into a playlist, and now in fact that is one of the channels on rTV. The RAW TV channel already has more than 17 hours of programming inclusive of 200 videos from July 2010 to April 2012, averaging 5 minutes in length. Check out the RAW TV channel on rTV.

200 is actually the limit in YouTube playlists, so I'm already starting to build up a "follow-up" channel, R2. As of today, there's already more than 1 hour worth of videos on R2. I will be updating it faster than RAW, the blog, as well. You'll see videos that are already up on R2 effectively being announced only on RAW (the blog). But that's the way it has been - the videos I link to on RAW are already on YouTube, and Facebook, and other sites.

You might ask, "Isn't video-on-demand (VOD) the future? Why go back to the old school TV model?" Please read the first paragraph again. :D  But seriously, rTV is the best of both worlds. You just sit back and watch. You change channels if you want. No commercials. Almost. You don't like the current show? Then, skip to the next on the list (works on most channels). It's like VOD, but it's also like TV. I wanted to call it another word (TV-on-Web? TOW?), but you know what, I just call it rTV.

Hey, while I set this up so that it can be useful to me, my idea is it can be useful to a lot of other people who, like me, want that TV experience without a TV, and only a computer with web video access. So if you have any suggested channels for rTV, or if you need professional help on how to set-up your own "Virtual TV Set" similar to rTV, send me an email at tv@ronjie.com.

Here's to the cable cutters!

Funny Scrabble ad

Reminds me of that (former Philippine president) Erap joke where a young Erap was being asked by his grade school teacher, "What is your favorite color?" He answers "Teacher, it's fuchsia." The teacher follows up with "Okay, spell fuchsia." Erap replies, "Oh, I'm sorry, my favorite color is RED." Anyway, indeed you might learn new useful words by playing Scrabble. :)

The Problem with Facebook

Check out this (to me, very funny) comic strip from StickyComics.com: http://j.gs/rFe. Any thoughts? :D

Rapper Tupac Shakur performs "live"

[WARNING: Funky Music with Explicit Lyrics]



Tupac Shakur, dead since 1996, emerges as "2.0 Pac," a hologram at this year's Coachella Music Festival. I'm likin' the gangsta funk, but really, this is the future. We won't be watching stuff on flat screens anymore. We'll be watching "live." We'll be watching all our favorite music artists of years past. The hosts of "The 404" podcast present to me a really compelling excuse to get on this technology as soon as it becomes affordable: I can watch Kurt Cobain and Francis Magalona perform again.  Next thing you know, we'll be in class with our (holographic) teacher right there in our living room giving us lectures and not needing to take bathroom breaks. No more video chats, just holographic chats. Our smartphones will display the person we're talking to from another planet in 3D hologram, ala Star Wars.  The possibilities are exciting. My prediction is... 2025, this goes mainstream.

9-year old builds his own arcade

This is "old news" already on the internet (maybe more than a week old?). But if you haven't heard about it yet, check out the video above on Vimeo, created by Caine's very first customer, filmmaker Nirvan. Thankfully for him he has a supportive dad and he met Nirvan who made his arcade go viral by organizing a "flashmob", posting on reddit, and making the video above. All signs point to a billionaire future for Caine, and you can help him get there and other like-minded young kids by donating to Caine's Arcade Foundation.

I ♥  and other cool ASCII symbols

You know how in Facebook we just type <3 and out comes a ♥? Of course, you can always just copy and paste, but to type that character directly, this article tells you how and it's basically different from system to system (i.e. Windows, Mac, or Linux, or via HTML): http://j.gs/r2M.

That same website (http://j.gs/r2N) has a ton of other resources for you to make your ASCII artwork, or simply to add some more flavor to your Facebook or Twitter posts, and other similar communication channels. As to the  symbol, just press Option+Shift+K on a Mac, or type 

&#63743;

inside your HTML code, from the ampersand (&) to the semi-colon (;) without spaces. For the clover leaf command button thingy (⌘), type

&#8984;

inside your HTML code. Found those out from http://j.gs/r2R.


Update: I was corrected by a friend who says those symbols specifically are not actually ASCII, but rather Unicode.

2001: A Space Odyssey in LEGO!!!

This is a parody video of the now-classic sci-fi movie from 1968, "2001: A Space Odyssey," by Stanley Kubrick. It is a stop animation short film made entirely of LEGO pieces, and it is entitled "ONE: A Space Odyssey." For more LEGO artwork related to the same movie, visit this article on io9.com from where I found this video. I ♥ LEGO!

Flip books in the digital age

You've probably done it before. You're bored in class, and so instead you draw cartoons on each page of your notebook to create an animation. And then you flip through the pages of your notebook to watch your masterpiece. What you have created is called, a "flip book."

In the digital age though, we'll be getting rid of notebooks and maybe paper in general. Can we still do flip book animation? You bet we can. And here's one example of it.

Check out www.twitter.com/smartarg - it is actually the Twitter account of Smart Cars in Argentina. You know that 140 character limit of Twitter posts? And have you heard of ASCII Art? Well, those are the two key elements to this "digital flip book."

To view the animation, go visit their Twitter account, press and hold "End" on your keyboard or simply scroll to the very first, bottommost tweet (until it says "Back to Top") - this is to make sure all tweets are loaded already - then go back up to the very first one. If you're on Chrome, keep pressing "J" to get the desired flip book animation. I am not sure if pressing "J" will work on other browsers; and you have to press it a number of times to get the animation moving; holding it won't cut it. Yeah, this is even more work than an actual flipbook. And because of changes in fonts and layouts and what not, the animation seems a little garbled up. So much for the "digital" age, right?

But hey, it is the digital age. You can just press play on this YouTube video that features the "digital flip book animation" from their Twitter page. It's actually probably their TV advertisement, though. Yeah, welcome to the digital age.




I found out about this through TWiT.

The #makeitcount ultimate Internet Meme

You know what an Internet Meme is? Here (http://adf.ly/7LivD) is a Google search result to remind you, and here (http://adf.ly/7Lj0E) is the Wikipedia article to understand it all.

I even contributed one to the internet society (http://adf.ly/7LjCA) talking about a bunch of cool memes about the Philippines (link 1, link 2, link 3).

So anyway, mostly they're photos with some kind of message embedded on it.

But this one is taking internet memes to a whole 'nother level. It's a video of a 10-day trip around the world by two men, in just under 10 minutes.

It's cool. The shots are great. The editing is great. I guess the selection of quotable quotes that make this like an internet meme is actually quite a good, carefully selected collection of quotes to support the "#makeitcount" hashtag campaign as well. All thanks to a chunk of Nike's marketing budget and the artistic talent of these two men. I would try to convince you it's a must-watch, that is unless the thumbnail below hasn't already convinced you it is.



Thanks to friends MC and RJ for sharing this link.

Google+ re-design and whitespace rant!

I know 99.9% of you probably aren't active on Google+ but hey, they have a funky new design, complete with that large photo you can put on your profile that seems awfully familiar... If you're a Facebook user, you know what I mean. Anyway, here's the official video that features the details:


And here's a video of a review of the new user interface:


If you check out what's trending on Google+, yeah, everyone seems to be screaming, "WHITESPACE!"

Presidential Comedy

Check out these videos!  First up is US President Barack Obama delivering a stand up comedy routine at the Radio & Television Correspondents' Association (RTCA) Dinner in 2009. It's in two parts:

Part 1:


Part 2:


Former President George W. Bush also had his time at an earlier RTCA event. This one was 2008 or earlier:



Then there was this guy named Steve Bridges (RIP, Steve; 1963-2012) who impersonated presidents. In this video, former president George W. was game enough to invite Steve to impersonate him while he was delivering a speech:



And then this was Steve's take on President Obama back in 2010, in two parts.

Part 1:


Part 2:


And finally Steve in a much improved performance as President Obama in 2011:

Interesting Origami

More interesting origami stuff, this time from Inhabitat; this first one showcasing use of small paper, among others:
http://inhabitat.com/6-surprising-and-delightful-origami-creations/

This second one features the use of paper bills:
http://inhabitat.com/craig-folds-five-manipulates-money-into-amazing-origami-art/

Watch Paulo Coelho

Do you read Paulo Coelho books, some of the bestselling books of our time? Well, you can watch Paulo Coelho instead! Check out this playlist of his video blogs:



He calls the series of "videocasts" as "CoelhoOffice" - because he records his thoughts from his desk at his office.

A musical instrument for the digital age

There's already plenty out there! This is just one of them and I like it a lot. Check out incredibox.fr. Here's some sample music I created using incredibox:

http://www.incredibox.fr/?music=1334017355-9232

For those who think this is not music, or this is not a musical instrument, read this blog article I wrote earlier.

The future is here. NOT!

Google yesterday released a concept video about their augmented reality glasses/goggles:



Everybody has been talking about it. Is it the future? Or is it too good to be true?  Here are a couple of parody videos of what might be the actual user experience with such glasses.  The first is the problem with it getting your speech commands wrong and then you having to bump into an accident and hurt yourself and others:



This other one shows what the now-evil Google will actually do to your display: a ton of ads and mostly links to other Google services (even if they're not the best service out there).



P.S. This is what the glasses might look like.  Ignore the smiles and the use of carefully selected models.