This is a short video of a house in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood (of hey man, got any acid? fame) in San Francisco with a secret garage door that opens out of a couple seemingly boring windows, making it that much easier to accidentally park your car in a neighbor’s basement. This apartment building in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood of San Francisco has recently been remodeled to include four precious car parking spaces while maintaining the historical Victorian facade. Damn, that’s one hell of an improvement FOR AN APARTMENT BUILDING. I’ve been waiting seven months for the landlord to replace the exhaust fan in my bathroom. You know how embarrassing it is knowing your friends can hear you busting ass when you’re on the can? No seriously, I’m asking — I’ve never had friends over. I tried inviting a pizza delivery guy in one time but he was all “no homo” and I was all “DOUBLE SAUSAGE!” Hit the jump and be impressed. Obviously still needs a touch up though.

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Clever, Veeeery Clever: Hidden Garage Door

Seen here NOT DOING HIS F***ING JOB, a San Francisco city employee plays a Yahoo Bus Stop Derby game while on the clock . Web giant Yahoo has installed twenty large touch-screen displays in bus shelters across San Francisco. It’s called the Yahoo Bus Stop Derby, commuters able to choose from four simple games to play. While they play, their results are being tracked and updated in real-time, letting residents of various neighbourhoods see how they shape up against their cross-city rivals. There’s the option of solo play or multiplayer, provided there’s somebody else waiting at another bus stop who wants to play the same game as you. Wow, that almost sounds like as much fun as playing games on your smart phone. Only thing is, YOU HAVE TO HANG OUT AT A GOT-DAMN BUS STOP WITH YOUR BACK TURNED TO EVERYBODY. Just sayin’ you ever been stabbed by an angry homeless man wearing nothing but two different shoes and a scowl? That shit’ll put a damper on a weekend, lemme tell ya. Bus Shelters Turn Wait Times Into Neighbourhood Deathmatches [kotaku] Thanks to Jerry, who’s on his way to San Francisco right now to relieve them of all those large touch-screen displays. Get me one!

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Iffy: Yahoo Installs Bus Stop Video Games

A History of the Sky is a project by Ken Murphy in which he plans to collect 365 days worth of time-lapse video from the sky above San Francisco , and then slap them all together in a video mosaic , each cell representing one day, in chronological order. Impressive Ken, but have you considered using a Dewey Decimal order instead? A History of the Sky reveals the rhythms of weather, the lengthening and shortening of days, and other atmospheric events on an immediate aesthetic level: the clouds, fog, wind, and rain form a rich visual texture, and sunrises and sunsets cascade across the screen. This is a work in progress. Currently, an image of the sky is being captured every 10 seconds from a camera installed on the roof of the Exploratorium, on the edge of San Francisco Bay. Each day’s images are assembled into a time-lapse movie. The final piece will consist of a large mosaic of 365 movies, each representing one day of the year, arranged in order by date. The days all play back in parallel, so that at any given moment, one is looking at the same time of day across all of the days. The video after the jump is of the 125 days Ken has collected so far, and I’ve got to admit: it’s mesmerizing. Mesmerizing in a “holy shit I think those clouds just told me to kill my neighbor” kind of way. Mr. Kirby? But he’s so nice! Fetch my shovel. Hit it for the video and links to the project pages.

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It’s Just So Beautiful: A History Of The Sky

SF Weekly writes : With the aid of a GPS — and nary a can of spray paint — San Francisco graphic designer Vicente Montelongo has created a series of bike trails in the city shaped like videogame heroes of yore… Montelongo has been posting maps of his GPS videogame trips on the Web site EveryTrail.com . New York Times more recently reports : Part sport, part art, GPS drawing lets runners, walkers, cyclists and hikers imagine themselves anew — not just as a collection of burning muscles, sweaty armpits, forward motion; not just as people endeavoring to crest a hill or lose five pounds. Instead, they are neo-cartographers, jumbo-size doodlers and bipedal pencils, mapping their track lines across cities, roads and farms, and sharing them online… Pedaling the rectangular city blocks in San Francisco, Vicente Montelongo, 32, a graphic artist, realized the street layout lent itself to the pixeled shapes of vintage 1980s video game characters like Pac-Man, Q*bert and Donkey Kong. Back home with a printed-out Google map and a pencil, he drew Pac-Man chasing a ghost over in the Sunset District and then set out on his bike, iPhone in tow, GPS mapping application on. After riding 8.6 miles in an unwavering line, he uploaded the GPS track data from his phone, and had his picture. If you’re in SF or planning to visit, here are directions on how to make the above Space Invader.

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HOWTO Create a GPS Grafitti Space Invader

I used to never get lost in San Francisco. I was a safe driver who obeyed traffic rules. Then I got a GPS, and everything changed. I’m a closet road geek. I love thinking about how cities are built and how roads interconnect. When the new Octavia exit to the 101 opened up, I gawked at the pure genius that was highway construction for a month before I finally shut up about it. When I first moved to Bay area, I rode the pee-stained bus up and down the veins and arteries of San Francisco with a foldable city map and learned the names of all the side streets that crossed 19th Avenue, Geary Boulevard, and Market Street. By the time I got a car two years later, I had a map of the city imprinted in my geography geek brain. At first, the GPS (I have an old Garmin) was a novelty–a tool for experimentation. It was fun to see how long the thing thought it would take to get from point A to point B. I was just the receiving end of a network of commands relayed through the voice of a nice British lady. But then it became a habit, and weird things started happening to me. I started to forget how to get places without it. The map in my brain became a distorted blur. And then my driving became more reckless. I invented this game where I tried to beat the estimated arrival time that the GPS gave me. Often, that entailed running yellow lights and exceeding the speed limit. Sometimes, the GPS fell off of its suction cup on the windshield and onto the floor, and I would have to fumble around with my right hand while steering the wheel and shifting gears with my left. The worst was when it couldn’t locate an address or a satellite signal. I would drive around in circles bouncing between rage and confusion. Why am I relying on this dumb machine? Why is this machine that is supposed to help me get places screwing with my innate sense of direction? Ultimately, I think the GPS just made me lazier, stupider, angrier, and a worse driver. I wish I could say I’d rather be without one, but a part of me is dependent on it. I’m a recovering GPS addict who has been clean for several weeks, but it’s still sitting in my glove compartment beckoning to be used. Advisor is a new weekly column about how to juggle technology, relationships, and common sense. Got a story to tell? Email it to mango [at] tokyomango [dot] com.

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Advisor: Why my GPS is bad for my brain

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"The Shortest Line I’ve Ever Seen For an iPhone"

That there’s a solar bus shelter, it is, the first in San Francisco. Mike Chino took a look : Situated at Geary and Arguello boulevards in the Richmond District, the new bus shelter features an undulating solar roof that calls to mind both the hills of San Francisco and a seismic wave (this is earthquake territory after all!) The roof is constructed from an innovative 40% post-industrial recycled polycarbonate material embedded with thin-film photovoltaic cells, and the steel structure is composed of 75% recycled material. The shelter also features a pushbutton update system, more room for transit information, and is expected feed back energy into the city’s electrical grid.

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San Francisco’s solar-powered bus shelter