Discover more from The Land of Random

Rediscover the magic of the Internet! Remember the old days? when the Internet was a fun place of discovery? It's back. Join over 2225 other readers every Monday morning! 200 issues and counting . . .

Over 2,000 subscribers

🚚Death of Treasure Truck, 3D Design, and Lego Keyboards

RIP to Amazon's coolest idea

David Nichols

Nov 7, 2022

Hey friends! How’s it going this fine Monday?

Hope you had a fantastic Halloween last week - we had a lot of fun trick-or-treating around town with our kids.

including an adorable moment where my daughter accidentally dropped her orange, lost a shoe, and began running and shouting “mahh ornge” in the most distraught tone. Orange was rescued without injury and shoe restored - but I really wish i had that moment on tape.

Core memory - I tell ya.

I’ve been checking out a lot of the early Black Friday deals and haven’t seen anything that caught my eye yet other than . ..

There was a really good Target deal for a $200 58 inch Element TV - which we returned because it was wayyyyyyyyyyyyy too big for our living room.

If you see any REALLY good tech deals let me know! I’m in the market for a cheap (sub $300) 50ish inch TV.

Have you caught any of the various sicknesses that seem to be going around? I caught a cold last week - but am feeling much better now!

I finally sat down to watch some of the found footage movies that have come out recently. Deadstream was hilarious - and VHS 99 was unhinged. If you have to choose one - go with Deadstream - it’s tonge in cheek references to Youtube will keep you entertained.

Heck - I’ll probably watch it again!

It even has its own mock influencer landing page - which is a fun touch. I can only imagine that someone had a ton of fun making the site.

Let’s jump in shall we?

🚚Death of the Treasure Truck

The Amazon treasure truck is dead. Kaput.

No more good deals on random products every day - well - at least from Treasure Truck.

And definitely, no driving out to go get the product from a little Amazon truck.

You may be wondering - what the heck is he talking about??

Back in 2016 Amazon rolled out a nifty promotional offer - it was only available via text - and you had to drive to a truck near you to pick up the product you ordered.

The deals were usually pretty good too! I ended up buying a few things myself.

You’d drive up - pick up your product, maybe grab a few stickers - and sometimes they’d have little activities set up (cornhole comes to mind). Some of the trucks were also really dope-looking too!

Geekwire snapped this photo of one of the trucks - doesn’t that look so much fun? Wouldn’t you want to take a picture and share it with your friends?

It was a delightful buying experience - like a bougie trunk sale.

Getting a package is an experience bereft of any sort of personality, character, or joy - Yes - the package itself may contain those things - but the experience is robotic.

Phone alert. Grab package. Enjoy.

Treasure Truck was a way to reclaim some joy from the mundane online purchasing world.

Now . . . it’s gone.

“Treasure Truck was a unique way to bring customers exciting deals directly to their neighborhood,” Amazon spokesperson Betsy Harden told GeekWire. “In 2020, we moved those deals online and the feedback from customers was great. We’ll continue to offer customers new deals every day on Amazon.com.” (source)

I for one hope it returns someday!

At least the team had a good sense of irony with the last offer - a Schitt’s Creek party game.

The amount of subliminal messaging there is incredible. 😂

Wario64 @Wario64

today is the last Amazon Treasure Truck promo (ending as of Nov 2nd)

Go reminisce about some of the highlights at the link!

No Mas Treasure

🎉3D Design in Your Browser

Ready to test your skills at creating 3D designs?

WOMP is a browser-based tool for creating 3D designs that anyone can use. Think of it as the Canva for 3D design perhaps?

I love their promo video - it’s so fun!

I don’t know anything about 3D design - so it’s definitely a bit of a learning curve to play around with it.

Here is my cursed cheese blob.

However - given a few hours, I reckon that I could figure out how to make something fun - like a snowman.

There’s not a lot of buttons - which is very nice. Just start adding shapes and dragging them around - tweaking things as you go.

It’s all part of Womp’s mission

Womp doesn’t use complex geometry. Instead, it uses goopy liquid shapes that you can play around with to have fun from the start without the steep learning curve. People want to avoid dealing with technical features and an arsenal of complicated tools. Womp keeps things simple so creators can jump in and start creating immediately! (source)

Creator tools that DON’T make you feel like you have to take a 10-hour course.

That’s music to my ears.

Sometimes all we want to do is experiment with a discipline to create a particular idea - like I’ll probably try to use Womp to create the Lofi Radio - or at least give it a shot!

Go start building at the link!

WOMP

🧱Lego Keyboards

If you’d have asked me 5 years ago about desk aestheticcs - I probably wouldn’t have had much to say.

Maybe some glowing LED lights in the keyboard and mouse? A cool desktop wallpaper?

Today - desk aestheticcs are a HUGE part of streaming/gaming culture, and social media is awash with beautiful setups.

These are just three of thousands of sick setups

Soon - you’ll be able to take your keyboard another step further.

Pixel is the FIRST lego compatible mechanical keyboard - and it just CRUSHED its kickstarter campaign.

like - by a 10x. 50K was the original goal - it has raised over 500K.

You can customize it however you wish - either with the bricks that came in the kit, or with your own.

Customize the front, and the keycaps themselves!

I’m not really a keyboard guy at this point in my life (heck i’m using a hand me down free gamer keyboard and mouse from walmart) BUTTT I can tell you that I’m looking forward to seeing how these perform on people’s desks.

Go check it out at the link!

Pixel Keyboard

🐙The Land of Random

Random links for your random internet enjoyment.

Truffle Website Explorer

Explore websites from the old days - like Amazon 10 years ago.

Adventure is Calling

Remember Pollo Tropical?

That chain wasn’t bad - but it died pretty fast. This video is actually quite unsettling

Becoming a Pirate Archivist

This is a really in depth and fascinating article about becoming a Pirate Archivist. Also RIP once again to our fam at Z Library.

Yarhar!

Goldfish Social

An open source TikTok / Vine app. Yeah - there’s been ALOT of clones - but this one is open source . . . sooo you could remix it for something unique.

Goldfish?

Pokemon CSS

oooooh look at how cool this advanced css code makes the pokemon cards.

Very spinny

Doom in your Browser

Download a WAD file of doom, then use this site to load and play it ORRR play the freeware version right in your browser. It works too!

Doom Man has Entered the Chat

Infinite E-Ink Art

SERIOUSLY - how COOL would it be to have a AI generated Eink art frame displaying eternal landscape scenes? Pair this with some lofi . . . and some rgb lights . . .

I want to make one