WARNING: Reduce speaker volume before playing
As a child, I don’t think I ever freaked out that much over a game console. After a few seconds of apparent indifference, this kid nearly succeeded in busting my eardrums when he started screaming. He almost tops the N64 kid’s performance that dates back a few years… almost, but not quite! I’ll let you judge for yourself:
With more than 4.2 million page views, 2008 has been an amazing year for us. In fact, it’s been the best one since the blog’s inauguration back in 2005. Some of our most popular stories ever have been published in the last year, and in case you weren’t around back then, here are the top 10 most viewed ones for 2008.
1- HOW TO: Cheap Wireless For Your Xbox 360 – 289857 views
2- Accused Music Pirate Turns the Tables on the RIAA – 109622 views
3- 12 Reasons Why a Geek Will Steal Your Girlfriend in 2008 – 99622 views
4- Unbelievable Google Suggestion – 92726 views
5- Cell Phone Spying: Is Your Life Being Monitored? – 91928 views
6- HOW TO: Delete an Undeletable or Locked File – 89414 views
7- The 10 Hottest New Tech Toys for Summer – 71872 views
8- World’s First Digital Camera – 62753 views
9- Amazing Geek Toy: The Van De Graaff Levitation Wand – 54889 views
10- 10 Must-Read Books for Geeks – 47238 views
By Casey Lynn
Contributing Writer, [GAS]
Lake Superior State University has issued its 34th annual List of Words to Be Banished from the Queen’s English for Mis-use, Over-use and General Uselessness. Nominations for the list come from the general public, through the university’s website. The targets are generally “pet peeves from everyday speech, as well as from the news, education, technology, advertising, politics, sports and more.”
This year’s list was obviously influenced by the media saturation of the election, including words like “maverick,” “bailout,” and “carbon footprint.”
However, this year there’s actually an emoticon on the list: <3. What, no texting/instant messaging love? One of the nominators suggested, “Just say the word instead of making me turn my head sideways and wondering what ‘less than three’ means.”
I don’t care what the list says; I still less than three emoticons.
By Jimmy Rogers
Contributing Writer, [GAS]
It appears that once again, the Land of the Rising Sun has taken something completely normal and made it into hot anime chicks. This phenomenon is called “Moe” and it actually means taking inanimate objects and making them into female characters. In this case, it sort of makes sense because it’s intended to help you learn The Periodic Table of Elements.
What better to make you remember Sodium than a sexy girl baking bread? Ok, so maybe that one doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but you get the point. Normally the elements are hard to mentally characterize, especially as you climb to the higher numbers. Give each one a little “personality” and voila, you’ve got yourself a boobtastic mnemonic.
Magnesium here seems to have more than a little of that personality. I guess you can remember that the element is very reactive when burned? Anyway, each page has extra info about the elements and who discovered them. What will they think of next?
The book, by the way, is called Genso Shuki Moete Oboeru Kagaku no Kihon, and it retails for $30 at HimeyaShop.com.
[Akiba Blog via techyum]
Beginning around midnight last night Pacific time (2008-12-31), 30GB Zunes everywhere started freezing at their boot screens, with the progress bars ironically at 100%. Zunes that were in use at that time spontaneously rebooted in order to get to that frozen state. Obviously, this was due to a disturbance in the force, emanating from Cupertino.
OK, maybe not. Users are calling this event Z2K9, because of its proximity to the beginning of the new year — but it’s unlikely to be related to the calendar rollover, because Microsoft never releases anything ahead of schedule. However, a relationship with the calendar is not out of the question. One commenter on Gizmodo suggested that it might be related to the fact that today is the 366th day of the year (due to the leap year), and that the Zune’s firmware may not have accounted for that. The problem only seems to affect 30GB Zunes running later versions of the firmware.
Users have found that the problem can be corrected by disconnecting and reconnecting the battery and hard drive. However, this could endanger your warranty or possibly invalidate some sort of permanent fix from Microsoft.
The Zune support site reports the following status (11AM PST):
Customers with 30gb Zune devices may experience issues when booting their Zune hardware. We’re aware of the problem and are working to correct it. The Zune Social might be slow or inaccessible. Sorry for the inconvenience, and thanks for your patience!
“Issues” might be a bit of an understatement.
You may not have heard of the company, but among audio- and videophiles “in the know,” Oppo, a Chinese manufacturer, reigns as a “best bargain” champ among very high-performance disc-player brands. The company makes a noted effort to include high-quality parts and better-than-usual engineering designs to maximize both audio and video quality, plus, uses extensive beta-testing and consumer feedback to continually improve its designs—all at rock-bottom prices. So, A/V geeks are excited about Oppo’s first Blu-ray player, the BDP-83.
What’s really cool about the forthcoming player is that it also is one of the first universal Blu-ray players—not only compatible with DVDs and CDs, but also (as with Oppo’s other DVD players) with two effectively stillborn competing high-resolution audio formats from earlier this decade, DVD-Audio and Super Audio CD (SACD), that suffered a format war similar to the HD-DVD/Blu-ray war of the last few years (and fought by basically the same manufacturers…will they never learn?). So, there’s little the BDP-83 won’t play (namely the defunct HD-DVD hi-def format).
A couple of caveats: I have not reviewed the player, but am going on Oppo’s excellent reputation. And, the company has reported in an email to Sound and Vision’s Leslie Shapiro that at this stage in the BDP-83’s development, the player’s firmware currently only supports Blu-ray Profile 1.1, meaning some features of the Blu-ray spec will not be supported immediately out of the gate, such as some interactive and net-based features. Also, Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD Master Audio (both lossless, uncompressed audio formats in the Blu-ray spec) may not be supported via onboard decoding at launch, although these bitstreams will be outputted to your receiver or preamp/processor for decoding. However, the company promises a firmware update soon after launch to rectify these issues, and may offer a mind-blowing price at launch as an incentive for early-adopters who want to check out the interim feature set, knowing that these issues will be corrected via update in the near future. Look for the first incarnation of the player to land early in January in the $499-$599 range—easy to recommend assuming it’s a typically excellent Oppo product. Do check out the link above for more technical info. and the Oppo email.
Edit: The OPPO BDP-83 is now available for purchase on Amazon.com.
By Will Sullivan,
Contributing Writer, [GAS]
By Casey Lynn
Contributing Writer, [GAS]
Considering that many people spend almost as much time playing games like Halo and World of Warcraft as they do at work, love matches made in-game are only going to get more common. They may not have made our list of geeky proposals, but Desirai Labrada and John Henry not only met over the dulcet sounds of n00bs being fragged, but they’re having a Halo-themed wedding.
Gizmodo has completed their Go Miniman Go video contest to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the Lego minifig. This clever video, Train To Catch took first place, and a Lego Galaxy Explorer goes to creator David Boddy. The top five entries are posted at the site, all worth a watch.
By Jimmy Rogers
Contributing Writer, [GAS]
While there are a lot of “link shrinkers” and “URL shorteners” out there, this one caught my eye. Adjix is a link shortening service that has the added benefits of tracking and monetization.
Back in the early days of TinyURL and its ilk, shortening a link was a fairly click-heavy, but necessary process for many people. You could insert your long link for an eBay listing or something similar and voila: the service would provide you with a shortened version, usually no longer than 20 characters.
Things have progressed over the last few years. Link shortening has become so incredibly important in the world of microblogging (Twitter, Plurk, etc.) that many sites have it built right into the update entry box. Many, many TinyURL clones have popped up as well, each not much different from the other. Some have begun to offer tracking of your links, but Adjix really takes it to another level.
When you sign up for Adjix (which is not at all necessary to just use it as a link shrinker), you have the opportunity to select “Linker” or “Advertiser.” Let us not concern ourselves with the latter category except to note its existance. If you want to advertise with Adjix, their Advertiser section is quite easy to understand.
Once you have chosen Linker and filled in your vital statistics, you’ll be presented with a user control panel from which to change your preferences and such. This part appears to be fairly early in its development, so let’s focus on the core features. The first thing you should do is take a link and shrink it. This can be done in several ways.
The easiest way to shrink a link is to go to the front page (make sure your email address is showing below the box so the link will get tracked) and enter your long URL. When you do this, you will be asked if you want no ad, a random ad, or an ad from a specific category. These are not ads to keep the service free…they are actually ads that will directly pay out to you.
Getting back to the links, they shorten to something like: http://adjix.com/XXXX. You can then place these links in emails, documents, Twitter tweets, and just about anywhere else you want them. They’re also great for flyers and such because they are easy to transcribe back into a URL. You can track the number of people who have clicked your links on the Adjix backend I mentioned earlier.
To really understand the tracking, you need to also understand the advertising. The pictured tracking window shows a link (which obviously wasn’t very popular) to a blog post I wrote. A small ad is displayed in banner form above the page that one links to and stays there, even when scrolling up and down. After trying it out, I don’t think it is too much of a nuisance and if you are catering to a fairly normal audience, they probably won’t notice or care.
The ad payout is as follows (though I assume this is subject to Adjix’s discretion):
While it may not seem like a whole lot, if you built Adjix into your normal link shinking habits, it could build up over time. Also, if nothing else, it’s fun to be able to see who’s doing what with your links. Every link has deeper tracking so you can see the activity for individual users clicking your links.
Adjix makes it relatively easy to integrate their service into your digital life. There are quite a few bookmarklets available.
Overall, I think Adjix could have a bright future ahead of it. For me, I really need some automatic integration with some of the Twitter services, but aside from that, I really can’t find any fault in their application.
What’s your favorite link shrinker? Are you tempted to switch?
Built out of a Bioloid Humanoid Robotics kit, this amazing Humvee transformer robot can actually transform from its initial truck form into a fully functional, badass-looking robot.
Not an average robot kit, the Bioloid Comprehensive Kit from Robotis allows you to build and configure over 26 robots! The Bioloid Robot Kits from Robotis are the first educational robot kit based around “smart serially controlled servos” which are not only capable of switching between positioning and full continuous rotation, but also provides you with access to sensory feedback such as position, speed, temperature, current draw and voltage of each servo. Bioloid kits are designed in a way that allow the user to construct multiple types of robots. In addition to the great hardware, the Bioloid Kit comes with some powerful GUI-based software. The software is freeware, so whether you’re using this kit for education, research, or personal recreation, you can download and install it on as many computers as you need. Bioloid Robot Kits are perfect for Education, Hobbies, Research and Competition.
[Via TechEblog]