youloo

Jun 24

Conan O’Brien Slams Final Cut X

Jun 13

“I’m committed to cakes”.

Jun 10

Adam Buxton reads Mac video comments

May 30

The Ostrich, A Pillowy Sleep Cocoon For Your Head

The Ostrich is a pillowy cocoon that swallows a tired office worker’s head and hands, providing an impromptu venue for an odd-looking power nap. The Ostrich is a design concept by architecture and design studio Kawamura-Ganjavian.

OSTRICH offers a micro environment in which to take a warm and comfortable power nap at ease. It is neither a pillow nor a cushion, nor a bed, nor a garment, but a bit of each at the same time. Its soothing cave-like interior shelters and isolates our head and hands (mind, senses and body) for a few minutes, without needing to leave our desk.

May 20

Nerdy Wedding Invitations

Russell Brand’s wedding

A Look Back At The ’90s Internet

GeoCities

In the early days of the Internet, people were simply astounded that they could make their own web pages. Being able to put up your own MIDI files (those bloopy songs that were ringtones before ringtones could play actual songs) and animated GIFS was unbelievable…the act in itself was worth doing, not to share your feelings or get any kind of commercial gain or anything. This is what we did before blogs. Today GeoCities is available only in Japan, but the Geocitiesizer website can show you what your favorite page would look like if only it had been made on GeoCities.

Chat rooms

When the Internet first started, no one knew how depraved people could get. There were no parental controls, no nanny software to block bad sites, nothing. Kids who came of age in the 90s were exposed to the most bizarre minds you can possibly imagine in AOL and Yahoo! chat rooms just by clicking around for two seconds. Kids today won’t ever experience that unless they’re clever enough to seek it out on their own and circumnavigate parental blocks.

Napster

Oh man, remember when Napster first came out? We remember sitting on our Dad’s computer for an hour waiting for a TQ song to download. This was just amazing. There was no iTunes and nobody had any idea music sharing was illegal then, either, so we just went all out, sometimes downloading a whole album in a weekend! The best was when it showed you what internet speed the person you were downloading from had, so you could avoid the 56K modems and go straight for the DSL, baby!

Netscape Navigator

Netscape officially died on March 1st, 2008. Before then, everybody used Netscape Navigator. More people we knew used it than Internet Explorer. Then it lost out during the late 90s during the first great American browser war, and IE hasn’t died ever since.

Hamster Dance

The Hamster Dance was among first Internet memes ever created. All it was was an entire page of animated hamster gifs—four of them—repeated over and over. And nobody could get enough of it. If you weren’t alive or sentient during that time, there’s nothing we can do to explain it to you. This is the closest living page to the original Hamster Dance.

Ask Jeeves

Before people knew how to use Google, we talked to computers like they were people. So some genius created Ask Jeeves, a fictional butler who would “respond” to your questions with internet searches. All you had to do was type questions into the box. Somehow, this made the whole Internet thing a lot easier to understand and made us feel like we were king of the robots. Now Ask Jeeves is just Ask.com, and that sucks.

Under Construction signs

Whenever a website was in the process of being built or changed, the webmaster or webmistress would litter his or her page with these signs to let the visitor know. Why people felt the need to do this, we’re not sure. Websites are changed every single day, yet no one bothers with the animated construction worker gifs anymore.

Dial up

In the 90s, people got their internet through the telephone. Most households only had one phone line, which meant that no one could call your house while you were on the internet. Since most people didn’t have mobile phones, this was an eternal battle between adults and children. And when someone called and kicked you offline? Oh, boy.

Scrolling text

Making text move across the screen in an infinity banner was not only extremely stylish, it was mesmerizing. This was our generation’s weed. Learn how to make your own scrolling text in HTML here.

Hit counters

Hit counters at the bottom of your website are now relegated to eBay auctions. Back in the day, we cared about our number of visits not just for interweb traffic metrics, but for pride. Displaying the tens of tens of people who visited our personal GeoCities pages: it’s what our self esteem hinged on before we had Facebook friends to Like our posts.

Emoticons

How can I be expected to communicate with just words? What do I look like, Billy Shakespeare? I can’t afford no high-falutin’ ruffle collar. Before we had Asian style smilies, we did things like this: <*:oDX That’s a clown, enjoy!

Instant messaging

We guess people still use this today, but time was we raged on this thing like Facebook. Being able to contact friends, like a bunch of them at a time, chatting privately to each one about the other in real time. Frequently asked questions include A/S/L? The correct answer is 18/F/Cali.