Awesome Etc

Hate when people look over your shoulder to see what’s on your screen? While there are privacy filters that can reduce the viewing angle of displays, Hugh Jefferys’ mod prevents others from seeing an iPad Mini’s screen, and only someone wearing polarized glasses can view its contents. It’s a neat idea but a daunting task.

They say necessity is the mother of invention. And apparently, war creates a lot of necessities. So it’s no wonder so many things get invented for the military. Mental Floss digs into nine popular items that you probably didn’t know started with a military purpose from Silly Putty to Slinkies to powdered cheese.

Hydraulic Press Channel has smashed many items until they exploded . Fortunately, the humans conducting these experiments have stood behind a blast shield for protection. But what if you stood right next to the press without any safety gear? We now know the painful answer with the help of a ballistic gel head.

We were convinced this video was sped up, but it’s not. What you’re about to witness is the crazy speed that an electric model car can hit when placed on a twisty, slotless car track. The description doesn’t say if the Tamiya Mini 4WD car has been modified in some way, but we’re betting it’s been tweaked. And then there’s night mode.

Filmmaker Jennie Williams takes us to the Northern reaches of Newfoundland and Labrador, Canada, to look at a New Year tradition of the Nunatsiavut, the region’s Inuit people. During the festival, locals emerge from the sea in tattered clothes and scary masks to bring gifts to the good children and chase down the bad kids.

Every kitchen must have at least one cast iron pan, especially if you sear meats. Eater host Daniel Geneen takes us inside the Lodge Cast Iron factory in Tennessee for a look at how they crank out nearly 2 million pans per month. It’s cool to see how they melt down casting scraps and reuse them.

Lofty Pursuits is known for its impressive candy-making operation. For their latest video, they decided to let the candy do its own talking, capturing the sound of its Shamrock hard candies being cracked apart, shaken, and mixed in preparation for sale. When they got to the blue stuff, all we could think of was Breaking Bad.

There are lots of faster ways of getting around than walking or running. Red Side put together this animated infographic that compares the speeds of various means of transportation, from bicycles to bullet trains to satellites in orbit. The sound effects enhance the experience, so headphones are recommended.

Scientists estimate that roughly 20 quadrillion ants are marching around the planet. Then they said visualizing them all was “unimaginable. VFX artist Wren from Corridor accepted that challenge and came up with a way to generate a massive virtual ant pile. The 2.5 million ants-per-person ratio is gonna keep us up at night.

Pencils and pasta have more in common than you might think. Process X takes us inside a factory in Japan that makes pencil leads using a similar process to making spaghetti. After mixing raw ingredients, they extrude them into soft noodles, then cut them. Though instead of boiling them, they bake then soak them in hot oil.

Between its two Vermont factories, Ben & Jerry’s cranks out a million pints of ice cream each day. Insider Business takes us behind the scenes to see how they make their delicious ice cream, along with a brief history of the socially-conscious company. For more Ben & Jerry’s fun, check out Rhett & Link’s 52-flavor taste test.

Most humans won’t venture deeper than a basement or tunnel, but you could dig 7917.5 miles before you came out on the other side of Earth. On your way, you’ll visit the crust, lithosphere, asthenosphere, mantle, and outer and inner cores. This pixel art video from Posit Pixel explores what you might see on your journey.

Pneumatic tubes were a popular way for companies to send documents between offices. These days, the only place we still see them is at bank drive-thrus. Tom Scott visited C1 Espresso, a Christchurch, New Zealand café that uses the tubes to send orders to the kitchen, and delivers some food items to customers’ tables.

Willow Creative is a master costume and mask maker. In this clip, she shows off an epic mechanical mask she built based on Savathûn, the Witch Queen from Destiny 2. It has bright blue LED lighting and articulated facial features that move when she opens and shuts her jaw. The maker explains how it works in this second video.

Using a Dremel rotary tool to power an R/C helicopter seems like a really stupid idea. But Peter Sripol is the guy who built an airplane out of an angle grinder, and a gas-powered NERF blaster, so if anyone can pull it off, it’s him. But there’s much more to engineering a helicopter than just slapping a rotor onto the Dremel.

When you want to make fried rice, it’s best to stir-fry it in a wok. But if you can’t be bothered with the stirring part, then you need one of these automated stir-fry machines that spins the wok over a flame while combining the ingredients. There’s also a simpler stir-fry machine that just shakes the wok.

MetaBallStudios is known for its infographic-style comparison videos. This time they took a slightly different approach, showing off the relative heights of different cliffs by driving a simulated car off of each one and watching how long it took to fall all the way to the bottom.

Didn’t make it to the mountains for winter vacation? Then live vicariously through this first-person toboggan ride captured in the Swiss Alps. The 10 km (6.2-mile) downhill trail goes from soothing, to thrilling, to awe-inspiring and includes a few especially sketchy spots zooming close to the edge near the trees.

We’ve seen footage of a cigarette lighter sparking up in slow-motion, but this video from RentHighSpeed gets us much closer to the action. The clip also serves as a side-by-side demonstration of the frame rates of four Phantom high-speed cameras shot at the same resolution, with a range from 3,200 fps to 28,000 fps.

Thanks to surface tension, it’s possible to skim a bullet across the water like a skipping stone. The Slow-Mo Guys set up an experiment to bounce bullets across an aquarium and captured some amazing 82,000fps footage of the splashes. They also figured out how to bounce bullets off of glass without shattering it.

We’ve used the modern alphabet in English writing since the 16th Century. Language lover RobWords explores how every letter from A to Z got its start, the hidden meanings in each one, how they’ve changed over the years, and even where we got the word “alphabet” from. The whole U, V, W story is fascinating.

This award-winning short film takes place at the world’s worst telemarketing outfit – a place where lack of performance is met with severe punishment. Director and writer Sam Rudykoff’s dark comedy might actually have you feeling sympathy for the person on the other end of the line the next time you receive an unsolicited call.

From Titanic to The Perfect Storm to Finding Nemo, Hollywood has been depicting shipwrecks for decades. Insider asked maritime archeologist and historian James Delgado to evaluate the realism of on-screen disasters and the wreckage left behind. While they’re not always accurate, a few of the films are surprisingly spot-on.