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NES gamepad mouse is the most amazing piece of industrial design in the history of humankind

Joshua Topolsky — Thu, 30 Apr 2009 14:47:00 GMT

Apparently as of right now, this stunning piece of high art is just a foam model mock-up, but listen to us, mouse manufacturers of the world: if you build this, we will give you every penny we have to own it. Our only gripe? The D-pad should definitely be up top for navigation duties. Still... where's the waiting list?

[Via Technabob]

Filed under: Gaming, Peripherals

NES gamepad mouse is the most amazing piece of industrial design in the history of humankind originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 30 Apr 2009 09:47:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Movie Trivia: The Wizard of Oz

Stacy — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 16:57:52 GMT

There’s so much behind-the-scenes info on The Wizard of Oz, I couldn’t possibly touch on all of it in one Neatorama post. I just picked some of my favorites, but if I missed your favorite bit of Oz-related trivia, definitely leave a comment and let all of us know.

Poor Margaret Hamilton (the witch) was really injured in the scene where the Wicked Witch of the West departs Munchkinland in a huff after Dorothy arrives. She was standing on a trap door and was supposed to disappear down into it quickly when the smoke (followed by fire) puffed up, but during the second take of that scene, the fire came too early and her costume started burning. She suffered second and third degree burns and was unable to work for a month. When she came back, she refused to do any more work with fire.

Toto was played by a Cairn Terrier creatively named Terry. Because of her previous experience (she was “Rags” in Shirley Temple’s Bright Eyes) Terry got $125 a week for her efforts, which was more than twice what the actors playing the Munchkins got ($50/week). She got her foot broken during filming when an actor playing one of the guards stepped on her.

Margaret Hamilton wasn’t the first choice for the Wicked Witch. The iconic role almost went to Gale Sondergaard, who was very pretty and balked at the makeup job that would make her the ugly witch. Maggie Hamilton, however, was used to playing plain-Jane roles and had in fact based her career around it. You’re probably so used to the green makeup job that some of her other roles may be totally unfamiliar to you, even if you’ve seen her in them – she was Morticia’s mom in The Addams Family TV show, she portrayed a maid on As the World Turns in the early ‘70s, and played Cora the Maxwell House coffee lady in commercials in the ‘70s as well.

Margaret Hamilton’s son has said that she loved her “I’ll get you my pretty…” line so much, she used it in her personal life on a somewhat frequent basis, just for fun.

The date on the Wicked Witch of the East’s death certificate is actually the date of L. Frank Baum’s death. The 19th anniversary of his death, to be exact. We can’t read it, but this is what the Death Certificate says:

Certificate of Death

Name: The Wicked Witch of the East
Residence: The Land of Oz

I HEREBY CERTIFY that I attended deceased from May 6th to May 6th, 1938

I last saw her alive on May 6th 1938:

Death is said to have occurred on the date stated below at 12:30 p.m.

Date of Death: May 6th 1938

Month Day Year

Signature: W.W. Barister, M.D.

Address: Munchkin City

Can you imagine anyone but Judy Garland as Dorothy? How about Shirley Temple? Although producer Mervyn LeRoy had always had Judy in mind for the role, he was being pressured to “borrow” Shirley Temple from Fox. She was only 10 and Judy was 16 at the time; studio executives thought 10 was a much more appropriate age for this particular role. They ended up auditioning Shirley just to say they had, but in the end it didn’t matter anyway: Fox refused to loan her out.

The first film version of Dorothy depicted her as a blonde with baby doll-esque makeup because that’s the way Oz illustrator John R. Neill drew her in the books. Well, he was actually the second person to illustrate Dorothy for L. Frank Baum - the first was W.W. Denslow, who drew her the way we know her today: brunette pigtails and the blue-and-white Gingham dress. But Baum had a falling-out with Denslow and John R. Neill took over for the design from then on out, which amounted to more than 40 stories. People who are fans of the book series over the movie say that they usually picture a blonde Dorothy as opposed to the Judy Garland Dorothy.

When the song “If I Had a Heart” is playing and a girl speaks the words “Wherefore art thou, Romeo?” the voice you’re hearing is Adriana Caselotti – Snow White.

The Horse of a Different Color was created by putting Jell-O paste onto a white horse. It was difficult to keep the horse from licking the paste, so the scene had to be shot quickly. If you look closely, you can see the driver of the buggy subtly restraining the horse from licking himself.

Originally, a scene with an insect called the Jitterbug was shot. It involved a dance sequence with our heroes but was ultimately cut due to time constraints. But you can still hear a reference to the scene in the movie when the Wicked Witch of the West sends the flying monkeys after the gang. She says,

“Take your army to the Haunted Forest, and bring me that girl and her dog. Do as you like with the others, but I want her alive and unharmed! They’ll give you no trouble. I promise you that. I’ve sent a little insect on ahead to take the fight out of them. Take special care of those ruby slippers. I want those most of all. Now fly!”

In the book, Glinda is the Good Witch of the South, not the North. The two Good Witches were combined into one character for time’s sake in the film. She is, however, restored to her proper direction in The Wiz.

Likewise, Dorothy’s slippers were silver in the book. They were changed to the famous ruby red version for film to take full advantage of the new Technicolor technology. There are many authentic versions of the ruby slippers – some counts say at least seven. Among those, one pair is housed at the National Museum of American History at the Smithsonian, Debbie Reynolds owns a never-used pair with curled toes, and one pair was stolen from the Judy Garland Museum in Grand Rapids, Minnesota.

Bert Lahr, AKA the Cowardly Lion, was the first to use the phrase “Heavens to Murgatroyd!” that Snagglepuss later became famous for. Snagglepuss’ voice was based on Lahr’s. His son, John Lahr, is the senior drama critic at The New Yorker.

As most people know, the Tin Man was originally supposed to be played by Buddy Ebsen, but when Ebsen discovered he was severely allergic to the Tin Man’s makeup job, he was forced to drop the role. Jack Haley replaced him, using a voice that he used to tell his son bedtime stories. Somewhat strangely, Jack Haley, Jr., was married to Liza Minelli for about five years in the ‘70s.

The classic “Over the Rainbow” almost didn’t make it into the film. Studio heads thought the black-and-white beginning was too long and wouldn’t entertain kids like the Technicolor part would, and they also thought it wasn’t appropriate to make Judy Garland sing in a barnyard.

When the witch first tries to take the ruby slippers from Dorothy at the beginning and her hands are zapped with fire, you’re actually seeing dark apple juice squirting out of the shoes. The footage was later sped up so the streams of apple juice resembled fire more closely. So says IMDB, anyway – I couldn’t verify that through any other source.

This one sounds like a total urban legend, but Snopes says it’s true. The costume designers were looking for a very fancy coat for Professor Marvel – the Wizard’s Kansas counterpart – but one that had gotten quite shabby. Some of the crew went to a secondhand shop and bought a bunch of coats to go through; Frank Morgan (the actor who played the Wizard), the director and the wardrobe people selected one out of the bunch that seemed perfect. It had a velvet collar but the nap was worn off of the velvet and it was looking a little worse for the wear. It even fit Morgan just right. Morgan was wearing the coat one afternoon and discovered a label that said “L. Frank Baum.” The coat had originally been made for Baum in Chicago – the tailor verified it, and Baum’s widow did as well. She was given the coat after the movie wrapped.

I loved looking for creepy things in movies when I was in high school, and I totally bought all of them - the “ghost” in Three Men and a Little Baby and the “munchkin suicide” in The Wizard of Oz among them. In case you haven’t seen it, it’s allegedly at the end of the Tin Man sequence, right before Dorothy and Co. head back down the Yellow Brick Road. I remember very clearly seeing this image back then (the clip below will show you exactly where) and having no doubt that it was clearly a suicide, and how creepy it was. Ever since I’ve discovered that it was just the wing of an exotic bird, that’s all I can see. I can’t even fathom how I used to buy that it was a munchkin suicide. Check out the clip below of TV Land’s “Myths and Legends” to get the whole scoop.

Here’s another myth, sort of. I tried this one in high school too – matching up Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon with the movie. And it works! It really does. But various members of Pink Floyd have denied that they wrote the album while watching The Wizard of Oz or that they were inspired by the movie or anything of that sort at all. But it does eerily match up. It gives the whole thing a very spooky vibe. If you don’t want to rely on YouTube and have both the album and the movie, here’s how to do it: start the album at the third lion’s roar in the MGM movie title right before the film starts. Otherwise, here’s the YouTube version. I suggest also checking out “The Great Gig in the Sky” which coincides with the tornado scene – it’s kind of amazing.

strip for March / 16 / 2009

Mon, 16 Mar 2009 07:00:00 GMT

World Builder by Bruce Branit

Wed, 04 Mar 2009 01:01:15 GMT

A strange man builds "a world" using holographic tools for the woman he loves. Wow, watch the video, very cool!"This award winning short was created by filmmaker Bruce Branit, widely known as the co-creator of '405'. World Builder was shot in a single day followed by about 2 years of post production. Branit is the owner of Branit VFX based in Kansas City. "

#877630: < billn> so pizza hut has that field in the online...

uwe@magerquark.com — Thu, 05 Feb 2009 22:37:23 GMT

Score: 475

< billn> so pizza hut has that field in the online order form, for special instructions?
< billn> I put 'driver must beat box.'
< billn> turns out, he could.

Brought to you by Uwe Keim.

No Exit Strategy Whatsoever

Meg — Tue, 06 Jan 2009 13:35:00 GMT

Ruh-roh.

Melissa A., EXCELLENT MOTION BLURS!

The Essential Guide to Internet & Software for First-Time Computer Users

Amit Agarwal — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 13:33:47 GMT

You bought a brand new laptop computer for mom - the Apple Macbook was too expensive so you settled for a Dell machine loaded with Windows Vista and a trial copy of Office 2007.

Your mom is a great self-learner and knows all the basic stuff about computers but needs some help is in finding the right software tools that will help her do stuff more efficiently and as inexpensively as possible.

Letter to Mom suggesting tools and web apps for her new computer

Dear Mom - I hope you are enjoying the new Dell notebook. Now the first thing I want you to do is install PC Decrapifier - this will detect and remove all the unwanted trial programs that came pre-installed with your machine.

Next you should install Firefox - it’s an Internet Explorer like web browser but slightly better. Instead of using browser bookmarks, try the delicious add-on to save the addresses of all your favorite websites. Another add-on that you should install is Iterasi - web pages come and go but Iterasi will permanently archive your favorite web pages (like that eggless cake recipe).

You should create two email accounts one Gmail.com - share the primary email address with your friends and family but for everything else (like the newsletter and shopping deal alerts) always use the secondary email address. If you come across a site that requires registration, generate a temporary email address from 10MinuteMail.com and enter without sharing your main email.

With so many websites around, you’ll soon find it very hard to remember all those passwords so get into the habit of putting down all the different passwords into KeepPass from day one.

If you plan to carry this laptop in public places (like the Library), get this Laptop Alarm software that will emit a loud sound if someone tries to shut down your computer or remove the power cable. Laptop thefts are not so uncommon after all.

The trial version of Microsoft Office on your computer will expire after 60 days so you may completely uninstall that software and switch over to Google Docs - it has all the basic feature you would need in an Office suite including templates for tracking expenses and utility bills. You can use your primary Gmail address to log into Google Docs.

Sometimes your friends will send you documents, images or video clips that won’t open on your computer - that’s because you don’t have the right viewer software on your machine. You can simply go to zamzar.com and convert the file into some simple format (like avi for video, jpg for images, doc for documents, mp3 for songs, etc.) that you computer can play/open.

If the computer contains too many programs that you’ll rarely or never use, get the Revo Uninstaller to get rid of such programs permanently. To free up additional space on the hard drive, use WinDirStat to learn about file folders that are occupying the maximum space on your computer and delete the unnecessary files.

Be very careful when deleting files on your computer but if you ever delete something important accidently, Recuva may help you recover all those erased files. It even works with the memory card of your digital camera.

To download pictures from your digital camera onto the computer, get Windows Live Photo Gallery. This software can also upload your photos to our common family Flickr account so everyone gets to see your pictures even though we are several hundred miles away from you.

If the computer is not able to play your huge collection of DVD movies, you’re probably missing some codecs (don’t worry about the term) - just download the VLC player and the DVDs will play just fine.

You should also get Live Mesh - it will allow us to share files and documents with each other privately plus you can use Mesh to backup important files onto the cloud (I mean the web).

I am almost always available for chat on Google Talk but if some of your online friends use other chat software (like Yahoo! Messenger or AOL), you can easily connect with them through Miranda or, if you don’t want to install any software, use Meebo.

Another thing - do open an account at PayPal and link it to your main credit card as this will make online shopping easier. If you ever have a problem with PayPal or something isn’t clear, just call their toll-free 1-800 support number from your browser using Gizmo.

If your current voice plan is too expensive, I suggest that you download Skype - it lets you make calls from the computer to any landline or mobile phone at much cheaper rates. We can also use Skype to have video chats on weekends but if you don’t find me online, just send me a video email with Eyejot.

If you have newspaper clippings, bill receipts and business cards lying in the closet, just take a picture of them separately using the camera of your mobile phone and transfer them to the computer with Evernote - it will turn your "paper" documents into digital format that is always so easy to find and manage.

When planning a movie or weekend dinner with friends, you can send all of them a quick reminder for the event via phone and SMS for free using Notifu. If you’re inviting people at home for a party, head-over to sites like VideoJug.com, SuTree or 5min.com for new ideas about food, cocktails, party games, etc.

If you ever need to fax a document somewhere, just go to FaxZero, upload the document and fax it for free. FaxZero is only available for fax numbers of US or Canada but for international numbers, you may try eFax.

You can also consider dropping those magazine subscriptions that are delivered by snail mail - switch to Zinio instead that delivers the same magazine but in digital format.

As far as I remember, you’re currently using an unlimited data plan for the Internet but if that’s not true, get BitMeter - it will help you visually monitor your bandwidth usage so you never exceed the plan limit. You may also want to download FlashGet for downloading big files from the Internet.

If you notice carefully, some websites add an orange colored icon in the browser address bar (go to cnn.com to see a live example) - this icon means that you can get updates about new articles posted on that site automatically without having to visit the site again and again. If that’s the case, go to Feed My Inbox and type the address of that website - you’ll be notified automatically via email.

When browsing the web, you’ll frequently come across photographs, web pages and videos that you’ll want to share with us (your family members) - you could either send the link in a group mail or better still, simply create an account at Tumblr and start saving all the "interesting" stuff there.

And if you ever find yourself spending too much time on the computer, get RescueTime to know about websites where you spend most of your time.

There are a few other things that I want to do on your computer like installing a hosts file and configuring OpenDNS so that sites load quickly on your machine. These however require some geeky knowledge so I will try configuring them from here itself via CrossLoop - a remote desktop access tool.

Related: How to Rebuild a Slow Computer

The Essential Guide to Internet & Software for First-Time Computer Users - Digital Inspiration

The Pixar Story available on iTunes

Guido — Wed, 17 Dec 2008 13:27:08 GMT

The Documentary The Pixar Story directed by Leslei Iwerks is now available for Purchase through iTunes at $14.99.

Monty Python: The Dead Parrot Sketch

Scott Beale — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 00:41:50 GMT

Monty Python just uploaded their infamous “Dead Parrot Sketch” to their recently launched YouTube channel. The sketch is from the 8th episode of the first season of Monty Python’s Flying Circus, originally aired in 1969.

See Previously: The Monty Python Channel on YouTube

This is a blog post from Laughing Squid For more content like this, subscribe to the RSS feed, Twitter & FriendFeed.

Monty Python: The Dead Parrot Sketch

- The Monty Python Channel on YouTube

- Star Trek Goes To Camelot via Monty Python

- Monty Python’s Holy Ale

- FriendFeed Comments on Laughing Squid

- FriendFeed, Aggregate and Share Web Content With Friends

Police Car Dashboard Camera Records Meteor Over Edmonton

Scott Beale — Sat, 22 Nov 2008 04:37:15 GMT

A police car dashboard camera captured a meteor over Edmonton, Alberta yesterday.

Here’s more on the meteor sighting from the Edmonton Sun and CBC.

This is a blog post from Laughing Squid For more content like this, subscribe to the RSS feed, Twitter & FriendFeed.

Police Car Dashboard Camera Records Meteor Over Edmonton

- 8 Foot Alien CCTV Prank Generates Immediate Police Response

- Skateboarding Video Shot at 120 FPS on a Red One Camera

- New Nikon D90 Camera, Includes Ability To Shoot 720p HD Video

- Behind The Scenes Video of Barack Obama Preparing For A Debate

- Slinky Cat Goes Down The Stairs

Color In Wallpaper

Alex — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 08:23:47 GMT

At one point in our lives, we all love to color - and for some of us whose love of coloring things go beyond coloring books, artist Jon Burgerman has made this wonderful thing: the color-in wallpaper!

Link - via RuebenMiller

Mac Pro Ultra Mini: Making That Itty Bitty Computer A Reality

range (no@email.com) — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 20:30:53 GMT

What happens when you update your laptop to the latest Apple MacBook on the market? You're stuck with an old computer that you probably won't get a lot of money for. Most of us are stuck with them and accumulate them. Others find ways to reuse them and recycle them. It's always galling to find out that the Mac you bought a few years ago is out of date and that you have to update. Wolphcry was given non-functional 13" MacBook. What was wrong with it you might ask? Apparently water had been poured all over it. Here you will find out how you can convert a 'dead' Apple MacBook to a Mac Pro Ultra Mini.

So, the Macbook was dead. Wolphcry took it apart and found out that the motherboard was still good, but everything else was toast. He used his electronic know-how to repair as much as he could. Once he added a new HD and some RAM, the little machine was up and running again. It didn't take him long to think about converting his little computer, which worked fine as a media computer, into the Mac Pro Ultra Mini. The trick was finding an external hard drive case that looked like a Mac Pro. For about $40, the Macally G-S350SUA Aluminum External Enclosure did the job nicely. The most difficult part was actually fitting the motherboard into the enclosure. A lot of cutting had to go into this part, to make sure that the board fit in well. Then a lot of hard work went into making sure that everything worked well. This is a great little build that you can try if you have enough electronic acumen. We think that the Mac Pro Ultra Mini looks awesome and it fits really nicely in your living room, next to your HDTV. Check out Wolphcry's step-by-step guide on how he completed this build and his flick photo set. [via Wolphbite, photos by Wolphcry] MORE MAC MINI The Mac Mini Cube

Robot Chicken: Star Wars Episode II

Scott Beale — Tue, 18 Nov 2008 21:40:19 GMT

Robot Chicken has just released “Star Wars Episode II”, the long awaited squeal to their hilarious animated Star Wars parody “Robot Chicken Star Wars Special”.

via The Official Star Wars Blog

This is a blog post from Laughing Squid For more content like this, subscribe to the RSS feed, Twitter & FriendFeed.

Robot Chicken: Star Wars Episode II

- Robot Chicken Star Wars Special

- The 10 Best Sex Scenes From Robot Chicken

- Law & Order: KFC on Robot Chicken

- Death Star & Star Wars Spacecraft Fly Around San Francisco

- Silent Star Wars

Small Kid Firing Up a Big Crowd

GeekAlerts — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 21:26:58 GMT

A wonderful video clip of a young kid that knows how to get a crowd fired up.

We snuck out into the middle of Broad Street to snap a pic in front of City Hall and all the crowds. When Will raised his hands for the picture, cheers erupted. So he continued to repeat the gesture, getting wild response from the crowd on both sides of the street up and down the street…

Link [YouTube] - via Pusha

All Three Presidential Debates Synchronized In One Video

Scott Beale — Wed, 29 Oct 2008 15:39:45 GMT

23/6 has put together a brilliant video that synchronizes all three presidential debates.

via Boing Boing

This is a blog post from Laughing Squid For more content like this, subscribe to the RSS feed, Twitter & FriendFeed.

All Three Presidential Debates Synchronized In One Video

The Wire: Writing Into Your Arc

Merlin Mann — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 13:46:14 GMT

Important

While this article about The Wire deliberately contains as few actual spoilers about the show as possible, it does contain numerous links to pages with information that will tell you critical spoiler information about the stories and fates of the show’s characters. The article also contains language and links that are very much not safe for work. Please proceed with caution on all fronts.

In the time since I gallantly announced what makes a good blog, I’ve had time to think more about the qualities of work that endures.

Not thinking just of personal blogs here, or solely in terms of the ways that we can improve online publishing and social media —although clearly these are areas that could stand some improvement. I’m talking about the extent to which some of those qualities that I mentioned in that article relate to broader ideas around all creative work and the process behind how it gets made well and consistently by an auteur who’s only incidentally a merchant.

And it’s especially got me thinking about how any thing we choose to make today can contribute to, for lack of a better phrase, an arc.

So, naturally, I’ve been thinking a lot about The Wire.

First, understand that I’m an unapologetic superfan of and evangelist for The Wire, which is David Simon’s epic, 5-season HBO drama about the life and work of a lot of very flawed characters in contemporary Baltimore. This is neither the first nor last time that I’ll quote Simon’s excellent description of the show’s theme, which is taken from his DVD commentary of the very first scene of s01e01:

[The Wire is] really about the American city, and about how we live together. It’s about how institutions have an effect on individuals, and how … whether you’re a cop, a longshoreman, a drug dealer, a politician, a judge [or] lawyer, you are ultimately compromised and must contend with whatever institution you’ve committed to.

Much has been written about the dense, literary quality of the show (read Kottke for context and great links), so it may not surprise you to learn I’m one of the many people who consider The Wire to be the best series that’s ever appeared on television; my wife and I have watched the first (and, in my opinion, best) four seasons at least three times.

Yeah, that’s a plug for you to give The Wire a chance, but it’s not exactly my point.

Ok. So, why The Wire?

My point is that one big reason why The Wire was so good is its endlessly satisfying story arc, which is composed of many smaller, complementary arcs inside the big arc. That’s where a good story becomes a much more engrossing narrative that’s ultimately about more than itself.

Like any creative work that connects with the people who enjoy it, The Wire tells a story. And, to some extent, every story is about change.

Something happened. Or something is going to happen. Or something that everybody expected to happen hasn’t happened. But, it’s a change, and it’s having an impact on the lives of people we care about. Correct me if I’m wrong, but that’s basically the bones and teeth of every story from Adam & Eve through Harold & Kumar. Something changed, and now people have to deal.

How that dealing spins out over the life of a project, how the story is told, and what the story says about the world are the sorts of questions we’re only encouraged to ask about Big Important Things like very old books and Bergman films. Which, of course, is bullshit.

There’s no reason you can’t look at the lifetime of any good piece of story-telling — and, yes, why not, let’s say that could include blogs, Twitter accounts, and Flickr streams — and be able to see what the change is.

Yes: if it’s any good, I can look at one page or one photo or one 140-character post and enjoy it for its value as one independent thing in the world. But over time, all those potentially thousands of pieces can and do snap together, often without our even realizing it. The question is, what story is it that we’re telling? What is the arc?

And, that’s where I look to an example of middlebrow culture that falls somewhere between Bergman’s Death playing chess with Man on a beach and Scoble’s latest shaky video of a guy who likes golf speaking in press releases. But, The Wire is a piece of popular culture that beautifully illustrates how satisfying all those seemingly unrelated pieces of an arc can be — and how much richer they each become when the audience is engaged, challenged, and rewarded by the effort of giving the work 100% of their attention. Of course, it also helps if the creator is talented, tries really hard, and doesn’t treat the audience like a bunch of bored imbeciles. But, I digress.

Like any story, The Wire has characters, settings, and things that happen over time. Example? Let’s start with a single, one-minute scene from s01e05 — an episode called “The Pager,” that’s from right around the time when the series really started cooking. Which, not coincidentally, was also when the intersecting arcs started to reveal themselves.

The Scene

Meet Jimmy McNulty.

Jimmy’s a talented, politically deaf, pain-in-the-ass homicide detective and drunk who’s estranged from the mother of the two children he adores. One night, in the shitty little apartment he’s recently moved into, Jimmy’s too wasted on cheap scotch to properly assemble the Ikea furniture that he bought for his kids’ imminent visit. Jimmy is a mess, because he’s dealing with change. In his own inimitable way.

But, see, you don’t really even need to know all this to just enjoy the scene. (Please watch from 0:09-1:25)

One small scene of a guy who’s drunk and a little careless. There’s loud music playing in the next apartment. He has to make a few trips to get all of the stuff he bought into one room (bet he’s in a walk-up apartment, right?). Jimmy’s useless tonight, clearly more focused on the bottle than on assembling the parts of his new SÜLI. Here’s a middle-aged man whose bedroom contains a green plastic lawn chair. Plus, the whole sorry scene is grimly lit by a single high-wattage desk lamp — reminiscent of the unforgiving light flooding the interrogation rooms that Jimmy and his partner, Bunk, work every day. Painful already, right?

So, that’s just one very small bit of character, setting, and thing-that-happens. While it’s certainly not a story, in and of itself, it’s still an entertaining, well-made scene to watch. Not as famous as Jimmy and Bunk’s deservedly best-known scene from the previous episode (warning: very NSFW), but you get the idea. You can already tell a few things about this show.

It’s well photographed, the set is painfully realistic, and the man dealing with change seems convincingly Baltimorean and drunk (although the actor portraying him is stunningly British and, to my knowledge, mostly sober).

Even if you have no idea what else happens on the other dozens of hours of this series, past and future, you could watch this one-minute scene and think, “yeah, that’s pretty good.”

The Episode

But, if you were able to watch the whole episode — and it’s a good one — you’d see an atypically intense and complex police drama about cops in an understaffed bureaucracy trying to gather string about a case that seems impossible to crack. You’d see that some of the cops are brilliant (“Natural PO-lice”), some are dedicated, a couple are intoxicated by brutality, and a memorable pair with a Gaelic pun for a name are hilariously useless and corrupt. None is prefect, but none is without his or her interesting and redeeming qualities. End to end, it’s a very colorful bunch.

Same goes for the dealers and drug kingpins, who are struggling with their own related set of problems around bureaucracy, trust, and continuity inside a crumbling system. Theirs is a mature but increasingly vulnerable criminal enterprise that’s being menaced and robbed at will by a dangerous and unforgettable outsider with surprising tastes, ethics, and style.

Along the way you’d see a lot of beautifully shot scenes that show (without telling) why these people are so desperate. Plus you’d be introduced to secondary characters who are anything but stage dressing, such as a junkie informant who’s inked and filled-in with the complex texture of a Mercutio or a Fagin.

So, basically, if you gave this episode from June of 2002 about an hour of your time, and it was the only thing you ever saw of The Wire, you’d probably walk away thinking, “Wow, I didn’t understand almost any of that, but it was really interesting and well made. This looks like a great show that you have to actually watch and think about.”

But, here’s where it gets really good, and where we start to see a bigger arc that may not have been clear before.

The Season

Indeed, if you watched that whole first season of The Wire, you’d find yourself rewarded with a storyline — an arc — that I will not spoil for you.

But, you’d start to see that almost every character you meet ends up having some effect on at least a handful of other characters — even if they never knew the others existed. The decisions that people make early in the season have resonance throughout the story that plays out in unexpected ways. And the change that describes the generic arc of that first season (Antihero cops try to take down an antihero Baltimore drug crew) ends up telling a much deeper story than any typical police procedural that I’m familiar with.

Even in one season, we’re seeing a story that’s closer to Dickens or Zola than any styrofoam plate full of Law & Order. This is nothing short of a Greek Tragedy about broken people trying to stay alive in a broken system. Nobody’s perfect, and everybody is fucked in one way or another.

In my opinion, it’s a breathtaking set of 13 episodes. And if those hour-long TV shows were all you ever watched: again, you’d have enjoyed a real treat.

But there’s a lot more story, more change, and still more to the arc.

The Series

Finally, if you watched all five seasons of The Wire, you’d see a lot more going on than you imagined from one season, one episode — let alone one short scene of a drunk cop trying to build children’s furniture by lamp light.

You’d see each successive season turning to a different broken and dying institution: unions, government, public education, and print media, respectively. You’d see the same themes, and characters, and mistakes, and hopes, and horrible consequences brought back to life in different ways. Stuff that happened before still means something; possibly even more than you’d first realized.

This is a show that uses previous story arcs to deepen and expand on current stories. It uses things you’d never noticed from previous viewings as the centerpiece for a whole new story. It suggests grace notes that are barely audible unless you’ve been listening carefully for a very long time.

In sum, The Wire pays back the attention you invest in it like few pieces of art created in my lifetime. It’s vicious about telling every letter of the story with muscular precision — even when it chooses to do so at pace many would consider pointlessly deliberate: “dull.”

And, because the story rarely stops to explain what’s happening for the folks who just wandered in from the first segment of Family Feud, it demands that you bring the same care and thought to watching the show that its creators brought to making it. Thinking, on both ends of the art. That is engagement.

Like great literature, yes, you can return and enjoy this series on many levels and based on whatever you have to bring to it at a given time. It’s not only smarter than anything else that I’ve seen on TV, it’s also smarter than I am. Which I love.

Arcs Matter Because Writing Matters

I doubt that I’ll ever make anything one-tenth as intelligent, thoughtful, and engaging as The Wire, and, in all likelihood, neither will you. But, again, that’s not the point.

The inspiration you need to take away from this is the idea that every scene matters to some arc. Even the one minute with the drunk furniture assembly. Whether your given “scene” is in a screenplay, or an Excel spreadsheet, or the Tweet that you’re about to type about your flight delay: it matters. It all matters.

Like I said in the talk where I first brought up this thought about The Wire (video and slides of which below), if you think what you write about or otherwise choose to make doesn’t matter, talk to Stephen King.

He started writing a book I adore before he nearly died, then finished it in excruciating pain after it turned out he was still barely alive, let alone whole. The story he tells about what happened in-between may change your mind about whether this stuff is worth caring about. Just understand: it matters to the people who follow your arc and it really ought to matter to you — long before some idiot with a rottweiler hits you with his giant van.

There’s already one arc that you began the minute you made something, called it “done,” then put it someplace where people could see it. How that very, very large story gets told may be too late for you to completely control. Sorry, but that — as Omar would say — is all in the game.

But you very much do have the power to design the arcs you make, starting today. And even if you haven’t figured out how your final episode ends, consider how the pieces you want to lay down might fit together. And how the string that you gather might crack a case you hadn’t expected.

Who do you want to delight? Who do you pray gets your references? Who will you flatly refuse to explain your backstory to? What’s the one goddamned thing that only you can make today — and what arc might it fit into downstream? Which “average reader” are you prepared to find the courage to tell: “Fuck you.”

Above all: whose attention will you reward with the best thing you can possibly make today?

Good. Now go, and reward the shit out of them.

Supporting Material: “How to Blog”

kung fu grippe - How to Blog

Here’s the presentation I recently did in which I talked about this Wire stuff for the first time (that part starts around the 53:00 mark in the video)

Video

Tip: Sean’s a nice enough guy, but his introduction in this very choppy video will redefine your personal concept of “headache-inducing.” With respect, skip to 5:20 to get to where my actual talk begins.

Update 2008-09-25 11:09:18 PDT

I apologize. I cannot get this busted-ass video embed not to autoplay, and if I hear Sean screaming about a scavenger hunt on my site one more time, I’m going to lose it. Video’s here. So sorry for the extra click.

Slides

”The Wire: Writing Into Your Arc” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on September 25, 2008. Except as noted, it's ©2008 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Hovis Bread, 122 Years In 122 Seconds

Scott Beale — Thu, 25 Sep 2008 16:38:58 GMT

MCBD produced a wonderful TV commercial for British bakers Hovis Bread celebrating their 122 history in 122 seconds.

Here’s the making of video and more on the ad from Brand Republic and The Independent.

via Coudal Partners

This is a blog post from Laughing Squid For more content like this, subscribe to the RSS feed, Twitter & FriendFeed.

Hovis Bread, 122 Years In 122 Seconds

Coca-Cola readying 100-flavor soda fountains

Tim Stevens — Fri, 29 Aug 2008 15:52:00 GMT

Filed under: Misc. Gadgets

Your typical soda fountain in a fast-food joint features eight boring choices, usually offering nothing more exotic than "Orange." It's been that way for decades, but one of the oldest players in the market is finally shattering that paradigm. Coca-Cola is introducing a machine that can pour 100 different flavors. Early prototypes underwent testing earlier this summer and second-gen units are headed for limited markets early next year -- the same thing they said about those self-cooling bottles last year. Assuming they do come to market, swapping out the highly-concentrated flavors is likened to changing a print cartridge, meaning new choices can come and go quickly depending on popularity. It all sounds refreshing, but we're not looking forward to the lines as the thirsty yet indecisive ponder 15 different flavors of Diet Coke.

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Spreading the Word About Cerebellar Hypoplasia

moderncat — Sun, 24 Aug 2008 23:19:07 GMT

This video features Charley, an awesome cat who happens to have cerebellar hypoplasia, a condition that affects the motor skills. Other than some awkward movements, Charley and other cats with this condition are happy and healthy and can live perfectly normal lives. Apparently, kittens with this condition are often needlessly destroyed. Please help spread the word that cats with cerebellar hypoplasia can make wonderful pets.

Secret SEGA Archive

Alex — Fri, 15 Aug 2008 17:34:17 GMT

Photo: SEGA of America

When the folks of SEGA America blog went on a tour of the product development department in the SEGA HQ, they found this secret room full of just about every game and console ever made by the video game company!

Link | Hi-res Flickr photos

no description

(author unknown) — Fri, 04 Jul 2008 09:29:08 GMT

"no description"

Hellboy: Inside the Actors Studio Interview

Alex — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 07:26:25 GMT

What - just what - happened when Hell Boy got interviewed by James "Booyah" Lipton of Inside the Actors Studio? Find out here: Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] - via The Fire Wire

Here are some more Hellboy Interview clips: Link - Thanks Levi!

Philips Highlights: LED Lamps with 16 Million Color Options

soniaz — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 21:09:32 GMT

This week Philips held its Holidays in June press preview. We stopped by to check out what's in store for the rest of the year. Today and tomorrow we'll give you the scoop on Philips highlights. First up are these psychedelic LED lamps...

Branded LivingColors, the LED lamp can beam 16 million different colors. Using a touch wheel, similar to that found on your iPod, you can scroll through the color spectrum to find your perfect shade. You can also set it to to go through the rainbow on its own, changing hues throughout the evening. LivingColors will be available in the Fall and will sell for $199. For those of you who don't want to wait, it looks like you can get them from an import shop now for $189. A less expensive version, the LivingColors Mini, will be available for $79. This budget version will offer 256 colors, and the colorwheel is integrated into the light, while the bigger version has a separate remote. Below a video, in what I think is Dutch, of the LivingColors in action.

Sarcasm is an Evolutionary Skill

Alex — Sun, 22 Jun 2008 18:23:36 GMT

Neurophysiologist Katherine Rankin at the University of California, San Francisco (my alma mater!) recently discovered that sarcasm is actually an evolutionary survival skill:

More important, we run our lives by social calculation. A favor is mentally recorded and paid back, sometimes many years later. Likewise, insults are marked down on the mental score card in indelible ink. And we are constantly bickering and making up, even with people we love.

Sarcasm, then, is a verbal hammer that connects people in both a negative and positive way. We know that sense of humor is important to relationships; if someone doesn’t get your jokes, they aren’t likely to be your friend (or at least that’s my bottom line about friendship). Sarcasm is simply humor’s dark side, and it would be just as disconcerting if a friend didn’t get your snide remarks.

It’s also easy to imagine how sarcasm might be selected over time as evolutionarily crucial. Imagine two ancient humans running across the savannah with a hungry lion in pursuit. One guy says to the other, "Are we having fun yet?" and the other just looks blank and stops to figure out what in the world his pal meant by that remark. End of friendship, end of one guy’s contribution to the future of the human gene pool.

Link - Thanks Geekazoid!

Top 10 Ways to Trick Yourself into Saving Money [Lifehacker Top 10]

Kevin Purdy — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Good money management is a mental exercise in self-regulation and focusing on the long-term goal, even when you're sure you just can't go on another day without buying that Kindle or MacBook. Even the most uber-organized and priority-minded people can stumble when it comes to money—how to save more of it, how to stop spending it, and how to keep doing both over and over again. While every person's financial needs are different, anyone can set up simple systems to help themselves stop buying what they don't need and almost automatically save money they'll need later. Let's take a look at 10 ways you can cut costs and do right by your money without much effort, after the jump. Photo by Darren Hester.

10. Save for big buys with "Reverse Credit."

Similar to the classic "envelope" method, but designed for modern conveniences. Got your eye on a shiny new MacBook? Buy yourself Apple store gift cards as you manage to put aside money, ensuring you don't spend the money frivolously and that you've really got the money to spend. You'll want to make sure your cards don't expire before you hit the savings mark, but it's a pretty solid way to ensure you honestly earn your big purchases. But, as our commenters noted when we first posted this, a sub-account through your bank, or a rechargeable gift-style debit card, might be better options for earning interest or avoiding vendor lock-in. Photo by Tomeppy. (Original post).

9. Sleeve your credit card with what you really want.

Personal finance blogger and crusader against needless debt Trent taped pictures of his son around his primary credit card to make him think before making a purchase, and it worked. Create your own sleeve out of two card-sized pictures, and modify the motivation—whether it's a positive (something you're saving for) or negative (reminder of the debt you're paying off)—and you'll likely curb some auto-pilot spending. (Original post).

8. Set up a waiting rule for flashy purchases.

Nearly everyone knows what next-day regret feels like—at least when it comes to big purchases. To sift the real needs from the impulse buys, get into the habit of using a system like the Get Rich Slowly blog's 30-day rule, where you write down each thing you want to buy and you don't look at it again till 30 days later, or the $100 rule, in which you enforce a one day wait for every $100 you plan on spending on some non-essential gear (scaling that increment when necessary). You wouldn't use these for homes, cars, or appliances, but they'll prove that sometimes just living your life for awhile helps you remember how unnecessary most must-haves truly are to it (Original 30-day and $100 posts).

7. Round up purchases, bank the change.

Spare change jars have been a passive saving technique since change was first offered, but fewer and fewer transactions these days use real cash. If you're one of those responsible types who balances a checkbook, you can try writing every purchase to the next dollar to create an invisible buffer in your account. More likely, though, you do your banking online and can't trick yourself that easily—that's why programs like Bank of America's Keep the Change, which put your round-up differences into a money market account, are a sneaky way to siphon off savings. Got your own round-up saving method? Share it in the comments below (Original round up checking and Keep the Change posts).

6. Freeze your credit card for serious spending stoppage.

If you had to wait for a block of ice to melt every time you wanted to treat yourself to the next season of your favorite show on DVD, would you re-consider watching it online, or just waiting for reruns? That's the idea. As our sibling site Consumerist points out, you'd ruin your credit card if you tried to defrost it in the microwave, so you really will have to sit alone with your second-thoughts. Recommended for serious shopping addicts who still need a credit card around for vital purchases.

5. Always bank your savings and discounts.

It feels like free money when you hit an unexpected sale, discover a little-known rebate, or simply use a valuable coupon. Why not turn that free money into even more free money? As the Digerati Life blog points out, it's money that's easy to set aside, since you didn't expect to have it, and it doesn't require any budget reviews. It also protects that little boost from disappearing into another full-price purchase while you're out shopping (Original post).

4. Use a high-interest online account to motivate yourself.

To paraphrase Gordon Gekko, greed, for lack of a better word, is a great motivator to get things done. If you're putting money away into a higher-interest, online-only savings account, find out where it tells you how much interest you've earned for the year and keep it in front of your eyes. Doing so is a great motivation to stash more cash in there—think of it as a kind of progress bar until your next financial Level Up.

3. Let Firefox find your deals for you.

If you've got money to spend, you can stretch it pretty far by knowing (or just stumbling across) some great online deals. Like most savings tools, however, you have to go out of your way to take the time and remember to grab those deals. Luckily, the Firefox browser and a few extensions make it hard not to find coupons, rebates, and killer deals. RetailMeNot automatically pops in to let you know when a site you're at has freebies and discounts available, while PriceDrop adds buttons to Amazon.com's item pages to help you get notifications when prices go down. If you're more prone to random browsing for killer discounts, the Woot Watcher helps you get the jump on those ridiculous deals on random items at Woot!. Make it hard for yourself to pay full price, and bank the savings however you choose. (Original posts: RetailMeNot, PriceDrop, Woot Watcher).

2. Defer dumb purchases with a "Crap I Just Don't Need" list.

This isn't so much self-trickery as self-realization, but it's a great way to see how fleeting and utterly unnecessary most of our Must. Have. Now. urges are. Every time you feel the need to buy something that's not a real necessity, write it down on a list (pocket notebook, PDA, wiki, or wherever). Eventually, you'll start noticing how long the list is, and how well you've gotten along without any of it. Bonus: Making a pseudo-wish list of your consumerist desires can help you get them out of your system. This aversion therapy hack comes from Merlin Mann, who notes that it doesn't cost a thing to try out. Photo by .Gladius.

1. Set up an Automatic Savings Plan for set-it-and-forget-it saving.

As shown above, you can play all kinds of mental games with yourself to keep your worst impulses away from your money, but the real meta-hack is to have the right amount of money earned moved auto-magically into a savings account, or a "buffer" account for unexpected costs, or investments—anywhere but your walking-around stash. Gina's walked us through automating your finances in thorough fashion, and The Simple Dollar has also posted a front-to-back demonstration using ING Direct. If you're not using a bank that offers easy tools for automation, you might want to rethink where you keep your money. (Original post.)

Everyone's mind works a little differently, of course, so our crafty commenters will probably have a few mental overrides of their own to cut useless spending and shuttle away more savings. Let's hear about them—how do you keep your money away from your irresponsible alter-ego? What tech or real-world tools do you use to keep your money in its place? Let's hear about it all in the comments.

Wirewize Explains How to Connect Your Entertainment Gear [Web Utilities]

Kevin Purdy — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 12:30:00 GMT

Free A/V website Wirewize takes most of the guesswork out of hooking together your television, DVD player, stereo speakers, and other gear. After a free sign-up, enter in the model and make of each component, and Wirewize will offer up which cables are needed, and diagram how they should run. Not every bit of equipment will be listed, especially those no longer sold, but the site has PDF manuals for some of the goods it does have. For A/V neophytes and those trying to troubleshoot friends' systems over the phone, it's pretty helpful.

Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Lego [Giz Goes To Lego]

jesusdiaz — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 10:18:00 GMT

You sent the questions and now here are the answers. Do you want to know how many bricks are produced per minute? How many bricks have been produced in history? What's the best-selling set ever? What has been the worst? Do they recycle? How did they survive the crisis that almost killed them? How successful is Mindstorms? What are the actual names of each of the pieces? Why there are no blondes in Lego sets? Why there are extra pieces sometimes? Here's the definitive mega-reference, straight from Lego.

I have organized all your questions in groups: about the company, environment, design, trivia, crazy questions, and the future.

Trivia

• Why did I always have pieces left over when I built my castle sets? Do they just do that to jack with kids?
For two reasons: first, because some pieces are so small that they weigh too little to be measured by their scale, during packaging (you will see this when I publish the factory tour. J.) Second, because it's better to have too many of those pieces than have one of them missing. Since we statistically know what pieces may get lost, we include some extras when appropriate.

• Why there are no blonde minifigs in the regular Lego sets?
Because they will look bad with the yellow heads. There are blondes, however, in the licensed lines, like Star Wars or Harry Potter.

• Why aren't Lego figures ever sold separately from the sets?
Minifigures can be purchased separately on a limited basis. Some of our Lego stores sell the minifigures separately. You can also purchase minifigure pieces through Lego.com in the Pick-a-Brick wall. Additionally, there is a set called Community Workers which features nothing but classic minifigures. However, watch shelves in the coming year, you never know what you might find! (What I want to know is where the heck can I buy stormtroopers helmets for all my minifigs. J)

• What do you call the different pieces internally? Any other name beyond bricks, like "flats" for the flat pieces or something similar?
We refer to the standard pieces as bricks. Flat pieces are either plates (these have studs and are 1/3 the height of a Lego brick) or tiles (these are the flat pieces with no studs). Everything is referred to by its stud count, so a classic Lego bricks is referred to as a 2x4. Carry that out, and you can see there are 1x2s and 2x3s and 1x8s and on and on and on…

• Why did you change the color palette?
The color palette changes as our themes change. However, our basic brick colors—red, yellow, blue, green, black and white—will always remain as staples in the assortment.

• Why don't Duplo blocks integrate with Quatro blocks like the regular Lego bricks integrate with Duplo?
Duplo bricks are indeed compatible with Quatro bricks, just as Lego bricks are compatible with Duplo bricks. Lego provides the only building system that is compatible from birth to collector!

• I want you to ask the Lego gang for the definitive answer on the plural for Lego bricks. Is it, as we Brits say, simply Lego, or is it, as some Americans insist, Legos?
Actually both the Brits and the Americans are wrong—but are all forgiven! “Lego” is an adjective and is not meant to be a standalone name. It should always be Lego bricks, Lego building, Lego products, etc.

• Why there are no black minifigs?
When the minifigure was first introduced 30 years ago, it was given the iconic yellow skin tone to reflect the non-specific and transcendental quality of a child’s imagination. In 2002, as more licensed properties were added to the assortment, the decision was made to introduce ethnic and skin tones more in keeping with the actual characters and personalities who were being replicated. This included the introduction of black minifigures. However, these ethnic minifigures are only used in our licensed sets, all Lego playthemes continue to use the generic yellow face.

About the company

•How many Lego bricks are produced each year?

Approximately 19 billion Lego elements are produced per year. 2.16 million are molded every hour, 36,000 every minute.

• Approximately, how many bricks they've ever made since Lego started to produce them?
More than 400 billion Lego bricks have been produced since 1958. There are about 62 Lego bricks per person of the Earth’s population.

• How many Lego sets do they manufacture per year?
The number of sets varies per time of year and per year. In the U.S., we launch on average 130 new sets per year. Approximately 7 Lego sets are sold every second around the world.

• How much money do they make per piece?
Because we have so many specialized pieces, the average cost per piece is difficult to name. For example, a 2x4 Lego brick does not require the complexity to produce as a Lego minifigure or a Lego fence piece. The molds that we use to create Lego elements are very expensive to design and produce.

• When can we buy ANY Lego element on shop.Lego.com (and maybe get recommended replacement suggestions if they are not available). If I will pay $300+ for a GREAT Lego Technic model used on eBay, I certainly would have no problems dropping the same into one of my own creations?
We are always working to improve the assortment of pieces available through our Pick a Brick service. Right now we have over 900 elements available. Unlike the traditional toy retail business, it’s more difficult for us to project which individual pieces or elements will be in demand in a given time period. For example, we know that kids like Lego sets with wheels. So if a new set has wheels, we look at other sets historically that have wheels to predict the demand. But in an individual brick fulfillment, we have no way to know when someone may decide to build a six-foot monster that is orange, thereby requiring a huge amount of orange bricks. As a result, we currently limit the number of bricks available so that we can maintain healthy inventory and prevent consumer frustration, but also test to see what people want the most on a piece by piece basis.

• Why is Lego so expensive?
Quality and safety are the top concerns for the Lego Group. To ensure the best and safest products, Lego bricks are made with the highest quality materials, which does factor into the cost. Using premium materials ensures that the product is not only safe, but that it is durable enough to hand down from generation to generation. [I was told in the factory that their tests show that no bricks have ever decomposed or released any chemical substances. -J]

• I'd like you to ask the Lego guys, why they don't have all the parts available for order as singletons or in bulk on their web site?
See above.

• I'm curious as to why they discontinue series and sets more rapidly now than they did in the past. It used to be that a series could be counted on for multiple years, now it's barely 12 months and they're "no longer produced." Is this marketing? Logistics? Or are trends really changing that fast in their market these days?
The toy business has become a very fast-paced and competitive world—almost mimicking the fashion industry in how quickly things come and go as fads. The life of a typical Lego play theme line can range anywhere from one to three years. However, there are certain themes—like Space and Castle—that we consider evergreen themes, and those are rotated in and out over the course of a few years. When a theme is a classic, we often maintain the theme, but rotate the new models on a shorter term to maintain novelty and interest in the market.

• Will Lego sell bulk bricks again?
The Lego Group has never stopped selling bulk bricks. Our Creative Building buckets and tubs are available at all major and specialty retailers. New boxes of bricks are also available. Additionally, if you’re in the area of a Lego store you can stop at a Pick-a-Brick wall or visit the Pick-a-Brick section of Lego.com.

• Has the Mindstorm's investment paid off?
The Mindstorms product line has been an incredibly successful venture for the company. The Mindstorms RIS 2.0 is the #1 selling product in the company’s history, and there are over 1 million RCX bricks that have been sold. Mindstorms NXT, the next generation of the original robotics toolset, also has been very successful.

• What country buys the most Lego sets per person?
Germany is the number-one Lego market, in fact, Lego is the number-one toy company in Germany. The top-selling lines in Germany are Lego TECHNIC and Lego CITY. The U.S. is the second largest market, with the top-selling lines being BIONICLE and Lego Star Wars.

• How did they re-launch the company when it was almost bankrupt?
As a company we were very lucky to have survived our crisis. We had some very rocky years, but it was our fans who got us back on track. We were trying to do too many things and deviated from what we do best: classic building. To regain our footing, we went back to basics and focused on the brick and those core themes on which our company foundation was built, like City and Castle. We also shed the things that were not related to the toy business—we licensed out our video game development to the best partners and we sold off our theme parks. Thankfully for us, our fans were patient and welcomed us back with open arms. Fortunately, no matter how much the market changes and kids tastes vary, there will always be room for classic Lego play.

• What is the best selling Lego set ever made?
The Lego Mindstorms Robotics Invention System set is the best-selling Lego set ever. Over 1 million of these have been sold globally since their launch.

• What theme was the worst selling one they have made?
A few years back, we strayed too far from our core product line when we entered into an action figure line called Galidor. With no traditional Lego construction elements, it proved to be unfamiliar to Lego fans who expect a certain kind of play experience from the Lego brand.

• What theme is the best seller, excluding Basic sets and town?
Every country has a different best-seller and as we rotate themes in and out different themes rise to the top. Over the last 50 years we have seen that Town, Space, Castle and Pirates are the evergreen themes that seem to always have a place in the hearts of Lego fans. Right now, Lego CITY is the number-one theme around the world, and other global best-sellers include Lego Star Wars, BIONICLE and Lego Indiana Jones.

• Why don't they (Lego online shop) ship Lego to Hong Kong?
We are always looking to extend the reach of our Lego products and where they are sold and shipped. Currently, Lego products are sold in stores in Hong Kong.

Environment

• What happens to all the bad pieces? Is there a Lego heaven? Do they recycle them?
Due to the precision of the brick molding machines, there are very few “bad” pieces—only 18 elements in every million produced fail to meet the company’s high standards. Extra pieces or pieces from boxes that are caught on the line and identified as missing pieces or have boxes that are slightly damaged are used for donation boxes that are distributed to underprivileged children’s organizations around the world.

• Why there is no recycling program for all the plastic they produce?
Lego Bricks are recyclable, just not in the way that most people think of recycling. Lego bricks are one of those things that never break and most people pass them down from generation to generation, thus keeping them alive. Also, during production we recycle all of the residual plastic used. In the molding machines, we crunch any faulty elements and put the granulate back in to the mold. Plastic that we can no longer use is sold to industries that can make use of them.

• Is the plastic currently used to form Lego the same as it was 20 years ago?
The plastic is almost the exact same plastic used 20 years ago. Slight changes to the mix have occurred, but the quality has remained the same.

Design

• How much the tooling costs are? Who makes them?
The price of a single mold is very high. Most of them are made in Germany.

• How much is Lego considering the Adult fans vs the children when designing sets?
When we design sets, we take both children and adults into consideration. Children are our primary audience, especially as it relates to the core play theme sets; however, much of what appeals to children in today’s Lego sets has strong appeal among adult fans as well. With Lego Star Wars, adults are equally considered. In designing any set, it’s about the balance between the building experience and the play experience. We do also leverage our direct to consumer channels to provide ultimate collectors sets, special exclusives, sculptures and models that are designed with skilled builders and adult fans in mind. We sometimes even invite our adult fans to help us design new sets.

Mindstorms NXT is a great example of how we worked together with adult fans to determine what the set would include, with a particular focus on ensuring that the end result was as compelling for a child as it was for an adult user. We continually look to our community of both kids and adults to ensure that we are meeting and exceeding expectations.

• Why did they changed the founders rule to never make gun like elements?
The company still has a no gun policy when it comes to realistic or military play scenarios. However, in order to stay true to the strong licensed properties we incorporate to the Lego portfolio, we need to stay true to those properties and sometimes that involves including weapons. In our own play themes, some element of good vs. bad conflict is typically considered to provide for role play opportunities. In those instances, the setting is very clearly a fantasy world. (Fortunately, there are third-parties who do this, like the amazing people from Brickarms. J)

• I would like to know why they are using so many specialized pieces in their sets now instead of using more "basic" bricks that allow for greater building outside the set the pieces came in. Why have Lego sets for the latest few generations been dummied down?
This is an impression that many people have but, in fact, the piece count has been reduced drastically and there's a move back to roots in Lego, not only for creativity but to save money. Lego went from 12,000 different pieces to 6,800 in the last few years—a number that includes the color variations.

• Why do they use so many 'cheater' bricks... i.e., instead of stacking 4 1x2 bricks they produced a 1x2x4 brick. Or those HUGE chunks uses for castle walls. Sure it speeds construction, but it reduces creativity/playability.
Sometimes larger bricks are used to help kids ease into building and help them complete the model faster so that they can get to the play experience. We have learned that there are many different types of builders out there—some are all about the building experience, but some are about the play experience. We try to balance our portfolio to appeal to both groups.

• Has the decision to make faces other than the smiley face caused problems in any markets?
Changing the minifigure faces first happened in 1989 with the introduction of the Pirates line. Since that time, we have had very few questions from consumers. For those Lego purists out there, we have left the original smiley in the assortment so that a familiar face is always there.

• I would like to know what happened to the good old days of really complex, lifelike models? I have some of the old classics still like the Semi Truck with the pneumatic crane on the back, the JCB Excavator, the all wheel steer sports car, the Ferrari esque car with the 4 speed gearbox... Where did models like this go?
We still have awesome Lego TECHNIC sets and models that carry extreme levels of detail and functionality. They aren’t always available in the mass retail channels, so you often need to look for them on Lego.com or other specialty retailers.

• How long do they take to develop a theme, all the sets, start to finish?
Over the past few years we have been able to dramatically decrease the time it takes to develop and produce a new set. The average development period is now about 12 months from start to finish, down from 2-3 years previously.

• What's with all the stickers lately? Don't they pre-print anything anymore? And if you have to take the stickers off to disassemble the sets, why not have replacement sheets available on Shop-at-home?
Certain elements are still pre-printed; however, we find that the stickers allow for even more details and more realism in any given set. We understand that it can be frustrating sometimes, and encourage anyone with questions to contact our Consumer Services department.

Crazy questions

• Any plan to sell real-life brick-size Lego pieces? I want to build an actual house.
We have no plans at this time to sell real-life brick-size Lego pieces. You’ll just have to build your house of normal materials for the time being.

• Why do Lego look so delicious but taste so bad?
As your parents probably told you when you were young, there are some things that shouldn’t be eaten. Lego bricks are one of them. Please keep them away from your mouth.

• Are bricks available in truly staggering quantities, for artists wishing to explore the possibilities of Lego as a medium for large scale sculpture?
We always encourage creativity and love our Lego artists. Unfortunately at this time we don’t have a system put in place to sell staggering quantities. Pick-A-Brick and buckets and tubs are the best solution for those looking for large quantities of classic bricks.

• Where can I buy a legit golf shirt with the Lego logo embroidered on it?
Lego shirts tend to come in and out of the assortment. Currently, we do not have a golf shirt in the assortment, but keep checking back!

• When will Lego’s produce a beer stein kit complete with a tap?
We love your creativity, but the Lego Group probably won’t be producing a beer stein kit in the near or distant future; however, if you are so inclined, you can design your own on LegoFactory.com.

The future

• Any plans to refresh old sets like Blacktron or the monorail?
We are constantly looking back at the past to help shape the sets of the future. As of now there are no plans to refresh these sets, but what’s to come is always a mystery.

• Would you include Mindstorm technology in normal Lego sets?
In 2007 we introduced the Lego Power Function system, which allows models to come to life using motors and sensors without the programming feature of Mindstorms. For those looking to combine Lego building with Mindstorms technology everything is compatible.

• Why don't you use LEDs?
Currently we do not use LEDs, but our designers are always coming up with new and exciting ways to enhance the building experience.

• I know you do Lego Ferris wheels, but have you ever consider a Lego roller coaster?
In deciding what products will go to market, there are numerous factors that we have to consider. As a global company, we try to pick products that have global appeal. We also look for models that have the best building and play experience. Our model designers are always coming up with new and great ideas, roller coasters may be included in that, it’s just a matter of making sure it works in the current assortment.

• Would you consider doing Lego sets based on famous history scenes, for education?
Anything is a possibility with the Lego System. We have created models of famous landmarks, like the Statue of Liberty and the Eiffel Tower, and we have an Education division that is always coming up with new ideas. But if you don’t want to wait for this one to surface, there’s always Lego Factory where you can design and build your own historic scenes.

• I really wish they weren't discontinuing their 9V electrified rail train sets. My question is why?
As a company, we are very focused on the core bricks and developing the “system of play.” With the recent development of the Lego Power System, we are able to replace several non compatible applications with one electric system. Unfortunately, this means that we are moving from two systems with trains to one coherent system.

• Will Lego continue to reach out to a more adult audience with more intricate and larger sets?
Our adult audience is very important to us and we will continue to produce the larger, more intricate sets, which are typically found in our direct to consumer channels and other specialty retailers. The latest introduction is the Lego Star Wars Death Star.

• Where are the clear Lego? Glow-in-the-dark? Recycled? Corn Plastic? Rubber? LED Illuminated? Rustic?
New products and elements are always in development. We have had glow-in-the dark parts in several sets in the last few years, and we also have light bricks in select sets. We use rubber to produce Lego tires—did you know we’re the world’s largest producer of vehicle tires?

• When will the 9v train tracks and motors be coming back to factory?
Unfortunately, the 9v train tracks are being phased out and we are moving toward a more coherent system using the Lego Power System.

• Does Lego have plans for Wi-Fi connections for Mindstorm?
Mindstorms NXT includes Bluetooth capability for wireless communication and downloads.

• Will Lego produce trikes and the old bikes again?
As of now there are no plans to produce trikes and old bikes.

We have a very strong licensing department who are always working with leading manufacturers to identify new categories and products that can carry the Lego brand name.

• When will the new train sets be introduced?
Our designers, as well as some faithful fans are working hard to get the new trains ready for market. We expect that these sets will be on sale in 2009. More details to follow!

• Why don't we get the serious RC stuff in the US?
RC models are available in the U.S. Check your local retailer, or visit the Lego shop.

• i just started to get into the Lego trains and purchased the remote control set with extra tracks...now they are not available! There was talk of a new series of trains but I can't find the reference now. The question is simply: what's the plan for Lego train sets?
See question above

• Why won't they bring back for good the space theme?
The space theme is an evergreen theme for us. We currently have Lego Star Wars and Lego Mars Mission themes to satisfy consumer demand for space themed building.

• Are there any chances that Lego will ever start producing modern day warfare Lego, with tanks and helicopters and what not?
We have a strict policy regarding military models, and therefore, we do not produce tanks, helicopters, etc. While we always support the men and women who serve their country, we prefer to keep the play experiences we provide for children in the realm of fantasy.

• Could you ask them if they plan to do another Star Wars robots Mindstorms set please?
As of now there are no plans to come out with a new Star Wars robot kit; however, we encourage all of our fans to create their own.

• I am a major fan of the Star Wars Lego, I have the Death Star on my coffee table, and I was wondering I they were ever going to make models based on the expanded universe?
With the Star Wars franchise, anything is possible! Keeps your eyes open for exciting new things.

• When are they going to be releasing an advanced model of the Batman rambler?
As of now there are no plans to release this model.

Thanks to all the readers who submitted all these questions. Please note that some of the questions you sent about licenses were not included because the Lego people are as secretive about their future products as Apple is. [Giz's Lego Trip]

Wall-e Is Huge Glorious Robot Clusterfrak [Robots]

jesusdiaz — Mon, 23 Jun 2008 11:26:11 GMT

Explorer robots, pilot robots, cleaning robots, broken robots. Robots robots robots. Robots everywhere. After drooling over this featurette on Pixar's Wall-e robot cast—with the creative team getting all Jon Iveish with us, explaining how their design follows function—we can only say two things: first, consider us officially excited. And two, we are happy George Lucas is not involved with this movie at all.

Fake Bus Stop Prevents Alzheimer’s Patients from Running Away

Alex — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 16:42:59 GMT

A German nursing home got tired of having to call on the police to retrieve Alzheimer’s patients who ran away (to their often non-existent homes and families), so they came upon a brilliant idea: install a fake bus stop outside!

"It sounds funny but it helps," said Franz-Josef Goebel, the chairman of the "Old Lions" association.

"Our members are 84 years old on average. Their short-term memory hardly works, but the long-term memory is still active.

"They know the green and yellow bus sign and remember that waiting there means they will go home."

The result is that errant patients now wait for their trip home at the bus stop, before quickly forgetting why they were there in the first place.

"We will approach them and say that the bus is coming later and invite them in for a coffee," said Richard Neureither, Benrath’s director. "Five minutes later they have completely forgotten they wanted to leave."

Link

Read This Post. Do Not Pass Go. Do Not Collect $200.

StacyBee — Mon, 09 Jun 2008 22:34:53 GMT

I love me a good game night. Monopoly gets pretty cut-throat when we’re at my in-laws – cheating bankers, people hiding money, my brother-in-law yelling at people about the free market. It’s a blast, actually. But I love the word games too – Scattergories is probably my favorite, but Catch Phrase is a good time. Especially if there’s alcohol involved. I’ve been itching for a good game night lately, so to satiate my urge until I can convince some friends to come over and be mercilessly beaten at Clue, here are a few facts about some of your favorite (at least, my favorite) games.

Monopoly

It’s thought that Monopoly originated in the early 1900s by Elizabeth Magie, except then it was called “The Landlord’s Game” (that’s her original patent in the picture). A professor at the Wharton School of Finance at the University of Pennsylvania even started using Magie’s version as a learning tool in his classes. Evidence shows it was also used at the University of Toledo, Smith College, Princeton, MIT and Columbia. She took different versions of The Landlord’s Game to Parker Brother on several different occasions but was turned down by George Parker every time.
Eventually, a later version of the game was played by Esther Darrow, the wife of Charles Darrow. It was Charles who changed the layout and some rules of the game and began calling it Monopoly. Darrow tried to sell Monopoly to Milton Bradley but was rejected in 1934. Bad move, Milton Bradley. But Parker Brothers again passed on the game too, saying it was too complicated, too technical and too long. However, the company heard about how well the game was selling locally and reconsidered their rejection just a year later. They bought all of Darrow’s remaining inventory and helped him patent the board. They also bought Elizabeth Magie’s patent to The Landlord Game to make sure that they had undisputed rights. Uh, pretty smart, considering that Monopoly has sold more than 250 million copies worldwide since then.

• For some reason, I always thought the Monopoly guy was Uncle Moneybags. Nope. But “proper” names for him include Rich Uncle Pennybags, Milburn Pennybags and Mr. Monopoly (his most recent name). Some sources say he’s loosely based on J.P. Morgan.
• Marvin Gardens is actually a misspelling of Marven Gardens, a housing area in Margate City, N.J. In fact, all of the properties on the “classic” Monopoly board are named after places or streets near or in Atlantic City, N.J.
• In the London version of the game, Trafalgar Square is a red property, Piccadilly is yellow, Regent, Oxford and Bond Streets are green and the blue properties are Mayfair and Park Lane. The railroads are replaced by Underground stops (King’s Cross, Marylebone, Fenchurch Street Station and Liverpool Street Station).
• Neiman Marcus once sold an all-chocolate edition. The whole set, including dice, money, hotels and board, was edible.
• F.A.O. Schwarz in NYC sold a $100,000 version, which included 18-carat game pieces, a rosewood board, real money, street names written in gold leaf and various gems scattered across the board.
• The most expensive board even made is a set worth $2 million It’s made of 23-carat gold and has rubies and sapphires embedded in the top of each house and hotel.
• Various versions of Monopoly include Batman, ESPN, Family Guy, American Idol, Nintendo, Sephora, and, honestly, just about any other version you can possibly think of.

Clue

What we in North America know as Clue, the rest of the world knows as Cluedo. Would you believe that it was invented by a part-time clown? Totally true. Anthony E. Pratt invented the game in England and it was published for the first time in 1949 by a British company. Bought by Parker Brothers, the U.S. version came out the same year.

• The dead dude is known as Mr. Boddy in North America, but he’s Dr. Black everywhere else. Also, Mr. Green is apparently alias Reverend Green in some parts of the world.
• Also, some of the Clue characters have little-known first names. They are: Colonel Michael Mustard, Miss Josephine Scarlet, Professor Peter Plum, Reverend/Mr. John Green, Mrs. Blanche White and Mrs. Elizabeth Peacock.
• Characters used in other or deluxe versions of Clue include Miss Peach (not to be confused with Princess Peach), Lady Lavender, Prince Azure, Rusty Naylor and Captain Brown.
• The original nine weapons were axe, shillelagh, bomb, rope, dagger, pistol, syringe, poison and poker.

The Game of Life

Life has been around since 1861… not in the format we recognize today, of course. Milton Bradley himself invented “The Checkered Game of Life” when his lithography business started to go down the tubes (his major product was a portrait of clean-shaven Lincoln… when Lincoln grew the beard, Bradley went out of business).
He had actually been circulating the game on a smaller scale before his clean-shaven Lincoln lithograph took off, but he abandoned it once demand for his lithograph increased. After that plummeted, he focused more attention on marketing and ended up selling more than 40,000 games in 1861 alone – no small feat for that time period!

• Milton Bradley used a spinner to count the number of spaces people could move because dice were associated with gambing.
• In the original Checkered Game of Life, landing on the “Suicide” square put people out of the game completely. Obviously.
• Other squares on the original game board included Prison, Infancy, Ruin, Gambling, Disgrace, Honesty, Truth, Cupid, Industry and “Happy Old Age” (the goal of the game).
• One interesting variant (among many) is The Game of Redneck Life. Careers include Mullet Salon Operator and Monster Truck Announcer. The goal of the game is to get out with as many teeth as you can – through the various fights and brawls you get into over the course of the game, this can prove to be pretty challenging. I’m dead serious.

Scrabble

Scrabble came about in 1939 when architect Alfred Mosher Butts modified a game he had been working on earlier – Lexiko. At first he called it Criss-Crosswords and based the values of the letters on based on letter usages from the New York Times (and other reputable sources). In 1948, he allowed James Brunot to manufacture the game as long as he got a cut of each board sold… which wasn’t much, at first. They actually lost money the first year they produced it. Legend goes, though, that the President of Macy’s played the game while on vacation and, upon his return to work, was shocked that his store didn’t carry it. When they did start to carry it, sales skyrocketed.

• There are 96 two-letter words that are “legal” in Scrabble… including 10 that are spelled with vowels only. I’m so learning those.
• A typical Scrabble board has 225 squares.
• The highest known score for a single word in competition Scrabble is 392. In 1982, Dr. Saladin Khoshnaw achieved this score for the word “caziques,” which means “Indian chief.”
• The highest possible score a player can get in Scrabble on a first turn is for the word MUZJIKS (128 points).

I realize there’s tons of beloved board games I’ve missed, so maybe I’ll turn this into a series… a three-parter, or something. Sorry!, Candyland, Chutes and Ladders, Risk, Trivial Pursuit. Lots of options. Have one you’d like to read about? Leave it in the comments and maybe I’ll add it to the list!

No Jiggling in The Empire: Fun Facts About Star Wars

Alex — Thu, 12 Jun 2008 08:31:31 GMT

The following is reprinted from The Best of Uncle John's Bathroom Reader.

The original 1977 Star Wars poster

Did you know that Star Wars almost didn't happen because Universal Studios turned it down? Or that Harrison Ford was an unknown actor working as a carpenter when George Lucas chose him to play Han Solo? Or that Luke Skywalker's original name was Luke Starkiller? Here are some fascinating facts about Star Wars, one of the highest grossing sci-fi film series in history:

"There's a whole generation growing up without any kind of fairy tales. And kids need fairy tales - it's an important thing for society to have for kids." - George Lucas

BACKGROUND

In July 1973, George Lucas was an unknown director working on a low-budget 1950s nostalgia film called American Graffiti. He approached Universal Studios to see if they were interested in a film idea he called Star Wars. Universal turned him down.

It was the biggest mistake the studio ever made.

Six months later, Lucas was the hottest director in Hollywood. American Graffiti, which cost $750,000 to make, was a smash. It went on to earn more than $117 million, making it the most profitable film in Hollywood history - even today.

While Universal was stonewalling Lucas, an executive at 20th Century Fox, Alan Ladd, Jr., watched a smuggled print of American Graffiti before it premiered and loved it. He was so determined to work with Lucas that he agreed to finance the director's new science fiction film.

Star Wars opened on May 25, 1977, and by the end of August it had grossed $100 million - faster than any other film in history. By 1983 the film had made over $524 million in ticket sales worldwide - making it one of the 10 highest grossing films in history. [note: this article was written in 1993; Star Wars is currently the 24th highest-grossing films]

MAKING THE FILM

- It took Lucas over two years to write the script. He spent 40 hours a week writing and devoted much of his free time to reading comic books and watching old "Buck Rogers" episodes and other serials looking for film ideas.

- Lucas insisted on casting unknown actors and actresses in all the important parts of the film - which made the studio uneasy. Mark Hamill had more than 100 TV appearances, and Carrie Fisher had studied acting, but neither had had much experience in films. Harrison Ford's biggest role had been as the drag racer in American Graffiti, and when he read for the part of Han Solo he was working as a carpenter.

THE CHARACTERS

Luke Skywalker. At first Lucas planned to portray him as an elderly general, but decided that making him a teenager gave him more potential for character development. Lucas originally named the character Luke Starkiller, but on the first day of shooting he changed it to the less violent Skywalker.

Obi-Wan Kenobi. Lucas got his idea for Obi-Wan Kenobi and "the Force" after reading Carlos Castaneda'sTales of Power, an account of Don Juan, a Mexican-Indian sorcerer and his experiences with what he called "the life force."

Darth Vader. David Prowse, a six-foot, seven-inch Welsh weightlifter, played the part of Darth Vader. But Lucas didn't want his villain to have a Welsh accent, so he dubbed James Earl Jones's voice over Prowse's. Still, Prowse loved the part. "He took the whole thing very seriously," Lucas remembers. "He began to believe he really was Darth Vader."

Han Solo. In the early stages of development, Han Solo was a green-skinned, gilled monster with a girlfriend named Boma who was a cross between a guinea pig and a brown bear. Solo was supposed to make only a few appearances in the film, but Lucas later made him into a swashbuckling, reckless human (allegedly modeled after the film director Francis Ford Coppola).

Chewbacca. Lucas got the idea for Chewbacca one morning in the early 1970s while watching his wife Marcia drive off in her car. She had their Alaskan malamute, Indiana (the namesake for Indiana Jones in Raiders of the Lost Ark), and Lucas liked the way the large, shaggy dog looked in the passenger seat. So he decided to create a character in the film that was a cross between Indiana, a bear, and a monkey.

Princess Leia. Carrie Fisher was a beautiful 19-year-old actress when she was cast to play Princess Leia, but Lucas did everything he could to tone down her femininity. At one point, he even ordered that her breasts be strapped to her chest with electrical tape. "There's no jiggling in the Empire," Fisher later joked.

R2-D2. Lucas got the name R2-D2 while filming American Graffiti. During a sound-mixing session for the film, editor Walter Murch asked him for R2, D2 (Reel 2, Dialogue 2) of the film. Lucas liked the name so much that he made a note of it, and eventually found the right character for it.

C-3PO. Inspired by a robot character in Alex Raymond's science fiction novel, Iron Men of Mongo. Raymond's robot was a copper-colored, polite robot who was shaped like a man who worked as a servant. Lucas intended that C-3PO and R2-D2 be a space-age Laurel and Hardy team.

SPECIAL EFFECTS

- The spaceship battles were inspired by World War II films. Before filming the special effect began, Lucas watched dozens of war movies like Battle of Britain and The Bridges of Toko-Ri, taping his favorite air battle scenes as he went along. Later he edited them down to a 10-minute black-and-white film, and gave it to the special effects team - which reshot the scenes using X-wing and T.I.E. fighter models.

- None of the spaceship models ever moved an inch during the filming of the flight sequences. The motion was an optical illusion created by moving the cameras around motionless models. The models were so detailed that one of them even had Playboy pinups in the cockpit.

MISCELLANEOUS FACTS

- The executives at 20th Century Fox hated the film the first time they saw it. Some of the company's board of directors fell asleep during the first screening; others didn't understand the film at all. One executive's wife even suggested that C-3PO be given a moving mouth, because no one would understand how he could talk without moving his lips.

- The underwater monster in the trash compactor was one of Lucas's biggest disappointment in the film. He had planned to have an elaborate "alien jellyfish" in the scene, but the monster created by the special effects department was so poorly constructed that it reminded him of "a big, wide, brown turd." Result: The monster was filmed underwater during most of the scene - so that moviegoers wouldn't see it.

The article above is reprinted with permission from The Best of Uncle John's Bathroom Reader.

Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts.

If you like Neatorama, you'll love the Bathroom Reader Institute's books - go ahead and check 'em out!

Hot at Google IO: Android

Robert Scoble — Thu, 29 May 2008 09:36:40 GMT

How can you tell what’s hot at a conference? Come to the party and check out the size of the crowds around the tables.

Answer: Android. Android is Google’s open source cell phone operating system and range of cell phones.

Look at TechMeme. The demos are awesome. Go watch them on the Android Community website. They were filmed by this guy who tells me what his favorite demo was.

It’s becoming clear I was wrong about Android (when it first came out I was skeptical). They have one huge hurdle to execute on, though: getting devices into stores so normal people will be interested.

But look at the tables. Android has the attention of developers. That’s key.

Steve Gillmor recorded the press conference with his Qik camera along with the keynote.

Snackr drenches your computer in a river of news

Harrison Hoffman — Sat, 17 May 2008 05:32:00 GMT

Marshall Kirkpatrick, over at ReadWriteWeb, turned me on to Snackr with a post from earlier today. Snackr describes itself as being an RSS ticker. It provides a constant river of news on your screen. Built with Adobe AIR, it is compatible across all platforms and looks really slick.

Snackr sits on one of the four sides of your screen and scrolls through recent posts from sites which are input either by hand or by loading an OPML file. A nice added touch is that if there is an image in the post, it is included in the scrolling entry. There is a quick shortcut for minimizing the ticker in case it gets in the way and you can literally throw it around the screen. If you just grab Snackr and fling it in the direction of an edge of the screen, it will transform and stick there. Just try it to see what I mean.

Clicking on an entry brings up the full version of the post, readable and scrollable in the slide out window. This application becomes really useful when you narrow your feeds down to your mid to high priority ones and limit the items that it displays to a maximum of somewhere between 2 and 5 days old. If you have anything older than that, the posts start to become stale and irrelevant.

Snackr may be a distraction for some and overwhelming for others, but I really like having this extremely relevant river of news glide by on my screen. As Marshall mentioned, it's a pain to remove feeds if you have a lot of them that you need to unsubscribe from after importing an OPML file, so a batch remove feature would be a great addition in the future. Additional features, such as indicating new items in the river and the ability to change themes, are things that would make sense for future releases, but Snackr runs really well and is very functional, especially for a first release.

Snackr is was written by Narciso Jaramillo, who is a product designer for Adobe Flex and previously worked on version one of Macromedia Dreamweaver.

Wall-sized, multi-touch 'Missile Command' -- every gamer's fantasy

Joshua Topolsky — Tue, 13 May 2008 16:24:00 GMT

Filed under: Displays, Gaming

What could make a game of Missile Command more exciting? If you said playing it on a gigantic multi-touch screen, you're probably right. Luckily for you, someone has gone to all the trouble so you won't have to. A gentleman named Steve Mason has created a large-scale version of the game that can be played by hand using multiple contact points. The result? Extreme awesomeness. Don't believe us? See the video after the break, then just try and tell us you don't want to get in on that action.

[Thanks, Penny]

Continue reading Wall-sized, multi-touch 'Missile Command' -- every gamer's fantasy

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The Rise and Fall of Atari

Alex — Mon, 05 May 2008 07:03:19 GMT

The following is reprinted from Uncle John's Ahh-Inspiring Bathroom Reader

Pong, Atari's most popular game (Image: screenshot of Pong from the Atari Arcade Hits #1, 1972, by Hasbro Interactive [wikipedia])

If you know anything about the pop culture of the 1970s, the name Atari is synonymous with video games. So what happened? Where did Atari go? Here’s the story.

THE GAMBLER

In the early 1960s, a University of Utah engineering student named Nolan Bushnell lost his tuition money in a poker game. He immediately took a job at a pinball arcade near Salt Lake City to make back the money and support himself while he was at school.

In school, Bushnell majored in engineering and, like everyone else who had access to the university’s supercomputers, was a Spacewar! Addict. But he was different. To his fellow students, Spacewar! Was just a game; to Bushnell, it seemed like a way to make money. If he could put a game like Spacewar! Into a pinball arcade, he figured that people would line up to play it. (Photo: Stibbe.net)

FALSE START

Bushnell graduated form college in 1968 and moved to California. He wanted to work for Disney but they turned him down, so he took a day job with an engineering company called Ampex. At night he worked on building his arcade video game.

He converted his daughter’s bedroom into a workshop (she had to sleep on the couch) and scrounged free parts from Ampex and from friends at other electronics companies. The monitor for his prototype was a black-and-white TV he got at Goodwill; an old paint thinner can was the coinbox.

When he finished building the prototype for the game he called Computer Space, he looked around for a partner to help him manufacture and sell it. On the advice of his dentist, he made a deal with a manufacturer or arcade games, Nutting Associates. Nutting agreed to build and sell the games in exchange for a share of the profits, and in return, Bushnell signed on as an engineer for the firm.

If you’ve never heard of Computer Space, you’re not alone. The game was a dud. It sounded simple - the player’s rocket has to destroy two alien flying saucers powered by the computer - but it came with several pages of difficult-to-understand instructions.

The fact that it was the world’s first arcade video game only made things worse. Neither players nor arcade owners knew what to think of the strange machine sitting next to the pinball machines. “People would look at you like you had three heads,” Bushnell remembered. “ ’You mean you’re going to put the TV set in a box with a coin slot and play games on it?’ ” (Photo: Flippers [wikipedia])

NUTTING IN COMMON

Still, Bushnell was convinced that Nutting Associates, not the game, was to blame for the failure. And he was convinced that he could do a better job running his own company. So he and a friend chipped in $250 a piece to start a company called Syzygy (the name given to the configuration of the sun, the earth, and the moon when they ‘re in a straight line in space).

That’s what Bushnell wanted to name it … but when he filed with the states of California, they told him the name was already taken. Bushnell liked to play Go, a Japanese game of strategy similar to chess. He thought some of the words used in the game would make a good name for a business, and company legend has it he asked the clerk at the California Secretary of State’s office to choose between Sente, Hane, and Atari.

She picked Atari.

FAKING IT

Bushnell hired an engineer named Al Alcorn to develop games. Meanwhile, Bushnell installed pinball machines in several local businesses, including a bar called Andy Capp’s Tavern. The cash generated by the pinball machines would help fund the company until the video games were ready for market.

Alcorn’s first assignment was to build a simple Ping-Pong-style video game. Bushnell told him that Atari had signed a contract to deliver such a game to General Electric and now it needed to get built.

According to the official version of events, Bushnell was fibbing - he wanted Alcorn to get used to designing games and wanted to start him out with something simple. Ping-Pong, with one ball and two paddles, was about as simple as a video game can be. In reality, there was no contract with G.E. and Bushnell had no intention of bringing a table tennis game to market. He was convinced that the biggest moneymakers would be complicated games like Computer Space. “He was just going to throw the Ping-Pong game away,” Alcorn remembers. But then Alcorn gave him a reason not to.

OUT OF ORDER

Instead of a simple game, Alcorn’s Ping-Pong had a touch of realism: if you hit the ball with the center of the paddle, the ball bounced straight ahead, but if you hit it with the edge of a paddle, it bounced off at an angle. With Alcorn’s enhancements, video Ping-Pong was a lot more fun to play than Bushnell had expected.

As long as the game was fun, Bushnell decided to test it commercially by installing Pong, as he decided to call it, at Andy Capp’s Tavern.

Two weeks later, the owner of Andy Capp’s called to complain that the game was already broken. Alcorn went out to fix it, and as soon as he opened the machine he realized what was wrong - the game was so full of quarters that they had overflowed the coin tray and jammed the machine. (Photo: ProhibitOnions [wikipedia])

That was only half of the story. The bar’s owner also told Alcorn that on some morning when he arrived to open the bar, people were already waiting outside. But they weren’t waiting for beer. They’d come in, play Pong for a while, and then leave without ordering a drink. He’d never seen anything like it.

That was their first indication that Pong was going to be a hit.

JUST A COINCIDENCE

But did Nolan Bushnell really come up with the idea for Pong … or did he lift it from another video game company? Video game history buffs still debate the issue today.

Here’s what we do know: In the late 1960s, a defense industry engineer named Ralph Baer invented a video game system that could be played at home on a regular television. The system featured 12 different games, including Table Tennis. (Photo: Ralph H. Baer Consultants)

Magnavox licensed Baer’s system in 1971 and prepared to market it as Odyssey, the world’s first home video game system. The company planned to sell the system through its own network of dealers and distributors. In May 1972, the company quietly began demonstrating the product around the country … and on May 24 it demonstrated it at a trade show in Burlingame, California.

“In later litigation,” Steven Kent writes in The Ultimate History of Video Games, “it was revealed that Bushnell not only attended the Burlingame show but also played the tennis game on Odyssey.”

UNANSWERED QUESTIONS

Did Bushnell have a revelation when he played the Odyssey game? Did it convince him that simple games like Pong would be more popular than complicated games like Computer Space?

Or was it just as he claimed - that he instructed Alcorn to invent a ping-pong game, perhaps inspired by he Magnavox Odyssey, only because it was the simplest one he could think of? We’ll probably never know for sure.

As far as the law was concerned, the only thing that really mattered was that, unlike Willy Higginbotham (Tennis for Two) and Steve Russell (Spacewar!), Ralph Baer actually had patented his idea for playing video games on a TV screen and had even won a second patent for video Ping-Pong. His patents predated the founding of Atari by a couple of years.

Bushnell never applied for a patent for Pong, and didn’t have a case for proving he’d invented it. And even if he did, he didn’t have a chance fighting a big corporation like Magnavox in court.

SMART MOVE

So why did Atari become synonymous with video games instead of Magnavox? It was skillful maneuvering by Bushnell.

Since he couldn’t win in court, Bushnell paid a flat fee of $700,000 for a license to use Baer’s patents. That meant that Atari bought the rights free and clear and would never have to pay a penny in royalties to Magnavox. And because Magnavox was now the undisputed patent holder, they had to sue Atari’s competitors in court whenever competing game systems infringed the patents. Atari didn’t even have to chip in for the legal fees.

Magnavox Odyssey, signed by Ralph Baer. (Photo: Wgungfu [wikipedia])

Magnavox had Odyssey on the market while Atari was still years away from manufacturing a home version of Pong. But Magnavox wouldn’t capitalize on their exclusive market. Their first mistake was selling the product exclusively through their own network of dealers, when it would have been smarter to sell them in huge chain stores like Sears and Kmart. Their second mistake was implying in their advertising that Odyssey would only work with Magnavox TVs. That wasn’t true, but the company was hoping to increase TV sales. All they ended up doing was hurting sales of Odyssey.

In 1975 they discontinued the 12-game system and introduced a table tennis-only home video game to compete against the home version of Pong. Then in 1977 they introduced Odyssey2 to compete against Atari’s 2600 system.

Yet in spite of all the effort - and in spite of the fact that they, not Atari, owned the basic video game patents - Magnavox was never more than a me-too product with a marginal market share. Magnavox finally halted production in 1983.

KING PONG

From the moment it was introduced in 1972, Atari’s arcade game, Pong, was a money maker. Placed in a busy location, a single Pong game could earn more than $300 a week, compared to $50 a week for a typical pinball machine. Atari sold more than 8,000 of the machines at a time when even the most popular pinball machines rarely sold more than 2,500 units.

Atari would have sold a lot more machines, too, if competing game manufacturers hadn’t flooded the market with knockoffs. But there was no way that Atari could fight off all the imitators.

Instead, Atari founder Nolan Bushnell managed to stay one step ahead of the competition by inventing one new arcade game after another . (One of these games, Breakout, in which you use a paddle and a ball to knock out holes in a brick wall, was created by an Atari programmer named Steve Jobs and his friend Steve Wozniak, an engineer at Hewlett-Packard. Do their names sound familiar? They should - a few years later, they founded Apple Computer.)

THE ATARI 2600

In 1975 Atari entered the home video game market by creating a home version of Pong. Selling its games through Sears Roebuck and Co., Atari sold 150,000 games that first season alone.

Bushnell was ready to introduce more home versions of arcade games, and he’d decided to do it by copying an idea from a competing video game system, Channel F. The idea: game cartridges. It was a simple concept: a universal game system in which interchangeable game cartridges plugged into a game player, or “console.”

There was just one problem: inventing a video game cartridge system from scratch and manufacturing it in great enough volume to beat out his competitors was going to cost a fortune. The only way that he could come up with the money was by selling Atari to Warner Communications (today part of AOL Time Warner) for $28 million in 1976. Bushnell stayed on as Atari’s chairman and continued to work on the cartridge system.

Atari 2600. Photo: joho345 [wikipedia]

Introduced in mid-1977, the Atari Video Computer System (VCS) - later renamed the Atari 2600 - struggled for more than a year. Atari’s competitors didn’t do much better, and for a while it seemed that the entire video game industry might be on its last legs - the victim of the public’s burnout from playing too much Pong.

ALIEN RESURRECTION

Then in early 1979, Atari executives hit on the idea of licensing Space Invaders, an arcade game manufactured by Taito, a Japanese company. The game was so popular in Japan that it actually caused a coin shortage, forcing the national mint to triple its output of 100-yen coins.

Space Invaders on the Atari 2600. Image: Kudla.org

Just as it had in Japan, Space Invaders became the most popular arcade game in the United States, and the most popular Atari game cartridge. Atari followed up with other blockbuster cartridges like Defender, Missile Command, and Asteroids; by 1980 it commanded a 75% share of the burgeoning home video game market. Thanks in large part to soaring sales of the VCS system, Atari’s annual sales grew from $75 million in 1977 to more than $2 billion in 1980, making Atari the fastest growing company in U.S. history. But it wouldn’t stay that way for long.

THE BEGINNING OF THE END

Within months of bringing VCS to market, Bushnell was already pushing Warner to begin work on a next-generation successor to the system, but Warner rejected the idea out of hand. They had invested more than $100 million in the VCS and weren’t about to turn around and build a new product to compete with it. Warner’s determination to rest on their laurels was one of the things that led to Bushnell’s break with the company.

By the time Space Invaders revived the fortunes of the VCS, Noland Bushnell was no longer part of the company. Warner Communications had forced him out following a power struggle in November 1978.

If Bushnell had been the only person to leave the company, Atari’s problems probably wouldn’t have gotten so bad. But he wasn’t - Warner also managed to alienate nearly all of Atari’s best programmers. While Atari made millions of dollars, Warner paid the programmers less than $30,000 a year, didn’t share the profits the games generated, and wouldn’t even allow them to see sales figures.

The programmers didn’t receive any public credit for their work, either. Outside of the company, few people even know who had designed classic games like Asteroids and Missile Command; Warner was afraid that if it made the names public, the programmers would be hired away by other video game companies.

BREAKOUT

So Atari’s top programmers quit and formed their own video game company, called Activision, then turned around and began selling VCS-compatible games that competed directly against Atari’s own titles.

Activision dealt a huge blow to Atari, and not just because Activision’s games were better. Atari’s entire marketing strategy was based around pricing the VCS console as cheaply as possible - $199 - then reaping huge profits from sales of its high-priced game cartridges. Now the best games were being made by Activision.

Atari sued Activision several times to try to block it from making games for the VCS but lost every time, and Activision kept cranking out hit after hit. By 1982 Activision was selling $150 million worth of cartridges a year and had replaced Atari as the fastest growing company in the United States.

THE ATARI GLUT

Activision’s spectacular success encouraged other Atari programmers to defect and form their own video game companies, and it also prompted dozens of other companies - even Quaker Oats - to begin making games for the VCS.

Many of these games were terrible, and most of the companies that made them soon went out of business. But that only made things worse for Atari, because when the bad companies went out of business, their game cartridges were dumped on the market for as little as $9.99 apiece. If people wanted good games, they bought them from Activision. If they wanted cheap games, they pulled them out of the discount bin. Not many people bought Atari’s games, and when the cheap games proved disappointing, consumer blamed Atari.

Meanwhile, just as Bushnell had feared, over the next few years, new game systems like Mattel’s Intellivision and Coleco’s ColecoVision came on the market and began chiseling away at Atari’s market share. With state-of-the-art hardware and computer chips, these game systems had higher-resolution graphics and offered animation and sound that were nearly as good as arcade video games … and vastly superior to the VCS. Adding insult to injury, both ColecoVision and Intellivision offered adapters that would let buyers play the entire library of VCS games, which meant that if consumers wanted to jump ship to Atari’s competitors, they could take their old games with them. (Photo: Fritz Saalfeld [Wikipedia])

EATEN BY PAC-MAN

But what really finished Atari off was Pac-Man. In April 1982, Atari released the home version of Pac-Man in what was probably the most anticipated video game release in history. At the time, there were about 10 million VCS systems on the market, but Atari manufactured 12 million cartridges, assuming that new consumers would buy the VCS just to play Pac-Man.

Big mistake - Atari’s Pac-Man didn’t live up to its hype. It was a flickering piece of junk that didn’t look or sound anything like the arcade version. It wasn’t worth the wait. Atari ended up selling only 7 million cartridges, and many of these were returned by outraged customers demanding refunds.

ATARI PHONE HOME

Then Atari followed its big bomb with an even bigger bomb: E.T., The Extra-Terrestrial. Atari guaranteed Steve Spielberg a $25 million royalty for the game, then rushed it out in only six weeks so that it would be in stores in time for Christmas (video games typically took at least six months to develop). Then they manufacture five million cartridge without knowing if consumers would take any interest in the game.

[YouTube Link]

They didn’t. The slap-dash E.T. was probably the worst product Atari had ever made, worse even than Pac-Man. Nearly all of the cartridges were returned by consumers and retailers. Atari ended up dumping millions of Pac-Man and E.T. game cartridges in a New Mexico landfill and then having them crushed with steamrollers and buried under tons of cement.

TOO LITTLE, TOO LATE

That same year Atari finally got around to doing what Noland Bushnell had wanted to do since 1978: they released a new game system, the Atari 5200.

But in the face of stiff competition from ColecoVision, which came out with Donkey Kong (the 5200 didn’t) and had better graphics and animation, it bombed. Staggering from the failures of Pac-Man, E.T., and the 5200, Atari went on to lose more than $536 million in 1983.

THE LAST BIG MISTAKE

In 1983 Atari had what in retrospect might have been a chance to revive its sagging fortunes … but it blew that opportunity, too. Nintendo, creators of Donkey Kong, decided to bring its popular Famicom (short for Family Computer) game system to the United States. The Famicom was Nintendo’s first attempt to enter the American home video game market, and rather than go it alone, the company wanted help. It offered Atari a license not just to sell the Famicom in every country in the world except Nintendo’s home market of Japan, but also to sell it under the Atari brand name. Consumers would never know that the game was a Nintendo. In return, Nintendo would receive a royalty for each unit sold and would have unrestricted rights to create games for the system.

Atari and Nintendo negotiated for three days, but nothing ever came of it. Nintendo decided to go it alone - and it was good choice.

The article above is reprinted with permission from Uncle John's Ahh-Inspiring Bathroom Reader.

Where else but in a Bathroom Reader could you learn how the banana peel changed history, how to predict the future by rolling the dice, how the Jivaro tribes shrunk heads, and the science behind love at first sight? Get ready to be thoroughly entertained while occupied on the throne. Uncle John rules the world of information and humor. It's simply Ahh-Inspiring!

Since 1988, the Bathroom Reader Institute had published a series of popular books containing irresistible bits of trivia and obscure yet fascinating facts.

If you like Neatorama, you'll love the Bathroom Reader Institute's books - go ahead and check 'em out!

Sezmi looks to provide alternative for cable / satellite, confuse everyone

Darren Murph — Thu, 01 May 2008 19:12:00 GMT

Filed under: HDTV, Home Entertainment

In case you're not content with just keeping your current cable / satellite / fiber TV service and using the recently launched ZvBox to pull in content from the web, a new startup is aiming to satisfy your bizarre desires. In what's potentially the most befuddling launch of the year, said firm is looking to introduce its 1TB set-top-box to consumers on a city-by-city basis. Put simply (or, as simply as possible), the box will fetch content from a number of places: the built-in OTA receiver will grab locals, and it will use the owner's broadband internet connection to snag IPTV material and web-based content (YouTube, Hulu, etc.). Sezmi plans to launch the product with "3G and DSL" telcos that don't currently have a way to offer a triple-play package, and while some sources say that monthly fees will be as low as "half" of a typical cable / satellite bill, we've also seen Phil Wiser, co-founder, chairman and president, quoted as saying that it will be "roughly comparable" to its rivals. Hit up the links below for loads more info, and join us as we sit back and wait for this entirely-too-complex endeavor to implode.

[Via PC Magazine]

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Winpooch: Open source anti-malware for Windows

Jordan Running — Tue, 06 Dec 2005 21:13:46 GMT

Filed under: Windows, Open Source, Security

There's not much to say about Winpooch apart from the facts: "Winpooch is a Windows watchdog, free and open source. Anti spyware and anti trojan, it gives a full protection against local or external attacks by scanning the activity of programs in real time." It hooks into Windows to let you prevent certain processes from making changes to system files rather than the signature method used by most commercial spyware products. It also integrates with ClamWin to provide virus protection. I'd be interested to see how well it works, but regardless it's nice to see some more open source action in the Windows security sector.

[Via Digg]

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Boot Windows XP off a USB flash drive

Jordan Running — Wed, 07 Dec 2005 00:12:37 GMT

Filed under: Windows, Security, Utilities

You can run Firefox and Thunderbird off a USB drive, and you can boot Linux from most anything, but did you know that you can run Windows XP off a flash drive? Me neither. Tom's Hardware has a slick guide to installing XP on your 256MB-or-bigger USB flash drive with Bart PE Builder for use as an emergency kit for un-borking your busted PC.

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TheOpenCD, a great stocking stuffer

Victor Agreda, Jr. — Tue, 13 Dec 2005 12:51:22 GMT

Filed under: Windows, Business, Design, Linux, Freeware, Open Source, E-mail, Finance, Fun, Games, Internet, Office, Productivity, Text, Utilities

Looking to introduce a loved one to the joys of open source software? TheOpenCD is chock full of Windows apps that are free, open source, and above all, very good quality. OK, maybe not chock full... As you may know, not everyone knows about Firefox. Why not also show them OpenOffice, GIMP, Blender, NVU, or Celestia? There's just enough to do what you need, but not so much as to bombard a neophyte. It automatically launches when inserted into a machine, and presents the software in a friendly and helpful manner. Each app gets a full description, and it's easily installed. There's also an Ubuntu and Kubuntu live CD variation. To top it off, I've even included a free, prinatble CD label to use, even if it is a little lame.

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Mmm Free - Clean Up Context Menus

Jason Clarke — Thu, 22 Dec 2005 13:10:00 GMT

Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Productivity, Freeware

If you’ve been running on the same installation of Windows for any length of time, you may have noticed that some of the software you install adds options into the right-click menu, otherwise known as the context menu. While this can be handy, it can get out of hand when there are a lot of entries, particularly when you rarely use the vast majority of them. Windows can also take some time to render a complex menu, particularly when the menu items have icons associated with them.

Mmm Free helps you deal with this problem by allowing you to completely remove any context menu items that you never use, and move those that you rarely use onto a Rarely Used sub-menu. This can significantly speed up the rendering of the context menu, and make it much more convenient to find those menu items that you actually do use often.

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Trip Stalker - Find Low Airline Fares

Jason Clarke — Thu, 22 Dec 2005 14:20:00 GMT

Filed under: Finance, Internet, Utilities, Windows, Freeware

Finding low fare airline trips is one part science, and one part voodoo. Trip Stalker is a utility you can install that will try to make the process easier. The software takes your criteria for a trip, then silently checks various internet travel sites for the lowest fares for the trip you specify, and alerts you when it finds one that falls into the criteria you set.

[via Lifehacker]

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Easy Windows-to-Linux migration with Progression Desktop

Jordan Running — Thu, 22 Dec 2005 18:20:00 GMT

Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Linux, Commercial

From the "I think they might be on to something" department, Versora Progression Desktop, is an app designed to ease the transition from Windows to Linux. Progression Desktop's migration wizard saves your Office settings, Outlook messages, contacts, and calendars, web favorites and history, and IM contacts into a "migration file," which is then opened on the Linux side where your settings are transferred into the likes of OpenOffice.org, Thunderbird, Firefox, and Gaim (though the list is much longer than that). While I suspect it might not be the two-click process Versora claims, the price, at $10, is just right.

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Watson: Today's Free File

Marc Perton — Thu, 22 Dec 2005 21:33:00 GMT

Filed under: Utilities, Windows, Freeware

If you're looking for another desktop search tool to add to your arsenal, check out Watson, a contextual search bar that can generate realtime results based on the content of whatever you're working on in another window, such as a browser session, Outlook message or Word document. That could get a little annoying, but could also come in handy now and then, if you need to quickly get a piece of info that will help you fill out a document you're working on. It can also use the indexes compiled by Google Desktop or Windows Desktop Search, which saves you from having to re-index your whole hard drive if you want to use it as a desktop search tool. And, yes, it's free (though, of course, there's a Pro version available, at prices of up to $199 for a lifetime subscription).

[Via The Office Weblog]

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Page Saver - Today's Browser Tip

Jordan Running — Fri, 23 Dec 2005 10:00:00 GMT

Filed under: Windows, Macintosh, Mozilla, Browsers

Awhile I posted about ScreenGrab, an extension for Firefox that takes a screenshot of an entire web page. It got the job done, but I had a few issues with it, namely that it required Java and it was a tad buggy. Pearl Crescent's Page Saver looks like a great alternative. It's only for Firefox 1.5 and above and uses the Canvas feature to capture either the visible portion of the page or the whole thing without your having to do so much touch your scrollbar. The only caveat is that at this point it isn't able to capture the output of plugins such as Flash.

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Software for Starving Students

Jason Clarke — Thu, 12 Jan 2006 11:40:00 GMT

Filed under: Audio, Business, Fun, Internet, Security, Text, Utilities, Video, Windows, Macintosh, Blogging, E-mail, Office, Productivity, Freeware, Open Source

Software for Starving Students is a compilation CD of the best of freely available software for both Windows and Macintosh computers with a mind towards usefulness for students and educators, though most anyone could make use of the software included in this elegant package. The list of included software is simply astounding, including both Open Source and simply free software. Here's a few packages that caught my eye:

Windows Packages

Audacity
Azureus
DeepBurner Free
Exact Audio Copy
FileZilla
Firefox
Gaim
Juice Receiver (formerly iPodder)
OpenOffice
PDFCreator
The Gimp
Thunderbird
VideoLAN Client
winLame

Macintosh Packages

Audacity
Azureus
Carbon Copy Cloner
Cyberduck
Desktop Manager
Firefox
Freemind
Genius
ImageBurner
iShred
md5App
OpenOffice.org
Tweak Freak
VideoLAN Client

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Lexar and Ceedo make any app portable

Jordan Running — Thu, 12 Jan 2006 13:50:00 GMT

Filed under: Hardware, Windows

We're a big fan of portable apps here at Download Squad, so this is cool news to us: Lexar has partnered with an Israeli software company called Ceedo on a program called PowerToGo that "lets most existing Windows applications run unmodified from [Lexar] flash drives." The article from Embedded.com says that Ceedo will license the software to other device vendors but that it "will be developed as an open standard" and will be compatible "most consumer and electronic mobile devices," though it's fairly vague on that particular point. I have my share of questions about this, for example will PowerToGo be smart enough to use a machine's hard drive rather than the flash drive for temporary storage so as keep from shortening the life of the flash memory with frequent access, and will running large apps (as so many of them are these days) be quick enough to satisfy users' need for speed? Still, if they can pull it off, it could be great news for flash drive nomads.

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The Philosophies of Margarine

Alex — Fri, 18 Jan 2008 20:58:48 GMT

Found at Tweebiscuit - via Accordion Guy

Retro-gamer cupcakes OM NOM NOM NOM

Cory Doctorow — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 14:46:43 GMT

Flickr user Hello Naomi has been baking and icing a series of delicious, video-game-themed cupcakes, each more delicious-looking (and forbidden to me) than the last. How I yearn to consume the carbolicious goodness of these 8-bit treats, but my resolve is strong (and they aren't actually here, which helps quite a lot). Link to Super Mario cupcakes, Link to Pac Mac cupcakes (via Geekologie)

A Kid with an Unbelievable Talent

Spluch — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 13:23:00 GMT

The kid you're about to see just turned 11, and his talents will blow you away.

Video: LiveLeak
Tags: Basketball | Kid

Toy Story Trilogy To Be Entirely 3D

Alex Billington — Fri, 25 Jan 2008 08:59:26 GMT

To infinity and beyond! It sounds like beyond is actually 3D, however. Disney and Pixar are turning the entire Toy Story trilogy into 3D, with the third film due out in 2010. The studio will convert the two previous films, which arrived in theaters in 1995 and 1999 respectively, into 3D under close observation from filmmaker and director John Lasseter. The technical team is retrieving all of the original digital elements and rebuilding them in 3D. Toy Story 3 will be directed by Lee Unkrich and is set to arrive after the first two films are released in 3D at some point in 2010.

Disney and Pixar will release the first Toy Story in 3D on October 2nd, 2009 and follow that up with Toy Story 2 in 3D on February 12th, 2010, with a likely summer 2010 release of Toy Story 3 in 3D. Disney Chairman Dick Cook commented on this "ambitious plan" with the following statement.

"We are committed to bringing moviegoers the best and most exciting 3-D movie experience, and we think they're going to love seeing Buzz Lightyear, Woody, and all the wonderful 'Toy Story' cast of characters in an eye popping and dazzling way. John Lasseter and the animation team are putting all their passion and hard work into making this the greatest 3-D experience yet, and we're excited to share their efforts with audiences everywhere."

"The 'Toy Story' films and characters will always hold a very special place in our hearts and we're so excited to be bringing this landmark film back for audiences to enjoy in a whole new way thanks to the latest in 3-D technology. I am sure that this is going to be nothing short of fantastic and people are going to be blown away by the experience."

With Beowulf first and now U2 3D, I may be on my way to actually coming to accept 3D. However, I will never accept it as the "new format" of movies, as it will always still be a sales gimmick and never mainstream. They can try, and they certainly are, as is obviously the case here, but 3D will never be the only format of the future. I'll be seeing this 3D trilogy in theaters, only to relive the Toy Story movies once again on the big screen, but that's it.

Discover More: Movie News

Get a New Flight When Stranded at the Airport with Rule 240 [Air Travel Tip]

Adam Pash — Wed, 30 Jan 2008 20:00:00 GMT

MSNBC highlights how to invoke Rule 240 to get a new flight fast any time your flight is canceled for anything other than weather.

I invoked Rule 240—which states that in the event of any flight delay or cancellation caused by anything other than weather, the airline would fly me on the next available flight—not their next available flight, which might not leave for another 24 hours. And guess what happened? A lot of United passengers made it to Boston that day&mdash on American.

A relic of pre-deregulation airlines, the article says that most newer airlines won't honor rule 240, but apparently most of the older airlines still respect this rule as a matter of company policy. If you know anything more about rule 240—maybe you've invoked it yourself?—let's hear about it in the comments. For more details, check out Consumerist's rather extensive guide to Rule 240. Photo by dougww.

Video of the Day: Sarah Silverman is F**king Matt Damon!

Erik Davis — Fri, 01 Feb 2008 14:32:00 GMT

Filed under: Fandom, Trailers and Clips

A good friend of mine sent me this link a little while ago and I was cracking up. I'm not the biggest fan of Sarah Silverman's shtick, but this video -- which apparently aired last night on the Jimmy Kimmel Show -- is beyond awesome. Kimmel and Silverman have been dating for a long time, and I imagine this is some sort of inside joke (or not) designed to f*ck with Kimmel hardcore. I don't watch his show, and so I'm not sure whether this video comes with a long back-story, but if you know more about it, definitely let us know.

Actually, as I'm writing this, the video just popped up over at Entertainment Weekly and Slashfilm as well. They both say it's a long-running Kimmel Show punch line, so there ya go. But seriously, watch and enjoy. Fun stuff!

Watching the video reminds me of this one, also featuring Matt Damon. Note to self: Never leave my wife alone with Matt Damon.

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Ford truck with RFID tool tracker

David Pescovitz — Wed, 06 Feb 2008 16:49:27 GMT

Ford is announcing an RFID system for their big trucks to help track tools. (Click image to see the details.) Developed with DeWalt and ThingMagic, the Tool Link system comes with a bunch of wireless RFID tags that you attach to your gear. An in-dash display will then show what's in your truck so you can tell right away if someone snagged your hammer, or, hopefully, you just left it at the job site. Link to press release (Thanks, Steve King!)

Dragonfly Covered with Dew, Photo by Martin Amm

Alex — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 08:16:30 GMT

Photographer Martin Amm took this amazing macro photography of a red-veined darter dragonfly covered in dew. Link - via reddit

$6 Million Home Theater Makes Me Weep

Thu, 07 Feb 2008 20:00:10 GMT

Ever wonder what a $6 million home theater looks like? Well wonder no more. Pictured is a home theater owned by Jeremy Kipnis, a music engineer/producer. It's got 39 separate speaker units and 36 amplifiers. The entire equipment list will make you cry (which I have included after the jump for your sobbing pleasure). He plans to sell similar systems to other rich folks like Lucas and Spielburg, but for right now he's the only one that's gone so crazy. I mean $6 million for a home theater? If I had that cash I don't think I'd blow it all on a home theater. I'd buy a strip club. Now that's an entertainment center that's fun for the whole family. You know, if you're single. A ridiculously long and unbelievable list of the theater's components after the jump.

Hide Your Cables in Your Baseboards and Crown Molding [DIY]

Adam Pash — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 20:00:00 GMT

Hide your networking and television cables with WireTracks, a wire management solution that hides your messy cables behind crown molding and baseboards. The WireTracks site is full of instructions on how to install WireTracks. As for the actual WireTracks products, it looks like some solutions are more expensive than others, though a seasoned DIYer might be tempted to tackle the entire project without buying any of the gear from WireTracks. Whichever you choose, the idea behind WireTracks could be perfect for your home.

PicLens.

Richard — Fri, 15 Feb 2008 07:32:29 GMT

Wow. Wow, wow wow wow, wow. PicLens has got to be the absolute coolest way that I have ever seen to browse through pictures, ever. It’s a plugin for Firefox, IE, Safari and Flock that displays all of the images on a particular page on a very slick 3D wall that’s zoomable and has slideshow functionality. It works with Flickr, Photobucket, Picasa Web Albums, DeviantArt, Smugmug, Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Hi5, Friendster, Google Images, Yahoo Images, Ask Images, Live Images & AOL Images so far. They had me at Flickr.

VISIT SITE

also, Full Screen Google Maps.

Dilbert Documents Dilbert Case

Miss Cellania — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 15:53:57 GMT

Dave Steward of Fort Madison, Iowa was fired from his job after seven years because he posted a Dilbert comic strip on an office bulletin board. In the offending strip, Dilbert compared company decision-makers to “drunken lemurs”. Management checked surveillance tapes to find out which employee was responsible. The story became national news after the company fought Steward’s claim for unemployment benefits. Now Dilbert creator Scott Adams is incorporating Steward’s story in his comic strip. A series of strips on the case begins today.

In one of the strips, Adams gives his take on Steward’s dismissal.

Catbert: “Wally, I have to fire you for posting a comic comparing managers to drunken lemurs. You won’t be eligible for unemployment benefits unless you can prove you were stupid as opposed to malicious. Can you prove you’re stupid?”

Wally: “Is there another explanation for working here?”

Steward, who is still unemployed, says he will keep the strips in a scrapbook. Link to story. Link to daily Dilbert strip. -via Fark

(image credit: Scott Adams)

Create Your Own Cross-Platform Backup Server [Feature]

Kevin Purdy — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 17:00:00 GMT

Backing up your data on a regular basis is important, and turning a spare computer into a backup server is often the best way to make sure it gets done. But most methods require either a good deal of command-line learning or serve only one operating system. Not with Restore, a free, open-source backup system that can install or run from a live CD, work with any OS, and operate through a simple browser-based interface. Today I'll demonstrate backing up a Windows laptop to an older desktop, but you'll see how Restore can be easily molded to fit just about any home backup needs.

Getting started

First we'll need the right live CD from Restore's SourceForge pages. Grab the most recent "RESTORE-EE-LIVE" .iso file you see there—it's technically the "Enterprise Edition," but don't let that title scare you off. Burn the ISO to a blank CD with the program of your choice, place it in the disc drive of a computer that can boot from a CD, then fire it up. Now you can check out how Restore runs on your spare box (or old laptop) before dedicating yourself to installing it, without a single bit of data touched. Those with a bit of Linux savvy can also install Restore from Ubuntu/Debian packages or in a virtual machine; installation will be different, but the operation is the same.

Restore is based on Xubuntu, the lightweight Ubuntu Linux distribution, and boots up in nearly identical fashion. Hit "Start or Install RESTORE" from the first screen and give the CD time to boot up (go back and try "Safe Graphics Mode" if you see only black). Once you're in, you should see a desktop similar to this (click for larger image):

If you're not hard-wired to your internet connection, click the icon in the upper-right to configure your wireless connection. If you can't get access, your networking hardware might be the rare exception that Ubuntu doesn't handle out of the box; try the Ubuntu Forums or a little Google-searching for help.

If you're set on installing Restore, hit the "Install" icon on the desktop and follow the fairly simple prompts. Whatever drive or partition you install to, that's where the backups will go. If you need help partitioning off space from a Windows installation, reference Adam's triple-boot guide or Ubuntu's community docs for pointers. Whether you're installing or just testing it out, find the IP address of the computer running Restore through your router. Alternately, click the "Applications" button in the Restore desktop, then Accessories->Terminal, then enter the command ifconfig and look for the address after "inet addr:", which usually looks like 192.168.x.x). Save yourself future IP hunts by setting a static IP address for your new backup server; see Adam's recent BitTorrent feature for a primer.

Set up your systems

Most backup servers rely on each computer regularly sending their files to them. Restore, on the other hand, reaches out to computers and copies their important files on a schedule. To make sure your system's ready to accept remote connections, do the following:

Vista: Head to "Set up file sharing" or "Network and Sharing Center" from the Control Panel. Make sure "Network discovery," "File sharing," and "Password protected sharing" are set to "On." Right-click any folders you want to back up on your system, select "Share," "Change sharing permissions," and follow through the prompts.
Windows XP: Follow Restore's
own guide to selectively share folders for backup.
Mac OS X: Enable "Remote Login" in the "Sharing" section of the System Preferences menu. That's it—although take note of the IP address listed at the bottom of the "Sharing" screen.
Linux: You have your choice of either using Samba for Windows File Shares access—I've found this forum post to be the most concise setup guide, at least for Ubuntu—or open up an SSH server on your system (Google to find a how-to for your distro).

Schedule your backups

Open a browser on the computer you intend to back up and point it to that IP address you grabbed from the server, followed by /restore, as in:

http://192.168.x.x/restore

You should see a login/password prompt. Enter "admin" as the username and "password" as the password, without the quotes. You're now at the main Restore screen.

You can head to "Preferences" to make your login details a bit more secure, but let's roll up our sleeves and head to "Filestore" first." It's pretty bare on this screen, so hit "Add Target" near the upper-right corner. Here you'll get your choice of MySQL, SFTP (which is actually SSH File Transfer Protocol), straight FTP, or Windows File Share. I'll be using Windows File Share, which also works for Linux users comfortable with Samba shares, but Mac users will want to choose SFTP.

Type the IP address of the system you're connecting from into the "Hostname" field in the prompt that comes up, and then the username and password you use to log on to that computer. You'll be greeted by a collapsible list of folders that you can grab from. Ignore any "invalid argument" lines, select the data you need to copy and hit "Next" in the lower right. Give your selections a "Target Name" that relates to your selections (like "My Pictures Backup"), then hit "Save." You'll end up at that target's settings page. Hit the button that looks like "Play" on the far right to manually launch a snapshot backup if you'd like, but now we'll head to the "Schedule" tab.

Hit the "+" next to "Snapshot schedules" at the top of the left-hand column to choose how often Restore will reach out for a backup attempt. The "Simple" settings should be enough for most folks' needs; give your schedule a name and hit "Create." Now choose the "+" next to "Revision Schedule" on the right-hand column. This actually lets you set how many of your snapshots are saved and for how long, giving you a Time-Machine-like ability to choose from numerous versions of a file over time. Hit "Create," and you're done. When you need to get at your files, simply head to the "Restore Data" tab in each Target and choose which version you want to bring back.

You've now created a basic backup server that will look to copy files from any system manually or on a schedule, and which you can control with or without a monitor and other peripherals attached. Since you've got a working Xubuntu system running in there with CD-burning and other abilities, however, you might want to set up VNC to give yourself a graphical handle, when needed.

Need more help setting up or exploring Restore? Check out the Flash tutorials offered by its creator, Holonyx Ruffdogs.

What do you think about Restore? Does it seem easier than command-line-based options? Hit the comments with any questions, comments, suggestions and/or complaints.

Kevin Purdy, associate editor at Lifehacker, loves having his flock of systems shepherded by one small box. His weekly feature, Open Sourcery, appears every Friday on Lifehacker.

One String Willie Plays Guitar With One String

Thu, 06 Mar 2008 21:25:46 GMT

One String Willie is a recovering smack addict who used to turn tricks in a parked van to pay for his next fix. Not really, he's just some guy that likes playing a guitar with one string. I think his song is pretty impressive. You may not. But think about this -- if he's that good with just one string, imagine what he could do with, uh, half of one string. Not as much as a whole one? Really? Damn I hate fractions. One String Willie [core77]

First Look: Complete Watchmen Costumes Officially Revealed!!

Alex Billington — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 05:35:46 GMT

As Zack Snyder states on the official blog - here we are, one year from the theatrical release of Watchmen on March 6th, 2009. To ease the pain of waiting another 12 months to finally see the film, Snyder has released complete costumed photos of five of the main characters: The Comedian, Nite Owl, Ozymandias, Rorschach, and Silk Spectre. These may be the most downright incredible photos I've seen in the last six months from any comic book movie. It's time to begin the 12 month process of showing you how amazing Zack Snyder's Watchmen is actually going to be!

Don't let anyone fool you. If you hear other webmasters or critics out there railing on these photos, it's because they can't handle a movie being so good. They've got to tear it apart at any cost and can't just sit back and appreciate something truly amazing. Don't listen to them. These are amazing and I hope you can respect the work that Zack Snyder and his team have put into this.

Click each photo for full-sized versions!

Jeffrey Dean Morgan as The Comedian

Patrick Wilson as Nite Owl

Matthew Goode as Ozymandias

Jackie Earle Haley as Rorschach

Malin Akerman as Silk Spectre

Notice the updated Owl Ship in the background of Nite Owl's photo? If not, you may want to go back and take a second look. These are the photos that Watchmen really needed in order to start building buzz for it even a year out. You may only be thinking about this upcoming summer's movies, but don't forget to always keep Zack Snyder's Watchmen in the back of your mind.

A complex, multi-layered mystery adventure, Watchmen is set in an alternate 1985 America in which costumed superheroes are part of the fabric of everyday society, and the "Doomsday Clock" - which charts the USA's tension with the Soviet Union - is permanently set at five minutes to midnight. When one of his former colleagues is murdered, the washed-up but no less determined masked vigilante Rorschach sets out to uncover a plot to kill and discredit all past and present superheroes. As he reconnects with his former crime-fighting legion - a ragtag group of retired superheroes, only one of whom has true powers - Rorschach glimpses a wide-ranging and disturbing conspiracy with links to their shared past and catastrophic consequences for the future. Their mission is to watch over humanity… but who is watching the watchmen?

I hope by now all of you Watchmen doubters are finally starting to realize that this movie is going to turn out absolutely incredible! What are your honest thoughts so far on all of these costumes?

Watchmen is directed by Zack Snyder (of Dawn of the Dead and 300) and written by David Hayter (The Scorpion King, X-Men, X-Men 2) and Alex Tse. The movie arrives in theaters everywhere on March 6th, 2009. Stay tuned for even more Watchmen coverage, photos, and more exclusives right here at FS.net!

Discover More: First Look, Hype

Pranking the boss

Adam Stanhope — Sat, 15 Mar 2008 16:45:24 GMT

I laughed out loud at this one. Two employees prank their extra large boss and catch it on video. Before anybody gets too feisty, let it be known that I’m on Team Fat Man as well. Us big guys can dish it out as well as we can take it. The fat guy in the video took one for the team. I hope he got the pranksters back good. LiveLeak.

Coming This Fall: MotorStorm 2

Jeff Rubenstein — Wed, 12 Mar 2008 17:44:27 GMT

You may have wondered what that counter was ticking down to on top of Threespeech, or read bits of information on sites like on Eurogamer, or recently dropped by IGN for the video reveal - but here’s the news in its entirety: MotorStorm 2 is coming this fall.

The MotorStorm style of anything-goes racing is moving from the mountainous desert to a lush Pacific island, replete with thick swamps, dense jungle, towering peaks and steaming volcanoes. You’ll be rampaging through thick mud, tangled undergrowth, swift flowing rivers, and searing lava pools of this new location with all of the vehicles familiar to players of the first MotorStorm: ATVs, rally cars, buggies, motorbikes, race trucks, mudpluggers and Big Rigs. Joining the cast is the new monster truck class, likely to become a fan favorite (check out the video below).

It’s still a bit early, but here’s what we can confirm as far as features are concerned: 16 new multi-route tracks, 16 players can race head-to-head online, and a hugely requested feature hits MotorStorm: 4-player split-screen mode.

We’ll have more updates as MotorStorm 2 nears release, but in the meantime, take a look at the new environments and new monster truck in this just-released trailer.

Permanent Vacation: two PCs endlessly bouncing vacation autoresponders to each other

Cory Doctorow — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 19:56:18 GMT

Cory Arcangel (a great electronic artist whose previous achievements include the infamous modded Super Mario cartridge with everything but the clouds removed) has a new piece up: Permanent Vacation in which "two unattended computers send endlessly bouncing out-of-office auto-responses to each other." Link

strip for March / 27 / 2008

Thu, 27 Mar 2008 07:00:00 GMT

BlackBerry Guide for Power Users - Do More With Your BlackBerry

Amit Agarwal — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 10:22:22 GMT

A BlackBerry smartphone definitely makes you more productive but there’s a small learning curve involved.

If you don’t have the time to read manuals, here’s a quick overview of some great time-saving features, tips and lesser known keyboard shortcuts that will help you do things quickly and more efficiently with your BlackBerry.

BlackBerry Guide for Power Users - Take full advantage of your BlackBerry smartphone.

Close vs Escape - If you are running a browser or playing a game in your BlackBerry and press the "End Call" key, the application does not get closed but is merely hidden from your view. Too many open applications will soon slow down your BlackBerry so make it a habit to close, not escape.

See What’s Running - To see a list of all open applications in your Blackberry, press the ALT key followed by Escape. It’s pretty much like doing an Alt+Tab in Windows to help you navigate through open applications or switch from one application to another.

Save Web Pages - When you come across an interesting webpage but have no time reading it, you would normally send a link of that page as an email to yourself. To save time, simply open the menu of your BlackBerry internet browser and select “Save Page” – that page will be added to your message list just like other emails. This is like a built-in clipping tool.

Type URLs and Email Addresses Quickly - When typing a web address (URL) in the Blackberry browser, type a space and it is written as a dot. To insert a slash(/), use Shift+Space. When typing email addresses, your first space is recognized as @ while subsequent spaces are recognized as dots. So labnol google co uk will be written as labnol@google.co.uk.

Delete Your Emails – If you are looking to clean your BlackBerry Inbox, press the CAPS key and scroll UP or DOWN using the wheel to select the email messages that you want to delete. If you want to completely clear the Inbox, press t in the Message view to move to the top and select “Delete Prior” – this will delete all your BlackBerry emails.

Signal Strength – While your BlackBerry will display the current signal strength as bars on the homescreen, hold down the ALT key and type NMLL – the bars will convert into real numbers indicating the exact strength in that area. Repeat the same keystrokes to switch to bar mode again.

Multiple Email Signatures – By default, BlackBerry will append a text signature to all your outgoing email messages that you have set through the BlackBerry Internet Services portal. If you like more personalized signatures, compose a new email message in your BlackBerry, go to “Edit Auto-Text” and set up multiple entries corresponding to your different signatures.

BlackBerry Clipboard – If you are looking to copy text from an email message and save that as a note, position your cursor in the email, hold the Shift key (left Caps) and roll the trackwheel. When you are done selecting, click the trackwheel to put that selection onto the clipboard. BlackBerry Internet Explorer has a special Select Mode to help you copy-paste text from web pages.

Convert Case without the CAPS key – When writing an email message, hold down the key of any letter for a slightly longer duration and it will automatically turn into a capital letter. To type an accent or a special character (like a => à), hold the letter key and roll the trackwheel.

Stop Receiving Sent Emails - Every time you send an email from BlackBerry, you get a copy in your Inbox. To prevent this, setup a BlackBerry Filter.

Web Applications – Blackberry software like Twitter, Facebook, Gmail, Yahoo! Go, Google Talk, NewsGator, Picasa, etc. offer great experiences but they could drain the battery of your BlackBerry since these applications are constantly checking for updates in the background.

You may therefore want to switch to “manual updates” especially when running low on battery.

HTML Email - The current BlackBerry OS supports only text emails but the good news is the BlackBerry OS 4.5, due in few months, will support HTML email, YouTube and editing of Microsoft Office documents. Until then, you can buy the BlackBerry email viewers either from BSmart or Empower.

Erase Everything - If you are looking to sell your Blackberry phone or planning to exchange an old model with an upcoming version (like the BlackBerry 9000), it is a good idea to completely erase all your BlackBerry data. For that, go to Options -> Security Options -> General Settings and choose “Wipe Handheld” from the menu.

Prolong the Battery Life – You can set BlackBerry to completely shut down at a specific time and it will automatically wake up with the alarm (or any other time) - note that you won’t be able to receive phone calls when the phone is switched off so don’t turn off the device too early. Some more tips on improving the life of your BlackBerry Battery.

Move Around Web Pages Quickly - If you are reading a long (or very wide) web page, switch to the Page View mode that shows a view of the full website - use the scrollwheel to quickly navigate to any other area.

BlackBerry Resources - To download free BlackBerry software, games, ringtones and themes, go to Built For BlackBerry, Blackberry Owners Lounge or their Mobile Portal.

Screen Capture - There’s no inbuilt screen capture application in a BlackBerry so I use Mobiola Screen Capture that can capture still images as well as a video of your BlackBerry activity. Another option is SnapScreen that is cheaper but offers only still screenshots. The BlackBerry developers toolkit also has a screenshot application that you can have for free.

BlackBerry Blogs - Some BlackBerry blogs worth checking out are CrackBerry, Rimarkable, BoyGenius, BlackBerry Geeks, AllBlackBerry and BlackBerry Cool. If you like to know about Hollywood celebrities that carry BlackBerry phones, go to BlackBerry Sightings.

Got a Problem - If you have a question or problem related to BlackBerry, you can seek help from the Official forums or the more popular CrackBerry Forums. You can also search their technical center for additional support.

Related: How to Fix a Wet BlackBerry

BlackBerry Guide for Power Users - Do More With Your BlackBerry - Digital Inspiration | FAQ | RSS

Inspiration: Small Parisian Garden Shed Apartment

aaron (nobody@example.com) — Fri, 25 Apr 2008 16:00:00 GMT

This dwelling was created in a backyard shed for use by a teenager. The structure, divided into four stories, is both extremely small and undeniably cool. Made entirely of birch plywood, the interior is unified while still creating unique spaces for sleeping, living, and studying (and there's a bathroom, too!)...

Designed by H2O Architects, almost everything is built-in — storage, seating and work surfaces. In a space this small and intimate, the great number of open stairs double as seating! We thought the models and diagrams best described the space, but for more pictures, see materialicio.us and the photography portfolio of Stephane Chalmeau. When can we move in? Via: materialicio.us. (Pics: Stephane Chalmeau)

The Geek Beat: Relax, Don't Do It

Elisabeth Rappe — Tue, 08 Apr 2008 13:02:00 GMT

Filed under: Sci-Fi & Fantasy, Fandom, Comic/Superhero/Geek, The Geek Beat

Geeks are a passionate lot. It's what defines us, really. Actually, I don't think we're any more obsessive about things than anyone else. Lots of people are obsessed with football or NASCAR, and they're not snubbed nearly as much as those of us who follow film, Batman comics or sci-fi shows. But you know, geek passion has a darker side. I guess all obsession does (I've yelled plenty at a hockey game) but there's just something about the way we nerds can get. I'm reminded of this any time Zack Snyder releases something about Watchmen.

Now, I dug Watchmen. The sucker punch of an ending, the horror of the Black Freighter, the loneliness of Doc Manhattan - there's nothing I can say that hasn't already been said by the likes of TIME Magazine. Of course, I view a movie adaptation with a bit of trepidation, but after Lord of the Rings, I don't think anything is truly unfilmable.

But the fandom is wearing me out. I have many friends who love the graphic novel, and I practically dread any news release because it causes such a flurry of panic and disgust among them. The character stills, which I found promising and exciting, were met with not only skepticism, but weeks of pondering. Why were the stills photoshopped? Why were the actors so young? Why were they posed in action shots? On and on it went, my own casual theories - maybe they were just having fun, maybe these are from the heyday of the heroes - dismissed. No, couldn't be! It was simply that Snyder had messed up, end of story, and the movie was doomed.

Gallery: Watchmen

Continue reading The Geek Beat: Relax, Don't Do It

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$50 An Hour Professional Panhandler.

Aleki — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 23:22:59 GMT

Ever wonder what happens to your money when you give it to a panhandler? I’ve stopped giving money to anyone on the street. I know this is something that has been debated here on Neatorama before. I’ve just decided to give money to charities that are equipped to help out the homeless. It’s sad that someone would abuse the generosity of others in such a way as this.

Google Video Billboard Ad

Alex — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 16:32:17 GMT

To advertise its Google Video service in Germany, the giant Internet company put up a "see-through" billboard made like a Google Video window and then filmed the way people interact with it.

Hit play or go to Link [YouTube] - via AdFreak

And am I the only one who noticed the irony of this clip being on YouTube (also owned by Google)?

For Better or Worse - 28 April 2008

Lynn Johnston — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 07:03:07 GMT

James Brown and Luciano Pavarotti

Adam Stanhope — Thu, 01 May 2008 12:59:32 GMT

I was fascinated by this collaborative performance of “Man’s World.” I guess I’m not the only one, because the YouTube video has 3+ million views on it. The performance must have been fairly recent, because both of them look like the reanimated dead. I waited in line for a day in 1988 to see Mao’s pickled corpse in Tiananmen Square and frankly he looked like he was in better shape after 12 years under glass than these two look under the stage lights. An electrifying performance, regardless! YouTube.