Macallan Whiskey, often referred to as the “Rolls Royce” of single malt Scotch, has commissioned famous portrait photographer, Rankin, as the first artist in its “Masters of Photography” series.

The Masters of Photography series is “the coming together of mastery in two great artforms, whiskey-making and photography.” Macallan Whiskey promises to deliver collaborations with the art world’s most noted photographers. Point well taken - Rankin will be a hard act to follow.

Macallan released a limited ‘Rankin’ edition of the 30-year-old Scotch, wherein each bottle bears a unique photographic label. The bottle comes packaged in a black leather case that contains the original matching photo taken by the artist as well as a certificate of authenticity signed by the photographer. The collectors’ bottles are available for $1,300 each.

The Scottish-born photographer, who is known for his portraiture of the rich and famous (Queen Elizabeth, Bjork, Vivienne Westwood and Naomi Campbell have all sat for him), took to Scotland’s Easter Elchies House for six days to shoot the collection.

Rankin shot over 6000 photographs on the Macallan estate with an instant Polaroid camera, his favorite 1000 were used for the collection. The photographs depict everyday life at the distillery. Tuuli, Rankin’s fiancé and muse is featured in many of the photos.

If you’re looking to buy a new home, apparently now is the time to do it. With the housing market off kilter and homes going into foreclosure left and right you could probably negotiate a pretty good price for that house you’ve been eyeing. But what if I said you could move into a historic New England mansion instead, and for free? No money down and no monthly mortgage payments. What’s the catch, you ask? All you have to do is live in the house and act as its curator.

Curators are being sought out for historic residences where the state can’t afford the upkeep. The majority of the homes are in poor condition and need major renovation, that’s where you come in. Curators and their families may live in the houses as long as they are keeping up the maintenance. Although you’ll never technically own the house, it’s an opportunity to live in and revive a historic residence.

Follow the links for more information on curatorship programs in Massachusetts, Delaware and Maryland.

keyboardr.com from Julius Eckert on Vimeo.

Keyboardr is a cool new way to search using only your keyboard. It’s a homepage that makes search very easy, and is especially nice for laptop users who get tired of reverting to the the track pad to move a mouse around. Your fingers never have to leave the keyboard as you cruise around searching for your stuff on Google, Youtube and Wikipedia. As you type in the search bar, selections automatically pop up until you see your desired selection. Then just use the arrow keys to navigate around the screen, hit enter when you find what you want and off you go. The developers refer to Keyboardr more as a “launcher” than as a “searcher.”

Also, it is a super fast interface. When you type your search queries into the search bar Keyboardr is whipping up results almost as fast as you can type and this makes for a seamless and enjoyable search experience.

Having grown up on “choose your own adventure” books, a video series from comedy group Chad, Matt and Rob caught my eye. They created an interactive choose your own adventure style video called The Time Machine, where the objective is to get three coworkers to a meeting on time.

In the opening video, the coworkers are chased by a group of men in Matrix-style dark suits and glasses. Without giving too much away, a time machine eventually comes into the story and provides viewers with the first of many choices about what should happen next. The path I took lead me to a medieval setting involving a dragon and a futuristic place with zombies.

The videos are certainly entertaining but what’s more interesting is what they reveal about the possibilities of video content and the Web. Making video interactive makes a passive viewer into an active one who’s involved in the story. If the concept catches on and is done well, it could change the way films and shows are made down the road.

A path through the grass on the beaches of Hilton Head, SC

How do you make closets interesting?

Well, Swedish home furnishing giant Ikea presents a unique way for users to take a closer look at its various closet and storage ideas. They’ve got a fun website up called Come In To The Closet that allows users to interact with a series of ambiguous and kooky vignettes: dancing families, masked wrestlers and one scene where two mustached bedecked gentlemen are moving about like groovy Ninjas in suit jackets, ties and boxer shorts.

The cool part is that you control the movements of the people in the four Ikea furnished environments, either by utilizing the music provided, or uploading your own songs for the people to dance to. The most interactive way to control each scene is to use your own keyboard as a drum set. There is also a feature where you can also clap, whistle and sing as well. Just click on “Play Yourself” and bang away on your keyboard and all the various characters will jump, roll over, fall down, dance and throw things around depending on what keys you press.

Underneath each vignette there are three or four icons that will whisk you away to a very short video showing off some of Ikea’s “smart storage solutions” such as a sliding closet drawer with square dividers to store your watch collection.

What’s the point of all this? It’s a creative way to get you gazing at a lot of Ikea furnishings and perhaps it made an impression?

Come to think of it, I sure could use some sliding wire baskets to store my T-shirts.

There are a few different schools of thought when it comes to profiting from older video games. Some companies, such as Sega and SNK, package 30–40 games together and release them at a discounted price on modern systems, while companies like Square-Enix repackage the games individually and port them to every conceivable system at or near full price. Occasionally when a company remakes a game they will include the original version as a bonus for finishing the game (as was the case with the remake of Metroid for the GameBoy Advance). PC game makers Valve have opted for a much different course.

Valve has released some of the most beloved PC games of all time, and to celebrate the release of their new high profile game Left 4 Dead, they are offering PC gamers an incredible deal. Through the digital distribution site Steam, gamers can purchase a copy of Left 4 Dead for $50, or they can purchase Valve’s entire 22-game catalog for $99 instead of the $234 retail price. Thanks to virtually no overhead with digital distribution, Valve can let gamers experience some of the most critically acclaimed games from the past decade (such as Half-Life and Portal) for less than the cost of a single new game.

From a personal perspective as a longtime gamer, this is a fantastic way to catch up on a lot of the more popular games from years past while not having to break the bank. It is nice to see a game company that is interested in rewarding fans by giving them a deal rather than gouging them by releasing slightly upgraded versions of single games at full price, like some other companies tend to do.

To add to its “Mix not Match” theme this holiday season, Gap has enlisted the help of Tinseltown’s brightest stars to front their new ad campaign - Merry Mix It. A-list comedians, actors and singers turned up to record and shoot videos for remixed versions of classic Christmas carols like, “Jingle Bells,” “Deck the Halls” and “We Three Kings.”

The videos feature:
- Selma Blair and Rainn Wilson - “Baby It’s Cold Outside”
- Jon Heder and Janelle Monáe - “Winter Wonderland”
- Jason Biggs, Romany Malco and Freddy Rodriguez - “We 3 Kingz”
- The Dixie Chicks and Sandra Bernhard - “Deck the Halls”
- Flo Rida and Trey Songz - “Jingle Bells”
- Entire holiday cast performing a remix of “Jingle Bells” led by Flo Rida and Trey Songz

Check out the videos at gap.com/merrymixit

President-elect Barack Obama may be one of most tech-savvy politicians out there but one has to wonder what he’ll think of this. John Hart, an Assistant Professor of engineering at the University of Michigan has used nanotechnology to create what is likely the smallest Obama portraits. Tinier than a grain of salt, the 3-D mini-Obamas were created to increase awareness of the nanotechnology field.

The Obama portraits, which Hart refers to as “nanobamas,” are about a half-millimeter in size. An electron microscope was necessary to photograph them, according to Science Daily.

“Developments like this are an excellent way to bring the concepts of nanotechnology to a broader audience,” said Hart, who made the portraits with his colleagues by working late on a Friday evening. “Also, we thought it would be fun.”

The work is based on Shepard Fairey’s well known Obama poster, which was made into a line drawing, minimized and printed on a glass plate before the final images were created with carbon nanotubes.

This isn’t Hart’s first art project of this kind. His Web site explores the beauty that can be found in the tiny structures he builds.

There is something nostalgic about pulling out a pair of those old red- and blue-lensed glasses, popping a copy of The Giant Gila Monster into the DVD player and kicking back in your favorite recliner to remember the glory days of 3D cinema. Unfortunately nostalgia isn’t the only thing you get out of that scenario; if you watch more than 20 minutes chances are you’ll also get a splitting headache, thanks to the blurry, multi-colored glasses. This is but one of the reasons 3D was never more than a cinematic niche that film companies would occasionally use to generate interest in an otherwise dreadful film. But as the great Bob Dylan said, “The times they are a-changin.”

Utilizing technology from California-based RealD, moviegoers can now enjoy 3D movies without the fear of crippling migraines by the end of the first act. While glasses are still required, they are now clear and resemble a pair of sunglasses. And unlike the old days of 3D, where two projectors were needed to project the image (which often resulted in image distortion), movies are now projected through a single digital projector.

As a result of these recent breakthroughs Hollywood is coming back to 3D in a huge way. James Cameron is returning to the silver screen with his live action/animation hybrid Avatar, which is his first film since 1997’s Titanic. Also in the pipeline are a couple of high-profile animated pictures. Pixar is set to release Up, while Dreamworks is coming out with Monsters vs. Aliens. Horror fans will also get to enjoy the third dimension with the fourth Final Destination movie.

With so many big-budget films that rely on digital projection coming out in 2009, movie studios faced a problem: there were only around 700 screens nationwide that were equipped to show films in 3D. By partnering with theaters and helping to ease the cost of replacing older film projectors with the new digital ones, come 2009 the studios will have around 5,000 screens on which to showcase their new 3D films. Given that box office receipts have fallen dramatically in recent years (due in part to big-screen HDTVs and home theater systems), the studios, filmmakers and theater owners are joining together and hoping that by offering films in 3D, people will venture outside their homes and come back to the theaters.