Google’s daily brainteaser helps hone your search skills.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!
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.
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.
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!
GeekDad Community member Paul Brown shares his experiences at the start of a 6 month stint of being a stay-at-home Dad.
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.
Google’s daily brainteaser helps hone your search skills.
Maker Camp — a virtual gathering taking place on Make’s Google+ page over the next 30 days — will give teens a new project to work on every morning, and the chance to talk to a “camp counselor” and compare photos of projects done by fellow campers in a G+ Hangout every afternoon.
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.
With The Dark Knight Rises opening this week, we’ll get another glimpse at the latest incarnation of Batman: and, of course, all of his wonderful toys. Insight Editions recently released two art books for Batman fans, one focusing on Christopher Nolan’s interpretation, and the other tracking the history of the Batmobile, arguably the most fascinating of all Batman’s many gadgets.
It’s been less than a week since the OUYA open-source video game console first debuted on Kickstarter, and the project is already closing in on the $5,000,000 mark. And yes, you read that right — 5 million dollars.
GeekDad helps to build the world’s tallest Lego tower on a rainy Friday at Legoland Windsor.
At the beginning of this month, a new expansion for Flash Point showed up on Kickstarter, featuring two-story buildings. Designed by a German fan (who’s also a firefighter), Flash Point: 2nd Story gives you two new buildings to use, along with a few new mechanics.
Every once in a while you get a puzzle handed to you. This week I was at the scum hole the city of Boulder, Colorado, calls the dog swimming “beach,” and a guy with a black lab said that his dog, Selkie, has five brothers and sisters in town. “But I’ve never run into one of them,” he said. “I wonder what are the chances of that?”
By expanding the scope of user interaction and raising game animation to movie quality, Club Caveman hopes to elevate kids’ engagement with narrative and push the limits on what an iPad does with storytelling. Ben Sweat of Caffeine-Free talks about his current Kickstarter project.
Nora made it successfully to her Grandmother’s house with at least 1000 berries, enough for quite a few pies. Here is the puzzle as presented earlier this week: Nora is taking a trip to visit her Grandmother in northernmost New York State this week, to bring her some freshly picked berries. On the way there, she has to cross a total of 30 bridges, and under each of the these bridges lives a troll. (That’s how they roll in northernmost New York.) Each troll is aware of their bridge number, and either demands or gives berries based upon the rarest or most applicable description of their bridge. They demand or give berries according to the following schedule…
Last week, we took a family trip to Boston. My daughter flew there to spend a week with her Aunt (who lives in Cambridge), then the rest of us made the 12 hour drive (14 hours with stops) to join them and to spend some time exploring the city. We spent time downtown, hit a few spots along the Freedom Trail (including the Granary Burying Ground, the final resting place of Paul Revere, John Hancock, Samuel Adams and other historically significant figures), walked the campus of Harvard and spent about two hours in Newbury Comics’ Faneuil Hall Market Place location. Among the attractions we visited were the Museum of Science and the New England Aquarium.
With the 3DS XL coming with a bigger battery and lasting longer than the original 3DS, my family got talking one breakfast time about which DS console would last the longest. My daughter thought that her DS Lite would outperform her brother’s 3DS. He thought that the DSi XL would last the longest because it was bigger.
The other day I decided to put it to the test with a time lapse video.