Is it weird that I love old typewriters?

The first story I ever wrote was about a pur­ple pen­guin named Flippy who was dif­fer­ent from all the other pen­guins because he was pur­ple, you see. Look, I was five, what do you want from me?

I did it on this typewriter:

This is an Under­wood Rhythm Touch De Luxe model from 1949 (the only rea­son I know that is because I did some Googling and found this vin­tage adver­tise­ment  for one) that used to reside in my grandmother’s old house. When I was lit­tle, I used to get dropped off there before school with noth­ing to do but find ways to keep myself enter­tained all day. One of them was this typewriter.

It weighs some­where in the neigh­bor­hood of HOLY SHIT and METRIC FUCK TON and it’s faster to watch paint dry than it is to actu­ally type on the darn thing, but I’m sure back when Tru­man was pres­i­dent this was a pretty sophis­ti­cated piece of tech­nol­ogy. Just don’t ever drop it on your foot, or you’ll no longer have one.

Typ­ing on it the same way we do our mod­ern com­puter key­boards is impos­si­ble as every key punch requires near-mutant strength. I remem­ber hav­ing to  press down on each key with two fin­gers, and even then I wasn’t always suc­cess­ful, leav­ing only a faint out­line of illeg­i­ble ink where my let­ter was sup­posed to go.

The keys would also fre­quently jam up and I’d have to reach my fin­gers into the machine’s guts to un-stick them, get­ting ink all over me in the process. It was all worth it though, just to hear that glo­ri­ous clickety-clack sound. The only thing bet­ter was when you reached the edge of the page and got the hard car­riage return, result­ing in a cheer­ful “ding!” Call me old school, but I like tech­nol­ogy that rewards you with bells for your hard work. Not that I was writ­ing the great Amer­i­can novel at age five or anything–I mostly just liked to fid­dle with the var­i­ous levers, knobs and but­tons pro­trud­ing from all over this thing while pre­tend­ing I was doing some­thing important.

When my grandma got too old to take care of her­self and moved in with my par­ents, this type­writer was one of the few things I inher­ited from her estate–and by estate I mean a small rancher with an inte­rior like an episode of Hoard­ers . I’m glad she never got rid of this type­writer, though. I never both­ered to look up what it’s worth, but to me its price­less. I credit this hunk of iron with inspir­ing me to want to write, even if all I have to show for my “tal­ent” is this silly blog and a half-finished book I’ve never shown to any­one. One day…

What is it with old type­writ­ers and grandmas?

Here’s another old type­writer I inher­ited from a grand­mother, though not my own (my ex-boyfriend’s). It’s an elec­tric model Smith Corona “Coro­net Super 12″ from the 1970s that sur­pris­ingly still works.

I say sur­pris­ingly because when you plug this thing in it makes this god-awful hum­ming sound like you can hear the cur­rent flow­ing through its 40-year-old parts, caus­ing me to have seri­ous doubts about its elec­tri­cal safety. But know­ing it could burst into flames at any moment makes typ­ing on the Super 12 all the more fun.

Plus, I just love the color. When’s the last time you saw elec­tron­ics in robin’s egg blue?

I like toy type­writ­ers, too.

As it turns out, my affin­ity for type­writ­ers goes deeper than I thought. Appar­ently this was one of my favorite baby toys:

So much so that my par­ents have held onto it for 30 years. I recov­ered it last week­end when I went search­ing for child­hood trea­sures over at their house and was delighted to see it still works, even though it’s kind of beaten up. There’s a crank you can turn to scroll through the dif­fer­ent words–bears, cats, and apple. The but­tons make a great “ding!” sound when you press them, and col­ored ham­mers strike the cylin­der, which turns slowly as you “type.” It’s a lit­tle less sophis­ti­cated than the Under­wood and Super 12, obviously.

Ninja Turtle-izing my iPhone 5

So, I just got a shiny new iPhone 5 (I know, I never thought it would come to this , either) and it was look­ing rather naked, so my imme­di­ate goal was to trans­form it into the most Ninja Turtle-iest phone possible.

Until they come out with real  T-phones  ( and not this plas­tic piece of crap  which doesn’t even use the real voice actors), or at the very least, some kind of cool case that trans­forms your iPhone into a Shell­Cell, I have to set­tle for the next best thing.

Nick Tur­tles iPod 5 Case

This case is meant for an iPod 5, not an iPhone 5, but dammit, it’s the only offi­cial Nick­elodeon TMNT case that exists, which means I HAD TO HAVE IT. I asked around on Twit­ter to see if any­one knew if iPod 5 cases would fit iPhone 5, and ya’ll gave me some ter­ri­ble advice because this thing totally fits my iPhone 5, and pretty snugly at that. I’m glad I decided to ignore you and go with my gut. At Toys ‘R Us this thing costs  $19.99 and doesn’t count as elec­tron­ics, which means the 90-day return pol­icy still applies, even for open items. You can tell I really took a big risk here.

The iPod 5 case fits my iPhone 5 sur­pris­ingly snugly, how­ever the iPhone is a tad thicker than the iPod, so there is about 1.5mm of exposed hard­ware. But I don’t care because OMG NINJA TURTLES!

T-Phone Ringtone

Next order of busi­ness was to cus­tomize the ring­tone. A TMNT fan over at the Techn­odrome Forums had the good sense to upload an MP3 of the exact T-Phone ring­tone that’s used in the Nick­elodeon show, which can be heard when­ever the Tur­tles call each other. You can down­load it from File­Drop­per right here .

Here’s what it sounds like:

Nick­Tur­tles Wallpaper

And lastly, I needed some iPhone 5-sized (640 x 1136) wall­pa­per. Sur­pris­ingly, I couldn’t find any offi­cial TMNT iPhone wall­pa­per online, and as far as 5 min­utes of Google-searching tells me, nobody has both­ered to make any. So I had to get cre­ative and make my own. I made two designs–one for the home screen, and one for the lock screen.

Feel free to down­load these and use on your iPhone 5.

(Click to enlarge)

(Click to enlarge)

Bonus! Booy­akasha Ringtone

One of my Twit­ter bud­dies and fel­low TMNT fans, Justin Edwards ( @DUSTINDUSTRIES ), made an awe­some “BOOYAKASHA!” ring­tone for me, which I uploaded to SoundCloud:

You can down­load it here: Booy­akasha! Ring­tone

Thanks Justin!

Fun with PowerUp, the 8-bit & 16-bit Retro Camera App

I’m a sucker for cool cam­era apps, espe­cially the kind that will pixel-fy every­thing you shoot so that it looks like it belongs in an 8-bit (or 16-bit) video game. That’s what this new iOS app called PowerUp does.

Fea­tur­ing the lat­est in Blast Pro­cess­ing Tech­nol­ogy, PowerUp fil­ters your cam­era in real-time so that you can take pho­tos using the same res­o­lu­tion and color palette as your favorite retro video game sys­tems!

The app costs $1.99 and comes with four dif­fer­ent cam­era fil­ters that emu­late clas­sic retro video game systems–NES, Sega Gen­e­sis, Sega Mas­ter Sys­tem, and Turbo Graphx 16. Here’s what they look like:

Nin­tendo Enter­tain­ment System

Sega Genesis

Turbo Graphx 16

Sega Mas­ter System

I KNOW, I’m much more attrac­tive as an unin­tel­li­gi­ble blur of pix­els. Can you tell what I’m doing in this one?

10 Tips to Avoid Getting Burned by Kickstarter

(Look at me, writ­ing some­thing semi-useful for a change! )

Accord­ing to  sta­tis­tics just released today ‚ 2012 saw 2,241,475 peo­ple pledge $319,786,629 to fund 18,109 projects. That’s a stag­ger­ing amount of money mov­ing through a crowd­fund­ing plat­form that’s still rel­a­tively new and not fully matured. As you might expect with that kind of vol­ume, a large amount of projects aren’t suc­cess­ful. It’s dis­ap­point­ing for every­one involved when this hap­pens, but at least pledges are returned safely to backers.

But what about those projects which  are successfully-funded but, for some rea­son or another, never see the light of day? Scams, fail­ures, frauds, mis­man­aged funds or what­ever you want to call them–they’re the “suc­cess­ful” projects peo­ple have pledged their hard-earned money to only for noth­ing to ever mate­ri­al­ize. Over the past year I’ve seen sev­eral notable cases (like this one and most notably  this one ) of these phan­tom Kick­starter projects mak­ing the news–one of which I even pledged to (more on that in a bit–see #8).

As some­one who has backed over a dozen projects on Kick­starter rang­ing any­where from $1 to over $250–some of which were suc­cess­ful, a few which were not so lucky–I feel I’m at least mod­er­ately qual­i­fied to dis­pense a few pieces of advice about how to be smarter about man­ag­ing your pledges and avoid get­ting burned.

1. Be aware of the risks up front and under­stand what you’re really get­ting into.

There’s this gross mis­con­cep­tion that Kick­starter is like a store where you can pre-order goods that you’re guar­an­teed to get. This could not be fur­ther from the truth. Your Kick­starter pledge is more like an invest­ment. You are invest­ing money in a project you believe in but there’s no guar­an­tee you’ll get a return. Kick­starter is just the mid­dle man who pro­vides the fund­ing plat­form, and they are not oblig­ated in any way to reim­burse you if the project doesn’t deliver. I rec­om­mend read­ing this arti­cle for a bet­ter under­stand­ing of how Kick­starter works and what risks you, the backer, assume when you pledge money to a project.

2. Pay atten­tion to those “esti­mated deliv­ery” dates.

They’re just that–an esti­ma­tion. You can save your­self a lot of grief and heartache if you treat them as such. In fact, I would advise you to expect delays, because in my expe­ri­ence, it’s rare that suc­cess­ful Kick­starter projects are able to deliver on time. Again, this is part of that whole “under­stand what you’re really get­ting into” point I men­tioned above. If you’re really pas­sion­ate about a project, delays are for­giv­able if they mean end­ing up with a bet­ter fin­ished prod­uct. Most back­ers under­stand this and sup­port projects regardless.

3. Stick with what you know.

I’ve found the “safest” projects to pledge money to are those whose cre­ators have a proven track record of suc­cess­fully deliv­er­ing a sim­i­lar prod­uct, or projects Kick­started by peo­ple I know, whether through a friend or even a friend of a friend. Two exam­ples that come to mind for me: I donated to Jane Jensen’s Pinker­ton Road project because I’m famil­iar with Jane’s work as a game designer and I know she’s capa­ble of pro­duc­ing a qual­ity game based on her vet­eran indus­try sta­tus, accom­plish­ments, and pre­vi­ous work. I also donated to Strange Kid Comix mag­a­zine because sev­eral of my friends in the blo­gos­phere con­tributed arti­cles and had a vested inter­est in see­ing the mag­a­zine pub­lished. Which brings me to my next point…

4. Size up the sit­u­a­tion and adjust your pledges accordingly.

Rather than blindly giv­ing your money away, take the time to really inves­ti­gate the peo­ple you’re back­ing. Do some research. Ques­tion their motives. Com­pare the the amount of money they’re ask­ing for with the scope of the project–does it seem unre­al­is­tic? Sus­pi­ciously greedy? Treat the sit­u­a­tion as you would an invest­ment. If some­thing doesn’t seem to add up or rubs you the wrong way but you still think it’s a cool project and want to sup­port it, lower your pledge–or don’t pledge at all! Even though there’s tiered pledge amounts, there’s no rule that says you have to pledge at those amounts. How about only pledg­ing $1?

Here’s a good case study: I only donated $5 to a game called Haunts: The Manse Macabre because I wasn’t famil­iar with the devel­op­ers and their Kick­starter pre­sen­ta­tion didn’t seem as pol­ished or pro­fes­sional as other games I’ve pledged. And thank good­ness for that because this project DID end up being one of the ones that fell apart after being suc­cess­fully funded . The lead devel­oper quit, the money well ran dry, and now the project owner is scram­bling to res­ur­rect the game with vol­un­teer help from the open-source com­mu­nity. I really don’t care about los­ing that five bucks. It was a very tiny risk I took based on my assess­ment of the project. I’m happy to con­sider it a dona­tion toward…whatever this game becomes. But I imag­ine I’d be pretty ticked if it was some­thing like $25 or more.

And that’s a great segue into my next point…

5. Just because a Kick­starter project was suc­cess­ful doesn’t mean you’ll get any­thing from it.

With Kick­starter, you have to keep in mind there are no guar­an­tees. You, the backer, assume all of the risk when donat­ing to Kick­starter projects. Sure, Kickstarter’s terms of ser­vice may state that project own­ers are legally required to make good on their pledge rewards–but those are just words that exist solely to pro­vide a legal recourse for back­ers. If that sit­u­a­tion ever does arise, you’re the one respon­si­ble for pur­su­ing legal action. And would legal costs really be worth it com­pared to the mea­ger amount you pledged?

6. Keep close tabs on the projects you’re backing.

Don’t just pledge money to a project and then do noth­ing but wait around until it’s funded (or fails). Keep a close eye on the projects you’re back­ing. Read all of the updates. Be active in the com­mu­nity. Mon­i­tor the sit­u­a­tion with a crit­i­cal eye. If things look like they’re start­ing to go south for any rea­son, the things you’re hear­ing from the cre­ator don’t seem trust­wor­thy, or you just get a bad feel­ing about any­thing, you can always pull out (see #7).

7. Remem­ber: you have the power to with­draw your pledge!

Once you’ve backed a project you are under no oblig­a­tion to con­tinue back­ing it. Kick­starter does not remove any money from your account until the time runs out on the project’s fund­ing period after achiev­ing “Suc­cess­fully Funded” sta­tus. Just remem­ber that you can pull your pledge at any time while the project is still active.

8. Most prob­lems can be resolved through effec­tive communication.

Is the project you pledged late on deliv­er­ing what was promised? Did you receive the wrong reward? Usu­ally these kinds of issues can be resolved through com­mu­ni­cat­ing directly with the project cre­ator, using Kickstarter’s built-in com­mu­ni­ca­tion tools, com­ment sys­tem, or get­ting in touch with project own­ers out­side of Kick­starter. I always check to see if the peo­ple I’m back­ing pro­vide a means of con­tact­ing them  out­side  of Kick­starter, such as through email, social media, or a web­site. I feel bet­ter hav­ing that extra layer of legit­i­macy, know­ing I can con­tact them via another chan­nel if I ever need to.  Back­ers who pledged the Fairy Quest project, for exam­ple, expe­ri­enced extreme delays in receiv­ing the fin­ished prod­uct, due to a changeover in staff who was man­ag­ing the ship­ments, and a mail­ing data­base mix-up. After back­ers took to Kickstarter’s com­ments and mes­sage sys­tem, the project owner stepped in per­son­ally and was able to get every­thing sorted out and all the ship­ments on their way. There was no need for torches and pitchforks–just a lit­tle patience and communication.

9. Exer­cise your pow­ers as a backer.

Despite what it may seem, back­ers are not com­pletely pow­er­less. We have the power and col­lec­tive voice to hold project own­ers account­able. If some­thing about a project looks shady, speak up. Ask the hard ques­tions. Inter­act with other back­ers. Take advan­tage of Kickstarter’s com­mu­ni­ca­tion tools. Use social media to your advan­tage. Call it like you see it and share your opin­ions on Twit­ter, in the com­ment sec­tions of blogs pro­mot­ing the project, and other places where peo­ple are decid­ing to pledge their hard-earned money or not. One of the great things about this inter­net of ours is how judi­cious and demo­c­ra­tic it allows us to be with our sup­port and opinions.

10. Backer Beware.

This is kind of a reit­er­a­tion of my first point, but it’s worth stat­ing again, with a lit­tle more con­text. The larger Kick­starter grows, the more poten­tial for scams, mis­con­duct, and fraud­u­lent activ­ity. There’s also a huge gray area for projects that tech­ni­cally aren’t scams but make you stop and ques­tion the moti­va­tions and integrity of the project cre­ators. Now that Kick­starter has proven to be a viable and suc­cess­ful way to fund projects–especially for the gam­ing industry–I have the sneak­ing sus­pi­cion that more and more peo­ple are abus­ing it. I’ve seen game devel­op­ers using Kick­starter as an easy cash-grab even though they have other avenues of fund­ing avail­able to them. I’ve also seen cases where peo­ple are using Kick­starter to fund projects that are already com­plete and don’t need any more money–but that doesn’t stop them from jump­ing on the crowd­fund­ing band­wagon to pan­han­dle for some more. As should be the case with any trans­ac­tion involv­ing your money, keep your guard up, use good judge­ment and com­mon sense.

The Chinese Takeout Meal Wheel, Or Why My Twitter Friends Are Awesome

It started as an inno­cent, totally not seri­ous tweet:

I need a wheel I can spin that will decide what to order from Wok To Go.

— ShezCrafti (@shezcrafti) Decem­ber 12, 2012

See, there’s this Chi­nese place up the street called Wok To Go I order from all the time. No, I mean, like   all the time . We’re talk­ing 3–4 times a week, maybe more. I’ve stopped keep­ing track because I don’t like to think about how many pieces of shrimp toast I con­sume on a weekly basis, and also because I’m tread­ing dan­ger­ously into #forever­alone ter­ri­tory here. It’s cheap, fast, easy, and makes me feel a lit­tle dirty after­ward like an Asian hooker . Me so hun­gry! Not to men­tion it’s the best god­damn Chi­nese food within 25 miles AND they deliver late, and since I often don’t eat din­ner until after nine, it’s my kind of place. I have no idea what my mom’s cell phone num­ber is with­out look­ing at my phone, yet I know that Wok To Go’s num­ber is 410–838-1085. By heart.

Any­way, I tend to get in these food ruts where I order the same thing all the time–lately it’s Shrimp & Beef Szechuan–and thought it’d be more fun to let fate decide my next take­out meal, so that’s where that tweet came from. (I know, my tweets are SO IMPORTANT.) But I never expected any­one to like, you know, actu­ally make a wheel for me. But some­one totally did.

Ben Rol­lier , if I could give you a for­tune cookie right now, it would sim­ply say, “You’re awe­some.” LOOK AT THIS AWESOME THING HE MADE , you guys:

Ben made this on his lunch break. His lunch break! Do you know what I did on my lunch break today? NOTHING! Well, noth­ing besides eat lunch. The beauty part is that because all Chi­nese take­out menus are the same (for real, it’s like a sci­en­tific fact or some­thing), Ben’s app should work with your local Chi­nese and/or sushi dive. So yeah, Ben you totally get a Gold (Throw­ing) Star from me.

This is seri­ously the best thing that’s ever hap­pened to me…um, today . It’s going to com­pletely rev­o­lu­tion­ize my Chi­nese take­out con­sump­tion habits. What’s it going to be tonight, Wok To Go Wheel?? Shu­mai Steamed Dumplings? OKAY!

We should be teaching kids to be creators, not consumers.

If “Sissy’s Mag­i­cal Pony­corn Adven­ture” sounds like a game that was cre­ated by a five year old girl, that’s because it is. Well, her Dad helped too. Ryan Hen­son Creighton and his daugh­ter Cassie devel­oped a charm­ing lit­tle Flash-based game you can play right here for free that’s also avail­able on iOS  for $2.99. Cassie came up with the con­cept and drew all of the game’s art­work with crayons. You may have heard about it; it’s got­ten a lot of press.

I don’t expect you to rush off to play a game about “pony­corns” (unless you really want to, in which case I com­pletely under­stand), but my point in shar­ing this infor­ma­tion is so that you’ll under­stand why this same five year old girl and her dad just gave a very inspir­ing TED talk:

In it, Creighton argues that “we should be teach­ing kids to be cre­ators, not con­sumers.” Basi­cally, the more sim­pli­fied tech­nol­ogy becomes, the more it sim­pli­fies  us . And there are other issues too: Why aren’t we teach­ing kids pro­gram­ming in our schools? Why are our school system’s com­put­ers and soft­ware so anti­quated? Creighton’s vision of the future is one in which using com­put­ers for devel­op­ing games and other cre­ative out­lets is more acces­si­ble and eas­ier for every­one to learn, espe­cially chil­dren, and that these types of activ­i­ties are more encouraged.

This quote says it all:

When we see kids using tablet com­put­ers, we say “Oh my gosh, it’s so amaz­ing how well they’ve taken to tech­nol­ogy!” and we clap our hands together and we call them “dig­i­tal natives.” Folks, these devices have a touch-controlled inter­face and one but­ton. If we’re amazed our kids can use these devices, we’re not expect­ing enough of our kids.

Watch the video; it’s only about seven min­utes long. Be inspired.

Nick’s augmented reality TMNT app almost makes me want to shop at Walmart. Almost.

Nick­elodeon seems to be pulling out all the stops with their Teenage Mutant Ninja Tur­tles mar­ket­ing push. The lat­est is an aug­mented real­ity mobile app that will let you unlock exclu­sive TMNT con­tent and take pho­tos of your­self with the Turtles.

As a spe­cial offer to fans, Nick­elodeon and Wal­mart will launch a bilin­gual aug­mented real­ity (AR) App that uses cutting-edge tech­nol­ogy to make the Teenage Mutant Ninja Tur­tles come to life through­out the store through the customer’s mobile device — a first of its kind for Nickelodeon.

[via Busi­ness­week ]

But here’s the shitty part–it only works at Wal­mart. I nor­mally avoid Wal­mart at all costs because sav­ing 30 cents on cases of Pepsi isn’t worth the soul-sucking expe­ri­ence of going there, but a TMNT app like this could change my mind. Never mind that I’m 30 years old–I will stalk the toy aisle and the lit­tle boys’ cloth­ing depart­ment and I will do it proudly, dammit.

But don’t get too excited if you’re a TMNT fan in the U.S.–the app can only be acti­vated at Cana­dian Wal­mart stores.

The Tur­tles AR appli­ca­tion, which can only be acti­vated at Wal­mart Canada store loca­tions from Sep­tem­ber 20 — Sep­tem­ber 27, enables iPhone, iPad2/3, Android or tablet users to expe­ri­ence aug­mented real­ity through their device cam­era. Wal­mart cus­tomers are invited to visit stores and search for Tur­tles signs in the toy, apparel and enter­tain­ment depart­ments where they will help Splin­ter train each Tur­tle by unlock­ing their sig­na­ture ninja moves through the aug­mented real­ity app. Once fans unlock the sig­na­ture moves, they will have the oppor­tu­nity to meet a life-size Tur­tle through their device screen. Users can then pho­to­graph them­selves with the tur­tle and share the photo on Face­book, Twit­ter and email. The app also comes with an inter­ac­tive game and a unique photo-share fea­ture which enables users to cus­tomize their pho­tos with spe­cial Tur­tles badges.

Oh well. Maybe it’ll be a huge suc­cess in Cana­di­a­land and even­tu­ally come to the U.S.

Don’t for­get, the new  Teenage Mutant Ninja Tur­tles  show will be pre­mier­ing on Nick­elodeon Sat­ur­day, Sep­tem­ber 29th!

5 Things I Care About More than iPhone 5 Today

Apple is hold­ing a press con­fer­ence to unveil the new iPhone today, which means it’s a slow news day for every­one else who doesn’t give a shit.

Here are five things that are not iPhone 5 that I’m choos­ing to give my full, undi­vided atten­tion to:

#1 — The Release of ‘Dou­ble Dragon Neon’

Just released yes­ter­day, this newest Dou­ble Dragon game is the 1980’s-themed old school beat’em up I’ve been antic­i­pat­ing all sum­mer.  To pump myself up, I’ve been lis­ten­ing to the totally bitchin’ sound­track all day. As soon as I get home from work tonight I’ll be kick­ing ass and high-fiving anyone/anything that can be high-fived.

#2 — The Brand New ‘Wreck-It Ralph’ Trailer

#3 — The 25 Great­est Moments in TMNT History

Mark from TMNT Entity  recently posted a really fan­tas­tic two-part count­down of the “25 Great­est Moments in TMNT His­tory” over at Adven­tures in Poor Taste, com­plete with lots of images, quotes, anec­dotes, and Mark’s own per­sonal fan reac­tions. It’s quite lengthy but well worth the read. If you’re a Teenage Mutant Ninja Tur­tles fan or some­one who’s not as famil­iar with all the var­i­ous TMNT uni­verses and want to learn more, it’s a must-read. Here’s Part 1 and Part 2 .

#4 — This couch.

I want to say this is glo­ri­ous, but glo­ri­ous isn’t a strong enough word.

(Clin­tIsIce­Man via Tum­blr)

#5 — The World Trade Cen­ter in Movies

This won­der­ful site is a data­base of every movie the iconic twin tow­ers of the World Trade Cen­ter appears in, orga­nized by decade. For every movie listed, the site tells you where in the movie the WTC appears, and click­ing the links will show you a screen­shot. For exam­ple, the image above (if you haven’t rec­og­nized it already) is from the open­ing shot of the orig­i­nal Teenage Mutant Ninja Tur­tles movie from 1990.

How about you? Are you foam­ing at the mouth for every new tid­bit of Apple-related news today…or not?

I don’t NEED this ridiculously cute Toaster USB Hub, but I want it so bad!

I mean, just look at it.

This USB Toaster Hub and toast fam­ily is the lat­est evil prod­uct from ThinkGeek that I’m pretty sure was designed specif­i­cally to take my money. This is one of those times where I have to have a long, hard talk with myself about buy­ing cute plas­tic things I don’t need. I’m hop­ing that post­ing about it here will get it out of my sys­tem because all this adorable­ness doesn’t come cheap:

The toaster itself will set you back $27.99 and doesn’t even come with any toast. Butta, Ry Ry, Crisp and Tato each cost an addi­tional $24.99 and only have a 4G capac­ity. No mat­ter how cute these are, that’s roughly $130 for only 16G of storage.

MUST RESIST.

Techsistential Crisis: that moment when you realize you have too many gadgets…

…and you begin to ques­tion whether they have any mean­ing, pur­pose or value.

With the recent addi­tion of iPad to my tech­nol­ogy stash, my tally of “carry-on” gadgets–that is, gad­gets I actu­ally use and carry around with me on a fre­quent basis–is now up to eight. It’s begin­ning to get a lit­tle ridiculous.

I always have my mobile phone and at least one gam­ing hand­held on me, but now it’s get­ting harder to choose what else I should be car­ry­ing around with me, under which cir­cum­stances, and why.

This is what my  Fuck Shit Stack  of gad­gets looks like:

Not pic­tured: the dig­i­tal cam­era I used to take these pho­tos and the lap­top I’m using to cre­ate this blog post.

But do I really NEED all of these things?

Well, that’s what I’m try­ing to fig­ure out. This blog post is an exper­i­ment of sorts. In an attempt to jus­tify a need for all of this portable tech­nol­ogy and find out if it can peace­fully co-exist, I’m going to list each gad­get and attempt to ratio­nal­ize its place in my life.

Motorola Droid 2 R2-D2 Edi­tion

My cell phone. At almost two years old, it’s cer­tainly not on the bleed­ing edge of mobile tech­nol­ogy any­more, but it still serves me pretty well. I’m one of those peo­ple who has to have phones with phys­i­cal keys, and this phone’s key­pad is excep­tion­ally well-designed. I also like that it’s on the smaller side and enables me to oper­ate it fully with one hand. It is rooted and run­ning Ice Cream Sand­wich. I’m hang­ing on to it for as long as I can, or at least until my next upgrade credit comes along. I have never paid full-price for a new phone and refuse to start now. The down­side of that means never hav­ing the lat­est & great­est phone, but I can live with that.

Toshiba Satel­lite Laptop

My pri­mary “work­horse” com­puter, whether it’s docked in my office next to my desk­top PC or with me on the road. It’s sev­eral years old now, but still very capa­ble. The only time I run into per­for­mance issues is when doing heavy video edit­ing or play­ing a graphics-intensive game, which I don’t use this com­puter for any­way. It’s run­ning Win­dows 7 and I will most likely be upgrad­ing to Win­dows 8 in Octo­ber. Hav­ing a lap­top is a must for the type of work I do, as I often have a need to carry my work around with me.

Apple iPad 16GB

My newest toy, which I mainly bought for iOS-exclusive games and apps. Last week I also dis­cov­ered it’s amaz­ing for dig­i­tal comics. It’s prob­a­bly going to remain a “toy” to me until I learn to start using it for more pro­duc­tive pur­poses, which I’m still inclined to use my lap­top for; I couldn’t imag­ine doing a lot of typ­ing or graphic design on this thing. But for enter­tain­ment purposes–YouTubing, gam­ing, sec­ond screen web surf­ing, etc.–from the com­fort of my couch, bed or any­where else, this beats the hell out of lug­ging a lap­top around and is better-suited to the expe­ri­ence than my phone.

Kin­dle Touch

One of the best gifts I’ve ever recieved. I read a lot of books, both fic­tion and non-fiction. While noth­ing can replace the joy of hold­ing real books in your hands or the smell of them that I so love, the Kin­dle deliv­ers a grat­i­fy­ing read­ing expe­ri­ence. I don’t fore­see this replac­ing my new iPad as my “go to” device for books for two rea­sons: (1) I love read­ing out­doors or on the beach in bright sun­light, a huge advan­tage Kin­dle and other e-ink read­ers have over tablets. (2) Bat­tery life. A fully-charged Kin­dle can last more than week even if I’m read­ing for sev­eral hours per day.

Nin­tendo DS Lite

By far and away the gam­ing portable I spend the most time with. I’ve owned every incar­na­tion of the Game­boy since the orig­i­nal, includ­ing Color, Advanced, and SP. With its backward-compatibility for all GBA games, there is an enor­mous cat­a­log of games I’m able to play on this thing. I would like to even­tu­ally get a 3DS, but I can’t jus­tify spend­ing the money just yet when I’m so con­tent with this one. And as far as porta­bil­ity goes, it’s extremely durable (has been dropped many times and still looks new) and fits nicely in my pocket.

 PSP-2000 Slim

And this is the gam­ing portable I spend the least amount of time with, which is why I’m glad I got it for only $50 off Craigslist. It’s not that it’s a bad sys­tem or that there aren’t good games for it; far from it. It’s just that PSP, for me, occu­pies this weird niche between hand­held gam­ing and full-blown con­sole or PC gam­ing. The graph­ics are awe­some, but that’s kind of the prob­lem with it–I’d much rather expe­ri­ence games with awe­some graph­ics on my big TV. I keep this thing around for the few plat­form exclu­sives that I enjoy, and for emu­la­tion (mine is hacked).

Flip Ultra HD

This was another gift to me. I don’t have a legit cam­corder and my phone’s video qual­ity is sub­par unless the light­ing is really good, so this gad­get fills that role. It’s one of those dead-simple-to-use “it just works” prod­ucts, which I like. Just press the big red but­ton to start and stop record­ing. The zoom func­tion is pretty lim­ited, but the video qual­ity is really nice for how sim­plis­tic and afford­able this prod­uct is. Its design makes it easy to whip out and start record­ing at a moment’s notice, which is why I like to tote it around with me. You just never know when you’re going to see some­thing interesting.

What I learned from this exercise:

• I could prob­a­bly replace a cou­ple of these devices by upgrad­ing to a really nice phone.
• I’m def­i­nitely a bargain-hunter when it comes to gad­gets and technology.
• I’m OK with being a few steps behind the tech­nol­ogy curve. I have been liv­ing debt-free for over five years now and intend to stay that way.
• Despite hav­ing all this won­der­ful tech­nol­ogy at my fin­ger­tips, I still don’t agree that the “death of the PC” or even “the death of the gam­ing con­sole” are inevitable, as a lot of tech doom­say­ers have been point­ing out lately.
• I don’t like being teth­ered to so many gad­gets, but until some­one  invents a device that can trans­mo­grify itself into other devices, I don’t see this prob­lem going away any­time soon.
• And also…

…Not much has changed.

Just for fun, here’s the “ten years ago” ver­sion of my tech­sis­ten­tial crisis:

Yes, I still have these gad­gets lay­ing around in a box. I have a hard time let­ting go!

Leap Motion Looks like The Future

I’m prob­a­bly the last per­son to know about this and nerdgas­ming over new tech­nol­ogy is not some­thing I typ­i­cally do around here, but LOOK AT THIS THING, you guys:

I found out about Leap Motion from the com­ment sec­tion of the Ouya Kick­starter , where a vocal group of back­ers are push­ing to get it inte­grated with the con­sole (an idea I fully support).

Here’s a bit more about the device and how it works:

“The 3D ges­ture con­trol that’s like Kinect on steroids”

Leap Motion’s not the house­hold name Kinect is, but it should be — the company’s motion-tracking sys­tem is more pow­er­ful, more accu­rate, smaller, cheaper, and just more impres­sive. The Leap uses a num­ber of cam­era sen­sors to map out a work­space of sorts — it’s a 3D space in which you oper­ate as you nor­mally would, with almost none of the Kinect’s angle and dis­tance restrictions.

Cur­rently the Leap uses VGA cam­era sen­sors, and the work­space is about three cubic feet; Holz told us that big­ger, bet­ter sen­sors are the only thing required to make that num­ber more like thirty feet, or three hun­dred. Leap’s device tracks all move­ment inside its force field, and is remark­ably accu­rate, down to 0.01mm. It tracks your fin­gers indi­vid­u­ally, and knows the dif­fer­ence between your fin­gers and the pen­cil you’re hold­ing between two of them.

[via The Verge ]

Leap Motion is arriv­ing in Feb­ru­ary 2013.  It’s sur­pris­ingly afford­able at only $69.99 plus S&H to pre-order one .

Can you imag­ine what inter­net porn will be like now?

I joined the Dark Side today.

Because I finally broke down and bought an iPad. It is the first Apple prod­uct I’ve ever bought.

I haven’t even unboxed the thing yet because I have SO MANY FEELINGS that I need to get out first.

The deci­sion to buy an iPad is some­thing I’ve been weigh­ing since around Feb­ru­ary when I wrote this post  lament­ing all the cool iOS-exclusive games I’ve been miss­ing out on sim­ply because I don’t own a device with an Apple logo on it. The Cult of Mac is not some­thing I have ever wished to be a part of (prob­a­bly never will) and I still hold the belief that there are good and in many cases supe­rior, cheaper alter­na­tives for almost every Apple prod­uct that don’t require you to over-commit and have less control.

It’s not that I’m anti-Apple. I’m just pro– me, and two impor­tant facets of my dig­i­tal life are get­ting the most for my money and hav­ing as much free­dom and con­trol with my pur­chases as pos­si­ble. If money were no object, it’d prob­a­bly be a dif­fer­ent story.

But if there is one thing in this world that will com­pel me to spend ridicu­lous amounts of money on expen­sive tech toys I don’t need but want , it’s platform-exclusive video games. It’s the same thing I went through with Playsta­tion 3, and years before that, Dreamcast.

My wish­list of iOS-exclusive games that I want to play started as an exper­i­ment to see how long I could hold off until Applelust won me over. Today I know the answer: 207 days.

5 Creepy Robots I’m Irrationally Terrified Of

Greet­ings from the Uncanny Valley!

I’m embrac­ing my inner techno­pho­bia today with this col­lec­tion of real and fic­tional robots that, for one rea­son or another, creep me the hell out. Is my fear of these machines truly irra­tional, or am I just smart for rec­og­niz­ing the early warn­ing signs of the inevitable robopocalypse?

Boston Dynam­ics Big Dog

I’m pretty sure I saw this abom­i­na­tion in one of the  Silent Hill games.

Ani­ma­tronic Baby

I can barely even watch this. I don’t know what it is about robotic babies that makes my skin crawl so much, but this video does it to me.  Still not as creepy as the baby in Trainspot­ting , though.

Tripods from ‘War of the Worlds’

I saw this film with a girl­friend of mine late at night in an almost-empty the­ater. We were cling­ing to each other for sup­port and I almost pissed myself in fear every time I heard THAT UNGODLY SOUND these things make when they’re about to appear.

Side­bar: I don’t under­stand why Spielberg’s  War of the Worlds  gets shit on so much. Is it because peo­ple hate Tom Cruise? Or Dakota Fan­ning? Or that it’s a remake? I don’t get the hate.

Teddy Ruxpin

I know, I should just turn in my 80’s Child­hood Badge right now for admit­ting this, but I freak­ing hate Teddy Rux­pin. In this com­mer­cial, I would have been the kid in the back of the glass who dives out the win­dow the moment this thing’s soul­less, unyield­ing eyes flick­ered to life.

I’m not even sure why Teddy Rux­pin both­ers me. Maybe it’s just the way he’s designed; that he has a tape recorder on his back, that he’s a weird, ugly beige color, that his eyes look crossed…? It makes no sense because one of my favorite toys from child­hood was The Talk­ing Mother Goose , yet another robotic sto­ry­telling ani­mal that I never found creepy in the slight­est. What’s up with that?

Phillip

A mod­ern mar­vel of arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence or an early Skynet pro­to­type? You decide.

Fail Horn: Kevin Rose, Founder of Digg

It’s not every day Google offers you $200 mil­lion dol­lars for your pop­u­lar tech start-up. And if that deal doesn’t work out, you should con­sider your­self extremely lucky when another com­pany comes along and  offers you $80 mil­lion . Kevin Rose, founder and for­mer CEO of Digg didn’t think so.

After turn­ing down offers like these, he went on to green­light a series of incred­i­bly dumb deci­sions that led to his step­ping down as CEO, a dwin­dling user base, and ulti­mately today’s news that Digg has just been acquired for a pal­try $500 mil­lion. LOL did I say mil­lion? I meant $500 thousand.

As Giz­modo puts it: Digg Sells Itself for Pathetic Pocket Change: $500,000

TechCrunch’s sum­mary of the slow, sad decline of Digg  reads like an obituary:

Once a poster child of the Web 2.0 rev­o­lu­tion, Digg slowly faded into the back­ground over the last few years, espe­cially after its 4.0 update alien­ated many of its users. After that, Digg never quite found a niche for itself as con­tent shar­ing moved to social net­works like Twit­ter and Face­book (and the com­pet­ing social shar­ing site Red­dit). It still has a siz­able amount of users, but it’s really just a shadow of its for­mer self today. While an announce­ment like today’s acqui­si­tion would once have received hun­dreds of “diggs” and com­ments within a few min­utes, the fact that today’s announce­ment has only 16 diggs and four com­ments so far is rather telling.

Hind­sight is a bitch.

Thanks for the fun while it lasted, Kev. I had a good time dig­ging things for a few years there, and there was even a time when I used Digg more than I do Twit­ter. But then you had to go chang­ing things around for no good rea­son and bein’ all mega-rich and not car­ing about Digg any­more and shit. And now you get to hear a col­lec­tive “We told you so” from all your dis­grun­tled past and present Digg users.

Here’s to you, Kevin Rose. You win today’s Fail Horn.

Press Play to Receive Your Prize:

(I still think you’re kinda hot though.)

The New Tandy 2000: “Simply Incredible”

I stum­bled upon this great vin­tage Radio Shack ad the other day for the Tandy 2000 , which I wanted to share because it was the first com­puter my fam­ily ever owned and my intro­duc­tion to the magic of micro­pro­cess­ing. The “sim­ply incred­i­ble” part must be refer­ring to its $2999 price tag.

The Tandy 2000 debuted in 1983, which means it was already sev­eral years out­dated when my mom brought it home; I was about seven at the time. Luck­ily my Mom had a computer-related job and her employer sup­plied this “ultra-high per­for­mance” machine for her, oth­er­wise we’d have never been able to afford it. In fact, we were one of the only fam­i­lies I knew with a home computer.

I remem­ber being one of the only kids in class hand­ing in typed-up papers and book reports (after neatly tear­ing away the per­fo­rated edges from the dot matrix printer paper, of course) which tended to impress the teach­ers, and good thing, too, because my papers were usu­ally full of com­plete bull­shit. To this day I still remem­ber all those stu­pid Word Per­fect 5.1 commands—who else pre­tended like they were Doo­gie Howser when they used that program?

I con­sider myself very lucky to have had access to a com­puter at an early age, how­ever shitty it was at the time. But I didn’t real­ize how shitty until I read this prod­uct review over at 8-bit Micro, which essen­tially deems this machine “useless.”

These Romance Pants are for the ladies.

This has to be the greatest/creepiest Instructa­bles project I’ve ever seen:

Romance Pants are a pair of pants that dims the room light­ing and raises the stereo in rela­tion to the fly zip­per being pulled down. Of course it does not stop there. The roman­tic coup de grace involves elec­tron­i­cally ignited can­dles trig­gered by the unbut­ton­ing of the waist but­ton. This sub­tle sen­sual assault is sure to shock and awe any prospec­tive part­ner into ecsta­tic sub­mis­sion. As the evening pro­gresses, this smarty-pants tech­nol­ogy will undoubt­edly to set the mood to the appro­pri­ate level of ‘get­ting it on.’ Romance pants are def­i­nitely where the future lay.

If, after read­ing that, you’re wish­ing there was a video so you can see these mir­a­cles of mod­ern sci­ence in action for your­self, you’re in luck because there’s totally a video. Perv.

I can think of a few char­ac­ters that would love a pair of these pants.

I’m already plan­ning what music I’m going to set my Romance Pants to.

This cheap little device is how I play & record old console games on PC.

I don’t often do tech reviews, but I thought I’d share my thoughts on the Dia­mond VC500 One Touch Video Cap­ture Device (that’s a mouth­ful) because it really is a use­ful piece of plas­tic if you’ve got a col­lec­tion of old gam­ing con­soles and want to hook them up to your com­puter to play and record your games.…easily.

Here’s what the pack­ag­ing and instruc­tion man­ual look like, in case it’s help­ful to know:

It retails for about $40 on Ama­zon, but I got mine on sale a while back for $25. Con­sid­er­ing all it does and how easy it is to use, that’s not a bad price ver­sus some of the more expen­sive equip­ment that’s out there. Mind you, it’s not meant for play­ing and record­ing in HD, but it’s a work­horse for every­thing else: game con­soles, VHS, cable boxes–pretty much any­thing with an RCA con­nec­tor that you want to play through your com­puter and capture.

Here’s a closer look at the device itself:

As you can see, it has a stan­dard com­pos­ite RCA  con­nec­tion (which I’ve got my Super Nin­tendo plugged into) as well as an S-Video con­nec­tion. The other end that you can’t see is a USB con­nec­tor that plugs right into the front or back of your com­puter. And there’s a bright blue LED power indi­ca­tor light for added cool factor.

You’ll need to install the included dri­ver and “EzGrab­ber” soft­ware, which is the pro­gram that han­dles the play­back and record­ing. When you launch the appli­ca­tion, it opens a small win­dow and con­trol panel on your screen that looks like this:

(Yeah, I know, I need some new wall­pa­per. This is my spare PC, and I’m lazy.)

I have the Super Nin­tendo pow­ered on and the Super Castl­e­va­nia IV car­tridge is fir­ing up, so there’s the famil­iar Kon­ami intro. From here you can max­i­mize the win­dow by double-clicking any­where on it, or you can resize it man­u­ally by drag­ging the edges around.

Here’s a closer look at the interface:

You can use the on-screen con­trols to start record­ing, but that’s not very prac­ti­cal if you’re view­ing what­ever it is you’re view­ing in full-screen mode. That’s where the “one touch” phys­i­cal RECORD but­ton on the device really comes in handy.

The device has a sec­ond LED indi­ca­tor that flashes red while you’re record­ing, which I love. To stop record­ing at any time, sim­ply hit the big RECORD but­ton again. The pro­gram won’t inter­rupt you to ask where to save the video file, which is sim­ply auto­mat­i­cally saved to what­ever the default folder is. I set my default folder to be my Desktop.

The EzGrab­ber Setup menu is where you can cus­tomize your cap­ture set­tings, for exam­ple, select­ing from var­i­ous video for­mats. You can also choose your pre­ferred video for­mat like NTSC, PAL, etc. and spec­ify Com­pos­ite or S-video. You can also use this pro­gram to take reg­u­lar snap­shots (screen­shots) and save them as images, but I’m just focus­ing on the video aspect for this review.

That’s really all there is to it. The Dia­mond VC500 and EzGrab­ber soft­ware is dead sim­ple to use and it’s one of those prod­ucts that “just works.”

The only neg­a­tive thing I could say about this device, as I men­tioned ear­lier, is that it is inca­pable of cap­tur­ing in high-def. But if you’re using it to record your­self play­ing old video games, do VHS trans­fers, etc, which is really its intended pur­pose, you can’t get HD video from those sources anyway.

If you’re in need of an afford­able, easy-to-use device that lets you do any of the above, I have no hes­i­ta­tions about rec­om­mend­ing the Dia­mond VC500 One Touch Video Cap­ture Device. Now please excuse me, I’ve got some 16-bit undead to slay.

ShezCrafti’s Rating:

9 out of 10 stars.

Real “Homebrew” Minigolf Inspired by Portal, Minecraft & Other Games

What hap­pens when a cre­ative guy like Tom Scott gets together with a bunch of his hacker friends to make a real minigolf course with ridicu­lously chal­leng­ing holes inspired by video games and other geekery?

This!

Tom’s “home­brew” minia­ture golf course fea­tures some amaz­ing Por­tal –themed holes, a Minecraft hole, a crazy turf labyrinth con­trolled by a Wii Nunchuck (pic­tured above), a vaccum-powered suc­tion tube hole, and holes inspired by game shows like Wheel of For­tune and Britian’s The Crys­tal Maze .

Com­bin­ing minigolf with video games, espe­cially games like Por­tal, is one of the most bril­liant ideas I’ve ever seen. I’m sur­prised there aren’t any real minia­ture golf courses that have run with this idea, con­sid­er­ing how pop­u­lar video games are. I mean, don’t you get tired of all the Pirate, Dinosaur, and Tiki themed minigolf courses?

I’ll be play­ing quite a bit of minigolf when I go on vaca­tion next week to Myr­tle Beach, a place where there’s some­thing like over two hun­dred courses. And none of them are nearly as cool as any­thing shown in that video.

Why isn’t there a dubstep remix of the Fraggle Rock Theme?

I’m dis­ap­pointed in you, Inter­net. There’s dub­step remixes for prac­ti­cally every song in exis­tence except, evi­dently, the Frag­gle Rock Theme , for which my Google search turned up zero results.

The Wub Machine to the rescue:

The Wub Machine is a free app that lets you eas­ily cre­ate dub­step (or Elec­tro House or Drum & Bass) style remixes of any song just by drag­ging and drop­ping an MP3 into the interface.

It’s no Skrillex , but it gets the job done.

Fur­ther Listening:

• Pinky and The Brain Dub­step
• Tetris Dub­step
• Thriller Dub­step
• Mor­tal Kom­bat Dub­step
• Super Mario Dub­step

The ‘Reading Glove’ Project = Real Life Adventure Games?

Via  Scoop.it  —  Shezcrafti

Have you ever wished it was pos­si­ble to play point-and-click style adven­ture games in real life–using real loca­tions and real objects? (No? Am I the only one?) The Read­ing Glove is an amaz­ing tech­no­log­i­cal research project that might make “real life adven­ture games” a real­ity one day.

If read­ing a book or watch­ing a movie in 3D isn’t immer­sive enough for you to get a kick out of mys­tery sto­ries, The Read­ing Glove might be just what the doc­tor ordered. Com­prised of a rec­om­mender (a dis­play), objects and a glove, The Read­ing Glove sys­tem enables users to expe­ri­ence a whole new level of sto­ry­telling by being part of the story. Users pick up objects which then trig­ger a non-linear nar­ra­tive that clues them in on what objects they have to pick up next in order to move the story for­ward. Think of it as a point and click adven­ture – except that you’ll be a char­ac­ter in the game as opposed to a per­son behind the screen.

Via ubergizmo.com

But how does it work?   The Read­ing Glove  is an adap­tive, tan­gi­ble sto­ry­telling sys­tem con­sist­ing of a custom-built wear­able RFID reader glove used to inter­act with a set of tagged objects and a table­top dis­play.  Here’s what it looks like up close:

The Read­ing Glove  is a col­lab­o­ra­tive project between  Karen Tan­nen­baum  and her hus­band  Josh Tan­nen­baum , both PhD stu­dents of the School for Inter­ac­tive Arts & Tech­nol­ogy (SIAT) at Simon Fraser Uni­ver­sity. Karen’s research inter­ests include arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence, ubiq­ui­tous com­put­ing, tan­gi­ble com­put­ing, inter­ac­tion design, design phi­los­o­phy and design fic­tions. (I don’t even know what some of those terms mean, but it sounds impressive!)

“We wanted to see what hap­pened when we gave peo­ple a story that was embed­ded on real, phys­i­cal objects that could be played with and moved around. Our orig­i­nal vision was an entire room that told a story when you explored it, respond­ing to objects you touched or moved via light and sound responses — sort of like a haunted house, but intended to tell a spe­cific nar­ra­tive rather than just be spooky,” Tan­nen­baum explained in a recent inter­view with O’Reilly Media.

Here’s a video of Karen and her team demon­strat­ing The Read­ing Glove  with a sam­ple mys­tery puz­zle game about espi­onage and betrayal:

You gotta admit this is freak­ing cool, even if you’re not a fan of adven­ture games.  If The Read­ing Glove tech­nol­ogy were per­fected and its capa­bil­i­ties real­ized by game devel­op­ers and cre­ative sto­ry­tellers, just imag­ine the potential.