Author: Nathan Campbell

Nathan runs St Eutychus. He loves Jesus. His wife. His daughter. His son. His other daughter. His dog. Coffee. And the Internet. He is the pastor of City South Presbyterian Church, a church in Brisbane, a graduate of Queensland Theological College (M. Div) and the Queensland University of Technology (B. Journ). He spent a significant portion of his pre-ministry-as-a-full-time-job life working in Public Relations, and now loves promoting Jesus in Brisbane and online. He can't believe how great it is that people pay him to talk and think about Jesus. If you'd like to support his writing financially you can do that by giving to his church.

Clocking Off

I like clocks. Especially clever clocks. These are clever clocks.

On Foot

On Foot displays the world record times for running different distances. Three arcs map the records to the hours, minutes and seconds on the watch. The outer arc shows records of less than 60 seconds: 100m, 200m and 400m. The two inner arcs align with the minute and hour hand respectively, for records of under and over one hour, showing distances from 800 metres all the way up to 100km

Hubless Clock

The creator of this clock set out to create a clock with no hands, it’s just got two rotating circles…

Switchital Clock
This one’s my favourite. Its mechanism uses a bunch of rearranging magnets. Watch it in action in the video clip.

October 8, 2009

More Mac time

That Maccas billboard from yesterday was really clever. Here’s another piece of outdoor advertising that’s also cool… and also from Maccas.

This is a lamp post.

October 8, 2009

Seeing double

Sometimes at a dinner party the table can be littered with glassware, and it’s a klutz’s nightmare. You place your knife down just that little bit too hard, and the glasses fall like dominoes. If only there was a solution to all that clutter.

But wait. There must be. Because you can see the picture below already, there’s no air of mystery. These double ended glasses are expensive, but you’ll save money on broken glasses in the long run…

October 7, 2009

Bloody furniture

October 7, 2009

Shirt of the Day: Robots in bad disguise

I would possibly buy this. If I was allowed to buy novelty T-shirts.

October 7, 2009

Getting to home plate

Give your meals a blast with this pepper mill.

October 7, 2009

Stuck in a good book

This is a cool bookmark. But at $26 for a set of five they’re want to be made of gold.

October 7, 2009

Entiecing attiere

Finding the right outfit for a formal occasion is a tough ask. Especially if you’re a function over form type of person. Lucky I’m here to help – with these two suggestions for your next work party… one for the clumsy eater and the other for the beer drinker.

October 7, 2009

Magic fail

Or is it? At the very least it made me laugh.

October 7, 2009

Rick Rolls

Mmm. Rick Rolls.

Found here… originally on Flickr

October 7, 2009

A question of gravity

In the spirit of pointless science here’s an exploration of the gravity of Super Mario’s world in each Mario release.

First, you must find the time it took Mario to fall from the edge of the ledge to the ground in each game. To do this, we opened each clip in Quicktime movie player, and using the frame by frame option, found the total number of frames it took Mario to fall. We then used the formula:

Time = (Number of Frames) / (Frame Rate)

To find the time of each of Mario’s falls. Once we knew the time, we needed to figure out the distance Mario fell in each game. We used a screen shot of Mario next to the ledge he fell from in each game, and found the height of Mario and the ledge in pixels. According to Wikipedia, Mario is “a little over five feet tall.”, so we used 5 feet, or 1.524 meters, as Mario’s height.

Turns out they’re getting closer and closer to real world conditions – which is a shame – because Mario’s success depends on his ability to leap tall pipes in a single bound. Read the rest of the study here.

“We determined that, generally speaking, the gravity in each Mario game, as game hardware has increased, is getting closer to the true value of gravity on earth of 9.8 m/s2. However, gravity, even on the newest consoles, is still extreme. According to Wikipedia, a typical person can withstand 5 g before losing consciousness, and all but the very latest of Mario games have gravity greater than this. Also, with gravity that great, it is a wonder Mario can perform such feats as leaping almost 5 times his own body height!”

October 7, 2009

Spiderman Strikes Again

David Thorne, from 27bslash6, is up to his old antics once again. This time he’s terrorising a real estate agent. And I think we can all agree that real estate agents deserve it. Particularly because inspections are a pain and their need to come back again and again borders on voyeurism…

So I enjoyed this…

The email exchange after that report begins like this…

From: David Thorne
Date: Wednesday 30 September 2009 6.04pm
To: Peter Williams
Subject: Inspection Report

Dear Peter,
Thankyou for the surprise inspection and invitation to participate in the next. I appreciate you underlining the text at the bottom of the page which I would otherwise have surely mistaken for part of the natural pattern in the paper. I was going to clean the apartment but had so many things on my ‘to do’ list that I decided to treat them all equally and draw pictures of sharks instead. I have attached one for your honest appraisal.

I have read through your list of chores and intend to rectify the situation by wrapping my entire body in eighteen rolls of super absorbent Thick’n’thirsty® paper towels, hosing down the apartment, then rolling around on the floor and rubbing myself up and down walls. I will cover the more stubborn marks with Liquid Paper. I will also get back to you in regards to the premises being inspected in another two weeks, my agreement to do so will depend on availability and not wanting to.

Regards, David.

And it ends like this… read everything in between here. His site contains a fair bit of material that may offend though, so I wouldn’t click around too much if you’re the easily offended type…
From: David Thorne
Date: Friday 02 October 2009 10.36am
To: Peter Williams
Subject: Nom nom nom

October 6, 2009

Hide your light in a bottle

You can let your little light shine – quite literally – with this blood powered lamp. It’s meant to teach you the value of energy. Some sort of lesson that all energy use comes at a cost. It’s cool. Science with a message.

Here’s a video of the thing in action…

Blood Lamp from miket on Vimeo.

Thanks to Ali for the tip.

October 6, 2009

Super Mario Clock

What time is it when the big hand points to Flower Power Mario and the little hand points to Mario64?

You can answer this question for your friends, countrymen or children if you purchase this clock from etsy.

October 6, 2009

Mac time

I love clever billboards. This one from McDonalds is one of the cleverest I’ve seen for a while. Their outdoor advertising department is doing a good job…

October 6, 2009