This isn’t part of our usual beat, but I thought I’d share it with you anyway. This New Year’s Eve has a very special event associated with it, a blue moon. No, that doesn’t mean a baby smurf is going to be born, if means that there are going to be two full moons in the same month. → Read More
http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=8302692&server=vimeo.com&show_title=0&show_byline=1&show_portrait=0&color=00ADEF&fullscreen=1 A good idea if you can afford the cartridges: Mark Tasman took a picture of himself every day (or more often) for 10 years, and has put them all in order to create this video. Man, that would be an arduous process. I’d have to hire an underling. If you need more time-shifted beard action, try our slow-motion bearded high fives. [via Laughing Squid] → Read More
It’s about time that TiVo outs some new hardware and it looks like it might be sooner than later. The TiVo HD and HD XL have been sitting atop the companies mast unchanged for sometime now, while other DVRs like the Moxi keeps the updates rolling. But a little manual mix-up might show what TiVo is prepping to launch.
The story goes that Patrick McCarron upgraded to a TiVo HD and discovered that his box included a TiVo Premiere and Premiere XL setup guide. Now that’s a little interesting because as far as anyone knows, those products don’t exist. But from what we can make it, the info on the unannounced products seem to follow a evolutionary path from the current models. → Read More
Anyone who follows John Mayer on Twitter knows that he’s a smart guy. A bit kooky at times, sure. But he’s definitely not just shooting his mouth off with self-promotional drivel. He’s built up quite a following on the service too, with over 2.8 million Twitter followers. So when he invites all of his fans to give up Facebook, Twitter, and other social networks for a week, you know there are a lot of people paying attention.
Tonight, Mayer has announced a One Week Digital Cleanse. The purpose? To ring in the new year with a slightly less chaotic mental state. In his post announcing the Cleanse, Mayer likens our increasingly scattered lifestyles to fragmented hard drives. It’s an apt comparison — between sites like Twitter, Facebook, and multiple Email boxes, most of us have data and friendships scattered across a dozen different places. Mayer thinks giving some of these up for a while might be a good way to “defragment” our minds. → Read More
It’s almost January 1st, 2010 and we’ve been mulling over our favorites of 2009 – and the previous decade. Here we present another installment in our “Of the Decade” lists. Winner: Resident Evil 4 (GameCube, 2004) This decade saw a lot of “big” games, but how many of those games were any good? How many do you think you’ll even consider replaying in five or 10 years? If there’s one, and only one, game of the decade it has to be Resident Evil 4. The game resurrected a waning franchise, justified your purchase of a GameCube, and was actually fun to play. How rare. The lackluster Resident Evil 5 only reinforced how well made Resident Evil 4 was: perfect controls, probably the best graphics ever to grace the GameCube, and, yes, the best single-player mode of the decade make this the game of the decade. It’s pretty much non-stop fun, which is really all you can ask a video game to do. → Read More
Someone call Bruce Willis. Russia announced Wednesday that they are considering launching a spacecraft with the intention of altering its possibly earth-crushing trajectory to a less threatening one. → Read More
“Baby, let’s blow this popsicle stand.” That’s the snappy dialogue you can expect to see in the screenplay I’m writing about a man who takes up Escape From Earth 2012′s offer. You see, there’s a company out called there EcsapeEarth2012 that’s offering you the chance to leave this dumb planet before everything explodes in an orgy of stardust and iPhone cases come December 21, 2012. So, you buy a ticket, then if the apocalypse does, in fact, arrive, you board the spaceship and it takes you to a brand new planet, one that’s fit for humans. → Read More
Even though developement started in 1997, the year Clinton was inaugurated a second time, Duke Nukem Forever never came out. It’s dead dead. Hopefully Game Stop at least gave him $10 worth of in-store credit. → Read More
Your next Ford might have flowers, pastel colors, or calming scents coming from the interior. All of this will be aimed at reducing stress, and allow the driver to better connect with their vehicle. → Read More
The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco upheld a 2008 ruling that stated the iPod does not pose an unreasonable risk for hearing loss even though everyone knows the old stock iPod earbuds were the worst earbuds ever made. (I added that last part) The original case augured that because the iPod earbuds were designed to sit so far back in the ear, and the iPod itself does not have any volume meters or noise-isolating properties, that the device could be made safer. But the courts just told the plaintiffs to shut-up and sit down. → Read More
It seems that Clayton Morris, from FoxNews, has confirmed from a “source inside Apple” that there will be a “big” event in January 26th. This source also stated that the event will focus on the mobility space, which could actually mean a lot of different things. That is if there is if this event even is real. → Read More
Amazon has just released its “Best of 2009″ lists, showing the top-selling devices, books, DVDs, and such from this, the final year of the aughts. And although 2009 has not brought us hovercycles or Lunar colonies, it has brought us love-stricken vampires and a great number of replacements for paper-based book products, both of which sold extremely well.
Do you like drawing conclusions from lists? Then buddy, this one’s for you. → Read More
Newsflash: Tomorrow is the last day of 2009. That means we’re moving into the first new decade of the 2000s. And we have a decision to make.
Say “2009″ outloud. Chances are you’re saying “two thousand and nine.” But if you think about it, that’s weird. Say “1909″ outloud. Chances are you’re saying “nineteen-oh-nine.” It makes some sense, since we weren’t going to pronounce “2000″ as “twenty hundred,” but for whatever reason, going forward, we never moved to something like “twenty-oh-one” for “2001″ and so forth. A new website is urging us to do just that for the next decade. → Read More
Between CES and Google’s press event, next week is bound to be a torrential mess of press releases. Looking to sneak onto the radar before every tech writer in the lands is pulled into cranking out post after post on the latest and great from the industry’s big guns, iPhone accessory maker Mophie has gone ahead and put their upcoming wares on the table. Known primarily for their battery packs and cases, Mophie is about to jump into a whole new ball pit: credit card readers for the iPhone. → Read More
E-readers don’t always have to be stark slate’s of modern art and the Owen E1 E-Book is anything but. You just know by looking at it that it’s comfy to use and should fit into more pockets thanks to its rounded edges and smallish 5-inch screen. But it doesn’t matter, you probably won’t be able to buy it anytime soon. → Read More
Back in November, I wrote up a review of the new Magic Mouse, noting that it was “Apple’s best mouse ever, but…” Essentially, the problem is a software one. Apple gave its new mouse multi-touch capabilities, but only takes advantage of a fraction of what it can do. (And yes, it’s fully multi-touch capable.) A new third-party program called MagicPrefs, enables all the multi-touch capabilities you could ever want for the device — and even some you likely don’t.
MagicPrefs, which is made by developer Vlad Alexa, is a free piece of software that runs in the background once you start it up. It gives you a boatload of new multi-touch options for your Magic Mouse, broken into three main categories: Clicks & Taps, Swipes, and Drag, Pinch, etc. Clicks & Taps are the ones that are likely to be most useful to you, as they’re the ones that are the easiest to use, and get use to. MagicPrefs has options that allow you to set actions for two-finger clicks, three-finger clicks, four-finger clicks, and one-finger middle axis clicks. There are also all of those options and then some for “taps” which is essentially touching the top of the Magic Mouse without clicking on it. Clicking on the checkbox to enable any of these also shows you a picture of exactly how the function works on the Magic Mouse. → Read More
Weird naming conventions aside (What, no colon? And what’s with the capital B?), Castlevania fans have another installment in the series to conquer. This one’s available as WiiWare for ten bucks. → Read More
It’s been a big year for Hulu, the video streaming site that lets you watch a large variety of premium content free of charge. The site has grown from a destination for the tech-savvy to a mainstream hit in the two years since its launch, and much of that growth came in the last 10 months or so. Hulu has just written a blog post about the last year, and it boasts some pretty big numbers.
CEO Jason Kilar writes that Hulu is now up to 43 million unique visitors — a 95% increase over the same time period last year. That’s impressive, but it’s also not much more than the 41.5 million it had back in April. In fact, in terms of unique visitors, Hulu’s growth seems to be fairly stagnant, which could indicate that the market is getting saturated. → Read More
Sure, this isn’t the largest or most impressive LEGO ship out there, but it still cooler than anything you could build. Check out Jerac’s Flickr set to see the construction and other just-as-nice LEGO creations. [Thanks for the tip, Scott!] → Read More
