Vulture Bytes comes to you this week from the sweltering confines of a Megabus, where nearly everyone is plugged into one device or another. For them and for you we have five new ways to use pop culture as a diversion. This week: 2-D glasses for 3-D movies, a way to watch Tom Hanks, Adam Sandler, and Will Ferrell all in the same place, free access to Canada’s film archives, a website that doubles as a musical instrument, and an update to an iPad 1 magnetocover hack.
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These glasses are maybe the only good thing to come out of Tron: Legacy. Hank Green made them in a fit of selfish selflessness. On their way to see Tron, his wife told him that she just couldn’t bear another 3-D movie; they gave her a headache. Green, not wanting to see a movie alone, went to his toolbox, hacked apart a couple of 3-D glasses, and made these ingenious 2-D ones. Normal 3-D glasses feed a slightly different image into each eye; take the glasses off and all you see is a blur. With the 2-D glasses, both eyes get the same image: No 3-D effect, and no blur. Unsurprisingly, anti-3-D crusader Roger Ebert was an immediate fan. He tweeted a link to the glasses hours after they made the rounds on gadget blogs.
PRICE: $9.99
For years a website called Crackle has been lost in Hulu’s shadow.It’s a video site filled with content just like Hulu, and at times it’s even better. Like Hulu, it’s owned by a media corporation; Crackle’s sugar daddy is Sony, which means it streamed The Larry Sanders Show before I ever dreamed of it showing up on Netflix, and is also host to the only sanctioned Seinfeld streams we’ve seen on the Internet. The movie selection also far outstrips Hulu’s (which, other than its new Criterion Collection films, is as bad as Netflix Watch Instantly circa 2008): The Da Vinci Code, Stranger than Fiction, and that Adam Sandler/Don Cheadle 9/11 movie you forgot about but always meant to see are all waiting. And now Crackle has an iOS app — and it doesn’t make you pay for it like Hulu does.
PRICE: Free
There are things we associate with Canada: cheap prescription drugs; linguistic tics; a group of people who call themselves Mounties. And, increasingly, film sets. Vancouver has become a sort of Swiss army knife for Hollywood, able to disguise itself as any locale and offer a few tax breaks along the way. But Canada has its own film history that’s separate from Hollywood, and now a huge amount of it is online. The National Film Board of Canada has made more video available than you’re going to be able to watch. And it’s on every platform you can imagine — iPhone, iPad, Android, even the new BlackBerry tablet. Documentaries, cartoons, and classic cinema are all there, and it’s all stuff you’ve likely never heard of. Missed out on Acadia Acadia?!? (punctuation theirs), a documentary about student protests at Canada’s largest French-language university, when it first came out in 1971? Well, now you can finally get around to seeing it. Oh, and the Mr. Frog Went A-Courting animated short is a personal favorite. There’s a frog with a sword and pistol, a jingle, and an interspecies love affair. Canadians are the best.
PRICE: Free
A year or two ago a music simulator called Ball Droppings made the Internet rounds. It was disguised as a video game, and people who played it were asked to draw platforms beneath a ball dropping down the left side of the screen. The ricochet would then make a noise — a noise that would change depending on the angle. We were reminded of Ball Droppings when we played with Otomata, a far more complex, and far more addictive music generator from Batuhan Bozkurt. It’s much easier to play with than explain, but suffice to say you use a grid to create what sounds like a symphony of Martian harpsichords. The beats you can create are endless, and there’s a trippy animation that goes along with it. Perfect for the next time your Burning Man friends come over.
PRICE: Free
At Vulture Bytes HQ, we’re obsessive about gadgets even after we tell you about them. And so we discovered that a previous hack from a few weeks ago has actually been improved, making it as handsome as it is useful. In a previous Vulture Bytes we told you about a way to get one of those fancy new iPad 2 magnetocovers to work on your iPad 1. (By installing magnets, naturally.) But the guy who came up with the hack (who happens to be the same one behind the Cosmonaut, an iPad stylus we also told you about previously) was unsatisfied with the way the iPad 1 felt in the hand with the extra magnets on the side. So a buddy created a 3-D model of a flat strip that can hold the magnets, making the whole thing more ergonomic and attractive. Purchasing that strip is somewhat complicated (you have to buy many at once) because they’re manufactured per order, so we’ll let him describe the process. But know that there’s really no excuse for you not to have a magnetocover now. No matter what kind of iPad you have.
PRICE: Shouldn’t be more than $30, depending on how you split up the magnet-holder purchase.
