Today on Refrederator: Betty Boop in “Poor Cinderella”. Cool! Notice the trademark Zukor 3-D feel, and the racy scene where Betty Boop gets her clothes changed by the fairy godmother in time for the royal ball. Guaranteed to get the guys howling! 🙂 Here is the link.
Chad's Design For Television (1960)
From A-HAA!: “Remember those matchbooks that said ‘Draw Me!’ on the front? They advertised a correspondence course called ‘Famous Artists’. Everyone made fun of ‘draw Binky the Skunk any size but the same size’ – but the truth of the matter was that the Famous Artists Course was no laughing matter – it was one of the best art instructional courses ever created…”
Read the entire post for some great background info on Chad Grothkopf, one of the great animators. Here is the link.
Earthquake safety testing
From CNET News: “Video: Earthquake safety testing. Japan’s Hyogo Earthquake Engineering Research Center tests real houses under earthquake conditions. This video shows the difference between two actual wooden houses, the one on the right retrofitted to limit damage.” Very cool! Here is the link.
Are energy vampires in your home?
In the April Issue of the UCS Green Tips, standby or phantom energy loss is detailed. From the issue:
“This wasted energy, known as standby or phantom energy loss, represents a relatively small but growing percentage of an individual home’s electricity use (about five percent), but taken across all U.S. households, adds up to an estimated 65 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity each year. This extra electricity costs consumers more than $5.8 billion annually and sends more than 87 billion pounds of heat-trapping carbon dioxide into the atmosphere each year.
Some of the biggest energy wasters in most homes are the adapters that come with rechargeable battery-powered cordless phones, cell phones, digital cameras and music players, power tools, and other electronic devices. Most draw power whenever they’re plugged into an outlet, regardless of whether the device battery is fully charged or even connected. Other culprits include appliances or electronic equipment with standby capability (such as televisions and computer monitors), a remote control, and/or a digital clock display (such as microwaves, DVD players, and stereo systems).”
Read the issue (it’s only a page long) to find out what to do to prevent phantom energy loss. Here is the link.
Bonjour for Windows 1.0.3
Downloaded Bonjour for Windows, tried it out, and I’m a little disappointed. All it does is to allow you to share printers across the network. True enough, worked very easily to allow me to install the shared printer from my iMac, but I expected it to allow me to see the shared Mac drives as well. See below for a snippet from Cult of Mac:
“Apple made Bonjour for Windows 1.0.3 available today. Bonjour is Apple’s implementation of zero-configuration networking — advanced auto-detection of other networked devices, basically, without the need for IP address knowledge. It’s also an integral part of sharing iTunes and iPhoto libraries, as well as networked printers. Apple’s been committed for a little while to making this truly cross-platform; the source is open, and Windows support has been out there for awhile. I don’t see this new Windows version as an indication of a product launch, just Apple placing its claim on simplified network creation — AppleTalk for the next generation. Plus, the more broadly Bonjour is supported, the better off Mac users will function in mixed-platform environments.”
Raoul Pop 