fun

'This is sand' offers sweet reprieve for landlocked office drones

Did you forget to schedule vacation time this summer to hit the beach, or another place with that thing called nature? There's hope, albeit a dirty one in the form of ThisIsSand.com. This simple Flash app will let you drop colored sand to your heart's content. You can build up huge mountains to stare at in place of the real world, and it comes complete with a soothing sand sound with each drop.

While not as engaging as the classic falling sand game, the end results have a really neat textured look, and you can swap between … Read more

10 awesome Internet Easter eggs

Adding hidden items in Web sites is what separates good developers from great ones. Below I've compiled a list of 10 of my personal favorites from the past few years. If you have any of your own feel free to share them in the comments.

1. The Konami code. The infamous code sequence that appears in many video games old and new (↑ ↑ ↓ ↓ ← → ← → B A) has a place on the Internet too. Two sites that we know of take advantage of this to yield humorous results. The first, and most recent, is Google Reader. Inputting the code graces your feed source menu with one of the ninjas found in the newly skinnable sharing pages. This trick also works on GameSpot.com. Entering in the code and hitting enter at the end will take you to the cheats section for Contra, the game for the Nintendo Entertainment System for which it's best known.

2. Yahoo's singing yokel. If you remember the 1990s you'll remember this wonderful yell--the sound of the Yahoo yodeler. To hear it any time just click on the ! at the end of the Yahoo logo on Yahoo.com.

3. JetBlue wants a sandwich. The infamous peanut butter jelly time dancing banana (background) was briefly a part of JetBlue's travel search site. Typing in "PBJ" into the search box while holding shift and clicking the search button would pull up a clip from Fox's Family Guy with the dog Brian doing the dance. It was removed shortly after it was discovered. You can still see a shot of what it looked like here.

4. Google Easter eggs (3 parts)

Google bombs come and go. Their very nature depends on search relevancy, so no one Google bomb will stick around forever. Two of the more prominent ones had to deal with the George W. Bush presidency, including the infamous faux 404 page for " Weapons of mass destruction" and the search for "miserable failure" which would link up to Bush's profile at the White House Web site. A more humorous iteration exists using Google's built-in calculator in relation to Douglas Adams' masterpiece The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Searching for " the answer to life, the universe, and everything" yields 42, which you'd understand if you had read the book.

Google Moon. Google's mapping services are chock full of secrets. For a while Google Moon had a really great one. When zooming too far into the surface of the moon it became cheese, something that was later removed probably at NASA's request or improved topography. Here's a video someone captured of it by KoolAidGrenade at Metacafe.

Is The Moon Made Of Cheese?!? ACCORDING TO GOOGLE.COM - video powered by Metacafe

Ridiculous languages in Google Search. Remember the Swedish Chef from The Muppets? Why not make him your liaison to the world of search? Amidst the myriad of language options in Google you'll find "bork, bork, bork" which serves up your results in the gibberish language of the fictional Swedish Chef. Believe it or not Google gets over a million page views a day in Swedish Chef according to Marissa Mayer, Google's vice president of search and user experience.

If Swedish ain't your thing, there's also Elmer Fudd from Loony Toons and Esperanto, the language that belongs to no nation or people. However the best of all is Google for h4x0rs (hackers), which you can get to by going to 600673.com (Google spelled out in leet speak).

Continue reading for 5-10.… Read more

Make numbers less boring with SensibleUnits

One of my buddies who is a finance nerd spends weeks at a time working on giant, awe inducing Excel spreadsheets. He seems like the perfect type to enjoy SensibleUnits, a silly service that takes standards measurements and converts them to real-world items like Alaskan moose-antlers, football fields, and London buses. The hope is that you can take any number of units (large or small) and make it a little more interesting. Any writer or storyteller would be wise to bookmark this.

For the more visually inclined, check out Nikon's Universcale site which maps out objects in the world … Read more

DIY pixel art made easy with Cubescape

Pixel art has held a special place in the the world of Web 2.0. Most recently it reared its head at Adobe Systems' Engage event earlier this year, where attendees received a poster with pixel art characters using various Adobe products. The poster was professionally designed, but that doesn't mean you've got to go out and buy some special software or take digital art classes to have some fun making your own.

Enter Cubescape, a simple app that gives you some easy-to-use tools to create 3D pixel art on a large canvas. You can drop blocks down … Read more

Duck, duck, blog

At the intersection of lightheartedness, bath-time fun, and photography, you will find the Duck Show. A creation of photographer Colleen Fletcher, the blog transports you into a world inhabited by rubber ducks. They mark the passage of time by celebrating holidays, rocking out in Vegas, and having adventures around New York. They even star in film stills.

As you might expect, this all started in a bathroom--a very large bathroom apparently. Ms. Fletcher decided to decorate that bathroom with rubber ducks, began a collection, and as she puts it, "A couple of years and 333 ducks later, I found … Read more

Test-build your Lego masterpiece digitally

Do-it-yourself magazines like MAKE and basement-brewed steampunk anachronisms might be at the forefront of home engineering projects, but 50-year-old Lego is still the name builders know best. Now you can play with them on your computer in the official freeware program Lego Digital Designer, available for both Windows and Mac.

… Read more

Netdisaster adds Led Zeppelin and acid urine to any Web site

Editors note: To turn off the Flash ad, click the "remove disaster" button in the upper-left corner of the screen.

You know those highly intrusive Flash ads that you occasionally find while surfing? The kind that march all over the page and are impossible to ignore and sometimes get rid of? From that same technology comes an enjoyable service that lets you see your favorite sites in a whole new way. Netdisaster, which picked up an innovation award from Yahoo UK three years ago is still pretty innovative by letting you turn any Web site into a playground of destruction and/or defilement.

The service provides more than 30 ways to destroy a site, and a good majority of them manage to do it humorously. All you need to do is plug in a URL and pick the terror you wish it to befall. Certain options cause more damage than others, and many feature an "auto-repair" option that will seal up the holes caused from explosions, letting the mayhem continue into infinity. This is especially helpful if you're using the chainsaw tool or nuclear blast, as they tend to do some pretty serious damage.

The one thing I really enjoy about this service is that you can try out other disasters without having to jump back to the home page and plug in the URL all over again. You can tweak the options ad nauseam, and simply click one button to get the action going again. It's a nice touch, and really keeps you trying out everything that's there.

If you're a really big fan, you can also install the toolbar, which lets you call up a disaster on any site you're on without having to click off the page. Webmasters also have the option of adding disasters or the disaster selector toolbar to any of their pages with a few simple lines of JavaScript, which I've done after the break.

[found on DownloadSquad]

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Hope floats: The remote-controlled serving tray

We're still waiting on the time machine, human teleportation, and commercially available flying cars. But scientists have been working hard, and now the Remote-Controlled Floating Serving Tray is ready for the world.

Hammacher Schlemmer's remote-controlled tray holds up to five cans (no room for a six-pack?) and a 16-ounce bowl of delicious, delicious snacks.

The piece de resistance--a remote control with 25 feet of range--lets the operator transport various refreshments to you aquatically. (Or, depending on how good a friend the operator is, float the snacks just out of reach and make you swim around and chase them.) … Read more

There's a TV for that

Hannspree has come out with some interesting televisions in terms of physical design as it continues to change its image.

The company is known for its kitschy televisions for kids. They have everything from toy helicopters to stuffed animals encasing TVs. While the company is still maintaining its children's lines, it's also bringing that sense of whimsy to adults with lines that offer hints at other fantasies.

In addition to the travel Hannslounge 26-inch widescreen LCD HDTV, Hannspree has televisions based on a man's belt, the cello, and even pearls.

The rubber-encased Hannstime.square 12-inch LCD TV … Read more