How To Solve A Rubik's Cube

 

I learnt how to solve the Rubik's Cube in 2022, just a small personal goal as I found the puzzle intriguing. I didn't know what I was in for, especially after seeing videos online that claim it can be solved with a single move. After practice and getting familiar with the cube, I've finally memorised the algorithms and can now solve it in under 2 mins. It's challenging to learn, but great when you get it. 

I found many of the videos online quite long-winded, so I created a document of each step to solve the Rubik's Cube that can be printed and followed, accompanied by this video for visual reference of the moves and algorithms, which I think is an easier way to learn how to solve it.

Find my notes here: How To Solve The Rubik's Cube and have fun learning the 8 steps. 

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YouTube Chapters Is A Great New Feature

YouTube started testing Chapters earlier in 2020 and on the 28th of May YouTube confirmed Chapters are here to stay and available to all who upload videos to the platform. I missed the announcement and found Chapters in a video last week, which led me to investigate further.

0:00 We heard you and added Video Chapters.
0:30 You liked it.
1:00 Now it's official: Video Chapters are here to stay.
1:30 Creators, try Chapters by adding timestamps starting at 0:00 to your video description. Viewers, scrub to find exactly what you’re looking for.
2:00 Enjoy! pic.twitter.com/bIHGsGVmyW

— YouTube (@YouTube) May 28, 2020

Chapters is a fantastic new feature that will benefit both content creators and viewers, by allowing people to jump ahead to parts in the video straight from the timeline. This feature will likely be best suited to longer videos for things like recipes, tutorials, news, travel or documentary videos.

Applying Chapters to your videos is easy, all you have to do is add timestamps to the video description, starting at 0:00, each chapter should be 10 seconds long (9 seconds worked for me) and you should have atleast three chapters listed in ascending order.

Here is what YouTube Chapters looks like and how to apply them:

This is fully customisable

When I searched on mobile for YouTube chapters, they seem to be indexed on the Google results page and allow people to deep-link into a chapter of the video straight from the search result page. The timestamps become links in the video description once saved. This makes me think that Chapters might be used as a ranking signal in the near future - we all know how mobile usage and video consumption is increasing year-on-year, so I predict Chapters may play a role in video Search Engine Optimisation. I love the feature, although I find it a bit strange that Chapters doesn't seem to work when videos are embedded off YouTube. 

See it in action on my How To Make Pineapple Beer or Five Royal Caribbean Cruises videos.

How To Make Pineapple Beer

This is a few weeks late with level 3 lockdown restrictions announced this week, allowing the sale of alcohol from 1 June in South Africa, but I wanted to document this anyway as it tasted pretty good and it's my first attempt speaking to the camera. When my booz started depleting during lockdown, I went on YouTube to learn how to brew my own 'beer', this is obviously after I had conquered banana bread and all the other lockdown must-dos. I took what I thought were the best tips from multiple people and created my own recipe. Seven days later, the end result was fantastic. So much so, that we immediately started the next batch, the very next day. I'm no expert, but this recipe and method worked, plus it definitely had a kick, so it's worth trying, even if just to learn about brewing basics.

Pineapple beer making has increased massively in South Africa since lockdown restrictions banned the sale of alcohol. After the first batch of pineapple beer, we replaced the pineapples with apples and raisins with the exact same method and it produced a very pleasing cider drink.

The recipe:

• 4x pineapples (or apples and raisins for cider)
• 2kgs of brown sugar
• 2x 10g sachets of instant/brewers yeast
• 23-24L of water

The method:

• Clean everything (scrub the pineapples with a brush)
• Chop pineapples with skins and place in the brewing vessle
• Pour sugar into the brewing vessle
• Fill with warm water - only half way so you can dissolve the sugar (stir)
• Fill the rest of the brewing vessle with cold water
• You want the overall temperature of your mixture to be about 26 degrees celcius
• Add both sachets of yeast (if the water is too hot, you will kill the yeast and prevent fermentation)
• Stir well and seal the container, leave it alone for two days
• Thereafter stir it once a day for five days
• On day seven, you're ready, strain the mixture into another container to remove the pineapple chunks and then bottle - you can drink it immediately. 

DIY airlock

The airlock is essential, I read you can use a glove, but it might give your mixture a rubbery taste, I tried this initially and it popped off my container, so I quickly made the airlock, details in the video.

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Greyton and Elgin New Year Summer Holiday

For our December holiday we decided to break away from the norm and spend 4 nights on our own in the country. We chose Elgin and Greyton as our destinations for their proximity to Cape Town, but mostly for their small town, good wine and good vibes feel. Quality surroundings with tranquility.

We visited the Elgin Railway Market, which was nice and over New Years we stayed 8kms outside of Greyton at Oewerzicht, which was amazing and is perfectly suited to couples, groups and families.

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Mercedes-Benz - Chris Returns To Chapman's Peak

An incredible piece of long-form branded content from Mercedez-Benz - telling the remarkable story of Christopher White's return to Chapman's Peak after his crash in 1988. They rewrite it to introduce the Mercedes Benz S-Class with autonomous driving. Five minutes entertained, high five!

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My Time-Lapse Compilation Video in HD

I've captured many time-lapse videos on my GoPro Hero 4 since buying it earlier this year and have become a bit obsessed with time-lapse videos. I've experimented a lot with the several settings in search of the best way to capture and edit these files in a manageable way without having the fastest computer at hand. Although the GoPro Hero 4 Silver comes with both image and video time-lapse options available, I found multiple images at a short interval vs recorded video works better and still produces smooth time-lapses. I really enjoyed learning how to use keyframes to add a panning or zooming effect and I mounted the camera to a kitchen timer for a 180/270 degree time-lapse pan.

Storing all my time-lapse videos over the last few months to finally compile them in this one video. They are filmed mostly around Cape Town, but also include a recent holiday on a cruise ship sailing around the Mediterranean Sea aboard Vision on the Seas, as well as two days spent in Venice.

Below are a few examples of the locations you can expect to see in the video:

Table Mountain

Acropolis in Athens

Lanseria Airport

A Busy Intersection in JHB

Leaving Venice on the Cruise Ship

Rialto Bridge - Venice

V&A Waterfront

I hope to improve (perhaps with a proper DSLR camera) and one day get the mandatory shot of clouds filling Cape Town CBD below Table Mountain or wrapping around Lions Head.

Let me know which one was your favorite in the comments below or on YouTube please.

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Head-On Collision, Only If You Fast Forward

You only see the crash with a truck if you fast forward the video by hovering over the time bar from left to right, viewing the preview thumbnail as you move. "Don't Rush" says InTouch Insurance. Not sure it's mobile friendly and branding not great, but clever video feature usage.

YouTube Rewind 2012 - Year in Review

YouTube Rewind 2012 has arrived and if you can bear through the Gangnam (Rewind YouTube) Style, it is pretty funny. Reviewing the top 10 videos of the year based on views, shares, searches, parodies, remixes and responses, find all the videos on youtube.com/user/theyearinreview.

News on YouTube is huge! 2012 highlights in the infographic below, from the official YouTube blog.

Related:

• Google Zeitgeist 2012
• YouTube Rewind 2011

Google Zeitgeist 2012

There it is, the release of Google Zeitgeist 2012, an annual review of how the world searched.

Related:

• Google Zeitgeist 2011

YouTube Pre Roll Ad Campaign - 5 Seconds

Brilliant idea based around the YouTube TrueView ad "Skip" button, offering a more favourable action.

via

Tipp-Ex Hunter and Bear are Back!

Tipp-Ex celebrate the birthday of their first bear encounter, select your year and enjoy the response.
"46 different scenes available and 8 scenes that will require interactions" - via

TNT is Dramatically Correct

TV channel, TNT, go crazy in Belgium flashmob. Just shy of 25 million views in 8 days!

"We Know Drama"

YouTube Rewind 2011

Rebecca Black presents, the cool and whack of what we watched most on YouTube in 2011.

Find the Top 10 videos and more at http://www.youtube.com/rewind

Google Zeitgeist 2011

Google Zeitgeist is back, and this time reviewing 2011 search activity, enjoy!

Related Post: 2010 in review.

Social Media 2011 Statistics

Similar to Social Media Revolution, an informative infographic video of Social Media activity in 2011.

Facebook:

1. 11% of the world population have an account.
2. There are more Facebook users (±800mil.) than motor vehicles (±750mil.) in the world.
3. 50% of users log-on daily.
4. The average user has 130 friends.
5. The average user spends 700 minutes per month on Facebook.
6. Every 60 seconds: 510 000 posted comments. 293 000 status updates. 136 000 photos uploaded.      
7. Ferrari sold 5329 cars last year, but gained 5 267 367 fans.
8. Facebook accounts for 10% of all mobile data on iPhone's.

Twitter:

1. 225 million users.
2. 150 million tweets per day, which equates to 1736 per second.
3. Highest record of tweets per second is 8900.
4. The average user has 115 followers.
5. Lady Gaga has the most followers on Twitter: 15 864 378 followers.

LinkedIn:

1. 135 million 'users', which is more than 15x the population of New York City.
2. A new member joins LinkedIn every 2 seconds.
3. Age of members: 18-24 = 21% | 25-34 = 36% | 35-54 = 36% | 55+ = 7%
4. Membership includes executives from every company listed on the Fortune 500.

YouTube:

1. 490 million unique visitors.
2. 92 000 000 000 page views per month, leading to 700 000 000 playbacks recorded last year.
3. 35 hours of video is uploaded per minute.
4. "more video is uploaded to YouTube in 60 days than the 3 major US networks created in 60 years."
5.  Justin Bie(what's his name)'s, "Baby" video has had over 659 070 256 views.

Flicker: 3500 pictures uploaded per second.

Google+: already has more than 50 million users.

Instagram: more than 150 million photos have been uploaded.

Foursquare: over 2 million check-ins per week.

Smartphone owners are 2x more active on social media than non smart phone owners,

60 % admit to using their devices while in the bathroom and woman (55%) 

are more active on social media than men (45%).

Sydney Opera House Projection Mapping

A unique 3D Projection Mapping celebration, this time only a sneak peak and on tricky surface. The full projection will be happening on Sunday for the Grand Finale of the YouTube Symphony Orchestra. I am impressed at this one in particular, because it's not your normal symmetrical building. Any ideas as to where the projection rig is?

Cheers: Google

Tweet


 

2010 in Review: Google, YouTube, Mobile

Google searches in review through 2010 are excellent in the above video, but also see the official website with the mind blowing statistics displayed for easy reading.



A rewind of the year in video! The official channel/website for full top 10 viewing, plus the YouTube Blog post. The world and I share some different opinions here, but that sounds about right.

Mobile usage is massive and these statistics are really incredible! The mobile trend is nothing new, but do yourself a favour a watch this one. Wish I had the time to write these all down in bullet point for your folk, but here are some stats to note.

Added Bonus: An awesome Infographic of the year on twitter. Still waiting for a facebook review... I know these videos have been shared like crazy and are clogging up people streams of information, but I do think it will be nice to document some of them. Think they are a bit premature without the effect of a full and post December 2010, but with that said, Happy holidays, Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to you!

Tipp-Ex Interactive Video Campaign Going Viral - Hunter Shoots Bear

The interactive videos that I have seen in the last few months have been of a very high standard. Tipp-Ex or shall I say "BIC World Stationary" have released this epic story video that is supper cheesy, but should make you laugh. The ability to get people involved with the brands message or product in a fun way, drives viral behaviour and this campaign is doing exactly that (right now, here). Of course the share buttons are well in your face to share the experience, but I think the action of the viewer is so relevant. It makes you re-type things, like you would when using the product (ok, writing on paper instead). According to Chris Rawlinson, 50 video responses have been made and I recommend you try some of the cool phrases in his post by linking to it here! 

I like how the videos on the second landing page show a views amount image. SHOOT has 750 283 views and DON'T has 750 283 views - exactly the same, I wonder why. At this present time, the welcome video has been watched 685 890 times. So maybe this is a prediction, a fraction below their target amount of views. I am sure they will exceed or reach 100 000 more views soon. I do not want to give anything away, but whatever you choose it directs you to the same place. The video just gets brilliant from there on so play with it when you have some time. RRAAAARRR (man bear runs wild). I chose to type the same headline, "shoots" after a while and was glad that they took care of this finer detail. I reckon next time I use Tipp-Ex (may be ages from now), I will think of these videos. Have fun with it..

Added note: I looked this morning at the YouTube video and less than 24 hours later it now has 1 208 451 views. Massive! On the 7th of September, just 4 days later the video is sitting just shy of 3.5 million views. Considered a viral campaign, great job Tipp-Ex. Also added, I liked the 404 error message if type is unknown and the parental sensory on explicit actions, still entertaining.

YouTube "Life in a Day" Video Vibes

What is a day in your life like? YouTube have launched an incredible crowd sourcing experiment that aims to deliver a world wide spectrum on "Life in a Day" on earth. Ridley Scott who directed movies such as Gladiator, Black Hawk Down and Robin Hood will be active in the production of this project. 

Kevin Macdonald who directed films like, The Last King of Scotland and One Day in September will be responsible for editing all the entries into one extraordinary video. 

How do you take part? 
On the 24th of July 2010, get your camera out and record the highlighted parts of your day. Upload your recordings to the YouTube "Life in a Day" Channel before the 31st of July 2010. Even if your videos do not make it into the final one, they will remain on the YouTube channel as reference for people to see what life on earth was like on the 24th of July 2010.


Source: Google Blog

The RED Lazarus Effect Campaign