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WTForeign Fridays: 9 Crazy Festivals from Around the Globe

In many ways, we center a large portion of our lives around festivals. They provide us days off from work, allow us time to be content with our families and loved ones, and a give us a chance to eat as much as we want without Aunt Carol saying something about our necks (it's thyroidal, Carol). However, some festivals are determined to push the needle to crazy. Here, for your consideration, are those offenders.

News: New Android Market Update Lets You Rent Movies and Buy eBooks

Google has been slowly rolling out a new update for the Android Market in the United States, which gives mobile users a new interface and some additional content for their Android-powered smartphones and tablets. The update started a couple weeks ago, taking the Android Market to version 3.0.27 on devices running Android 2.2 or higher. The new Android Market has a Honeycomb feel to it with a more visually pleasing layout and new colorful promotional page which showcases top apps and games, as...

How To: Calculate the Cost of Driving

With gas prices soaring in the US and around the globe, the cost to drive to a vacation destination is becoming a much larger expense item in the overall travel budget. Although it's easy to see that gas prices have risen dramatically in the past several months, it's not nearly as easy to figured out how it will impact that upcoming car trip, so here are the items you need to take into consideration to calculate how much it will cost to drive to a destination.

CISPA: What You Need to Know

Though under a lot of the average consumer's radar, the CISPA is now making rounds again with a coalition of advocacy rights groups. The act, known as the Cyber Intelligence Sharing and Protection Act, forces companies to ignore existing privacy laws and share information with the Federal Government. This short article will bring you up to date on this bill. The CISPA is another bill 'designed' to help prevent thefts and prevent them in cyberspace. But again, like all the previous bill before...

Making Electromagnetic Weapons: The Theory Behind EMP Generators

This is the third part of my electromagnetic pulse series (see Part One and Part Two). By now, I've covered the hardware and general concept of electromagnetic pulse generators, but how exactly do they disable electronics? How can an invisible field of energy have such a catastrophic effect on computers, cell phones, and most any other electronics? I'll be answering all these questions in part three of Making Electromagnetic Weapons.

News: Scrabble Beats Words with Friends to NOOK Color

Electronic Arts (EA) and Hasbro have always been a little slow at adapting Scrabble for the cyber culture. They failed to beat Scrabulous to the Facebook market by a whole year, but managed to save face by targeting the mobile market, specifically iPhone and iPod touch, making Scrabble one of the very first mobile apps in the iTunes App Store.

News: PopCap Bought by EA, Earns $750 Million Bonus Points

Electronic Arts is the biggest game publisher in the world, and have been for years. And yet, their only successful internally developed games nowadays are the EA Sports mega-franchises like Madden. Most of their success has stemmed from their ability to buy other companies on their way up, squeeze the creativity out of them, and then sell them to someone else or just let them go. This week they made their largest acquisition ever when they purchased PopCap Games for $750 million upfront—as m...

News: Creepy Theremin Utensils Howl the Pain of Slaughtered Ghost Chickens

One of the creepiest musical instruments ever is undoubtedly the theremin, a device originating from the early 20s that emits eerie sounds with a just a wave of the hand. If you've seen the original movie The Day the Earth Stood Still, you know what I mean—freakishly creepy. Playing the theremin can be off-putting for some, since it's a relatively pricy gizmo, but a new geek gadget called the EaTheremin aims to make all of us professional, dinnertime theremists.

Old Magic: A Rant

Running this World has prompted me to think about MTG on a deeper level than I ever have before. In attempts to contextualize it, explain it, research it, and understand the parts of it that I don't yet understand, I have come to an unexpected conclusion: I'm old.

News: The Ultimate Prank - End of the World

Got to be convince someone or a few innocent, young by-standers that the world is ending. Could maybe have a small group of student in an interview situation, maybe in a waiting room. Then you could play reports on news brodcast of mass casualties and disasters happening across te globe. Then after being exposed to that for maybe 10-20 mins they could cause a earthquake and outside there could be building crumbled. Pretend car crashes and causualties outside and smoke machines blowing red smo...

News: ScanMe Makes Social Networking Easy with QR Code T-Shirts

It's called a Quick Response code, but most know it simply as QR code, a matrix barcode dedicated to the world of smartphones. The information contained within the square black modules could be text, a URL, vCard, or some other kind of data. And even though mobile tagging has been around for eight years, it's just now spreading like wildfire across the globe, being incorporated into artistic portraits and wall art. And most recently... "social clothing".

How To: Make a High-Powered Compressed Air Rocket Gun

In this article, I'll show you how to make a high-powered, long-range, air-powered rocket gun. This launcher is based on a sprinkler valve, a modified propane tank, and a few other components. Though not hard to make, this device is VERY dangerous! The rocket can seriously harm, if not kill any living thing it's shot at. Here's a video of it in action, quite an accurate shot by my friend Chris... Parts

How To: Stop Bike Thieves Dead in Their Tracks! Make a Magnetically Controlled Bike Alarm

Bikes are a great form of transportation. They use human energy more efficiently than any other machine. You can keep it in your closet or hallway. You can even take it on the train in a pinch. However, this portability is also the bike's biggest draw back. If you own a bike in the city, chances are it will be stolen. Locks barely deter thieves armed with bolt cutters and crowbars. Throw the bike thieves for a loop and make a tilt-sensitive alarm. It will hopefully startle your bike's assaila...

How To: Conceal a USB Flash Drive in Everyday Items

Technology in computers these days are very favorable to the semi-knowledgeable hacker. We have TOR for anonymity online, we have SSDs to protect and securely delete our data—we can even boot an OS from a thumb drive or SD card. With a little tunneling and MAC spoofing, a decent hacker can easily go undetected and even make it look like someone else did the hack job.

How To: Join the Fight Against SOPA and PIPA

Amazingly, a lot of people I know haven't even heard of SOPA or PIPA. Now, every English-reading person with an internet connection will finally have those two four-letter acronyms emblazoned in their minds. For the entire day today, Wikipedia's English-language site will be in total blackout in protest against the proposed legislation in the United States. And that's not all. MoveOn, Reddit, BoingBoing, Mozilla, WordPress, TwitPic and other popular websites are down today in protest.

News: Hideo Kojima and Fox Engine Make Special USC Appearance

Hideo Kojima is one of the biggest names in Japanese game design. He's the man behind every Metal Gear game, each of which has been beautiful but divisive. He's an auteur, a rarity in AAA game design, managing business, design, and programming for Kojima Productions. Last week he made a rare public appearance at the USC School of Cinematic Arts, which contains the school's video game programs, and gave a 90-minute talk about his career, influences, and the specifics of his new Fox game design...

News: Scrabble Showdown Game Show a Disgrace to Competitive Scrabblers Everywhere

Scrabble has invaded just about every medium out there. It started as a mere board game, but has since spawned numerous board game spinoffs and variations, an electronic version, mobile apps for just about anything (Android, iPhone, iPhone, iPad and Kindle), games for both PC and Facebook, and video games for handheld consoles like the Nintendo DS and Sony PSP. Heck, it's even on the PlayStation and Xbox 360 gaming consoles. And it hasn't forgotten about film. You can see Scrabble featured in...

News: "Frankie Goes to Hollywood" Says: Welcome to the Pleasuredome!

The debate over whether video games can be considered art or not has intensified in recent years as games like Braid and Flow have taken the digital aesthetic experience to new heights. These new games are great examples, but there are much older ones that present compelling arguments as well. The best is a 1986 ZX Spectrum/Commodore 64/Amstrad CPC game called Frankie Goes To Hollywood.

AudioSurf vs. Polynomial: The Battle Between Psychedelic MP3 Games

In 2008, Audiosurf came out on Steam, creating the psychedelic music game genre. If you haven't played it in the intervening three years, you're missing out on one of the coolest things in video games. The player selects any MP3 on their computer, then the game builds a unique level based on that song, which the player must then navigate whilst playing a block-matching, Tetris-like puzzle game. It's an incredibly compelling audiovisual experience, one with immense replay value and surprisingl...

News: Has SimCity Been Destroyed for Good?

Yesterday, Electronic Arts had a nice sale on Steam for 40-60 percent off some of their Sims titles, which included The Sims 3 (along with its DLCs) and SimCity 4. I've never been a big Sims fan, especially with the slew of virtual people games in the last decade, so I didn't realize until now that Maxis had stopped making their SimCity games; They haven't released any city building Sim games since SimCity 4 eight years ago. There was SimCity Societies in 2007, but it was made by a different ...