The rabbit’s eggs

More and more I hear requests for so called easter eggs, hidden, funny features on websites. We used to redirect Minimalissimo to maximalissimo.com whenever you typed the Konami code. I changed this feature: it now turns the minimal layout to a maximalissimo one. It uses the incredible code you can find on the website MOTHER EFFING TEXT-SHADOW when you click the ‘all the way’ button. This site was created by Paul Irish, a true easter egg apostle.
During his talk on the Fronteers 2010 conference Paul Irish asked for more lasers whenever people press the letter ‘L’. I always thought this site would be just perfect for this feature. Try it. (For best results you should use a modern browser like Safari, Opera, Firefox or IE9. There is a weird Chrome bug on Windows which renders only half of the creature, that’s not how it’s supposed to be).
Know more sites with easter eggs? Let me know.

Galileo and a bully in a dress

You would expect that 400 years after somebody rediscovered that the earth is not the center of the universe everybody would just accept that as a fact and move on. No, not everybody. On Saturday November 6th 2010 the First Annual Catholic Conference on Geocentrism: Galileo Was Wrong will be held in a small town somewhere in the USA. These people earn their money with writing scientific books about this matter! That is just amazing, literally. I’m jealous, I wish I could make a living just by publishing huge piles of nonsense. Unfortunately I don’t have the money to attend this conference, without a doubt it would be the best and most entertaining waste of time ever.

There is some more

Finding nonsense in Happy Street

On May the third I tweeted an opinion about the Dutch Pavilion on the Shanghai 2010 Expo. The opinion was that it looks like a cheap tourist village somewhere in the Mediterranean. Kitsch. And embarrassing. It’s easy to express an uninformed opinion, 140 characters is more than enough. I’ll try to explain why I was mistaken, why I should never have tweeted that tweet.

Another apology?

Plant Pornography

Jonathan Keats, an American experimental philosopher and artist, is the creator of Cinema Botanica. This art installation was made to show stimulating images to ordinary American house plants. Your Sansevieria, which would otherwise only see the plaster ceiling of your appartment, can experience the blue Italian sky for once. But Keats took it a step further and also included plant porn; bees pollinating plants. He does not know what exactly happens to the plants, but his work definitely raises questions. “So if your children are supposedly vegetating in front of the television when they watch it for hours, what happens when you show television to vegetables?”

Loose women, germans and fishermen.

With their street view option Google added an incredible feature to their maps application. When you’re heading into unknown territory you don’t have to be prepared for the unexpected, you can explore the terrain from the safety of your hammock, looking for obstacles like traffic lights and speed cameras. It also helps finding a place to park. But not everybody seems to be happy with it. It can be considered to be a little invasive in ones privacy.

So where’s the nonsense?

Shady URL

Most URL shortening services merely make your URLs boring. For example, http://www.facebook.com/ becomes http://tinyurl.com/4t993 and http://twitter.com/lovenonsense turns into http://bit.ly/bg6JpN. But now there is a lovely new URL shortener, called ShadyURL.

Dare you click this?

Yes, it all fits

All kitchen necessities tucked to one wall and everything fits exactly. This is the ultimate efficiency, the ultimate minimalism in kitchen design. Why use a room when a wall is enough? And look at all the free space where you can, uhm, stand and look at your beautiful pots, pans and cupboards. I guess I’ll just leave that sink where it is and drink something else than water.

What are you going to drink?

What Your Internet Is Made Of

This post does not quite belong on a site about nonsense, because it adequately explains a phenomenon we use most every day; the Internet. What most people do not seem to realise, is that the Internet is made entirely out of cats. To make this field of Science more accessable to the public, Joel Veitch of rathergood.com has made a song with a video clip.

One issue sites

A clear trend on the interwebs is the rise of one issue sites. You have the simple single page sites that try to answer a question, like is it friday yet? or is it 2010 yet?. A site like this is built and published within ten minutes, you can’t really call that a waste of time. And they aren’t exactly nonsensical either. I wrote about a more complex one issue site, the incredible Defiant Dog a while ago and yesterday I found this very good reason to keep a computer with flash installed at hand: Giant Bat Farts. These two sites are not exactly built within a few minutes, somebody took their time to look at some trivial details (like the source code of the bat farts). But nevertheless, these sites are built and then they’re done. If we visit them next year chances are they haven’t changed.

So… Blogs?

Art on maps

I’ve always been a fan of On Kawara, the artist who meticulously registered every part of his life that can be registered. Every morning he sent a postcard to a friend with the time he got up, he filled up big books with a daily report of who he met that day, every day he painted a painting of the date, all very autistic. And he noted where he’d been by drawing lines on a map.

On a map?

Windows 3.1 Online

The main co-author of this weblog might reason that the use of any Microsoft product is always absurd. What’s even more nonsensical, is that someone has emulated Windows 3.1 using Javascript.

ctrl-alt-del

Problem solving

Many designers and engineers suffer from it: solving a non-existent problem by adding an extra problem. I found a nice example.

The iPhone responds to movement so game developers build games where by moving your phone you steer a car. A very simple and intuitive interface, no wonder this phone, and the games on it are so popular.
But you can’t control a car with your phone, you need a steering wheel to do that! So in order to make the gaming experience more realistic this clever dude built just the thing we need: a steering wheel for your iPhone.

I hate snow…

…if I have to leave the house. But I do like the things that people do with it. Yes, they exist, people who enjoy wasting some time in the cold. And happy happy joy joy the internets exist and everybody shares all their silly snow adventures with those of us who prefer the heat. I saw an informative movie about building a snow man and, the one I like most because it gives us a feeling of hope, a movie about what happens to that snow man when the temperatures return to normal.

Brrrrr

Mad Calculator

Cyriak “mutated monty” Harris is a wonderful animator, best known for his 2006 animation mix. But mutated monty brings more useless joy to the Internets.

He has left a solar powered calculator switched on since the 1980s. “During that time it has somehow developed its own form of consciousness,” Cyriak suspects. Every morning it shows different numbers. According to Cyriak these numbers are random, but I’m not so sure. For all I know, these numbers are the answer to life, the universe and everything. See for yourself and read a new number each day on Twitter by following mad calculator.

A handy box

A friend of mine just bought an Itazura Coin Bank, a completely useless box with a mechanical cat in it. I promised this friend I would write a piece about it. But the more I think about the Itazura Coin Bank the more I think it’s not as nonsensical as it seems.

Explain

A well executed nonsensical prank.

The city is building a new metro in Amsterdam. Things are not exactly going as planned, one of the problems is that some old but beautiful houses are on the verge of collapsing. In order to prevent further damage the ground in one of the pits is being frozen. The exhaust of this giant fridge is spitting out clouds of steam right outside the office where I work.

What’s with the exhaust?

Useful nonsense #01

When you hover your mouse over the header of this page (or this article’s header, or a link), you might see an effect. Sure, you’ll see the color, or the background color changing but if you use the right browser you might see an animation instead of this simple swap of colors.

So?

Defiant dog

One of my favorite examples of truly nonsensical single page domains is defiantdog.com, a website where the visitor can try to order a dog on a picture to sit by clicking on a button with the word ‘sit’ on it. You can click all you want but the dog won’t sit. The beauty of this web application lies in the fact that a button is used to give the dog the order. Buttons explicitly suggest than an action will occur when clicked.

w00f!

I love nonsense

As a tribute to nonsense, this site is here to celebrate people with too much time on their hands. Or maybe to celebrate people with a different preception of time, people who don’t necessarily think that efficiency is a virtue. People who think that time wasted is time well spent. This site is for those of us who know that building a useless machine is not a waste of time. It’s for people who take the time to show us, in a well designed and accurate graph, the percentage of a pie-chart that resembles Pac-man. It is a tribute to reinventing the wheel while we know it already exists.

Seriously?

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