What happens when you put rubbing alcohol in a 5 gallon water bottle and then light it on fire? Well, that was something we were wondering too. So we decided to find out on GeekBeat LIVE!

Don’t forget, you can catch all of our new episodes every Friday at 4pm EST/3pm CST at LIVE.GeekBeat.TV. And in the next couple of weeks the show will also begin airing on nationwide television in the US!

Got any other wild and crazy ideas for GeekBeat Extreme? Leave me a comment below… preferably with a link to instructions on how to pull it off somehow!

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Norm Flores Streaming Across America

This is his first time on camera actually doing a show. He may need to work on his facts a little…

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The Naked Cowgirl

You might have heard of the Naked Cowboy (who plays guitar and stands around in his underwear), but did you know there is actually a Naked Cowgirl who wears a short skirt and pasties and stands around playing guitar and taking photos with crazy tourists?

What I found most amazing was that I was actually pretty cold when I took this video and the photos. I’d say it was about 70 degrees, but with some wind. So its interesting that she was standing out there all night like that without freezing!

Oh, that and the fact that for a tip she’ll make out with you while your girlfriend snaps photos! I wouldn’t actually care, but I worry about her ending up catching a cold (or herpes or something).

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Cali Lewis and I had the rare opportunity to travel to Los Angeles for a Samsung sponsored event at the DreamWorks facility. We spent about half of the day getting updates on the state of the very impressive new Samsung television lineup, and we spent the other half getting a personal tour of the DreamWorks headquarters!

So here is something you will basically never see… photos and video footage that lets you know what its like behind the scenes at the world’s favorite movie company!

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McIntosh MXA60 Bookshelf System

So, I was a little excited when McIntosh Labs sent over a brand spankin’ new MXA60 bookshelf audio system for review. After all, you can’t exactly run down to Best Buy and pick one up. You’re going to have to locate a dealer and then dish out $7,500 to be one of the few people fortunate enough to own one of these babies.

After hanging on to the MXA60 for a couple of months it managed to make me do something that very, very few products do. Love it. Lets start with my video review from GeekBeat.TV.

McIntosh MXA60 Video Review

McIntosh MXA60 Specs

I’m not going to hit you with all of the boring specs on this unit, but I am going to run down my favorites. Here we go:

• This “bookshelf” system weighs 64 pounds! (80 in the box). It is beefy because of the massive amplifier, heavy duty chassis, thick glass face and generally rock solid construction. It’s built to last a lifetime.
• The 8 ohm speakers are 2-way with a 4″ mid/base driver and a 3/4″ tweeter. Frequency response is 60-45,000 hz. It also has a subwoofer output so you can plug in a powered sub and really rock the house!!!
• 0.05% maximum harmonic distortion at any power level from 250 milliwatts to rated power, 20Hz to 20,000Hz.
• 75 watts into an 8 ohm load is the minimum sine wave continuous average power output, both channels operating
• The built in CD play will play SACD, CD, MP3 and WMA
• Width is 22 inches (55.88cm), Height is 10-7/8 inches (27.62cm), Depth is 16 inches (40.64cm) including connectors

McIntosh MXA60 Pictures

If you didn’t see them previously, check out the McIntosh Power Meter desktop wallpaper photos I posted.

And here are a bunch of other random photos I took of the MXA60 in case they amuse you as well.

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Hacking Passwords on MSN Homepage

MSN was featuring a little article I wrote called How I’d Hack Your Weak Passwords. You may have read it… many millions of people have. But this was not the first exposure on MSN.com. It’s previously been featured on other areas of the site several times. And I’m very glad that the article is getting the kind of coverage it is, because password security is a serious concern.

Anyway, I started thinking that a lot of people don’t really know what goes along with this sort of thing so I thought I’d give you a glimpse at the Woopra analytics being gathered by the click-through traffic the article was generating back to this blog.

Background

Before we really get into this, you are about to see a serious amount of traffic. What you need to know is that you can’t just buy a little $6 per month hosting account and experience what I’m about to show you. The traffic coming from MSN would take down that server in about 20 seconds. Max.

OneMansBlog.com is running on a large dedicated server that is cared for by my friends over at LayeredTech. This machine is an 8 core monster with 12GB of RAM and a Gigabit Ethernet connection right to the backbone of the Internet.

In addition, it has been specially tuned by my buddies over at HostCo. This tuning allows my big machine to perform like one that was 10 times bigger still.

All of this is expensive! So if you want similar performance without all of the cost, just go let HostCo put you on one of their servers.

What Happened

Sometime between 3pm and 4pm CST, MSN put a link to my article on their landing page. At this point in the day my blog normally has around 200 simultaneous visitors on it, but MSN pushed that number up over 1,100. The number even remained over 650 at midnight.

This happened because the article on MSN.com had links back to other related articles on my site from within the main article. And by the way this should show you the importance of interlinking your own articles…

For the remainder of the day the numbers of visitors remained extremely high. Ultimately driving the traffic over 100k pageviews for the day. This is about 3-4 times the normal level of traffic.

The Video

Finally, while you are watching all of the live traffic to your Website in Woopra, you also get to sit back and enjoy a real-time map of the visitors all over the world. This is what it looks like when you have a really busy site.

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Airplane Shadow

I was sitting at the window and I noticed that our shadow was nicely tracking us and converging with the general direction we were going. (As expected obviously…) You will rarely see this because everything has to be at just the right angle. The position of the sun, the direction of the runway, the approach to the runway, and even your vantage point within the plane all have to be correct.

Anyway, I pulled out my Samsung Galaxy Tab and started videoing, and I think what I caught here is actually pretty cool. Hope you enjoy.

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Geek Beat LIVE! - Episode 2

Here’s the second episode for those of you who weren’t able to see it live. This episode features Apple controversy, a scientific take on the Gender Wars, getting up close and personal with your scalp, social media revolutions and… Robots. LOTS of robots.

Thanks again to our good friends at Justin.TV!

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Hey everyone, if you haven’t heard, yesterday we took GeekBeat TV LIVE for the first time, and its something we’re going to be doing every Friday at 4pm EST / 3pm CST. This time slot also happens to work out to 9pm GMT, so depending on where in the world you are we may be live during your Friday work day or in the evening. If you can’t get around to watching the show live we’ll be recording it and you can catch up at your leisure.

Here is the very first show, thanks to our friends at Justin.TV:

Please stop by and subscribe to the Livid Lobster Justin.TV channel and join the 50,000 other people who watched the show! And thanks once again to everyone for your support!

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Brammo Enertia Instrument Cluster

Brammo is one of the oldest and largest manufacturers of fully electric bikes, which is not to say that they are old or large. Compared to Honda, Harley, Yamaha and the rest of the old school gang Brammo is in its infancy. But unlike all of the big boys, Brammo is currently producing and shipping fully electric motorcycles. And I’m not talking about little toy electric scooters! I’m talking full-on production quality motorcycles.

Brammo Enertia Electric Motorcycle

Recently Brammo announced the new Empulse model, which is purported to have a top speed of 100 MPH along with a 100 mile range. And I perked up! Since I was heading out to San Francisco on business, and since Brammo has some dealers in the area, I reached out to Craig Bramscher to see if I could arrange some time with it. Unfortunately, the Empulse isn’t quite available yet, but Craig and the team suggested I could at least take the Enertia out for a spin.

The Video Review

And take it I did. Here is my video review of the experience. If you have any questions that I didn’t cover here just drop me a comment below and I’ll tell you all about it.

The Photos

I also took a little time to stage a few photos of the Enertia, so have fun with the photo gallery.

Alternatives

More pricy, but higher performance competitors to the Enertia include:

• Brammo Empulse
• Roehr eBike
• Mavizen TTX02
• Mission One
• MotoCzysz E1

As soon as I get my hands on any of them I’ll bring you guys more electric motorcycle reviews!

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Well folks, last night I reported that a lunar eclipse was going to occur a few hours ahead of time. Hopefully everyone in the North American area was able step outside and observe it for a while. I sat out there for hours and it was magnificent.

I took some photos of the event, though my camera is not really set up for this kind of work, so they aren’t great. But here is a little overview of what I saw. The individual pictures are later in this post.

Stages of the Lunar Eclipse

The Lunar Eclipse Video

However, I did set up my camera to take a little video, and then compressed it down so you could watch a little of what was going on.

The Lunar Eclipse Photos

I also took photos of the lunar eclipse for a couple of hours in like 1 minute intervals, and here are some photos of what that looked like.

If you took or saw any other good photos of the eclipse please let me know! I’d love to see and share them with everyone!

UPDATE: Here are some of the photos from a Flickr collection that everyone took. Some are really nice!!!

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Well, we’re a week away from OpenCamp. Love it or hate it, OpenCamp has definitely impacted my ability to publish to my own blog. I’m looking forward to being done with all of that for a while so I can focus on my own projects again.

That is not to say that I am not finding OpenCamp to be an incredibally rewarding experience! It’s definitely worth every minute spent on it! I’ve made lots of close friends and had amazing experiences already. And I know that OpenCamp will change some people’s lives!

We have a lot of interesting stuff going on, and one of those things is that Dr. Nico Martini’s students from UTD will be attending OpenCamp as a mandatory part of class! So for a little fun Cali and I put this video together for them. Though everyone might get a kick out of it…

Hope to see you all at OpenCamp!

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Ok, I’m going to get this out of the way before I tell you all about my trip to the Indianapolis 500, “The greatest spectacle in racing.” Wait. Did I just say that? Well, not really… that is what THEY say, and its the same thing they have all the drivers say, it’s on all their commercials, the announcers say it – it’s generally everywhere when you are near the Indy 500.

Don’t get me wrong, Indy probably is the greatest spectacle in racing! But for God’s sake, who uses the word spectacle? I mean, unless you are trying to describe Grandma’s glasses. I think spectacle is basically the same as monocle. And frankly the word needs to be retired!

So I’ve got some other suggestions for the folks behind the Indy 500:

• The largest sporting event on the planet!
• The most amazing race on Earth!
• The most fun you can have watching cars!

Ok, now that I’ve had my say, let me tell you all about the Indy 500!

Behind the Scenes at the Indy Motor Speedway

As some of you will recall, I had full credentials to attend the Indy 500 this year. So I drove up from Dallas so that I could carry all my camera gear and anything else I felt like taking to be comfortable. It turns out that I learned the best way to attend Indy is really to travel light!

I believe I could have gone to the event with nothing but shorts, a T-shirt and a small camera and had a great time, so if you are planning on heading out don’t bother taking a bunch of stuff with you. For example, every where you look people were wheeling in ice chests. This means they had to drag them into the Speedway from literally a mile or two away. It’s not worth it folks! Beer is $5 not $15!

Anyway, one thing you need to know is that if you are coming to Indy, you need to go there at 5am. Yes, I know the race starts at 1:30pm or whatever, but if you don’t go at 5am you are going to be waiting in lines literally miles long, and its going to take you hours and hours to park. Plus, you’re going to end up parking miles away in someone’s front yard.

The good news is that if you get there early you can set up for a party until the race starts! Everyone is doing it, so you can make some new friends, get loaded, and play games.

Now, if we flash forward a bit, I’ll tell you that when the good folks at the IMS give you access to the event, they are NOT kidding around. I was able to go into the garage area for the entire two full weeks of planning for the event as well as just about anywhere on the grounds of the facility.

I was able to get inside the gates and go all the way up to the area where the pro photographers stand as the cars whiz by. I had full access to the media building, where they fed us every day and gave us snacks, water and drinks!

The media building itself, and yes, there is an entire 4 story building JUST for the media, was a monstrous structure with tons of space to accommodate vast numbers of reporters. There was plenty of room to spread out, and everyone had a place for a laptop, network connection, and tons of televisions from which to keep an eye on the event. Not to mention the fact that you could simply walk outside and look over the balcony at what was going on.

Race Highlights

Anyway, enough of the behind the scenes stuff, this year’s race was very exciting and there were a number of firsts and/or notable performances:

• Dario Franchitti led 155 of the 200 laps around Indy’s 2.5 mile track and eventually won the race! This is the second most dominant lead in the 100 year history of the race, behind only Juan Pablo Montoya’s winning run.
• There were 4 women in the field this year (the most ever at an Indy race) – Danica Patrick and Sarah Fisher of the U.S., along with Simona de Silvestro of Switzerland and Ana Beatriz of Brazil. Danica went on to place 6th, and Simona De Silvestro actually finished first among the rookies!
• This year’s race featured drivers from 13 different countries.
• The first, second and third place finishers were all from the UK!
• Tony Kanaan who started in the 33rd position (last place), managed to work his way all the way up to 2nd place, and nearly managed to win the whole race! You can read his own account of the race on the USA Today site!
• Marco Andretti was originally slotted in 6th place after the race, but immediately claimed he was passed by 3 drivers during a yellow flag. Turns out he was right, and so was later bumped into a 3rd place finish.
• Finally, Mike Conway, who was having an amazing day, also had one of the most amazing wrecks in the sport’s history! On the 199th lap (out of 200) Mike came up on Hunter-Reay’s car and had a wreck which launched him into the air and up against the catch fence at 200 miles per hour! Can you imagine being a spectator on the other side of that fence?

Here’s what the car looked like during the accident:

And here is an HDR photo that I took of Mike’s other car just two day’s before. This was his backup car, as I understand it, and had they not chosen to take his primary car out he’d have been in this one and would have started in 32nd place rather than 33rd.

Luckily Mike only had relatively minor injuries to his leg and back. He’ll be out for 3 months, but he’s not dead!

Indy 500 Photos and Videos

Now that we’re finished with all of the race overview details, I want to share a whole bunch of photos I took with you guys. First is a compilation video I created using Animoto. I think it turned out pretty good. It’s about 2.5 minutes long but didn’t seem boring to me to watch, so hopefully you’ll enjoy it too.

I’ve also uploaded all of these photos and video clips to my Indy 500 set on Flickr if you prefer to peruse them in high resolution. Here is a slideshow embed of those clips.

Don’t forget, I also put up posts from my trip to the Indy 500, and also the IPL500 Parade.

Finally, here’s a selection of a few of my favorite photos just for grins:

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Well, today I actually arrived in Indianapolis and consequently the Indy Motor Speedway. I met up with Jana, my friend at Indy who invited me, and she gave me the tour of the place.

The first thing you think when you arrive is, “Oh my God. I’ll be lost forever.” Seriously, the track is 2.5 miles long, and the entire complex is just massive. But after you spend a little time there you can pretty quickly figure out where everything is. Of course, I think that getting the VIP treatment helped speed up my learning curve… but the bottom line is that tomorrow when things get started I’ll be able to find my way around just fine.

So, today I wandered around a bit, got my bearings, and went over to the garage to see if any of the drivers and crews were doing anything interesting. Here are some photos from around the Garage area to give you a general sense of what was going on.

In addition to normal stuff, I happened upon the HP+McAfee team practicing their pit changes! It was awesome to be able to stand 5 feet from these guys and just take photos and watch them change the tires over and over. In fact, I was able to take some video to share with you guys! Enjoy!

By the way, this is the team behind driver Davey Hamilton. He’s an amazing story! In 2001 a crash at the Texas Motor Speedway nearly killed him. And although he spent a year in a wheel chair, had 21 surgeries, and wasn’t expected to ever drive again – he refused to go out like that! In 2007 he came back, and now he’s racing at Indy.

Here is his horrific wreck in case you want to see it:

Ok, after tomorrow hopefully I’ll have a lot more photos and video to share. I was a little down today that I couldn’t get more stuff, but I arrived too late to capture some actual cars on the track. See you tomorrow…

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