Month: March 2013

By Julia May, Smashing Magazine Feed – May 25, 2010 at 12:26PM

Modern Web-building technologies allow designers to realize their most daring and creative ideas. Enhanced interactivity and a remarkable visual appearance can be achieved by means of such tools as Flash, JavaScript and Papervision3D, to name just a few. These strengths usually impress and entertain visitors and thus are often used for conceptual artistic presentations and promotional campaigns.

In this post, you’ll find a collection of amusing websites that, by combining unconventional (and sometimes bizarre) ideas and clever JavaScript and Flash effects, will entice you to play on them for an embarrassing long time.

[Offtopic: by the way, did you know that Smashing Magazine has one of the most influential and popular Twitter accounts? Join our discussions and get updates about useful tools and resources — follow us on Twitter!]

Bizarre and Beautiful Websites

Record Tripping
Record Tripping is a nifty experimental game by Bell Brothers. You are invited to solve a series of puzzles by scratching a record with your mouse’s scroll wheel. Clever game play and a lovely interface make this online Flash game as fun as it is weird.

Sound of Hamburg
Here is one of the most creative and unconventional Flash websites we’ve seen lately. Sound of Hamburg lets you compose music on and with the city of Hamburg. The combination of brilliant idea and unique interaction makes for an absorbing Web experience.

Echogenesis
Echogenesis is another interactive brainchild of Bell Brothers. This exciting Flash website lets you explore five natural environments and experience a variety of sound and visual effects through your interaction.

Verbatim Championship
Verbatim Championship is a hilarious Flash-based website where you can build your own “Media Monster” using Verbatim recording devices and use it to fight other monsters.

Incredibox
This fun and well-developed Flash application lets you conduct a beatbox or a capella band. The website is available in both English and French.

De Montagetafel
This website was definitely among the best for Flash Web design for 2009. You are invited to try your montage skills and create your own documentary on an edgy topic.

Optus Whale Song
An amazingly creative experience is offered by the Australian telecommunication company Optus on its official website. You can compose a song for a whale and make an orchestra perform it. This is a must-see Flash website.

Flurrious
If you like to create things, this website will keep you busy for hours (especially in winter). Using a versatile Flash editor, you can compile your very own snowflake and watch it dance in an artistic snowfall.

Blues Maker
Blues Maker is a fun online Flash application that allows you to create a fine blues song. The list of options is rather limited; still the process of song-making is quite enjoyable. The design of the website is really cool, too.

Bubole
Bubole will definitely make you smile. It is an amusing monster builder and game. You create a weirdo and make it fight with monsters created by other players. The funny sound effects and typography are nice touches.

Ball Pool (not Flash)
Ball Pool is a beautiful jQuery website with a simple yet absorbing concept behind it. Just click and shake your browser to generate more colorful balls. A simple and fun app to cheer you up in the middle of a working day.

Bank of Imagination
How often do you start sentences with “What if…”? If you have a rich imagination, consider investing in the Bank of Imagination. This Flash-based interactive website allows you to note and save your “What if” thoughts. You can also observe other global flights of fancy by browsing other user messages.

Google Gravity
This website probably won’t be of much interest to the average Web user, but SEO specialists will love it: who else could stare at Google’s downfall for ages?

Flame
Flame is a brilliant JavaScript painting tool that proves that anyone can be an artist. The program was created by Peter Blaskovic as part of his experimental project “I am Artist.” Using a number of nifty drawing tools and, of course, your imagination, you can create some cool psychedelic drawings and then export them in a resolution of 1680 x 1050 pixels. All you need to use this tool is Java (probably already installed on your computer).

Ball Droppings
Ball Droppings is a cool JavaScript experiment that lets you create music in a quite unusual and tricky way: just draw lines with your mouse to bounce the balls that fall from the hole.

Beans
This is the pearl in our collection of bizarre JavaScript and Flash websites. Who would have thought that crushing little screaming beans could be so much fun?

Labuat
Labuat is the most beautiful and enjoyable time-killer in our selection. It’s a song illustrated by an interactive brush that reacts to music, and the lyrics won’t leave you cold.

Why Do You Stay Up So Late?
Why Do You Stay Up So Late? is a compelling lyrical poem accompanied by a beautiful Flash animation. Such a creative combo gives the website a special feel.

The Infinite Oz
The Infinite Oz is an interactive Flash animation that features a collaboration between nine acclaimed international artists. Exploring fantastic sci-fi worlds that replace each other infinitely is a quite relaxing pastime.

Annamika kaleidoscope
Catherine Hubert created this Flash kaleidoscope to provide Web users with a place for meditative contemplation.

Neon Bible
This interactive video for a song by Arcade Fire is weird and hypnotizing at the same time.

Drum Machine
Drum Machine has several pre-loaders that play before the actual animation starts. In most cases, you would not wait so long for a Flash website to load, but Drum Machine is an exception. a mesmerizing combination of animation and sounds won’t let you leave.

Soundtrack for a Book
This exquisite Flash website belongs to the Singapore-based indie band Concave Scream. A myriad of colorful particles assembled into 3-D book covers, set to dreamy music, makes for a beautiful and calming Web experience.

Papervision3D.org
Before entering the official website of open-source Flash framework Papervision3D, you have a chance to explore an interactive 3-D underwater environment.

Condiment
The portfolio of creative communication agency Condiment features a clever JavaScript jigsaw puzzle. This engaging feature, set against a neat and stylish design, makes the website a pleasure to browse.

The Digital Invaders
This Flash website takes some time to load, but incredible animations, showing an awfully funny crowd of invaders, fully compensate for that.

Bio-Bak
Bio-Bak is indubitably a trendsetter when it comes to bizarre Web design. Enter this kingdom of the absurd and fun to load up on positive emotions.

Donnie Darko
Okay, here is the most extraordinary movie website you may have ever seen. It engrosses you in a mysterious and suspenseful journey based on the 2001 US psychological thriller Donnie Darko.

Paul Neave
You will never get bored on this website. This online home of interactive designer Paul Neave is a fount of engaging Flash applications and games.

Salt Films
This website of film production company Salt Films tastes delicious. Elegant and funky graphics, creative animation and interactive salt shakers for the work of film directors deliver the most pleasing Web experience.

Forgotten Bookmarks

Browsing personal things a bookshop owner finds in rare and used books is another way to explore the amazing human nature (and an extremely absorbing pastime).

Bonus

And Then There Was Salsa
Although not a website, this cool video ad shows Flash in its glory.

About the Author

Julia May is a freelance writer now working with FlashMint, a top-class provider of beautiful Flash templates and smart jQuery templates.

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By Kevin Purdy, Lifehacker – May 25, 2010 at 09:00AM

The internet is undoubtedly a wonderful place, but let’s face it: some web sites are only too happy to serve up annoying ads, unnecessarily heavy Flash elements, and all-around user-unfriendly experiences. Here’s how to make your browsing experience as annoyance-free as possible.

Google’s Chrome browser already takes care of some of the web’s biggest annoyances—like browser slowness (Chrome is impressively snappy) and entire-browser-crashing plug-ins (if Flash crashes in one tab, for example, it won’t take down your entire browser session). Throw in some great extensions, and you can block annoying ads, browser-jacking scripts, and other bad behavior.

We have to put it out there, right up front: Chrome is not quite as extensible as Firefox at this point. So while the How-To Geek could show us how to fix nearly all of the web’s biggest annoyances with Firefox, Chrome lacks for the same in-depth tweaking abilities (most notably Firefox’s powerful about:config tool). Its Chrome Extension gallery, however, has developed quite a bit since its launch. The extensions highlighted below are some of the best at getting rid of what ails your web experience.

Remove Annoying Ads

On Firefox, the easy answer to annoying roll-over, pop-out, and never-stop-blinking ads is AdBlock Plus. In the Chrome Extensions Gallery, quite a few add-ons have laid claim to the “AdBlock” name, and none seem all that definitive. One preferred solution is AdThwart, which operates on the same kind of principle as AdBlock Plus—point at an ad you don’t like, and you can prevent it from showing up there or elsewhere on the net. AdThwart even uses the same ad-blocking database as AdBlock Plus on Firefox.

For a more comprehensive blocking “blacklist” you don’t have to do anything with to get working, AdSweep complements AdThwart nicely. The AdBlock extension that holds the position of most popular extension in the Chrome gallery gets good ratings from its users, though, so it might be worth trying, too, if you’re not an adherent of its Firefox counterpart.

Block Flash and Silverlight Selectively

Much like AdBlock Plus, many Chrome extensions have set out to offer the same functionality on Chrome that FlashBlock for Firefox does. The best one we’ve found is this version of Flashblock for Chrome. The extension installs itself in your address bar, where you can selectively block Flash for the site you’re looking at, along with Microsoft Silverlight. By default, the extension also places a transparent gray border around any Flash element you mouse over, but that can be turned off or modified in the extension settings. You can also whitelist particular sites to allow their (useful) Flash features, while keeping everyone else on an as-you-approve-it basis.

Make Non-Click-able Links Click-able

Some forum and blog commenters have great links to share, but don’t know (or don’t really care) how to make their pasted links easy to click through to. The Clickable Links extension fixes that very problem, wherever you head on the web. The one weakness, hopefully fixed in an update soon, is that the extension doesn’t open links in a new tab by default, so remember to Ctrl-click anything you need to read in its own space. The multi-purpose search helper FastestChrome also does this job, though it’s a meatier install with its own button to contend with.

Remove Unnecessary Page Breaks

If you loathe page breaks and want all your content to arrive in streaming fashion, AutoPager Chrome will roll one page after another on sites that use “Prev” and “Next”-style links to navigate results or posts. Best of all, the extension’s authors are engaged, updating regularly, and actively looking to incorporate the features of the Firefox AutoPage extension. As with URL linking, the Swiss knife of extensions, FastestFox, also offers “endless scroll” on multi-page posts.

Grab Full Images of Long Web Pages

Web sites are a vertical medium, but your monitor (probably) isn’t as tall as everything you might want to capture from a site. Grab the entire length and width of a site with WebPage Screenshot, which delivers on what it promises. Hit the toolbar button, choose your sizing, if necessary, then save the final image from a new web tab. Simple, effective, helpful.

Access the Downloads Windows from a Button

For those who have internalized the Ctrl+J keyboard shortcut for the Chrome Downloads tab, the Downloads extension is unnecessary. For those who prefer a button for something they don’t always need, or use Ctrl+J for another universal shortcut, this is the fix. Judging from its surprising popularity in the Extensions gallery, there are quite a few users that fall into the latter category.

Strip Formatting from Copied Text

Copy Without Formatting is one of those extensions that Lifehacker editors find hard to write headlines around, because it just does what its name suggests: strips out the HTML and styling from text you copy off a web page, so you can more easily throw it into whatever software you use to get your job done. (Original post).

Many of the Rest: User Scripts

Chrome’s Greasemonkey and user script support is developing all the time, and at the moment, all of the stuff at customization wonderland UserScripts.org is easy to install, and some of it works fairly well in Chrome. Dig around, and you’ll likely find fixes related to your particular annoyance, especially if it relates to one or two particular sites. Those types of on-page fixes tend to be the most Chrome-compatible. Scripts that call on Firefox’s Greasemonkey-specific functions, on the other hand, are hopefully in the works for support.

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What Chrome extensions, user scripts, or other tools do you use to make your browser not only fast, but skilled at avoiding time-wasting roadblocks? Give us your picks and links in the comments.

By Kevin Purdy, Lifehacker – May 25, 2010 at 08:30AM

Before you shake off the idea of repairing your cracked iPhone screen yourself with a kit, consider Brett. The crafty 10-year-old repaired the cracked screen on his father’s 3GS with a $22 mail-order kit, giving all of us a little more confidence.

To be sure, Brett’s a crafty kid who comes from geeky roots. But by patiently taking apart the 3GS, sliding out the cracked glass, and replacing it with a repair part from 3GCrackedGlass.com, Brett was able to save his dad the cost of buying an entirely new iPhone. This repair was for the glass only, as the LCD wasn’t damaged and the phone was otherwise functioning—but that seems like the type of repairs most iPhone owners need.

Hit the link for a photo gallery of Brett’s repairs and more detail on what happened. If you’ve drawn repair inspiration from another younger (or older) relative, we love those kinds of stories in the comments.

By Mike Masnick, Techdirt. – May 24, 2010 at 08:58PM

Earlier this year, we mentioned the Supreme Court was reviewing a lawsuit over whether or not the NFL had the right to have an exclusive license for its apparel. A company, American Needle, who had supplied apparel to various NFL teams, sued the NFL after it had entered into a long-term exclusive contract with Reebok to handle all team apparel. American Needle claimed that this was a clear anti-trust violation, as all of the teams had colluded to exclude everyone else from the market. The NFL argued, instead, that the entire league should be viewed as a single company. Today, the Supreme Court ruled against the NFL, saying that each team should be viewed as a separate company. The case then gets sent back down to be reconsidered:

The details of this particular case are somewhat unique, in that it really only applies to situations where there are sports leagues (Major League Baseball is the only sports league that has an official exemption from Congress for antitrust issues — though it’s not clear why the different treatment). However, the decision by retiring Justice John Paul Stevens highlights the importance of competition, and the problems of letting organizations team up, just because teaming up makes better financial sense for all of those organizations:

Directly relevant to this case, the teams compete in the market for intellectual property. To a firm making hats, the Saints and the Colts are two potentially competing suppliers of valuable trademarks. When each NFL team licenses its intellectual property, it is not pursuing the “common interests of the whole” league but is instead pursuing interests of each “corporation itself,” Copperweld, 467 U. S., at 770; teams are acting as “separate economic actors pursuing separate economic interests,” and each team therefore is a potential “independent cente[r] of decisionmaking,” id., at 769. Decisions by NFL teams to license their separately owned trademarks collectively and to only one vendor are decisions that “depriv[e] the marketplace of independent centers of decisionmaking,” ibid., and therefore of actual or potential competition.

This makes a lot of sense. Otherwise, you could argue that any particular industry could set up an organization of which all the companies in that industry are a “member” and allow that single organization to negotiate exclusive deals, with the argument that it’s “for the common interests of the whole.” But, that’s obviously collusion, with the intent to harm consumers. Thankfully, the Supreme Court saw through the flimsy claim that such a structure makes companies immune to antitrust law.

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By Saikat Basu, MakeUseOf – May 24, 2010 at 05:30PM

Calling all film and movie fanatics – which is your online home for movie information and its sharing? Please don’t say IMDB or RottenTomatoes. I agree these two and a few others are almost encyclopedic movie sites and first stops for things that are cinematic. But there are some movie and film sites that have grown up in the shadow of these biggies.

HelloMovies is one such Web 2.0 app that helps to narrow down on which movie to watch next. HelloMovies is very similar to Jinni in the way that it can search and recommend movies. That’s not surprising because both dig deep into the Movie Genome project for its search power. You can read a lot about the Movie Genome project in Wikipedia, but here’s a gist.

The Movie Genome is a way to tag all movies based on genre, mood, tone, plot, tastes etc. The index is generated from the words people use to describe a movie in internet discussions and reviews. All that web shoveling has resulted in a database that’s 22,000 movies strong and is swelling up with every release.

That’s the source of HelloMovies power. Now, let’s see how it benefits us, the film fan.

With HelloMovies you can…

• Find out which movie to watch.
• Find out where to watch it online.
• Find out what others are watching and share notes with them.

Finding out which movies to watch is the core job of the search feature on the site. There are many ways you can reach into its database and get the right movie for your taste or mood. You can search by Genres, Tastes, Release Year, Language, or Awards. You can use them one at a time or in combination like filters. You can further sort the results by release, recommended, popularity, or rating.

Or you can directly use the search bar (with auto-suggest) on top. I don’t, because I hate missing out on the cover flows of the related movies. The search box also leads to an Attic search, that is a listing of movies with the keywords in the title.

All of the information on one neat page

That’s one of the most organized aspects about HelloMovies. You get a brief synopsis with a mouseover on the poster. Click on your choice of movie and you get the full info about the movie. I won’t be able to put down everything here as you can see for yourself. But there are a few things you can focus on immediately.

HelloMovies describes the movie with a few adjectives under Tastes. The attributes along with the Genre frame the type of movie perfectly. These attributes are linkable and with a click, they will take you to other movies with the same qualities. The Trailer gives you a preview. Some movie pages though do not display trailers for lack of availability. Clicking on the white buttons helps you with recommendations to your friend list or adding it to your personal watch list for later viewing.

As you scroll down, you can roam your eyes over the ratings from IMDB and Critics Choice (from BFCA). If you are a film buff, these scores are instant indicators of movie worthiness. Then, further below, you get to read first-hand user reviews and those from sites like IMDB.

From the Recent Activity lookup, you can directly connect to others interested in the movie. What’s the world saying about the flick? Get the news from Twitter and Google News with a click.

Watching some movies online

Though not all movies are available for online viewing, you can source the ones which are available from the single click functions available under Where to Get It. The sources range from Hulu, YouTube, Veoh to subscription based sources (Netflix) and other DVD on-demand sources like Amazon. You can use the Where to Get It choices along with the other filters ranged above and below it.

The nerve center lies in the profile page

The user profile page is the starting point for building your own community of friends. It is almost Facebook-ish, with a Wall that displays what others post on your profile. You get to follow your friends’ movie liking-hating activities. Then there is the playlist which is your own watch list of movies that you are planning to see.

There’s a fun user activity monitoring feature that awards you points for rating movies, uploading movies, inviting users, uploading posters and trailers, reviewing movies, etc. You get to move through levels — starting from Newbie, through Movie Star and end up at the apex as a Godfather. For all that, you get rewarded with free gifts like HelloMovies Bumper Stickers, T-shirts, and even free tickets.

That will certainly keep me interested. I have seen my share of movie sites but I still like a slick way to get the scoop on a movie of my choice. HelloMovies makes it uncomplicated and right from the moment you land on the homepage, it’s a matter of 2-3 clicks.

Right now, I am happily clicking away on the movies I plan to watch. What about you?

If you’re a late-comer, do check out our freely downloadable The Internet Guide to the Movie Addict.

Follow MakeUseOf on Twitter. Includes cool extras.

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By Jason Kincaid, TechCrunch – May 24, 2010 at 03:30PM

They say a car loses half its value the minute you drive it off the lot. The same can often seem true of a brand new computer — after that lightning-quick first boot or two, PCs have the nasty habit of gradually bogging down until that new quad core processor doesn’t seem much faster than the last one you had. Enter TC Disrupt finalist Soluto, a startup that’s looking to help restore your computer to its former glory. And better yet, it’s going to hold those bloated, CPU hogging applications accountable.

Soluto has developed software that monitors your PC for things that are likely to annoy users — printing problems, crashy apps, resource hogs, and those frustrating applications that randomly cause your mouse to become useless for a few seconds at a time. It records which applications were running at the time of the hiccup, and analyzes low-level events to track things users aren’t even aware of, like which applications are competing for memory.

Even better: if a user somewhere in the world consistently has issues with a certain application and then makes a change that fixes it, Soluto can then tell other users who have had the same problem about the fix.

The product looks very compelling, with an impressive UI. After Soluto has analyzed your machine, it can suggest numerous fixes, including ‘no brainers’ like omitting certain applications from your bootup. It can show you your computer’s speed over time, mapping out when you installed a certain application — so you can see what led to the problem.

The company’s PCGenome project could actually help solve these problems. Soluto takes user-submitted data from its application and uses it to figure out which software works best on each computer. It can identify which hardware has had issues with which software. It can also help you pick out software that runs well on the specific model of PC you’re using, based on other users.

To monetize, Soluto has a few options. It will offer a freemium model with two plans: manual, which is suitable for people who are already computer savvy. This option tells you what’s wrong with your computer and how to fix it, but it’s up to you to do it. The second option is automatic: set it up, and Soluto will work in the background to fix tasks without your intervention. At this point this automatic setting does things like fix driver settings, and in the future it may be able to download applications that will work better on your machine than the one you’re currently using.

Soluto – Anti Frustration Software from Roee Adler on Vimeo.

Q&A:
Sacca: I wonder do you think this will migrate people back to PC on the platform. I’ve forgone that for the rest of my life probably.
A: It’s relevant for many computer platforms. We’re starting with PC but we will come and save Mac users.

Round 2 Business Presentation
Soluto was one of the companies chosen to proceed to round two of the TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Battlefield, where they talked about their business model. Here are my notes from that presentation:

We’re going to market with the geeks initially. There are hundreds of millions of people in pain. Consumer expenditures on security software is $3.6 billion. Snake oil solutions are pulling in $300 million.

We’re also going after SMB market. Value is easily quantifiable – we can look at boosts in workforce efficiently. We also extend the effective life of a PC, because people don’t get fed up with them and decide they need a new one. And we cut back on maintenance/support expenses.

Q: Distribution?
A: We raised a bunch of VC money to sustain free period where we create large PC genome. We believe we will do that. The challenge of being affiliated with one vendor or another is a huge challenge. We want to be objective.

Update:
Robert Scoble has posted a video of his interview with Soluto’s founders:

And here’s the entire presentation, at 51:30 in the session one video.

By Ben Blanquera, Techlife – May 23, 2010 at 10:09PM

Battelle chief lauds innovation partnerships with Ohio State : onCampus

Central Ohio has many of the ingredients necessary to become an even more significant part of the national innovation system — along the lines of Silicon Valley, North Carolina’s Research Triangle or the Route 128 circle around Boston, according to Battelle CEO Jeff Wadsworth.

Wadsworth, delivering the James F. Patterson Land-Grant University Lecture at the Nationwide and Ohio Farm Bureau 4H Center April 30, told attendees that land-grant universities must play a crucial role in both creating and sustaining the partnerships that will lead to prosperity.

After noting the similarities among the “innovation clusters,” such as the presence of a great university, significant research institutions, a highly-educated work force, the availability of venture capital and an entrepreneurial culture, he went on to say those noteworthy research clusters “are looking over their shoulders at us here, and they should.”

Considering central Ohio has all the above qualities as well as the nation’s best zoo, best science center (COSI), Chemical Abstracts Service and a host of top-tier businesses, he said, this region is poised to play a much stronger role in national innovation and serve as an even stronger economic engine for the entire Midwest.

Behind it all, though, he said “there are great expectations that it begins with us: All of you and your wonderful institution and those of us at Battelle.

“Like The Ohio State University, our mission can be boiled down to, quite simply, the betterment of mankind,” Wadsworth said. “Our ability to successfully resolve challenges including energy, health care, national security and education depends on innovation and on the strength and productivity of our economy.”

Wadsworth described the history of collaboration between OSU and Battelle, which didn’t really ignite until the beginning of this decade, when “an atmosphere of ‘not invented here’ yielded to ‘proudly found across King Avenue’ — in both directions.” The collaborative spark, he said, has led to nearly $80 million in projects that have involved both institutions in the past 10 years.

“We have changed the nature of our relationship from a transactional one, where individual researchers work together episodically on specific programs, to one of ‘engaged’ institutional partners,” he said. “Now our work together includes genuine collaborations in research, education, economic development and civic improvement.”

The interaction, he said, has been particularly effective in achieving results in the areas of science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) education and economic development.

The effort behind STEM education, he said, is at least partly self-serving for both Ohio State and Battelle; with nearly 40 percent of the current workforce eligible to retire in the next decade, it behooves both institutions to train and nurture their replacements.

He said the collaborative efforts with Metro Early College High School and the Battelle Center for Math and Science Education Policy at the John Glenn School of Public Affairs both have shown early success.

He said the partners also have set a “strong foundation on the economic development front,” citing work developing the Route 315 Research and Technology Corridor and the founding of TechColumbus as well as the joint Ohio Bioproducts Innovation Center that already has led to a multitude of new products that benefit the Ohio economy.

By Jason Fitzpatrick, Lifehacker – May 22, 2010 at 07:00PM

If you’re looking for a way to decrease the eye-stinging power of cut onions without resorting to wearing a dive mask, a simple soak will do the trick.

The sting of onions is so powerful that people are always on the lookout for new ways to banish it without suiting up like a bio-hazard team. At the cooking-centered blog The Kitchn they highlight a trick shared by Rick Bayless of the show Mexico: One Plate at a Time:

His sous-chefs were busy prepping onions and he quickly stopped the camera operator to make sure he got a shot of their large buckets filled with water and drowning onions. (Onions can’t swim without water wings – didn’t you know?) He said that all the onions in his restaurants get a quick dip in the “pool” before being used in any dish: fresh or cooked. They don’t need to soak long, just enough to get them washed off after being peeled and having their ends cut off. Not only does it eliminate tears, it also brings out their true flavor without being so harsh.

This is definitely an interesting twist on cutting onions under the water and certainly easier. Have a clever kitchen trick to share? Let’s hear about it in the comments.

By Jason Fitzpatrick, Lifehacker – May 21, 2010 at 11:00AM

If you’re an astronomy buff and looking for a little bit of Friday Fun, you can pore over high-resolution photos of the Moon and help NASA flag and identify previously unseen craters.

Moon Zoo is an interactive project between NASA and the public, powered by the Zooniverse engine. Participants can mark craters, identify interesting features—fissures, abandoned space gear, alien outposts?—and help map the surface of the Moon in unprecedented detail.

If you’re going to take a break and do a little aimless browser clicking, you might as well head over to Moon Zoo and be the one who discovers the long-lost Moon Death Ray of Dr. Zindartha. Have a favorite and fun project to share in the vein of Moon Zoo’s crowd-sourced discovery? Let’s hear about it in the comments. Thanks ptsgp!

By bkuchera@arstechnica.com (Ben Kuchera), Ars Technica – May 21, 2010 at 07:51AM

Star Wars: The Empire Strikes back is one of the best science fiction films ever made. It’s also 30 years old today, so we give you official permission to feel old. While every movie in the original trilogy is endlessly quoted and referenced in pop culture, Empire Strikes Back is the film that comes the closest to being a great movie.

The film is jet black in tone. Luke lost the only person he knew that connected him to his father, and to the legacy of the Jedi Knights, when Obi-Wan was struck down by Vader in A New Hope (or as older Ars staffers still refer to it, Star Wars). Han Solo is biding his time with the rebels before leaving to return to his life of being a professional smuggler and scoundrel; the bounty on his head is becoming too much to bear. The rebels may have destroyed the Death Star, but they’re still undersupplied and on the run, holed up on a frozen hell of a planet. Darth Vader is scouring space to find them, and he seems oddly preoccupied with a young pilot named Luke Skywalker. It only goes downhill from there.

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