If you haven't been following our fiction blog, Bit Lit, it's high time you started. Tonight we'll be giving away 5 autographed copies of David Wellington's new novel, Overwinter. But you gotta read to enter.
Okay! Here's how to win. Send an e-mail to david 'at' neatorama.com telling me what's your favorite part of Frostbite so far! If I like your answer, you win a copy of the sequel: Overwinter (autographed by the author!)
It's Tuesday and you know what that means! Another puzzle from our pals at Conceptis Puzzles! Yes, every Tuesday, we'll be offering a different logic puzzle, today featuring a 9x9 sudoku puzzle. Please give us some feedback on the new feature—we'd love to hear if you found it too easy, too hard, or what you think about Neato-Puzzles. Ready? Click here to play!
Congrats on making it to the last page of today's challenge. Don't forget to leave in the comments below, both the correct answer to the following question, AND the item from the neatoshop that you want if you're selected at random. If you don't leave the item you want, you will be disqualified.
Question: Tomorrow marks the release of the remake of the best-selling Nintendo 64 game "GoldenEye 007". Who played James Bond in the original movie?
Congrats on making it to the last page of today's challenge. Don't forget to leave in the comments below, both the correct answer to the following question, AND the item from the neatoshop that you want if you're selected at random. If you don't leave the item you want, you will be disqualified.
Question: What hit television show recently featured renditions of songs from the cult classic film, "The Rocky Horror Picture Show"?
Congrats on making it to the last page of today's challenge. Don't forget to leave in the comments below, both the correct answer to the following question, AND the item from the neatoshop that you want if you're selected at random. If you don't leave the item you want, you will be disqualified.
Question: What poet rhymed with iambic pentameter in the majority of his works which include over 30 plays and 154 sonnets?
Congrats on making it to the last page of today's challenge. Don't forget to leave in the comments below, both the correct answer to the following question, AND the item from the neatoshop that you want if you're selected at random. If you don't leave the item you want, you will be disqualified.
Question: What would be the sum if you added all the natural numbers from 1 to 36?
It's Tuesday and you know what that means! Another puzzle from our pals at Conceptis Puzzles! Yes, every Tuesday, we'll be offering a different logic puzzle, today featuring a 9x9 sudoku puzzle. Please give us some feedback on the new feature—we'd love to hear if you found it too easy, too hard, or what you think about Neato-Puzzles. Ready? Click here to play!
If you follow us on Facebook or Twitter, you probably heard about our latest contest where we're giving away a Boba Fett Electronic Helmet and some new action figures: Dack Ralter, Cloud Car Pilot, and Boba Fett. Whelp, the contest is mostly over. I say "mostly" because now the real fun begins.
We've selected four winners at random. Two from Twitter and two from Facebook. Whoever reads this post first and leaves a comment gets his/her pick of the prizes first, then second, and so on!
So, are you ready to find out who the lucky four are? Read on...
It's Tuesday and you know what that means! Another puzzle from our pals at Conceptis Puzzles! Yes, every Tuesday, we'll be offering a different logic puzzle, today featuring a 9x9 sudoku puzzle. Please give us some feedback on the new feature—we'd love to hear if you found it too easy, too hard, or what you think about Neato-Puzzles. Ready? Click here to play!
Everyone knows Kermit, Miss Piggy and Elmo. But how well do you know your more obscure muppets? (Some more obscure than others, of course). Take my latest BoingBoing quiz and find out:
If you live in the NYC area, please come out to the big mental_floss Trivia Show Sunday, Oct. 17th! It's a free event and it's being sponsored by Hannspree and Warner Home Video (they're providing a whole bunch of electronics and DVD's to give away)! Oh, and if that isn't enough incentive: if you bring 50 of your closest friends, mental_floss will give you a complementary crayon for the coloring portion of the night. Still need convincing? We've got details below.
Attention: Nerds, Knowledge Junkies, and most importantly, people who like to leave their house to drink and win stuff! The mental_floss Trivia Show is coming to a bar near you (if you live near Brooklyn*), and you're pretty much guaranteed to win something. In fact, our tagline is "[Almost] No one leaves empty-handed!" and we promise to [almost] live up to that.
But what exactly is The mental_floss Trivia Show? Well, it's part bar quiz, part game show, and part lots of really bad jokes! It promises to be a blast. So, go ahead and mark your calendar.
One of my favorite sites is Spacevidcast.com, a podcast hosted by husband and wife team, Cariann Higginbotham and Benjamin Higginbotham. Their goal? To take space to the masses. We were lucky to get a nice interview with Benjamin, who also went out of his way (upon request) to make this little video, a behind the scenes, if you will.
DI: Tell me the story behind the, er, launch of Spacevidcast.com. Was it your brainchild, or did you take it over?
BH: This was all us, there was nothing like it before we started and really nothing quite like it since. Cariann and I used to have a live podcast over at TechnologyEvangelist.com but the CEO didn't see the value in it and basically had it shut down. *I* saw the value in that we went from almost nothingness to 3,000 daily listeners over the course of a couple of months with no advertising. As soon as we shut down the podcasting section the site growth completely stopped, so I was pretty darned sure that we had a winning formula. At that time sites like TWiT.tv and whatnot were really starting to become popular, so I didn't want to do yet another tech podcast. Exploration had always been a passion of mine and so I locked on to the idea of space with an emphasis on human space flight. My wife Cariann didn't think we would have anything to talk about and basically told me to go have fun with my new project. After live episode 1.01 was done Cariann watched it, told me in no uncertain terms that I was terrible on my own and that she would help for a couple of weeks until we ran out of stuff to talk about (for the record, I really was terrible and that episode is still available on our site to painfully sit through.) Cariann said that once we ran out of topics we could do a real podcast, maybe something on the TV show Lost or similar. 3.5 years later we're still going strong, too many topics to actually cover. Cariann is the first to admit that she is glad she was wrong and we both have a blast doing the show. To be frank, I couldn't do this without Cariann. Fun startup stories aside, she has been and always will be my biggest supporter from 1.02 on which helps a lot when you can't yet see the light at the end of the tunnel.
DI: What were you doing before you got involved with the site?
BH: I do a lot of stuff. I work in IT as the Director of New Technology for an ASP in Real Estate and get to play with cool toys all day long. I did that prior to Spacevidcast and still do. It actually helps pay for the show. Going back a bit further, I worked in broadcast television as a director / technical director for a national news station, a national home shopping network, and a few local stations. Between the two I helped design and develop next generation digital television production facilities when I did R&D for a broadcast VAR. So I have a pretty wide and varied background, but a lot of it revolves around video and live television.
DI: I see you also do a series of awesome How-to vids for CamTwist, one of my favorite free tools of all time. How’d you get involved with them?
BH: Them is more of a 'Him'. Back in the TechnologyEvangelist.com days I was trying to find a way to design a home television studio that was inexpensive yet powerful. CamTwist had come out and I reached out to the developer, as I often do, expecting no response. A couple hours later I got a reply asking for more information. Over time we built rapport and began talking about my wishes and dreams for a low-cost HD switcher that would do whatever I wanted. The developer, Steve, was open to this idea and CamTwist Studio was born. Of course with all that power came a great level of complexity, so I helped make the videos to ease the support requests in the forums. It's a bit funny, but CamTwist in many respects is more powerful than some of the low to mid-end broadcast gear. I can do more in CamTwist than I can in the $500 Wirecast application from a live switching standpoint. Heck, with the exception of virtual sets, I think CamTwist beats out even the Tricaster TCXD300 which is a $15k box (although to be fair the Tricaster does more than just live switching). The entire Spacevidcast show is switched live in HD using CamTwist Studio and when you look at what we are doing it is amazing to think that it is *free* software making it happen. That's right, free software that can switch multiple cameras in HD and stream it to Flash Media Live Encoder in real time. I'm still amazed by the solution to this day!
DI: Spacevidcast isn’t a 501c3 so who pays for all this? What’s the business model?
BH: You are correct, we opted to go with an LLC rather than a 501(c)3 for some internal reasons. Right now the show is nearly break even. We have a subscription model where you can get our content without any pre-roll or overlay ads as well as some additional stuff that normal viewers don't get to see (what we call epic or Enhanced Productions, Interviews and Content). Between that and the ad revenue we're darned close to break even. But being that I always want to make the show bigger and badder, a lot of this comes out of my own pocket as well. I pay for all of the travel to the different events that we cover and I pay any time something like an HDTV blows up because a cat decided to pee on it (you can learn more about that cat/HDTV story in the Spacevidcast 3.28 post show, which is only available to epic subscribers.) My hope is that over time we will continue to grow and both the subscription revenue and ad revenue will help pay for the show and make it much easier to do bigger, badder and cooler events for everyone. It is a small niche market, so it may never break even, but I do believe that most people care about human space flight and that we're on the tipping point of something great... So I think this thing will happen! One other thing we do is consulting and live streaming on a contract basis for companies that want to do what we do, but can't figure out how (low quality streaming is easy, high quality streaming is not.) That all goes back in to paying for the show.
We're giving away a Boba Fett Electronic Helmet and some new action figures: Dack Ralter, Cloud Car Pilot, and Boba Fett!
Rules: The contest will run through Oct 24th, so we can get the Helmet to the winner in time for Halloween.
To enter, you must post the following to your Twitter feed or on our Facebook wall:
I want to WIN! @neatorama #StarWars #giveaway check it out here–> http://www.neatorama.com/star-wars-halloween-giveaway/ Ends 10/24
We'll pick four winners at random and blog about it. The first one to read the blog, find out you're a winner, and leave a comment, gets his/her pick of the prizes first, then second, and so on.
I'm old enough to remember the original TRON, released in the early 80s. I was so into the movie, I went out and bought every gaming console that had any cartridges TRON-related. One of my favorites was Intellivision's TRON Deadly Discs, which takes place on the famous TRON game grid:
Of course, with the upcoming, highly anticipated release of the sequel, TRON Legacy, the game grid is very much on many peoples' minds these days. Perhaps none more so than the good folks over at WonderHowTo.com, who've just bestowed on us the greatest honor a blog can receive; yes, they've named a sexual position after us. It's called the Neatorama (Difficulty Level 3!) and is actually SFW if you want to check out the fun video below. Thanks WHT! We're deeply humbled.
