Gizmodo Australia » rock

What Is This?

Danny Allen — Fri, 04 Sep 2009 05:46:16 +0000

Wait, is NASA making weather balloons shaped like a Rubik’s Cube now?

Nah, it’s one of the many art installations sprinkled over the dusty playa at Burning Man 2009. This year’s theme is Evolution: A Tangled Bank. Safe travels if you’re a weekend burner, and don’t forget the white distilled vinegar to neutralise the super-fine alkaline playa dust!

One year later (and having travelled around three continents since), I’m still spotting in random places, most recently in my hiking shoes. [San Francisco Chronicle]

This Is Classic Rock Radio!

Jesus Diaz — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 23:40:34 +0000

Seriously, this is classic rock radio. Real rock. OK, it’s cement, but it is real, not any of that plastic crap that you kids consume today. Here’s its back, and some more real rock.

According to its creator, Guus Oosterbaan:

My ROCK Radio is number two in my cement-audio-series. It started of being a very nice rectangular brick shape. Then I found out that a thick layer of cement shields the radio from actually receiving radio waves. With my “Now it doesn’t work anyway” philosophy, I took a big hammer and created this Flintstones look, and the radio works!

You Mr. Guus Oosterbaan you, you are pure win. [Guusoosterbaan via Likecool]

And the promised real rock:

Having a bloody great weekend, peeps.

Buy A Modded Guitar Hero Controller To Cheat At Fake Rocking

Jason Chen — Wed, 01 Jul 2009 01:00:00 +0000

We’re big Guitar Hero/Rock Band fans, but buying a controller so that it can play the songs perfectly so that you don’t have to do anything? That’s taking it a bit too far.

If pretending to rock is so hard that you have to pretend to pretend to rock, you should just go and eat your way up to 350 kilos and give up on life. [eBay - Thanks Ben!]

Game Over For Sun’s “Game Changing” 16-Core Rock CPU

Sean Fallon — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 20:55:00 +0000

In the wake of their buyout by Oracle, Sun Microsystems has canned their 16-core Rock chip project—once touted by the company as a “game changer,” and their answer to IBM’s latest Power CPUs—after five years of development. This represents the second major chip offering from Sun to be shelved in recent years. [NYT]

Treadwall Balances Your Love of Rock Climbing With Your Acrophobia

John Mahoney — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 13:06:10 +0000

Yes there are pool treadmills, desk treadmills, and water-resistance treadmills for dogs, but the Treadwall throws the horizontal nature of previous treadmill innovations out the window. For 10-grand, you can climb yourself to death in your own living room without getting higher than 10 feet or so, making the inevitable fall when you fail to keep up with the scrolling handholds all the more manageable. But let’s see how some drunken Jackass wannabees fare in the following video.

AU: Wow. I was climbing something very similar to this at the local rock-climbing centre when I was in Cadets back in 1996. Unlike the US to be so out of date…

Yeah, not so good. [BornRich]

YouTube Living Legends Gives Us Excuse to Talk Rolling Stones Shine a Light

Jesus Diaz — Fri, 04 Apr 2008 12:00:00 +0000

At last it’s Friday. And not any Friday. Today is the Friday, the worldwide release of Martin Scorsese’s Shine a Light. And like Keith said: you’ve got the sun, you’ve got the moon, and you’ve got the Rolling Stones. All of them probably created at the same point in time. YouTube is riding the Scorsese/Stones shockwave to launch their new YouTube Living Legends, a new channel in which you will be able to ask any question you want to legendary rock stars. I doubt there are any questions left to ask Mick, Keith & Co., but who cares. Screw YouTube. It’s Shine a Light. Go and watch it. Twice. I’ll do that this evening—then go exercise Richards-style: grab a vodka bottle and play air guitar. In the meantime, you can watch Mick and Keith in bloody Stella St. After the jumping, jack flash.

After Shine, Indiana Jones IV, Tony, JJ Abrams’ Star Trek, and Dark Knight, I would call it a year and go scuba diving in the Maldives, thank you very much. [YouTube Living Legends Shine a Light]

Guitar Rising for Real Guitar Heroes

Jesus Diaz — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 14:20:46 +0000

I never got the whole Guitar Hero, Rock Band and their fake guitars playing thingie, which require so much practice to master that you may as well use a real guitar to become as good as Satriani. That’s why I love the idea of Guitar Rising, which can use any real electric guitar, from a Fender Telecaster to a Gibson Les Paul. The software teaches you how to play actual songs, tracking your accuracy much like Guitar Hero would do, as their demo video shows.

According to GameTank’s CEO Jake Parks, the connection to the guitar would either work “via a guitar-USB adapter, a microphone, or directly to the sound card.” He told us that they are planning to release for both Mac and PC.

The cool thing about Guitar Rising is that it isn’t a simple videogame, but combines the fun of playing and beating scores to actually teach you how to play the real thing. While they “are in the process of licensing popular rock songs, and we’ll announce them on our website as soon as we finalise the deals,” there will be different songs for different levels of difficulty to ease the learning curve, as well as different speed settings, so you can start slow and progress until you master the song at real speed. In fact, they say that the song selection will include stuff easy for beginners but also songs challenging for experienced players.

In other words, you will actually learn to play guitar and try to be a Keith Richards-wannabe rather than just pretending to be Jeff Vader pretending to be Keith Richards. If you want to give it a try, they will be at the Game Developer Conference in San Francisco to visit us in the OMPR/IBM Pavilion, booth 6241. [Guitar Rising]

USB Stone is 4GB of Rock Solid Storage

Jason Chen — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 19:00:53 +0000

Michael Leung, some designer, made this USB “Mass Storage Stone,” which holds 4GB of flash memory inside a rock. It started as a prototype in 2005, and it’s “in development” now to become a real product. Whether that will actually happen is anyone’s guess, but who wouldn’t want to carry around storage that you can kill someone with? [Studio Leung via Swiss Miss via Geek Sugar]

Cleopatra Lounge Chair Burns Holes In Wallets, Loungers

Seamus Byrne — Tue, 03 Jul 2007 23:45:36 +0000

Most of the chairs we see around these parts are office or gaming related, but this gal is definitely too hot for your living room. Seriously, the Cleopatra Hotstone Chaise Lounge is a solid slab of carved rock that heats up to slow-roast you all the way through. Why you would want to pay $15,000 for a 107Â°F slab of rock when you could just go lay on your driveway is beyond me, but apparently this “luxury” product is more relaxing than your average rock chair.
[Cleopatra Heated Lounge Chair via Luxury Launches]