From the Skateistan website:

Skateistan is Afghanistan’s – and the world’s – first co-educational skateboarding school. Operating as an independent, neutral, Afghan NGO, the school engages growing numbers of urban and internally-displaced youth in Afghanistan through skateboarding, and provides them with new opportunities in cross-cultural interaction, education, and personal empowerment. Skateistan’s students come from all of Afghanistan’s diverse ethnic and socioeconomic backgrounds. They not only develop skills in skateboarding and skateboarding instruction, but also healthy habits, civic responsibility, information technology, the arts, and languages. The students themselves decide what they want to learn—we connect them with teachers who will enable them to develop the skills that they consider important. Since Skateistan has been active in Kabul, we’ve seen that Afghan youth of all ethnicities, genders, and socioeconomic backgrounds love to skateboard. Skateistan brings them together, equipping young men and women with the skills to lead their communities toward social change and development.

Maybe it’s the looming ski season that’s got me stoked on sports vids, but check out this dude Tim Knoll. Unreal.

photo by Dundas Football Club, used under Creative Commons License

There’s been plenty of talk – rightfully so – of the annoying swarms of bees that are the Vuvuzela horns you hear during the 2010 World Cup.  There reportedly have been more than one million sold since the Cup began last week.

Nothing short of a ban on the horns (it’s not going to happen) would help the players, broadcasters and fans at the matches, but as TV viewers, we thankfully have technology on our side.  A German sound engineer has created a 45-minute sound file you can buy and play during broadcasts.  It’s supposed to cancel out the sound using active noise control, the same way noise-canceling headphones work.

But thanks to another more industrious method, also originally posted by a German (Google translated page), you can just set your computer, stereo or TV equalizer to filter out the sound of the Vuvuzelas.

Apparently, all you have to do is duck your equalizer by at least 40dB at 465Hz and 235Hz.   If you are using your TV equalizer and it doesn’t offer those specific Hz levels, you can probably get away with approximating.

If you really want to get nerdy with it, here’s a video from Lifehacker that shows the before and after results:

From the Horizon Interactive Awards website:

In its 8th year, the Horizon Interactive Awards was created to recognize excellence in interactive media production worldwide. Since 2001, the competition has received many thousands of entries from countries around the world and nearly all 50 US States. Each year, those entries are narrowed down to the best of the best to be recognized and promoted on and international stage for their excellence. The judging process involves a Horizon Interactive Awards advisory panel, end user panel and a worldwide panel of judges consisting of industry professionals. Winning entries are dubbed the “best of the best” in the interactive media industry.

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