Digging in the Cache is a series where we go back in time to look at fun tidbits of Internet and computer history. This week: Diet Coke & Mentos! “Who cares?”, you say? Apparently millions of people. What happens when you put a regular mentos in a bottle of diet coke? It bubbles up and sends diet coke shooting into the air! (Come on, that’s at least a little bit cool…). A group called EepyBird took this concept and expanded it to a series of “experiements” where they use diet coke and mentos to put on a geyser show, or propel a car. [Read more...]

Digging in the Cache is a series where we go back in time to look at fun tidbits of Internet and computer history. How do you explain the Internet to someone who has never used it? What if that person was also in charge of regulating it? Well, you might think about the Internet as a series of tubes… as did Senator Ted Stevens. A series of tubes probably isn’t too much off the mark, but from Senator Steven’s remarks, you can tell that he clearly doesn’t understand the Internet. And if you’re trying to regulate something you clearly don’t understand, it’s probably going to lead to some ridicule.
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Digging in the Cache is a series where we go back in time to look at fun tidbits of Internet and computer history. If you haven’t heard of Three Wolf Moon (affiliate link), you’re in for a treat! (It’s still pretty amusing even if you’ve heard of it before.) Three Wolf Moon is a tshirt (seen at left) produced by a company called The Mountain.  The shirt itself is clearly awesome (ahem), and it was posted on Amazon, a sarcastic review was left by Brian Govern, which inspired others to leave their own amusing reviews.  The shirt has since been featured in several video games and makes appearances at tech conferences as an item of ironic humor. [Read more...]

Digging in the Cache is a series where we go back in time to look at fun tidbits of Internet and computer history. Way back when (ok, not really that long ago), computers and printers did not have graphics capabilities. If you wanted to make pictures, you were stuck with the 95 printable characters defined by the ASCII standard. Some of the oldest known examples were created around 1966 by Kenneth Knowlton, who was working at Bell Labs at the time. While computers (and phones and tablets, etc.) have graphical capabilities these days, ascii-style art is still used in text-based communications like email, text messages and Tweets. [Read more...]

Digging in the Cache is a series where we go back in time to look at fun tidbits of Internet and computer history. One of the first Internet memes was The Hamster Dance, which was just a website with a bunch of animated pictures of hamsters and a clip of sped up music. It was one of the first websites whose popularity spread by word of mouth, and had no real value other than being silly (and having an annoyingly catchy tune!). [Read more...]

Digging in the Cache is a series where we go back in time to look at fun tidbits of Internet and computer history. Will It Blend? is up this week. If you’ve ever doubted that word of mouth marketing (viral marketing) could work for boring products like a blender, then Will It Blend? is proof that clever marketing can work for just about any product.  Will It Blend? is a series of videos demonstrating a Blendtec blender attempting to blend various unusual items (iphones, glow sticks, golf balls, marbles, etc.) in order to show off the power of the blender. While the videos are fun and campy, they ultimately prove  the strength of the blender (which is more expensive than many blenders you’d find at retail stores). [Read more...]

Digging in the Cache is a series where we go back in time to look at fun tidbits of Internet and computer history. This week I want to introduce you to one of my favorite computer icons (pun intended) — Clarus the Dogcow, who is a bitmapped image created by Susan Kare for Apple back in 1983 as part of the Cairo font (originally as a dog). Fonts are created on a very small scale, so when the image was increased in size for use in a page setup window to show orientation, it became less clear if it was a dog or a cow. [Read more...]

After showing a friend some Internet memes she hadn’t seen before, I thought it might be fun to do a bit of Internet history on Fridays, starting with one of my favorites (although not too old). “the show with zefrank” was a short daily video show produced for exactly a year (March 17, 2006-March 17, 2007, ok technically a year and a day) which featured snarky commentary (often topical). While not every show was awesome, I did look forward to each one, as a nice little distraction during the day (look for the rubber duck that makes cameo appearances in most shows). “the show” proved that good video content could be produced daily with a small budget and a little talent. [Read more...]