News: In the journey it all exists and goes on...
Stan Parker StanDP~"Avid PC Enthusiast Since 1982..."
Stan Parker StanDP~"Avid PC Enthusiast Since 1982..."
Last weekend the 2011 World Scrabble Championship was held at the Hilton Hotel in Warsaw, Poland. There were 106 players competing from 44 countries for the $20,000 first place prize and title of World Scrabble Champion.
PayPal has, all in all, been great for allowing Web 2.0 economy to grow. For most entities, it's the best way to send money between two people on the internet.
Where did PC games begin?
Apple's "Let's talk iPhone" event has just ended, and the information isn't anything that wasn't already anticipated. Much to everyone's hopes, the iPhone 5 was not the headliner of the event. Instead, Apple's new CEO Tim Cook unveiled the iPhone 4S to the 250-seat audience, a speedier version of the iPhone 4. Here's the details.
The UK seems to have become an international hotbed of gamers going wild on society. Last week a British Navy sailor killed his superior officer, which parts of the tabloid media blamed on Grand Theft Auto. Today, a more concretely video game related tale of real life violence comes to us from The Daily Mail.
Portal is game design milestone. Originally only available bundled in with larger cousins Half-Life 2 and Team Fortress 2 in The Orange Box, its creators, Valve Software, changed what first person gameplay could be. It's been a stand alone product for much of the four years since its release, but never an expensive one, usually available for $5 on Steam (also created by Valve). If that barrier to entry was too high for you, or you just never got around to trying it, there are no more excuses....
FRONDEUR 62 points (12 points without the bingo) Definition: a rebel [n]
Oh, teenagers. Maybe you would be better off planning a scavenger hunt for the screaming toddlers. Just kidding! Despite the mood swings, teens will enjoy a scavenger hunt more than younger kids. Some things to keep in mind, though:
Now we're getting to the kids who actually know what's going on. You're more likely to get enthusiasm and dare I say focus from grade school and middle school kids. Here's the lowdown:
Our first look will be at scavenger hunt beginners. The youngsters. The ones some people say shouldn't even be doing a scavenger hunt (and maybe they're right). If you dare to put on a treasure hunt for people who can't tie their shoe, here is what you need to know.
You may not know him by name, but Eric Leebow is the man we can all thank for inventing social networking. At least, that's what he thinks.
For as much money as they've made from North American video game audiences over the years, Japanese game developers don't seem to have very much faith in them. Dozens of great titles from their 40 years in the industry have appeared in Japan and across Europe, oftentimes even in English. But they never make it over to America, like Mother 3, Last Window: Midnight Promise, Dragon Force 2, and Tobal No. 2 (that one didn't even hit Europe).
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...
Team Fortress 2 (TF2) is one of the best multiplayer games of all time. It took nine years to make, and the developers have supported it with more post-release free updates than any other game ever. Four years after its release in 2007, it is still immensely popular, and although its price has gone down, Valve has managed to continue making a massive profit by introducing the first successful microtransaction model in a mainstream American shooter. That model has been so successful that it lo...
Dropbox continues to make headlines with their recent programming blunder which left the accounts of its 25 million customers wide open during a four-hour time span. During the duration, anyone in the world could access any Dropbox profile by typing in any password. And seeing as this wasn't the first security failure, everyone, including the most loyal users are considering dropping the Dropbox.
Video games and movies have a history of interaction dogged by failure. Video game movies and movie video games both tend to be terrible. There has never been a good feature film based on a video game franchise. Even documentaries about games, which should be rife given the rapid rise of games on the cultural stage over the last thirty years, have been few and far between. The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters is by far the best, and for several years now has been the only really stirring f...
Without Japan, video games would not be very fun. Atari's early work was important, but Japanese developers, publishers, and hardware makers were responsible for almost every major advance in video games for the first 25 years of their mainstream existence. In recent years, it has often been said that they have become less relevant than Western developers. In the indie games movement— (our area of greatest interest here at Indie Games Ichiban)—Japan does not have anywhere near the presence th...
It's typically not the kind of video game you would see on WonderHowTo. Instead, you'd learn about games with gruesome zombies or beer guzzling dwarfs, even a controversial, dystopian war. But Sissy's Magical Ponycorn Adventure deserves some serious praise.
In just a few days, the biggest expo in the video game industry will unleash the newest games and hardware from all of the major companies. Nintendo is set to unveil its Wii-replacing Project Café and Konami will showcase its upcoming lineup, including new Silent Hill and Metal Gear Solid games. But what will Sony be presenting at E3 in Los Angeles this year?
As of right now, Guinness World Records claims that the highest human flight with a rocket belt is 152 feet, accomplished by Eric Scott in 2004. But they may need to update their records soon thanks to Martin Aircraft Company in New Zealand, whose Martin Jetpack finally showed the world it can fly—really fly.
Ikebana, the Japanese art of flower arrangement, dates back to over 500 years ago and is still practiced as a highly respected cultural art form in modern-day Japan.
Oktoberfest is the world's largest annual beer festival located in Munich, Germany! The festival starts in late September and lasts until early October -approx 16-18 days. Oktoberfest is an important part of the Bavarian Culture and has been going on for over 200 years. Each year the festival is held in an area called Theresienwiese, but often referred to as Wiesen for short. Wisen is located near the center of Munich. Oktoberfest is held as one of the world's largest fairs with over 5 millio...
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 ...
Nintendo has already confirmed that the successor to the Wii will be on the market in 2012, but a lot is still unknown about Project Café, the codename given to the device. From all of the leaked information on the web, it seems like there's a significant design upgrade from the Wii, making it hard to imagine this gaming console being called or even referred to as the Wii 2.
E Ink technology is nothing short of amazing. It recently contributed to the world's first bend-sensitive flexible smartphone, and now it's capable of something even cooler, not to mention astonishingly simpler—flashing digital displays on cloth.
In the past 25 years, there have been five generations of home video games systems. Since Nintendo changed the world by releasing the NES in 1987, there has always been at least two consoles competing for dominance in the wild west of the games industry. This competition— coupled with rapid advancements in technology—has led to a new generation of battling systems coming out every five years, like clockwork.
Can you really teach yourself to do a bilateral orchiectomy by reading a book? Would watching a few YouTube videos make you confident enough to perform an appendectomy? Could an iPhone app actually help you learn the skills needed to amputate a toe?
Below are a number of balloon artist related books that I have collected over the years. If you do not see a book that you own listed here, please feel free to let me know about it as I would love to add it to my collection. Additionally, I would be more than happy to share information on the books that I have here if you are interested in trying to find them for your own collection. Wishing you all the best in your balloon career...
Here is an interesting use of AR for a librarian. Anybody read Rainbows End by Vernor Vinge? The book does a great job exploring Augmented Reality in a future thriller & it actually has a moving library! Highly Recommended!
Some of you have already seen the superbness of tonight's "super moon", but for those of you in the western half of the United States, there's still time to ready your cameras and enjoy March 19th's super full moon. It's the biggest full moon in almost 20 years, the last one appearing in March of 1993.
In a word... WOW. 22-year-old Taimane Gardner, a Honolulu native, stuns the audience with her electric uke rendition of Bach's Toccata. Forget the fact that Taimane's skill level is incredible... her stage presence is insane! Taimane has been performing and winning ukulele contests since the age of five. Says Taimane: “I remember the day I got it. It was lying on the table and the first thing that popped into my head was ‘rock star’. I picked it up and played in front of the mirror until I br...
When children's book author Aaron Zenz took his family to see the highly acclaimed Banksy documentary, Exit Through the Gift Shop, his 10-year-old daughter Gracie was immediately inspired to become a street artist. Aaron quickly explained that "while the art was fun and the story was great, vandalism isn’t a good thing" so the family was challenged to come up with an appropriately stealthy public art project that didn't entail defacing public property. So, what do you get when you cross an in...
Does this man look vaguely familiar? A neighbor or former co-worker, perhaps? You might think you recognize him, but this individual is actually the face of 7 billion. Composited with endless photos taken from the world's massive population, he represents an analytically deduced median: a 28-year-old Han Chinese man. The Chinese Academy of Science in Beijing has drawn data for the past ten years to come up with this archetypal image, as well as the following stats:
Since its inception in 2007, the Pwn2Own computer hacking contest has been challenging the vulnerability of mobile phones and web-related software. In 2010, the fruit of two full days of hacking came down to the exploitation of the following web browsers: Safari 4 on Mac OS X, Internet Explorer 8 on Windows 7, and Firefox 3.6 on Windows 7. The winners walked away with the successfully hacked computer, plus a cash prize, but they left one Godly browser intact: Google Chrome. Even the savviest ...
We love all things Jackass at WonderHowTo, but before Johnny Knoxville and his pals were sticking fireworks up their butts, snorting wasabi, and taking a shock to the gonads (à la the childhood game, Operation), in the far off land of Ontario, Canada reigned another daredevil—a man named Ralph Zavadil, a.k.a. Cap’n Video. Just as we all winced when Knoxville tore his uretha, community access viewers of the '90s cringed as Cap'n Video bounced off concrete and broke his neck... until Zavadil wa...
ANIMATED FEATURE: Thanks to Tom Berger for another animated movie review!
Aram Bartholl over at F.A.T. is pretty pissed because MoMA is discriminating against internet artists. As most New York-based working artists know, MoMA offers annual membership for only $35 (compared to the standard rate of $75) to artists who can provide "credentials" that prove legitimacy. Though the offer isn't publicized on the MoMA site, word on the street is "credentials" equates to "a letter from the gallery or an announcement for one of the artist's shows within the past two years" (...
I am not trying to ruin anyones hopes and dreams...BUT... Look, say you go to Graduate school in fine art. You graduate 3 years later, $100,000 in dept. You go into a workforce which is so over saturated, you can't get a job making copies at kinkos.
Type: Digital, Landscapes Theme: Incredible Landscapes, "Beyond the Mundane"