Category: Entertainment

Attention viral video shoppers! Check out this nifty Dan Maas Mars Pathfinder animation, set to NIN’s “Sunspots,” which has been making the e-rounds. To paraphrase one YouTuber: “Rocket fuel and NIN. What’s not to like?”

Thanks, Jay!

The Machinima talk show This Spartan Life, which takes place in the Halo game world, gets my vote for one of the few videoblogs that doesn’t suck. I think it’s genius, in fact. Why doesn’t TiVo feed THIS to my boob tube and not that dreadful Rocketboom? Oh, wait, I think boobs have something to do with it.

Anyhoo, this episode of Spartan Life is basically a clever public service announcement about Network Neutrality. If you have no idea what that is, watch the show, read this Boing Boing piece and then check out the SavetheInternet.com petition.

A user on the Tivocommunity forums discovered an undocumented feature in the latest release of TiVo Desktop for the Mac (1.9.3). If you add a line of code in the OS X Terminal program, you can get videos on your Mac to show up on your Now Playing list on your networked TiVo. Cool! Details of how to do it in the discussion topic linked above.

[Via PVRBlog]

Now that Nate (and his game designer pals) has a brainiac game award under his belt, he’s on to his next bright idea. It’s a game of change called Condoleeza Dice, ’cause “Diplomacy is Random.”

Nate’s kicking around different ideas for the game and has created a blog to develop in the open. So stop by, share your thoughts, and watch a game take shape, from brainstorm to marketplace. Right now, he’s looking for an artist to do the second iteration of the dice art.

The New York Times reports today that the judge who recently ruled on the Da Vinci Code lawsuit buried his own little code in the actual opinion — until now barely noticed and apparently still unsolved. So subtle was the code that the judge actually had to drop hints about how to start unraveling the thread by looking at certain portions of the opinion that were in a different typeface.

Check the full text of the opinion to figure out the code on your own!

Street Tech Senior Editor Nate Heasley’s boardgame Wits and Wagers has been selected as a winner of the Mensa Select Mind Games prize for 2006! The game, which involves betting on answers to trivia questions, was co-developed by Nate, along with Dominic and Satish of North Star Games. Rumor has it they still won’t let Nate into the high-IQ society, but we’re putting him through a routine of Soduko and Tangrams to improve his scores.

[Editor’s Note: Congrats to Nate from all your pals at Street Tech. It couldn’t have happened to a bigger High Dome!]

Nyko, which seems to make a lot of game and mobile accessories that get our attention, has come out with a kit that allows you to create your own Xbox 360 faceplates. The kit (US$19.99) comes with 6 pre-printed faceplate skins, 15 blank skins, and a clear overplate to house the skins. I haven’t seen too many teen’s game boxes (or many adult’s for that matter) that aren’t festooned with stickers and other personal totems, so this seems like a cool way to individualize the look of ye ol’ frag box.

Making fun of botched Microsoft demos is like shooting fish in a barrel. But given the bluster and bravado of the carp in question, shooting them never seems to lose its appeal. The Korean Times is reporting that, at a recent Samsung show-off of their new Q1 Origami device, MS, Samsung, and Intel execs ALL stumbled and fumbled with the Microsoft-powered ultra-portable. First a Samsung veep couldn’t get passed the second page of the Powerpoint presentation on his Q1, then the device’s battery gave up the ghost after only minutes of operation (it’s rated at 2-3 hours). Then the President of MS Korea couldn’t even launch Powerpoint on his unit, and once he did, it failed him so badly he had to cut his presentation short.

But wait, there’s more! Then the CEO of Intel Korea whipped out his Origami, to save the demo, but had similar problems, as he and nervous underlings struggled to rope-start his presentation.

The Samsung Q1 will go on sale next month in Korea and will set you back US$1200, ya know, if you don’t factor in the cost of downtime, crashes, and calling other people in to help you troubleshoot countless software glitches.

[Via vnunet]

Thanks, Jay!

We’ve chronicled some of wacky side of USB connectivity here on Street Tech. Manufacturers seem to be pushing the limits of what can be plugged into this “universal” technology. So where to next? How about off the deep end? That’s where you’ll find “universal connections,” a German art exhibition of everyday objects plugged into the virtual world via the now ubiquitous USB connector.

I think I might actually want to make a thumb drive with the USB syringe, designed for “data junkies” and for use “in the event of a virus.” Hell, now that I think of it, that tie looks pretty geek big-pimpin’ too.

This one for fans of Japanese WTF? It appears to be a speaker made from a nano box. I’m assuming it’s a kit for transforming your own expensive MP3 packaging into a speaker? A Google translation offers such Dada poetry as: “It stops biting, (the paper sounds) the speaker” (That’s the NAME of the product, BTW. Catchy.)

Thanks, Jay!