Because filling your home with cameras controlled by one of the largest companies in the world wasn’t enough, Amazon announced today they’re making a flying Ring camera drone that will actually be able to fly to where the action is. The video shows the camera flying to the world’s worst burglar, but I imagine the real use is so Amazon can spy on people having sex and maybe pooping. What, you thought you could just point your camera away from your bedroom and bathroom? No, no, no, my friend. There’s no escaping Mr. Bezos’ tiny flying camera and he prefers his videos both private and embarrassing.

Keep going for the full, weird, announcement video.

Source: Geekologie – Amazon is making a Ring flying camera drone and they made a really weird video to promote it

This is a video of a girl playing around on her dad’s time-locking container after her brother jokingly puts her phone in it, not understanding that by rotating the lid she is actually increasing the duration of the timer. She eventually realizes what she’s done when the timer shows 2 days and she breaks down in a combination of laughter and tears. Her reaction is actually kind of amazing and I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything quite like it. I imagine it’s the reaction you would have if somebody was tickling you while simultaneously murdering your family.

Keep going for the full video.

Source: Geekologie – Girl accidentally locks her phone in a timed locker for two days

Filmmaker and radio/podcast guy Andrew Norton edited scenes of people wearing headphones in movies but replaced the music with podcasts. They’re all pretty good, but the Baby Driver (Serial Podcast) mashup is clearly the best. Personally, I can’t wait for the inevitable future where music no longer exists and only podcasts remain. Nothing says tension and excitement like Tom Cruise reaching the climactic scene of a Mission Impossible movie only to have The Joe Rogan Experience swell in the background.

Baby Driver (2017) x Serial pic.twitter.com/RDXoeCyF9W

— Andrew Norton (@andrewtnorton) September 18, 2020

Keep going for a few more of the edits, including American Psycho and Guardians of the Galaxy.

Source: Geekologie – People wearing headphones in movies, but they’re listening to podcasts

Every year for the past five years, Demi Adejuyigbe has put out a video on September 21 in honor of Earth, Wind & Fire’s song September. He somehow manages to top himself every year and they’re always weirdly delightful in a way that makes you forget the world is a dumpster fire of misery. Apparently he’s fought the desire to make the video each year but keeps getting sucked back in. He tells Vulture:

It kind of feels like a prison I’ve built myself. September 22nd is a very nice moment when I don’t have to think about that. Then, as I get closer and closer to September, I start feeling like, I guess I should figure out what I’m going to do this year. And I get lucky, because for a lot of time I won’t think about it. Then I’ll just have this idea, and build from that. Or I go to a craft store and just see a bunch of things and just let my mind go.

But it’s a strange experience to feel it coming on. Every year, for the last three years, I’ve thought, I should not do it this year. Or else I risk setting myself in a perpetual cycle: I guess I’m gonna do this until I die. So every year, I think, I won’t do it this year. I tweet, “I won’t do it this year.” And then I come up with an idea and I go, Okay, that might be fun. Maybe I’ll do that. That’s the cycle every year.

This year he put the fate of the video in the hands of viewers, saying he’ll only make a video next year if he manages to raise $50,000 for charity through sept21st.com. Although as of this publishing he’s already raised $253,012.55 so we should be good to go. I personally pitched in a stack of coupons and I think that’s really what pushed the amount over the edge so you’re welcome.

Keep going for the full video and the rest of Demi’s 9/21 videos from the past five years. They’re all great and a beacon of light in these trying times.

Source: Geekologie – A day late, but here’s Demi Adejuyigbe’s annual September 21 video

In sad news, Longcat, the infamously long cat, died in Japan yesterday at the age of 18. The cat, whose real name was Nobiko, was posted to the imageboard 2chan between 2004 and 2005 and became popular in 2006 for his longness (she was apparently 65 cm).

Hong Kong-based pro-democracy website Stand News reported that Longcat had been rushed to the vet after being found in a weak state on Sunday morning. The cat eventually passed away at around 2pm local time.

Looks like 2020 isn’t done with us yet. One can only hope Longcat is continuing to be long in heaven. I just wish there was another long cat to replace Longcat so that I could say, “Longcat is dead, long live Longcat.” Because long.

Source: Geekologie – Longcat, the cat known on the internet for being long, has died

Working with CGI artist Jan Koudela, TheToyZone created these ultra-realistic Polly Pockets from the fictional worlds of television and movies. The above is the Simpson’s residence from The Simpsons, but they also made one for Stranger Things, Friends, The Lord of the Rings, The Shining, and The Royal Tenenbaums. They’re all pretty great and worth checking out. It’d be cool if they could’ve made one for my home, but I guess nobody would be interested in a Polly Pocket that was just a cigarette box filled with trash and bed bugs. Realistic, yes. Fun, not so much.

Keep going for the rest.

Source: Geekologie – Fictional homes reimagined as Polly Pockets

Continuing humanity’s race towards potential deepfake hell, researchers have developed a way of creating 3D models from 2D images using neural networks. The full title of the project is PIFuHD: Multi-Level Pixel-Aligned Implicit Function for High-Resolution 3D Human Digitization and here’s some gibberish from the researchers:

Recent advances in image-based 3D human shape estimation have been driven by the significant improvement in representation power afforded by deep neural networks. Although current approaches have demonstrated the potential in real world settings, they still fail to produce reconstructions with the level of detail often present in the input images. We argue that this limitation stems primarily form two conflicting requirements; accurate predictions require large context, but precise predictions require high resolution. Due to memory limitations in current hardware, previous approaches tend to take low resolution images as input to cover large spatial context, and produce less precise (or low resolution) 3D estimates as a result. We address this limitation by formulating a multi-level architecture that is end-to-end trainable. A coarse level observes the whole image at lower resolution and focuses on holistic reasoning. This provides context to an fine level which estimates highly detailed geometry by observing higher-resolution images. We demonstrate that our approach significantly outperforms existing state-of-the-art techniques on single image human shape reconstruction by fully leveraging 1k-resolution input images.

I’m all for the progression of science and technology, but I honestly have no idea where all this research is heading. If things keep progressing the way they are, eventually researchers will be able to recreate the entire Universe using somebody’s Instagram profile picture.

Keep going for a video detailing the project and showing how it renders 2D video.

Source: Geekologie – Creating 3D models of people from 2D images

This is a side by side comparison of what it’s like to land an Airbus A320 at Los Angeles airport in real life compared to Microsoft Flight Simulator. It’s one of those instances where the simulator looks more realistic than reality. If it wasn’t labeled I think most people would have a tough time figuring out which was which. The textures on the runway in real life actually look worse than the simulator, like God needs to upgrade the graphics card or something.

Source: Geekologie – Landing at LAX in real life vs Microsoft Flight Simulator 2020

This is a video of a guy trying to feed a squirrel some pine nuts but then he somehow accidentally hits the reset button on it. It’s the cutest, weirdest thing you’ll see today unless you’re subscribed to some sort of puppy breakdancing video channel. At 1:30 he starts just putting the nuts in the broken squirrel’s arms and it’s so adorable I almost passed out. Actually I did pass out, and then woke up with a bunch of pine nuts in my arms. I hate when this happens, but also, hey, free pine nuts.

Keep going for the full super cute video.

Source: Geekologie – Guy accidentally reboots squirrel and it’s super adorable

Another day, another video of movie characters lip syncing to pop songs. This time, somebody turned AI Lip Sync on Gollum to make him lip sync The Scatman. There’s something about his expression that perfectly captures the horror of deepfake’s potential, like he’s aware he’s being made to sing The Scatman against his will. To make it perfect somebody needs to deepfake him mouthing “Help me” in between all that scatting. Also, how is this not a song about poop and the love of poop?

Keep going for the full scat filled video.

Source: Geekologie – Gollum lip syncs The Scatman using AI Lip Sync

The U.S. Customs and Border Protection tweeted last night that they seized a shipment of counterfeit Apple AirPods. However, just a quick glance at the pictures they posted show they’re clearly OnePlus Buds. The CBP even sent out a press release bragging about their “mission success”:

On August 31, CBP officers seized 2,000 counterfeit Apple Airpod Earbuds from Hong Kong destined for Nevada at an air cargo facility located at John F. Kennedy International Airport. If the merchandise were genuine, the Manufacturer’s Suggested Retail Price (MSRP) would have been $398,000.

“CBP Officers are protecting the American public from various dangers on a daily basis,” said Troy Miller, Director of CBP’s New York Field Operations. “The interception of these counterfeit earbuds is a direct reflection of the vigilance and commitment to mission success by our CBP Officers daily.”

I get that the design of the earbuds are similar, but those boxes are clearly labeled as OnePlus Buds. This would be like if they seized a bunch of Microsoft Surface Laptops and then bragged about stopping a shipment of counterfeit MacBooks. Was there really not a single person there that stopped to ask why none of the counterfeit Apple AirPods said “Apple” or “AirPods” on them? Is there a world where counterfeit Nike sneakers are branded as Adidas?

Keep going for a side by side comparison of the OnePlus and Apple earbuds, as well as the original tweet.

Source: Geekologie – CBP brags about seizing counterfeit Apple Airpods that are actually OnePlus Buds

Instagram account Fine Art Simpsons mashes up fine art with The Simpsons. They’re all pretty great, but the one above featuring Cy Twombly’s ‘Untitled’ on the chalkboard really shows the absurdity of the art world, since that thing sold Sotheby’s for $70,530,000 USD. That’s $70.5 million. For the thing that if nobody had pointed out you really would’ve thought a cartoon delinquent scribbled on a chalkboard.

Keep going for one more shot and check out @fine_art_simpsons for the rest.

Source: Geekologie – Fine art but with The Simpsons

Because 2020 has decided it hasn’t screwed with us enough, California is currently on fire and has turned San Francisco into a scene from the apocalypse. Well somebody took drone footage from the Bay Area fire and set it to the Blade Runner 2049 soundtrack. It’s insane that this is what San Francisco actually looks like right now. It’s weird seeing it covered in an orange hue as opposed to what it’s usually covered in: homeless people’s feces.

Keep going for the full video. It’s haunting and eerie and weird that reality is currently stranger than science fiction movies.

Source: Geekologie – Somebody took drone footage from the Bay Area fires and set it to Blade Runner 2049

The first trailer for Denis Villeneuve’s Dune is here. I’m not sure what the human limit of anticipation is, but I think I hit it. Although the Pink Floyd cover they chose kind of sucks and I feel like there was a missed opportunity to use Darude’s Sandstorm.

Source: Geekologie – The first trailer for Denis Villeneuve’s Dune

Twitter user Mike Mika modified the Kung Fu fight between Neo and Morpheus in The Matrix so that his polarized 3D glasses would show one side as the raining Matrix text and the other as the fight to simulate how it might look to the characters watching it in the movie.

Been playing with the polarized 3D TV and got the idea to convert the Matrix so that one pair of glasses sees only the Matrix Raining Text effect and the other pair sees the Kung Fu fight between Neo and Morpheus, to feel like the characters watching it in the movie. pic.twitter.com/8M3DexcDXr

— Mike Mika (@MikeJMika) September 8, 2020

And Mike explaining the process:

Polarized lenses and screen. I authored the video in after effects as compressed side-by-side, the TV interprets that into a mixed image, even-odd lines polarized which gets picked up differently by each lens.

— Mike Mika (@MikeJMika) September 8, 2020

Now that I know you can embed video in other videos, obviously I’m going to figure out a way to watch porn while my girlfriend is watching Selling Sunset. “Dear, do you mind if we watch while wearing these glasses? Also, keep your left eye closed the entire time. Whatever you do, don’t open your left eye.”

Source: Geekologie – Modifying ‘The Matrix’ so polarized 3D glasses show raining Matrix text

Visual effects engineer Jonty Pressinger (who previously fixed The Lion King remake by deepfaking it to look more like the cartoon version) was testing out Wav2Lip and put together this compilation of movies lip-syncing Smash Mouth’s All Star. Wav2Lip basically takes any video and syncs the lip movements using just an audio file. They even have an interactive demo you can use to test it out.

It’s just crazy that after decades of hearing about artificial intelligence and how the computers would think for themselves and take over the world, it turns out we’d just be using the technology to make videos of Tom Hanks lip-syncing to terrible songs. I mean, I’m not complaining. Dumb internet videos totally beat being hunted down and murdered by Terminator robots.

Keep going for the full video, as well as some examples of terrible dubbing that this technology would actually be useful for.

Source: Geekologie – Using artificial intelligence to make movies lip-sync Smash Mouth’s ‘All Star’

It was just a matter of time, but Twitter user Foone managed to get Doom running on a digital pregnancy test.

I tried zooming in and turning up the in-game gamma a bit, so you can see what’s going on slightly better.
(It’s a 128×32 pixel monochrome display, it’s never gonna be great) pic.twitter.com/dAU7LZ1pkT

— foone (@Foone) September 7, 2020

Although to be clear, it’s not running on any of the pregnancy test’s actual hardware. Foone swapped out the display and microcontroller so it’s really just Doom running inside a pregnancy test shell. It’s still a neat project though because of the unique form factor. Plus, who doesn’t want to play video games on a device that people pee on? I know I never pick up my Nintendo Switch without peeing on it first. It’s just how gaming is supposed to be.

Source: Geekologie – Doom running on a digital pregnancy test

Pareidolia is an art project that uses a fully automated robot to examine grains of sand and look for faces. The name of the project comes from the word “pareidolia” itself, which is defined as “the tendency to perceive a specific, often meaningful image in a random or ambiguous visual pattern.”

In the artwork Pareidolia facial detection is applied to grains of sand. A fully automated robot search engine examines the grains of sand in situ. When the machine finds a face in one of the grains, the portrait is photographed and displayed on a large screen.

I’ve got a project of my own, and it’s finding human faces that look like grains of sand. And yes, that means I just go around taking pictures of bald people.

Source: Geekologie – Machine that finds grains of sand that look like faces

Researchers at Northwestern University and the Delft University of Technology have developed a Game Boy that uses solar power and the energy generated from mashing buttons to run forever.

As the device switches between power sources, it does experience short losses in power. To ensure an acceptable duration of gameplay between power failures, the researchers designed the system hardware and software from the ground up to be energy aware as well as very energy efficient. They also developed a new technique for storing the system state in non-volatile memory, minimizing overhead and allowing quick restoration when power returns. This eliminates the need to press “save” as seen in traditional platforms, as the player can now continue gameplay from the exact point of the device fully losing power–even if Mario is in mid-jump.

On a not-too-cloudy day, and for games that require at least moderate amounts of clicking, gameplay interruptions typically last less than one second for every 10 seconds of gameplay. The researchers find this to be a playable scenario for some games–including Chess, Solitaire and Tetris–but certainly not yet for all (action) games.

It clearly still has some kinks to work out since it has to pause every 10 seconds, but it’s a clever idea to use the button mashing to power the device. It seems like the kind of thing that could be applied to keyboards or, say, the energy generated by teenage boys’ wrists. If you could harness the energy being generated from all that vigorous motion you could probably power a small country.

Keep going for video of the Game Boy in action.

Source: Geekologie – Researchers develop battery-free Game Boy that can run forever