Tracking Consumer Search Results

News: Green Tea For Weight Loss And Cleansing

I'm sure a lot of you like to find inspirational stories of people who by adding something to their diet lost weight or bettered their health. I know I love to search stories like that because it helps me see if I'm doing everything I can to be healthy and happy. It helps me stay motivated if I'm doing everything I should and it helps me tweak my diet if needed to get on the right track. Once in a while I experience one of those for myself, and I love to share those successes with everyone, h...

Community Byte: Hack Our IRC Bot to Issue Commands

Last week's Community Byte we got off to a great start! We had a few people build our IRC bot, and all went well. We had some great contributers, ideas, and people willing to learn. So, needless to say, we will be having another. Let's try to get a few more people involved this time!

How To: Reduce the Noise in Your Social Streams

Social network fatigue sets in when it starts to feel impossible to keep up with all that new content from your friends, followers, and acquaintances on a daily basis. You lose track of stuff you wanted to read more about, and you miss important news from your friends, but are bombarded with inconsequential details from people you don't actually care about. What's the solution? Filter your streams so that you only see the content you do care about, and get rid of the rest.

Scrabble Bingo Weekly Roundup: Shlemiels, Cynosures and Yanquis

Bingo! No, this isn't the game where balls fly around in machines and players dab their cards with daubers. In a game of Scrabble, bingo refers to the bonus a player receives when emptying their rack in one turn, which gets them an extra 50 points on top of whatever their play was. Even if you had two blanks on your rack and didn't utilize any premium squares on the board, you'd still have an impressive 56-point turn (at least) by using all 7 of your letters.

Scrabble Challenge #9: Can You Win the Losing Game on the Last Move?

The end game is a very important aspect of playing Scrabble. If you have just a few letters left on your rack and there are none left in the draw bag, but you're currently losing the game, you still might have a chance to win if you play your cards (er… tiles) right. No matter if you're playing a casual game at home with a friend or competing against diehards in club or tournament games, the scoring process at the end provides the same results.

News: Free Protein Folding Game Cracks HIV Molecule Riddle

Foldit is definitely a niche game. The sole gameplay mechanic is attempting to fold complex proteins into smaller and more efficient shapes following the rules of molecular physics and biology. Points are awarded based on how small one can make the protein. Online leaderboards track players' relative progress and allows them to view and manipulate other players' completed designs. It's original, certainly, but no developer is going to ship a million units of a game about molecular-level prote...

News: The Good and the Ugly of Console Controller Add-Ons

Video game controllers are our windows into the soul of the machine, our sole means of interacting with them. More often than not, consumers seem displeased by their controllers; it's comforting to blame sticky, poorly laid out buttons for messing up your game than your own lacking skills. The original "fatty" Xbox controller was so large it caused mass consternation and prompted Microsoft to replace it with a smaller version in a matter of months.

News: HP TouchPad Tablet Discontinued – Get One Now for Just $100

In a recent announcement, Hewlett-Packard announced that they're considering spinning off their PC hardware business, but even more recent was the decision to completely off webOS devices. Though they aren't eradicating the once popular Palm platform altogether, they are liquidating all of their HP branded smartphones and tablets in a fire sale, including the Pixi, Pre and Veer phones and TouchPad tablet, which is less than two months old.

News: Wake Up! Anti Sleep Pilot for iPhone Helps Curb Tiredness Behind the Wheel

Always falling asleep behind the wheel? The National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) estimates that there are over 56,000 sleep-related accidents each year, resulting in 40,000 injuries and 1,550 deaths annually in the United States. Don't want to be a statistic? Then you may want to try out ASP Technology's mobile application which aims to keep you awake when you're fatigued on the road.

News: Indie and Mainstream Online Games Shut Down by LulzSec

Anybody who spends most of their day on the internet should know all about lulz. Lulz are most often jokes made at the expense of web users, as popularized on 4Chan. Today, a consortium of hackers called LulzSec is attempting (and in some cases succeeding) in efforts to shut down some of the games that offer web users a giant share of their online fun. World of Warcraft, League of Legends, EVE Online, and Bethesda Softworks have all been targeted by LulzSec's hacking efforts in the last week,...

News: Goodbye Takahashi Meijin, World's Fastest Button-Presser

Pressing the button on a video game controller quickly is like running the 100 meter dash. Both require dedication and a precise exercise regime. There is also an odd quality about both in which the range between the very best and complete neophyte is tiny. Sprinter Usain Bolt holds the record in the 100 meter run at 9.58 seconds, only three seconds faster than I ran in freshmen high school track. And yet there are thousands of sprinters from a hundred years of Olympic competition in between ...

News: Was Worms the First Indie Video Game?

In the mid '90s, there was no such thing as a widely available indie video game. Brick-and-mortar stores were the only places for consumers to buy games, and magazines were the only outlets to hear about them. For video game creators, the need for a publisher to market and distribute was logistically essential to attract players.

How To: Get By with the Cheaper 16GB Option for iPhone or iPad

There are a few different types of Apple iPhone and iPad users: general household users who largely consume media—e.g. surfing the web, watching movies, listening to music. Other iPhone and iPad owners use their device(s) to produce stuff—written documents, edited movies, blog posts, music tracks, and the like. And then there are those who are very mobile with their devices. They commute to and from work on a regular basis with their iPhone or iPad. Some users may travel a lot on business, or...

News: Pirates! Possibly the Purest RPG Ever

I love role-playing games. They tell great stories, require intense strategy, and make minimal demands of my tyrannosaurus-like hand-eye coordination. The idea of an RPG experience, at least on paper, is to allow users to play the role of a character. However, real people do not gain generic experience points for killing things, nor do they pause for each other during combat or have the ability to carry hundreds of potion bottles without slowing down. These can be fun gameplay mechanics, but ...

How To: Clean Up Hard Drive Space by Deleting iOS Device Backup Folders from iTunes

By now, you probably know that your iPhone secretly tracks and stores the locations you've visited in a backup folder on your computer's hard drive. The files are unencrypted, which means anyone with access to your computer or device can retrieve the information, which is downright scary. But Pete Warden and Alasdair Allan are making it fun with their iPhone Tracker application, which lets you map out everywhere you've been with your smartphone.

Privacy Is So 2001: An Anime Video Game Novel About Social Media

Japanese people are into many things Americans find weird—like YouTube's beloved canine-hosted cooking show or Daito Manabe's light up LED grills or even more insane, a vending machine that distributes live crabs. In light of these cultural oddities, the Japanese phenomenon of visual novels (NVL, or bijuaru noberu), seems relatively normal. A meeting place of books and video games, visual novels are a sort of "Choose-Your-Own-Adventure" for the new generation.

News: Traveling with Augmented Reality

Searching for some new new in Augmented Reality Apps I came across Augmented GeoTravel. I would have loved to have this app when I went to Europe. Being able to travel and hold up the camera & get more information on cool places I was seeing would have been awesome. It is like an ultimate travel guide and so much more. Check out some of the things it can do below.

News: 1,200 Hot Wheels in Perpetual (NOISY) Motion

Chris Burden's latest piece is a portrait of L.A.'s hot mess of traffic, entitled Metropolis II. The artist has constructed a miniature highway system, complete with 1,200 custom-designed cars, 18 lanes, 13 toy trains and tracks, and a landscape of buildings made with wood block, tiles, Legos and Lincoln Logs. Burden tells the New York Times: