Hoshizora Camping demonstrates a cool way of making your camp stove super cool. He first angles the holes in the secondary combustion layer and then adds a fire ring to an ordinary, boring camp stove. With some tweaking, the flame coming out of your stove will be tornadoed into a cool braid-like effect. I like how he shows how he experiments with different configurations to get the best effects.
I think this would be a great way to add a luxury touch to your camp stove and give you something cool to watch at the end of a long day of hiking or climbing.
Luke Edwin shares this video collection of cool and often very simple tricks to get some interesting effect shots. Motion controlled greenscreen, shots that zoom in and out through objects, slow-motion effects, product shots and lots of little effects used in many modern videos. It’s pretty incredible these techniques and equipment are achievable by just about anyone for a very limited budget.
SteamdeckHQ reports that the recent 3.5.1 SteamOS update also came with a new BIOS firmware ver 118. Located in the SteamOS preview branch, this new version’s only change appears to be adding undervolting to the BIOS menu. Undervolting was possible before, but it could brick your device if you were too aggressive. To help prevent this, Valve appears to have put in a safety net in the BIOS that should save a lot of Steam Decks. Now, performing a CMOS reset (hold down the Volume Down button, 3 dot button, and power button at the same time) will also reset the undervolt settings to defaults.
Why undervolt your console? If your system is stable, your Steam Deck will typically run cooler, keep the fan quieter, possibly maintain higher speeds longer, and most importantly – improve the battery life.
Shopping on Black Friday is not as simple as “Buy it because it’s the cheapest price all year!” You have to actually do your homework to figure out which items are actually a good buy.
Here’s some great resources to help you figure it out.
Check out the Black Friday ads to make your plan:
The first thing you should do is be prepared for Black Friday before it comes. You’ll do this by starting a few weeks in advance by reading through the ‘leaked’ Black Friday ad scans and seeing if there is any deals you’re interested in.
Slickdeals Black Friday page – Not only does it have all the ad scans, it also has the normal Slickdeals voting system so you can tell what deals are actually deals.
Sadly, it’s all too common for review sites to be purchased and largely just paid advertising. Anything endorsed by Twitch streamers, celebrities, or any online personality through Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, etc – are almost 100% guaranteed to be paid advertising. Websites that are reliable and accurate one year turn into paid promotion sites with shocking regularity. You need to check who owns the sites and see if the founders are still standing behind their reviews.
Hardware Unboxed – Good rating site that’s probably best for its gaming monitor reviews
Monitors Unboxed – A dedicated subchannel of Hardware Unboxed that is just monitors.
CamelCamelCamel – check this historical price of any item on Amazon and see if it’s really on sale, or not. Just be aware that Amazon often changes the product links, serial numbers, and other tricks so you can’t get a long-term historical price on some items.
Retro game prices have shot up to crazy levels in the last few years. As prices continued to go up far beyond what most individuals could afford, sites quickly picked up on the astronomical rises by offering fractional ownership of retro games. Sites like Otis and Rally.
Here we are in late 2023, and it appears the crash has arrived. Karl has watched the prices plummet – and in a great many cases – by 90%.
The real question is if that money was ever real at all. In his original video, he indicated the astronomical sale prices likely didn’t actually involve those huge sums of money actually changing hands because WATA and Heritage were basically selling the games to themselves and the money and games never really changed hands.
One should question if the money ever even existed. So, we might take delight that a game that was falsely sold for $50,000 in a manipulated auction just sold for $5,000, but that’s still a good bit of dosh for games they likely bought off ebay for $500 or less years earlier.
Signal Festival is a festival of artworks from light design, visual and digital art, artificial intelligence, as well as conceptual art. It occurs in several locations in Prague and has reached it’s 20th year.
FLUX was one of most cool looking entries for 2023. It’s a fascinating interactive light installation from Ksawery Komputery. The installation is 6 meters tall, 13-meter diameter on the ground, 4 high-speed cameras, 8-speaker sound system, 4 800 meters of LEDs strips, 144,000 pixels running at 100 frames per second, with custom software and hardware. As people approached the installation, it would display them on the strands of led lights.
It also made an earlier debut at Miami Art Week Dec 2022:
Oh – you think you’re cool because you stayed at a luxury hotel in Dubai or comped to a suite in Vegas?
For the ultra rich, there are experiences that are far beyond the pale like David Copperfield’s Musha Cay. Renting for $50,000/night, you get the whole island. Multiple luxury residential buildings for up to 12 with high end catered food, their own mystery game to play, movies on the beach, and even custom fireworks show.
Or maybe try out Richard Branson’s Necker Island for a little over $107,500 a night (up to 40 guests), or $128,000/night for up to 48 guests. The buildings and island was almost completely destroyed in 2017 by hurricane Irma, but seems to have re-opened in 2022.
I find it interesting that even billionaires need to AirBnB their properties.