When Amanita Design released Botanicula earlier this year, fans knew the game was going to be good. The indie game maker had a track record; in 2009 they released a point and click puzzle game called Machinarium that won them heaps of awards and a dedicated fan base. Botanicula???s early art was promising -- a cross between a avant guarde kids book and indie band cover art -- but what ultimately pushed it over the edge were its noises, created by the Czech band DVA.
The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency and defense contractor Raytheon want to turn regular cargo ships into high-tech humanitarian aid platforms equipped with propeller-driven paraglider drones, easily mountable robotic cranes and unmanned amphibious cargo boats.
The New Zealand judge overseeing the extradition proceedings of accused file-sharing kingpin and Megaupload founder Kim Dotcom is recusing himself from the case after remarking that the United States was "the enemy."
People are already begging Yahoo's new CEO Marissa Mayer to make Flickr awesome again. The only way to do that is to fix its engagement problem.
A joint project between NASA's Kennedy Space Center and the Canadian Space Agency has yielded a lunar rover called Resolve which will search for water sources on the Moon.
A project to turn the Olympic media center into a new technology cluster has been given the green light after iCity won the bid to transform the buildings with a ??350 million ($546 million) investment after the Games. Startups, investors and global corporations are set to occupy the press and broadcast centers following the decision [...]
What if you could turn Instagram filters into lenses for your DSLR???Lensbaby, a Portland, Oregon, startup that's bent on getting customers more engaged in the art of photography, has done exactly that.
We give you the inside story of Miguel Lopez -- a man who went by the Digg handle "mklopez" and went on to become one of the social news aggregator's most influential power users. What was his method? Why did he do it? And was he ever paid for a Digg? Wired tells all.
Hours after the Syrian regime suffered its greatest setback in the year-long civil war, the U.S. and U.K. defense chiefs feared that dictator Bashar Assad might use his stockpile of chemical weapons -- the results of what may be the largest active chemical program on the planet. But because of the structure of Assad's extensive chemical weapons effort, stopping the Syria from using his weapons may not be possible, even if the U.S. military suddenly decided to openly intervene.
Winning, for Microsoft, won???t be about beating Amazon or VMware in the specific territories of public cloud computing. No, winning for Microsoft is remaining present in many positions, exerting influence and working on a much, much bigger picture, writes Alexander Haislip.
Google is offering YouTube users a way to blur the faces in videos, calling it a way to protect dissidents and kids.
Survivors of three Americans killed by targeted drone attacks in Yemen last year sued top-ranking members of the United States, alleging Wednesday they illegally killed the three, one 16 years old, in violation of international human rights law and the U.S. Constitution.
Have you ever dreamed of winning the lottery and buying that dream house? Have you ever dreamed that it might have secret passageways hidden behind bookcases and fireplaces? Well look no further, Movoto Real Estate has created a unique real estate listing for Wayne Manor, with a cool price tag in the multi millions it's certainly a super sized purchase.
Inspired by the inventive and fantastical tales told by real children, Written by a Kid is Geek & Sundry's newest series. Each week, a new child storyteller appears and shares his tale. These stories are then interpreted by professionals, resulting in some wonderful short films. This season, you'll see a pirate made of chairs, a mermaid actress who likes to go sunbathing, and a hungry horse who wears pink panties, all thought up by a new 5-to-9 year old author.
SAN DIEGO ??? War correspondent??Robert Young Pelton??approached Erik Prince, founder of the notorious mercenary company Blackwater, with a bold proposal in late 2004. Pelton, a veteran who’s covered more than a dozen conflicts, wanted to ride along for a month with the toughest for-profit soldiers in Prince’s outfit, in what was then the most dangerous [...]
A discussion on the origins and use of fake html.
Find the Dork Tower webcomic archives, DT printed collections, more cool comics, awesome games and a whole lot more at the Dork Tower website: www.dorktower.com.
Raspberry Pi, the new credit-card sized and moderately-priced computer, is announcing a summer programming competition for kids. If you're a kid under 18, write a program for Raspberry Pi that impresses the judges and you could win $1,000!
I had the opportunity to try out JayBird Gear's newest headphones, called Freedom. And "Freedom" is a perfect name for them! The product arrives with a sleek hard case, the headphones, a USB charging cable and several plastic molded forms that users can use to adjust the ear buds for a perfect fit.
When I pulled the earrings out, I discovered that over the years the silver on the earrings had tarnished to a dull grey, speckled with black spots. Not exactly the effect I was going for -- and there was no time to run out to buy silver polish. Science to the rescue! A quick search produced a kitchen chemistry recipe which promised to work even better than silver polish.
That weird dumbbell-shaped gizmo is the latest incarnation of Hasbro's popular Bop It! toy. The older models had various things to bop, twirl, pull, and tweak ??? all set to various sound effects and a voice shouting instructions at you. The Bop It! Smash takes the basic "bop" control and boils it down to a game of fast reflexes.
Skyhook, a company that provides location positioning technology to devices and software, has launched a power-management solution for one of the most power-hungry category of apps: the ones that use constant background location tracking.
Scientifically accurate constellation cookies by Bridget Edwards at Bakeat350.blogspot.com.
I love a good iPhone case, but as my junk drawer fills up with more and more options it becomes that much harder for a simple phone cover to make a proper impression. Still, there are those at work crafting innovative new shells for the ubiquitous iPhone 4/4S, even if what sets them apart also limits their overall utility.
Happy Comic Release Day! Welcome to another installment of GeekMom Comic Book Corner, where we recap our adventures in comics for the week.
Fantasy author Neil Gaiman made headlines around the world last week when he announced a return to the beloved Sandman series for the comic's 25th anniversary. It will be the first new Sandman story in a decade, and nobody was more excited by the news than Wired. We caught up with Gaiman the day after the announcement at a gallery in the Mission, where his wife, the powerhouse musician and performance artist Amanda Palmer, was preparing to take the stage for a standing-room-only concert appearance.
Most of us think of the future of eco-friendly cars in miles per gallon (or miles per kilowatt-hour). But a design team from Britain???s Aston University looked at the carbon consequences of the shipping required to move tons of steel and batteries from the factory to the garage. Their unnamed but fully functional concept is made of plywood, cardboard, and a little bit of metal. The whole thing can fold into a flat, light, and stackable package.
When Catherine Chalmers looks at leaf cutter ants, she sees Facebook; when she sees cockroaches, she sees suburban families. Her science-inspired art can be beautiful and disgusting at the same time, and she hopes it makes viewers question how we think of other animals.
Nunzio Gambale and David Small started out in the mid-1990s, trying to figure out a way to give ferries a way to automatically trigger audio files during Sydney Harbor tours. Now, 17 years later, they have built up a 34-person company called Locata that can deliver more accurate positioning data than the global positioning system (GPS) -- at least over small swaths of land.
Despite the interconnectedness of the global economy, the economics of bringing skilled foreign workers to the United States remains very much local.
Autodes, the company that sells professional enterprise design software to??architects, just paid $60 million to acquire Socialcam, a social video-sharing app that has quickly amassed more than 50 million users??on Facebook by making it easy??to watch??shaky videos shared by athletes. Wait, what? This unlikely union has confounded the design and tech communities.
Mention Kickstarter these days and blockbuster campaigns come to mind. But for all the success stories on Kickstarter, there are many, many failures. So what's the secret to ending a campaign with tall boys rather than tears?
There are autonomous cars, and there are drivers' cars. Now we have something in the middle. Sterling Anderson and Karl Iagnemma of MIT have created a semi-autonomous driving system that gives drivers full control of the vehicle, but kicks when the car gets too close to another object. This sounds like the adaptive cruise control found in expensive Mercedes-Benzes, but this software is much more nuanced and ambitious than anything on the road.
The Blackwater Chronicles is a gritty, unflinching portrait of hard men in a hard place at a moment in history that most Americans would probably prefer to forget.
When you're a child, the concept of getting your own mail is pretty exciting. Now imagine how cool it would be for your kids to regularly get letters from authors.
When The Watch hits theaters in July, 20th Century Fox is banking on stars Jonah Hill and Ben Stiller to bring in the viewers. But the movie, about a pack of subdivision-patrolling buddies who stumble on an alien invasion, took a dark turn in March thanks to some unforeseen circumstances. The first trailer—released at the height of outrage over the shooting of teenager Trayvon Martin by a neighborhood-watch captain—showed Jonah Hill pretending to shoot at a child from a car window. The macabre coincidence got the trailer pulled (and the film's title changed from Neighborhood Watch), but The Watch isn't the first movie to suffer from terrible timing. Here are some of the most cringe-worthy examples.
I'm not a huge stats geek, but I do enjoy looking at things like Kickstarter's yearly round-ups. However, it's apparently hard to dig up more specific details about Kickstarter projects which did ???not??? hit their funding goals. Kickstarter's own stats page says there were 27,086 total projects launched in 2011, of which 11,836 were funded. But then what?
It was a sort of early Christmas in my house last month when several boxes of The Dark Knight Rises toys arrived from Mattel to play with and review. Included were adult toys, such as a Batman mask, action figures of Bane, Batman and Catwoman, a Hot Wheels set that can be wall-mounted, a remote control Hot Wheels Tumbler, and various kids action toys. But the one that was opened first was the Batman Tumbler RC Vehicle.
Inside the State Department, a Silicon Valley veteran has quietly launched an improbable new initiative to annoy, frustrate and humiliate denizens of online extremist forums. The idea is nothing less than to teach Muslims around the world how to become effective trolls. It's hardly a substitute for drone strikes and commando raids, but as terrorist recruitment has moved online, it might prevent al-Qaida from attracting new terrorists. The only thing missing is a strategy.
Google's daily brainteaser helps hone your search skills.
Ken is out of town and Matt's computer isn't quite up to the challenge of hosting, so we must cancel this week's GeekDads podcast, which we would ordinarily record tonight. HipTrax will be back next week on schedule, though, and the GeekDads podcast will record again on the night of July 31st. We hope you can join us in the chatroom then! Have fun seeing The Dark Knight Rises!
VMware has named Pat Gelsinger as its new CEO, moving the industry veteran from parent company EMC, where he served as president and chief operating officer. Gelsinger replaces current VMware boss Paul Maritz, who will move to EMC, where he will serve as chief strategist.
Frontline tells a pretty amazing underdog tale in its new documentary, ???Fast Times at West Philly High.??? It???s about a group of inner-city high school kids who entered the Progressive Automotive X Prize, a $10 million competition to create a superefficient car. The Philly kids and their teachers didn???t have CAD software or much of [...]
This is one of the best -- and best-sounding -- portable audio recorders you can buy.
Rebels fighting against Bashar Assad in Syria's civil war are outgunned, outmanned and largely aren't professional soldiers. So they're turning to social media for tutorials in how to use their weapons.
Comic-Con International is perfect for people-watching. Just like in a typical city, everybody is either a performer or an audience member.
We're still waiting for Google's Data Center Navy. But Dell is doing its best to feed the Data Center Air Force. On Tuesday, the Texas computing giant took the wraps off what it calls the Dell Tactical Mobile Data Center -- a kind of data-center-in-a-box that's specifically designed for military outfits looking to air-lift temporary computing power into emergency situations.
AT&T "would almost certainly" violate net neutrality rules if it begins charging for using FaceTime over its cellular network when Apple's newest mobile operating system debuts in September, the digital rights group Free Press said Tuesday.
I attended the Games for Change Festival in New York last month, and what I saw there gave me reason to believe that there will be some big hits for education and health videogames in the near future.
Part of the appeal of the e-reader ecosystem is the ability to read the same book over multiple devices. From a dedicated e-reader to a smartphone, keeping up with your favorite protagonist's exploits without missing a beat regardless of the devices is key to happy book fans. Barnes and Noble recognizes this and is extending their ecosystem to browsers. Even Internet Explorer.
A gallery looking at the best potential robotic probes that could seek out and explore the strange worlds of our solar system.
Andrea Phillips recently published A Creator's Guide to Transmedia Storytelling. The book provides a taste of the creative and practical considerations that go into transmedia projects.
If you have ever dabbled in Linux or Steam and wished for the two to combine forces, look no further. The Linux Valve blog went live on July 16 - watch this space for open source game development news.
A California jury on Tuesday found Hans Reiser financially liable for killing his wife, Nina, four years ago, ordering the imprisoned Linux guru to pay the couple's two children $60 million.
Insurgencies are amongst the hardest conflicts to predict. Insurgents can be loosely organized, split into factions, and strike from out of nowhere. But now researchers have demonstrated that with enough data, you might actually predict where insurgent violence will strike next. The results, though, don't look good for the U.S.-led war.
It could be the plot of a young adult novel: Teenage girl from a broken home discovers that her father is a super villain and decides to be a hero to work against him. She has to deal with other crimefighters who don’t think she’s qualified, an unplanned pregnancy, a horrific torture and beating, a [...]
VMware is on the verge of a major shakeup that will see the company replace CEO Paul Maritz and spin-off Cloud Foundry, its highly-regarded open source cloud-building platform, according to reports citing unnamed sources.
There was a time when concertgoers were perfectly happy just listening to the band play. Not anymore. Today fans expect to see pyrotechnic spectacles with elaborate lighting and special effects for the price of admission. When the time came to create the visuals for Floating -- a new album by Danish electronic artist Rumpistol / Red Baron -- design studio Futura Epsis 1 made something that was a bit of both.
Today Apple was granted a notable addition to its IP arsenal: a patent for its method of displaying documents and lists -- and a whole manner of other things -- on a portable electronic device.
FitBit's Aria scale measures your weight and fat percentage, then logs it to the cloud, graphs it on a mobile app -- and even tweets it if you want.
When you plunk down $1,500 for the chance to purchase the future of wearable computing, you might expect some sort of security component to protect your investment. While tethering your augmented reality glasses to your belt with a chain is a plausible option, Google has come up with a much more technical solution.
If there were ever a retail model ripe for disruption, it's the humble car dealer. And Audi thinks it has the answer with Audi City.
Car sharing is starting to gain traction among urban dwellers who occasionally need a vehicle for a few hours, but don???t want to go the rental company day-rate route. In a recent Review Roundup, we found that the P2P car-sharing service RelayRides, which allows car owners to rent their vehicles for a cut of the fee, offered some of the lowest rates but had one of the thinnest fleets.
Wired’s Gadget Lab has gone hands on with Microsoft’s new office suites, and come up with: “Microsoft Office Finally Gets Serious About the Cloud.” Beyond making Office now “borderline cool,” writes Alexandra Chang, the big deal is in the cloud: Facing competition from Google Drive and Apple???s iWork/iCloud integration, Microsoft is stepping up its game, [...]
A century after the great Antarctic explorers crossed that icy continent, many of their destinations remain inaccessible -- at least on foot. From your desktop, though, you can visit huts built by Ernest Shackleton and Robert Scott, even plant a virtual flag on the Ceremonial South Pole.
The ReadySet is a power-generation tool designed for the developing world to help small-scale entrepreneurs earn a living as micro utilities. It's now available in the United States via Kickstarter.
With the recent release of The Amazing Spider-Man (here’s a discussion of some of the math and science in that movie), I thought it necessary to revisit one of the more exciting moments of my academic career: Peter Parker uses Steven Strogatz‘s Nonlinear Dynamics and Chaos textbook. Steve was my PhD adviser. Well, you can [...]
Tackling oh-so-current subjects like mass extinction and resource wars with nary a human character in sight, Grant Morrison and Barry Sonnenfeld's Dominion: Dinosaurs vs. Aliens is a cerebral comics/movie project that's far more ambitious than the uninformed observer might suspect. Get a preview of the comic and hear more about what's in the works.
Ideally, we???ll all benefit not only from better and more efficient agencies, but also from the cloud's $12 billion worth of annual savings in the federal deficit, writes Rob Vandenberg.
Platform as a Service (PaaS) is in an early stage of adoption today, particularly in the enterprise space.?? As with any early stage technology offering, adopters are most interested in what kind of advantage it offers them.?? For PaaS, that advantage usually takes the form of getting a product to market more quickly, a decision [...]
Marissa Mayer is a big deal. She's Google employee 20, the first woman engineer, and the highest ranking woman there. Well, she was. As of yesterday, she's a Xoogler. Mayer quit Google in order to become Yahoo's new CEO. As if that weren't enough, the same day she made the announcement, she tweeted that she and her husband were expecting a baby boy in October. That's right, Yahoo hired her with a visible baby bump.
Laser physicists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have broken the record for the highest-power laser shot with a collection of beams delivering more than 500 trillion watts of peak power.
Five years ago, guitar player, raconteur, writer, genome geek and Duke professor Misha Angrist surrendered his DNA to the eyes of the public, and to his own restless, rambunctious curiosity. Over at the fine site LabLit,??Richard Grant takes a smart, lively look at the smart, lively book that resulted: The history of science and medicine [...]
Mahdi, a new piece of spyware found targeting more than 800 victims in Iran and elsewhere, has been stealing documents and recording conversations since last December.Who knew that when the Messiah arrived to herald the Day of Judgment he'd first root through computers to steal documents and record conversations?
The McAllen, Texas public library moved from a smaller downtown location to a renovated 124,000 square foot former Walmart building last December. This was touching to me on many levels, so it's worth sharing with other readers if you hadn't heard about it. The story was making the rounds on the Internet because the architecture firm that designed the new location, Meyer, Scherer and Rockcastle, Ltd., had just won an International Interior Design Association Library Interior Design award. Learning more about this story was so fun for me. The town of McAllen had a 5 1/2 year journey from choosing the site to financing the work to cutting the ribbon this past December.
Find the Dork Tower webcomic archives, DT printed collections, more cool comics, awesome games and a whole lot more at the Dork Tower website: www.dorktower.com.
The Batcave is the centerpiece toy from the DC Super Friends range at Fisher Price. That makes it the most expensive of the range as well, but you certainly get value for money as this toy is big. Really big.
Prepare to Die!, a new novel from Paul Tobin, tells the tale of Reaver, a super hero with healing powers and a super punch, who has been given two weeks to live by his arch enemy, Octagon. Time enough to put personal matters in order, but other villains aren't necessarily willing to honor the time limit.
The past couple of years, my little family has been starting some of our own family traditions. At Thanksgiving we have a Charlie Brown Thanksgiving lunch. In June we celebrate May the Fourth Be With You. In July we celebrate Christmas in July. Why? Because it's fun and any excuse to get out our Santa hats and Christmas movies is good enough for us.
It's time for another Core Dump! In this one, a fascinating programming puzzle game, a couple of knock-offs (which are nonetheless addictive), and a couple of tabletop games turned into apps. Let's get to it!
Keeping kids safe is a priority for parents, especially when it comes to sharing information online. Everyone is worried about some creepy stalker setting up a meeting, or getting their information and whisking them away from a playground or a schoolyard. Many parents opt to keep them away from things like smartphones for fear of their making dangerous connections. The problem is that there are times most of us would like our kids to have a ready means of contacting us in a pinch. Kytephone aims to provide a way for parents to give their children phones and keep them safe.
The Game of Life was first created over 40 years ago by Reuben Klamer. Since its creation, the game has undergone some changes to keep up with the times. None of the changes have been quite as drastic as they are in the latest edition, The Game of Life: zAPPed Edition for iPad .
GeekDad Community member Paul Brown shares his experiences at the start of a 6 month stint of being a stay-at-home Dad.
On Wednesday, the Navy will sail its eco-friendly "Great Green Fleet" for the first time -- and maybe the last. The Navy has screwed up its once-promising biofuel plan with a blend of bad politics and questionable analysis, alienating Congress and Pentagon insiders alike. And that's before they get socked with a $1.8 billion annual bill for all that green fuel.
If you were to tick off the ideal leader for Yahoo, you???d wind up with a description that sounds a lot like Marissa Mayer: Highly technical, product-oriented, as Internet-savvy as anyone in the world, and charismatic enough to energize followers.
In 2008, a small team of coders inside the National Security Agency started reverse-engineering the database that ran Google. They closely followed the Google research paper describing BigTable -- the sweeping database that underpinned many of the Google's online services, running across tens of thousands of computer servers -- but they also went a little further. In rebuilding this massive database, they beefed up the security. After all, this was the NSA.
If you see a bat signal, or rather a laughing cat signal, hovering in the sky over Gotham City, San Francisco or New York this Thursday night, it won't just be a sign that the new Batman flick has opened. It will be a sign that the Internet Defense League has come to save the world ??? or at least the online part of it.
In the season premiere of Breaking Bad, Walter and Jessie attempt to erase evidence on a hard drive that is inside a police evidence room by parking a U-Haul truck containing a powerful electromagnet in it outside the building. Could this really work? Physicist Rhett Allain does the analysis.
In 2008, a team of software coders inside the National Security Agency started reverse-engineering the database that ran Google. They closely followed the Google research paper describing BigTable — the sweeping database that underpinned many of the Google’s online services, running across tens of thousands of computer servers — but they also went a little [...]
The Winner of the Mothership book & John Hughes film giveaway is announced!
As much as Facebook is a part of people's day-to-day lives, a lot of people don't actually like using the social network giant. Google+ on the other hand is getting a warm reception in comparison, according to a new ACSI report.
At first glance, Mary Lydecker???s colorful, kitsch postcards are seemingly innocuous, but look again and you???ll peer upon her world of dystopian leisure trips.
The Dark Knight has always taken two things with him into battle against Gotham's evildoers: his utility belt and a crippling, untreated familial trauma. And no matter what, he almost always responds to the Bat-Signal in some sort of awesome custom batride. Quick, reader: To the Batmobiles!
"The Microsoft Office for Windows" debuted in 1990. Since then, nothing has come close to unseating it.
I mentioned the Clump-o-Lumps back in February, but since they became available Knock Knock sent me a couple more so we could try some mix-and-match, and I have to tell you that the fun is multiplicative. (That's great for your kids, but may be tough on your wallet.) My kids have really enjoyed combining Squid-o the squid with Shark-o the Shark and Bird-o the bird.
We at GeekDad are sorry to hear of the death of author Donald J. Sobol who, according to??Reuters, passed away on July 11 at age 87, of natural causes. Sobol was best known for his Encyclopedia Brown series, featuring a boy detective named Leroy "Encyclopedia" Brown (so nicknamed because he was a genius). The boy Sherlock Holmes appeared in some 30 books from 1963 to 2011.
If you are a space geek like me and tuned in to the latest NASA Mars Science Laboratory (MSL) press conference, you probably weren't expecting anything unusual either. Surprise!
Shrimp chips are a snack that work on much the same principle as popcorn, but the appearance is different enough that it made my kids really curious.
In 1984, The Planetary Society commissioned Science Applications International Corporation to outline piloted missions to the moon, an asteroid, and Mars in the first years of the 21st century. Beyond Apollo blogger David S. F. Portree describes these plans, which reflect the short-lived optimism of the early Shuttle Era.
Google's daily brainteaser helps hone your search skills.
