browsing Competitions

Sony invites all-comers to "Graphic Splash" contest

sony-expression.jpgGraphic Splash is Sony's lineup of art-slathered notebooks, and it's the company's single coolest project going. It's teaming up with Microsoft to find new designs for the series, and is inviting "consumers" to send in their creations.
Starting today through Aug. 10, 2008, budding designers can submit their proposed designs online at www.sony.com/mygraphicsplash along with a photo of themselves and a brief message revealing their “style.”

That they can't get through their own pitch without putting "style" in scare quotes betrays a certain cynicism, yes, but they'll be selecting three entries to become real-life limited edition laptops. That's money where its mouth is, even if you won't be getting any.

CALLING ALL FASHIONISTAS: SONY AND MICROSOFT LAUNCH “MY GRAPHIC SPLASH” PC CONTEST [Sony]

Taking all bets: how long will it take Joel to get an iPhone 3G?

2436394652_0ecd67cca9_o.jpgJoel has sworn up and down that he's not going to buy an iPhone 3G today. "It can wait. The real hotness is 2.0" and "I'm busy moving this week. Don't have time." A little more than a year ago, he made the same claim about the original iPhone: "I'm pretty happy with my current phone" and "I'm going to wait for 3G."

How long did Joel's reserve of willpower last? All it took was a single instant message from one Ms. Xeni Jardin proclaiming the iPhone "rad" to send him sprinting his flabby blogger's frame down the block as he wildly tried to flag down a taxi, destination: "habbadegeebideeIPHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONE!"

Frankly, it was an embarrassment, and Joel should feel shame. Now it's a year later. Joel's considerably svelter, more confident. He has come up in the world. He's a bettter, more dynamic man. Surely his resolve won't wane so quickly this time. But in BBG's private channel, we can already see him sliding down that path again. Yesterday, Rob and I spent all day listening to him "review" iPhone 2.0 apps. There wasn't a single one he didn't refer to as "innovative" "amazing" or "game-changing." This included such programs as tip calculators, die-rolling simulations and a virtual abacus.

So how long until Joel's internal thought process goes something like this: "Man, that virtual abacus really is pretty dude. But imagine how much more wanktastic it would be with the power of 3G?"

My guess? If he gets to Saturday without one, he's going to start seeing dead babies crawling on the ceiling.

We're now taking all bets, measured in hours and minutes from the time the iPhone goes on sale this morning in Brooklyn. Soothsay in the comments! No fair guessing, Xeni.

Image: Bizarre first hit for 'Joel Johnson' in Flickr, courtesy of the great spaghetti communist, Camillo Miller

Update: Joel is emphatically denying he ever called either the virtual abacus or iPhone tipping calculator "innovative." Needless to say, if true, this new information might add hours to the time it takes for Joel to crumple into a mess of primal, unthinking consumerist impulses. You should adjust your bets accordingly.

Winner: The Boing Boing Team Fortress 2 Weekend's Awesomest Player

Thumbnail image for BBGfortress.jpg

You came, you saw, you conquered. You backstabbed engineers, uber-ed pyros, farmed medic achievements and beat mesomorphic Austrians clean to death with baseball bats... all while the Boing Boing puppet masters clapped their hands in fey delight at the gladiatorial orgy they had Nero-like decreed.

And now we're ready to declare our awesomest player for last weekend's Boing Boing Team Fortress 2, with the adjective "awesomest" decided entirely by Happy Mutant whim. This player will receive a Neuros OSD video storage device. And by consensus, our winner is... Bunnystew. At over 10 hours logged into our server, Bunnystew was this weekend's most committed Boing Boing Team Fortress 2 player, by far. Congrats, Bunnystew! Drop brownlee at boing boing dot net an email to receive your prize.

For the rest of you guys, don't fear: we've got the server for a little while, and we'll schedule matches every weekend until we give it up. Thanks for playing, guys! See you this weekend.

Winners of the Seagate Billionth Drive 1K Competition

new_seagate_logo2.jpg"1 kilobyte. 1 kibibyte. 1 kilobit. 1,000 ASCII characters. Source code, file size, tile size, the number of letters in a short story: you decide."

So was the challenge—the winner to receive a Terabyte hard drive from Seagate, which is celebrating is billionth sale—and so are the many fantastic entries. What better way to celebrate Terabyte-size hard drives than with a competition concerning tiny filesizes?

We hated judging this. So we picked out some extra prizes from the gadget dungeon to reward as many submissions as possible. Congratulations, everyone! Winners past the jump.

Continue reading Winners of the Seagate Billionth Drive 1K Competition.

The Boing Boing Gadgets 1K Competition Gallery

1kcompologo.png"1 kilobyte. 1 kibibyte. 1 kilobit. 1,000 ASCII characters. Source code, file size, tile size, the number of letters in a short story: you decide."

That—making the most of limited resources—was our challenge to you. In return, we received a host of fantastic entries, ranging from short stories to procedural robot generators. Now comes the challenge of picking one to win a terabyte hard drive from Seagate, but not before we collect all the entrants in one place.

The gallery of 1K wonders follows after the jump.

Continue reading The Boing Boing Gadgets 1K Competition Gallery.

Great entries in 1K competition—keep them coming!

mona.png BoingBoing Gadgets, in cahoots with Seagate, launched a competition last week challenging you to send us the most ingenious work of art, writing, code or whatever takes your fancy that fits into a kilobyte or less.

We've had some fantastic entries, one of which will win a Terabyte hard drive courtesy of Seagate. Pictured here is Gabriel McGovern's 1k rendering of the Mona Lisa (resized from his original to give a better view).

Continue reading Great entries in 1K competition—keep them coming!.

1K Competition: Seagate ships billionth drive, and we've got one for you

new_seagate_logo.png1 kilobyte. 1 kibibyte. 1 kilobit. 1,000 ASCII characters. Source code, file size, tile size, the number of letters in a short story: you decide. Use your imagination. Give us a thousand of whatever you want. A 1,000 byte JPG, MP3 or textfile. Need a little extra? 1,024 will do, we’re not religious. We’re cool. Just make it 1K of awesome, k?

Thanks to Seagate Technologies, which just shipped its billionth drive, one of you will get enough space to store your work a billion times over: a Terabyte hard drive.

If every drive it ever sold was put together, Seagate says, there'd be enough space to store 79 million terabytes (75 exabytes). It took three decades to do so, but thinks it will double that number in less than 5 years.

Making the most of limited space is the theme of the competition, however. It’s no good giving us 1k of actionscript glued to assets that mock the metric. If you write us a short story, 1,000 letters will trump 1,000 words.

On the other hand, if your 1K of source code ends up as a 3MB executable thanks to unavoidable embedded runtimes, worry not. So long as your rationale is clear, we won’t be sticklers.

The one rule is that whatever you do should be under a license that permits us to use your work at BBG without issue. GPL or Creative Commons licenses are suggested. (This is in lieu of the traditional option, where you submit this sort of stuff to a contest and then lose all rights to it.)

Link to your entry from the comments (or even just post it there!) and fire off an email to beschizza#gmail.com. We'll cycle back in a week and start picking the winners.

(P.S. The Seagate logo up top? Too big. It's 1,025 bytes!)

Update: Gabriel McGovern reminds that you can slim down PNGs very easily. Note that we're OK with using zip files or other "containers" to crunch something down, but will be more impressed by those who use cleverer compression methods like McGovern's