For more than a year, once every week or so, Benjamin Bennett sets up his video camera, sits in front of it, and smiles at it for four hours straight while recording.

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Inventions are exciting, but the best ones are art.

There's a wonderful little corner of YouTube where stoic burly men wander deep into the woods and chop down tall trees with chainsaws.

Perhaps the best cleaning motivation I've ever seen, and fortunately the lyrics are not McDonald's-specific. Using the trademark white glove to check for dust was a nice touch.

McDonalds "Clean it" training video featuring a fake Michael Jackson via Reddit Read the rest

Somebody check the carbs on this thing. Read the rest

Your old film photos need an upgrade. Enjoy Dean Putney's guide on how to get the best quality from your boxes of negatives as painlessly as possible.

The combination of a huge wheel of cheese, lots of specialized knives, and this cheese expert's unusual manner of speaking makes this a really entertaining watch. If you want to skip straight to the action, the cheese is "broken" about 7 minutes in.

"We have already explained to the cheese where he must broken." "This is the only way to cut such a cheese."

How to break open a Parmesan cheese with Carlo Guffanti Read the rest

In this infuriating video, Colin Nederkoorn records his computer streaming Netflix's test video over his Verizon FiOS connection. Then, via a VPN on the same home network, he receives a nearly ten-times faster stream.

Get out of town. Forcing your internet traffic through a VPN should slow your connection, not speed it up. But here, something (presumably Verizon) is preventing Colin from getting normal speeds without hiding his traffic usage from his provider. So much so that he's installing a router to run all his traffic at home through the VPN.

Read Colin's full post on his test, then go swear vengeance on something. [Video Link, via Waxy] Read the rest

Hold onto your bots: tomorrow is the fourth annual Robot Film Festival in San Francisco! Join the crowd of robotics researchers and enthusiasts in an all-day marathon of robot-related films, followed by the Botskers award ceremony hosted by Veronica Belmont.

Above, Moonbot In the Hood, my personal favorite film from last year's Robot Film Festival and winner of the "Most Uncanny" award. "Malt liquor!"

Robot Film Festival on July 19th in San Francisco Read the rest

Last year's Robot Film Festival, co-sponsored by Boing Boing!

My favorite San Francisco event of the year is coming up this weekend. Here's why you can't miss the fourth annual Robot Film Festival: It's held in Bot & Dolly's studios, the robotic cinematography company that did the special effects for Gravity and was recently acquired by Google. David wrote a profile about them for Business Week, it's an incredible place. People bring their own robots, and it's a total blast. Bot & Dolly demonstrates their massive robotic arms throughout the festival. See the above video for some of the robots crawling and skating around last year. Dirty Robot Brew Works will be serving up their special brewed-by-robots beers! And of course, the films! Lots of creative and brilliant robot-starring and robot-related movies were shown last year, and I can't wait to see what comes up this year.

Get tickets for the fourth annual Robot Film Festival on July 19th here! Read the rest

This segment from the documentary "The Cocaine Route" shows the picking, mashing and eventual reduction of coca leaves into a raw form of cocaine powder. The head of the production outfit, Pablo, grinds up the leaves with a weed whacker, mixes in some cement and dissolves everything in petrol. It's a pretty interesting watch!

[Video link] Read the rest

Digging a well is a TON of hard work, but the four men in this video make it look easy and even kind of fun. In one day they dig four meters down, break up a bunch of rocks at the bottom, haul it all out and brick up a really nice well. Their coordination and determination is mesmerizing.

Hand digging a well in Mexico Read the rest

Shapeways has a great model of a three-sided die available for printing. Neat design, I didn't know you could make such a thing! Read the rest

Caleb Brown's oil paintings bring us into a bizarre end-of-days scenario where super sharks, massive insects and towering otters take over humanity from every angle. They're beautiful, meticulously-crafted photorealistic representations of an unbelievable surreal world. I found Caleb's work through Reddit's Art section, where it regularly tops the charts. You can easily get lost in each painting. What makes them so captivating? Read the rest

Quirky is helping inventor Trisha Cleveland develop the dreams of everyone with a second floor into a foldable and practical product. The foam pieces fold up into a nice little chest when not in use, and velcro helps set it up easily. (via Incredible Things) Read the rest

If you can disassemble and remove this fifty-foot-long, century-old barn from some dude's property, it's yours. Probably a great source of beautiful old wood, as well as a substantial pain in the butt. Read the rest

In his weekly homily on Monday, the Pope explored the idea that extraterrestrial beings might want to join the Catholic church and determines that they should be accepted with open arms.

From the Vatican:

"That was unthinkable. If – for example - tomorrow an expedition of Martians came, and some of them came to us, here... Martians, right? Green, with that long nose and big ears, just like children paint them... And one says, 'But I want to be baptized!' What would happen?"

"When the Lord shows us the way, who are we to say, 'No, Lord, it is not prudent! No, lets do it this way'... and Peter in that first diocese - the first diocese was Antioch - makes this decision: ‘Who am I to admit impediments?' A nice word for bishops, for priests and for Christians. Who are we to close doors? In the early Church, even today, there is the ministry of the ostiary [usher]. And what did the ostiary do? He opened the door, received the people, allowed them to pass. But it was never the ministry of the closed door, never."

Pope at Mass: The Holy Spirit makes the unthinkable possible Read the rest