The Back to the Future trilogy is coming out on Blu-ray on October 26th. So I think that pretty much means everyone needs to mark that day and the next day off from work now so we can have a Back to the Future party. Life preserver jackets optional.

UPS has started making re-usable mailers. Hopefully all the other shipping companies will catch on with this soon. I can’t believe it’s taken this long for these things to become re-usable. I guess they’ve always been re-usable sort of, you just need to use tape. But I feel like I’m the only person that ever did that. But either way, I applaud you, UPS, let’s hope this catches on.

Pretty cool way to do animation.

First it was The Great Depression in color. Now it’s 1906 Europe. I’m really digging all these old color photographs that are turning up on the internet lately. Oh yeah, these ones are all geo-tagged, too. It’d be awesome for someone to go to these places and reshoot these photos 104 years later. Makes you wonder how much different this stuff looks now due to WWII and modern-day development.

I think aliens have finally figured out that we can’t read crop circles, so now they are leaving us QR codes. This article doesn’t really say much about the code, other than it was done so that it would show up on Google Earth. Clever idea, but I wonder if it’s big enough that when you see it on Google Earth you could actually use your phone (or some QR code reader) to read it.

UPDATE: Click here for the actual site about this thing: Hello, world!

I never really considered that the wooden #2 pencil might be an inferior writing instrument, but in light of Sharpie releasing a new liquid graphite pencil, I’m reconsidering. I’m also going to mention that based on seeing this already on Gizmodo and Boingboing, Sharpie’s social media campaign must be working.

If you’ve been reading this blog for any amount of time, you probably know that I love photo galleries of times since past. So this one is real treat because it’s all in color, which is pretty rare for 70+ year old photos. They were shot by the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information during the Depression and now all these slides look like they reside in the Library of Congress. So check them out here on the Denver Post’s photo blog or click any of the pictures below to go there. And seriously, check out that railroad welder guy, that photo is incredible.

I ran into a problem a few weeks ago when I was riding my motorcycle out to my parents house (which is about 2 hours away) in that I forgot to charge my phone the night before and it died on the way out there. Normally this isn’t a problem when I’m driving because I’ve got a car charger for my iPhone. But a ‘74 Honda CB350F doesn’t exactly have a cigarette lighter for me to plug in to. But if I had a Minty Boost, I could have just plugged my phone in while it was in my backpack and I would’ve been set. So maybe that’s not a scenario I face that often, but either way, the Minty Boost is a pretty ingenious way to get a charge on your phone when there’s no other charging options around. Check out the video of how they finally got it working for the iPhone here, check out more about the Minty Boost here and click here to read about it on Gizmodo, which is where I just found out about it.

The Text Bomber—portable graffiti printer. According to the comments in this Vimeo video, Nike and Livestrong did something like this but about 100 times bigger. Check out the Text Bomber in action below and check out the Nike/Livestrong version here.

TEXTBOMER from H@nnes at HfG on Vimeo.

Fun Smart ambient ad.

I feel like every six months I get handed a new coin or bill and I can’t help but wonder if there is counterfeit money in circulation. Money technology gets more and more complicated and the design gets more and more basic. Check out the new 2010 penny. This thing looks straight out of a board game.

Check it out over at the U.S. Mint’s website

Every once in a while we put together an interior panoramic shot. Usually that involves an iphone camera and some crude hacking in photoshop. If only we had a Lomography Spinner 360. I think the idea of pulling a cord and getting a 360 panorama is pretty damn cool. The spinner 360 uses any 35mm film and can take up to 8 full 360 shots with a 36 exposure roll. The pull cord makes this thing mechanical which means no batteries. This would be a very cool addition for any photography or camera collector. You can see some of the galleries over at Lomography’s minisite.

Normally I don’t like to talk shit in a public forum, but this direct mail piece I just got, well, you decide for yourself. From what I can tell, it’s from a photo-illustration rep or something to that effect. I’m just not quite sure what I’d ever need this specific set of talents for, but you never know. And just for the record, was Texas in the Civil War thereby justifying the use of a Confederate flag? Those legs remind me of something from that movie Legion.

We’re working on publishing a few eBooks right now and I happened across a file that had an ISBN number in it. So I typed it in on Amazon to see what came up, and it was The Crack Book. I thought to myself, “Oh cool, I didn’t know that was up on Amazon, awesome.” But then I scrolled down a little and noticed the “Frequently Bought Together” section. See that book that other people buy at the same time as Crack? It’s called Sprinkle Brigade, which is a group of people in NYC that find other people’s dog’s shit and poke it, prod it, prop it and photograph it. Seriously? Pictures of butts where the crack falls in the gutter—that’s funny. Pictures of you playing with other people’s dog’s shit—that’s just gross.

We’re really on a roll with this vintage stuff this week. Here’s a corridor from the London subway system that was sealed off in 1959. I’m guessing that it was just recently re-opened and someone decided to snap some pictures of the old posters that were still hanging up. (via DDC)