The Eton Rukus solar-powered bluetooth boombox harnesses the power of the sun’s rays to pump out your tunes through two full-range speaker drivers. That doesn’t mean that you’re limited to sunny days though – you can also use the included AC adaptor to charge up the internal battery.

While I’d imagine that this thing was designed for the outdoors, I initially charged it up by sitting it on a desk next to a window.

This solar-powered iPhone speaker system is perfect for the beach. The solar-powered boombox uses an e-ink display, so it’s easy to read even in direct sunlight. You can use the USB port on the bottom of the boombox to keep your phone or mp3 player charged as well as the boombox itself, which I thought was pretty cool. The pouch on the bottom of the boombox holds your phone/mp3 player snugly against the speaker, as seen below.

As far as sound goes, these aren’t the loudest speakers (my Bose SoundDock takes the cake there) but for someone like me who tends to annoy people with loud music, this may be a blessing in disguise.

I spent a good portion of my day outside yesterday, and while the Rukus was on a full charge when I brought it out, it was in direct sunlight the whole time it was playing music, and after several hours the battery only seemed to be drained 1/4th of the way.

Anyway, I’m writing about the Rukus because I got mine for free by entering their contest. They’re giving away one of these bad boys every day until May 20th, so there’s no reason not to enter. They announce the winner each day via their Twitter account, @EtonCorporation.

I’d like to add that I was not asked (or paid!) to post this – I simply wanted to spread the word because the Rukus is a pretty cool product, and there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of competition. Get on it!

Photo by Brian Ziffer

When I learned that bands sometimes play shows in Big Sur (Animal Collective played at the Henry Miller Library in May of 2009), I knew right away that I had to see a show there.

FolkYeah announced that Godspeed You! Black Emperor would be playing there back in December, and I grabbed tickets immediately.

I believe that they only sold 300 tickets for this event. They could have easily fit 1000 people in the area immediately in front of the stage. They could also setup the area in such a way that many more people could fit. They clearly avoid doing this in order to create an intimate atmosphere, and it definitely added to the experience.

Here’s some footage that I got of the show.

Normally I’m on the ball with this sort of thing and would have gotten much more footage, but I was so content to just relax under the stars and listen to the music.

All in all, it was an amazing experience that I won’t soon forget. I’m happy that I can now cross Big Sur off of my list of places where I need to see live music. Off the top of my head, here are the remaining places on my list:

• Red Rocks Amphitheater in Morrison, CO (I’ve been to the venue, but I’ve never seen a show there)
• Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Los Angeles, CA (Sigur Rós is playing there in August!)
• Horning’s Hideout in North Plains, OR
• The Gorge Amphitheatre in George, Washington
• Stubb’s BBQ in Austin, TX
• Jones Beach Theater in Wantagh, NY

Your spot will be 10 ft x 30 ft. You can’t occupy a car camping spot without a car parked there. There’s no limit to how many people are allowed in one campsite, but I’d say that 3 tents is the most that you’d be able to fit, and that’s pushing it.

I’m not going to go over all of the specifics, but here are some photos I took at Coachella in 2011 that should give you an idea of what the car camping setup is like.

Here’s a view of the front of a line of cars in the designated car camping area. You park your car and set up your stuff behind it. Then, behind your stuff, someone sets up their stuff, and then their car is parked behind that. This constitutes a row. There’s a whole bunch of these.

Here’s a side view of a line of cars parked in Coachella car camping. As you can see, there’s a half decent amount of space between each vehicle.

And here’s a side view from behind our campsite. It looks pretty roomy here, but I believe that’s because this image was taken after some of our neighbors left early.

Here’s a shot from the back of our campsite.

As you can see, we had room for an EZ-Up and a tent. Plenty of room for day drinking activities.

Here’s an unrelated image of me losing in beer pong.

If you’re heading to Coachella with a group of people and you’re planning on camping, the more cars you have camped together the better, as you can maximize your space.

That’s all I’ve got. I hope this was helpful!

Shot on Canon EOS Rebel XSi, F5.6 @ 1/125th.

Shot on Canon EOS Rebel XSi, F4.5 @ 1/30th.

Hardly Strictly Bluegrass is a free yearly music festival held in Golden Gate Park. As the name implies, the festival features artists from a variety of genres, including (but not limited to) bluegrass.

I saw some amazing acts over the course of the weekend. Robert Plant absolutely exceeded my expectations. John Prine made a new fan out of me. Seeing the legendary Dr. John was lots of fun. Dark Star Orchestra was great but crowded beyond belief. Broken Social Scene and Greensky Bluegrass were both awesome as usual. However, Buckethead was one of my favorite sets of the weekend.

As soon as he started his set I made a beeline to the front of the crowd. Not only was I able to get some pretty decent shots, but I also had a prime spot to witness his absolutely absurd guitar shreddery.

HSB 2011 was my second time at this festival, and I can’t imagine it’ll be my last.

“So I google image searched “morning beers” and you’re the fourth picture that showed up in the results”

When I first saw this text, I just assumed it was because of Google+, and that a logged-out Google search wouldn’t yield the same results. But I did a non personalized search and saw the same thing:

The image itself is from a Ghana trip that my friend Cortney and I took in 2007.

We were walking around in the Osu district of Accra, exploring and looking for a hotel. It was super hot out and we decided to stop by a food stand and grab a drink.

One second you’re enjoying an ice cold cruiser in Ghana’s Capital City, and the next, you’re showing up on Google Images. It’s a crazy world we’re living in.

To be a fair, “morning beers” is not a very competitive phrase. I’d imagine that the majority of people searching for the term are drunk, self-indulgent college students amused by the absurdity of the fact that they’re drunk before noon.

This change favors videos that are watched for the longest periods of time, and was seemingly done in attempt to cut down on YouTube “spam” – videos with misleading thumbnails, YouTube “reply girls”, etc.

People have been critical of this change. According to Mashable, “a 30-second video that averages 25 seconds of viewing time is less likely to be recommended than a four-minute video that averages 28 seconds of viewing time — which makes us wonder if this isn’t more about delivering impressive engagement numbers to advertisers than bettering the experience for YouTube visitors.”

Over the past few years I’ve uploaded quite a few videos to my YouTube account, and I’ve been keeping an eye on my Analytics since the announcement was made.

Here’s a screenshot of the total views across all of the videos in my account over the past 30 days:

As you can see, the change went into effect on March 14th.

The following video clip (orphans in Ghana playing with baby mice) gets the majority of the views on my YouTube channel. It’s 15 seconds long, just broke 7 million views, and has fantastic audience retention:

Now let’s take a look at how the views on this particular video have dropped over the past 30 days.

That’s a pretty serious drop. For comparison, let’s take a look at the audience retention on another video – this one’s about building a fire without matches or a lighter, and it’s roughly 3 minutes long.

The audience retention on that one isn’t nearly as impressive. However, it hasn’t seen nearly the same type of drop as that first video did:

Here’s another video, some concert footage of The Disco Biscuits. This one is almost 11 minutes long. As you can see below, the retention is nothing to write home about:

Again, we’re not seeing any real drop in views here…

So what do you think – is this algorithm tweak a change for the better? YouTube may have struck a blow to the “reply girls” and people who ride the coattails of popular videos with junk content, but at what price? Does this help to improve the overall quality of YouTube?

Is a 15 second long video inherently less valuable than a 10 minute long video? Will this change force people to create longer videos with “filler” at the beginning/end just for the sake of being included in “suggested videos”, even when the video itself only needs to be 10-20 seconds long? Food for thought.

She started off by baking 2 chocolate cakes in a 12×12 cake pan. In the meantime, I mixed fondant with food coloring in an attempt to match the colors of the different rooms found on the Clue playing board. We then flattened the fondant out using a rolling pin and cut out the shapes of each room.

I’ve told Lauren multiple times that she should start a cake blog. It’s such a tragic art form – you put 8+ hours of work into something, and then it gets eaten! It only makes sense to immortalize each one on the web. In the meantime, I’ll continue to contribute to her cakemaking efforts when possible, leveraging each opportunity for blog content from which I’ll gain an insignificant amount of longtail search traffic from Mommy Bloggers.

So what’s so bad about this guy? Well, his tactics are deplorable. The majority of the soldiers in his army are children. Some estimate that as many as 104,000 children have been recruited.

The charges being brought against him by the International Criminal Court (ICC) are many: murder, enslavement, sexual enslavement and rape, in addition to war crimes including murder, cruel treatment of civilians, intentionally directing an attack against a civilian population, pillaging, inducing rape, and forced enlisting of children into the rebel ranks. The kicker? All of this is done in the name of Christianity. He’s gone so far as to tell his child soldiers that a cross drawn in oil on their chest will protect them from bullets prior to sending them into battle.

Invisible Children is an American NGO that was formed to raise awareness of the actions of Joseph Kony and the LRA through a series of vigils/rallies, poster campaigns, social media activity, etc. They’ve put together a number of films, the latest of which can be seen below.

During my research, while admittedly brief at this juncture, I’ve encountered some criticism of this movement. Some feel that the efforts of the IC are misplaced. This blog post in particular highlights some inherent flaws in what they’re trying to do. Notice that the blog was posted in 2006, but the majority of the comments are from 2012, due to the sudden spike in interest regarding Joseph Kony caused by the KONY 2012 video that is spreading like wildfire.

Having read some of the criticisms of IC and the KONY 2012 movement, I’m a little torn. I was initially very interested in this movement. I spent some time volunteering in West Africa (Ghana and Togo). While I didn’t see anything remotely close to the atrocities that are touched on in the video, these issues strike a chord with me as a result of the time that I spent with there. Watching the KONY 2012 video last night got me all fired up and extremely motivated to get involved.

But now I’m not sure what to think. Invisible Children is drawing a lot of criticism (“neo-liberal, do-good Whiteness“). An entire blog (“Visible Children“) has been devoted to questioning their tactics. But I digress. My intentions were not to question the legitimacy of the campaign as a whole or the true effectiveness of the actions taken by the organizations involved – I’ll leave you to draw your own opinions on that matter. I simply wanted to highlight the video and how rapidly it has spread across the social web.

The one thing that can be taken from all of this is the power of social media to rally people together for a cause. At the time of this writing, #stopkony, Invisible Children and Uganda are all trending on Twitter, and the video itself has close to 5 million views.

If you took the time to watch the video, you can’t deny that it plays on your emotions and gets you worked up. If nothing else, this video will see to it that a huge portion of us know who Joseph Kony is and are aware of what he has done. 20 years ago, it would have been impossible to spread awareness on a scale like this, regardless of the issue. It’s a fantastic example of the power of social media and the sharing of information to rally people together for a cause and to take real action – action that results in change.

If you know me in real life, keep an eye on your mailbox, as there’s a chance that you received (or will be receiving) one of these in the mail. Again, my apologies.

Happy holidays!

After some delicious homemade sushi on Saturday night, we baked two circular cakes and a crazy amount of rice krispy treats. We did our best to make sure that the rice krispy treats were all close to the same height… Roughly the height of 2 of the cakes stacked on top of one another.

In the image above, you can see the basic body of the guitar. Two circular cakes were stacked on top of one another, and then rice krispy treats were used to create both the neck and the details (the curves and parts that stick out around the bottom of the base, I don’t know the proper term for these) on the body.

We used frosting as a sort of “glue” to connect the parts – we applied it to the rice krispy treats before connecting them to one another and to the chocolate cake as well.

You can’t see the cake and the rice krispy treats that were used to shape this because we placed a layer of chocolate fondant over the whole thing. The fondant is like malleable, edible silly putty made of sugar. It’s awesome to work with for something like this, because it basically takes the shape of whatever you place it on top of. It’s like throwing a sheet over something, but it settles and kind of melts into it.

Again, we used the frosting as sort of a glue before putting the fondant over the top. This also helped to smooth out the surface of the rice krispy treats, so that the fondant didn’t take on the rough texture of the rice krispies.

We also used the fondant for some of the details on the body. We used vanilla fondant with food coloring to create the tuning keys, the buttons at the top of the neck (adjacent to the tuning keys), the cavities in the body (those light brown shapes on the sides of the body), and the silver duder at the bottom of the body. That’s what they call it – a duder, right? It’s either that or a string post, but we’ll go with duder. We used the frosting to attach the fondant shapes to the cake.

We used frosting to outline the borders and to create the frets on the fingerboard. We (I) also used frosting to cover and eat about 10,000 calories worth of leftover rice krispy treats during this whole process.

Walah! The cake is complete. It looks pretty damn good, if you ask me. I LIKE CAKE, HOW ‘BOUT IT?

We had so many ingredients leftover (frosting, rice krispy treats and chocolate cake) that they made up roughly 75% of my diet over the past few days. I never even touched the mandolin cake until today. I actually ended up bringing it with me to the Wpromote office, where it was promptly devoured.

This isn’t exactly a step-by-step guide, but if you’re interested in creating something similar, don’t hesitate to get in touch with me via email/blog comments with any questions you might have. I’ll most likely pass them along to my girlfriend – she did the majority of the work here anyway.