Summer Fun
Fifty Shades Generator Makes Lorem Ipsum Text Dirty
If you’re a designer looking for a new way to populate your page with dummy text while you make it all pretty, Fifty Shades Generator may be able to help. The tool, created by an apparently all-male team of designers, scrapes the web for X-rated language to create the dirtiest nonsensical lorem ipsum text you’ve ever read.
We’d type an example here, but we have Google search results to consider. See for yourself.
You Can Play With Real Cats Right From Your Computer
If you’ve always wanted a furry fluffball to call your very own, but logistical issues like allergies or a significant other who is decidedly not a cat person got in your way, the internet–as always–has a solution for you. It’s called iPet Companion, and it allows you to use your computer to play with kitties that are hundreds of miles away. Read More
Happy Birthday, Internet! We Would Like to Thank You For…
Wired pointed us to the fact that on this day in 1991, “the world wide web became publicly available for the first time.” Father of the Internet Tim Berners-Lee posted an introductory post to the alt.hypertext Usenet group on August 7, 1991, and all at once another world was born: one where we’d be able to see each other’s faces without being near them and join with like-minded people to geek out about shit and–of course–watch lots and lots of free porn. Read More
Meet the Young Man Who is Ruining @Horse_ebooks
“The purpose of this blog is to provide sourcing for texts quoted by @Horse_ebooks and, whenever possible, provide context,” wrote freelancer Jack Stuef on a freshly-minted Tumblr conceived in the bleary midnight hours early Friday morning. Born out of that insomniac haze is “The Annotated @Horse_ebooks,” a blog devoted to teasing out nuance and substance from the glorious fountain of non-sequitors that is the Internet’s favorite Twitter account, @Horse_ebooks.
“The idea to do a Tumblr just came to me, but I had looked up some of Horse’s tweets before, and sometimes the sources of those can be just as bizarre and hilarious as the tweets themselves. Or they can be incredibly dull. I thought it was interesting,” Mr. Stuef, who frequently writes for The Onion and BuzzFeed, told Betabeat via Gchat. Read More
FYI, You Can Insert Animated GIFs Into Emails with Gmail
Hey guys, what’s up? Cool. Nothing’s really going on here at Betabeat, except that we just learned the best thing ever: In Gmail, you can insert animated GIFs into emails. Woooo.
This is a total game changer, communication-wise. Attaching a GIF just doesn’t possess the same panache. And what if your friends aren’t on Gchat to receive your (undoubtedly witty) IMs to Tumblr GIFs? These are serious problems that people like you and me grapple with every single day.
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With Justin Bieber Blasting, Uber Dabbles in Ice Cream Delivery for a Day
“I have butterflies,” confessed Cara Hodge, Uber’s New York office manager, as we stepped into the yellow Van Leeuwen ice cream truck. With Britney Spears playing in the background, the truck pulled away from the curb and headed down Seventh Avenue, beginning Uber’s one-day ice cream delivery event–complete with a bouncy pop soundtrack, neon tank tops for the customers Read More
Daytime Talk Show Solicits Reddit for ‘Teenage Computer Pro/Hacker’
If there’s anything the ’90s screen gem Hackers taught us, it’s that kids left to their own devices with devices can wreak a whole lot of havoc. Some of them can even get around parental monitoring software. Ring the alarm!
We’re guessing Reddit user “mtgilb” has seen Hackers, as they posted a thread in the NYC subreddit looking for teenage “hackers” ages 13-17 who might be interested in appearing on a daytime talk show. Read More
Use fontBomb to Blow Up Text on the Sites You Hate Most
It’s pretty rare that a “Show HN” post actually makes it to the top of the front page of Hacker News, as a lot of them are just half-baked startup ideas. Not so with fontBomb, a delightfully fun plugin that lets you blow up the text on your favorite (or least favorite) websites.
fontBomb is an HTML 5 plugin by Canadian programmer Philippe-Antoine Lehoux. As one commenter put it, “So awesome. Spent 10 min blowing the hell out of hn. Now instead of raging against trolls I can simply blow them up.” Read More
The Funniest Tech-Related For Dummies Books
We haven’t thought about the prolific For Dummies series since a college programming class when our professor had us buy Flash for Dummies (thanks for the vote of confidence). So imagine our surprise when this tweet popped up in our Twitter feed and we learned that there is an entire canon of For Dummies texts that go as niche as niche can go. Here are some of our favs, since it’s the evening before 4th of July and no one is reading the Internet anyway. Read More
