Thanks for the updates, folks.

Not that bothered by online authentication, myself, so long as they turn it off when they stop supporting the game or the authentication system.

For anything multiplayer, this is going to be the way it is, I have little doubt. I'd rather register and auto-auth than enter a damn CD-key every time I reinstall, that's for sure.

Lukkas, thanks for the link.

Fluffy, thank you for the wonderful lamp!

Dculberson, I was a little bamboozled by the quote Joel or John added, too. The broad thrust of the Reuters story is otherwise, and that's a "balance" quote that I think J or J might have misread.

No, it's 2007!

You may like every one except the one that has carpet -- brown carpet, at that -- in the bathroom.

Techno, I actually took a look at what I did all those years ago, and the function is named "MAC2ISO" so I'll bet a dollar you're exactly right!

I messed around with it at CES, playing Medieval II: Total War, and I think I actually managed to completely invert the POV. Lord Strongbow conquering the Irish while being suspended upside-down from a birch tree near Dublin, no doubt.

That's scary, Mark, but I got you beat. Just today, I ran across this magazine terror:

http://www.susurrations.com/?p=51

Thanks for spotting the HTML error, Harrkev. It's fixed now.

The "grocer's apostrophe" -- so that's what it's called! Much easier to explain than "catastrapostophe."

The C5, with a modern battery and various usability improvements, could be a hit today. The design, like a lot of Sir Clive's stuff, is bizarrely timeless and contemporary.

Mr. Culberson,

Thank you. I drew it subconsciously while calling Microsoft tech support, and when my mental faculties returned upon termination of the call, it was all I could do to recoil from the notepad.

"Space Prostitute" sounds like a great name for a funny, shitty flash game.

I can hate concepts!

We'll be turning on the password today, that should clear out the riff-raff.]

jackhammerjill

A year in, still going good.

My man, that's exactly what they do.

Yeah, surely the *last* thing you'd want is something designed to vibrate. I wanted to contrast it against some kind of "speaker in an inert blob of acoustic brick" but couldn't find much of anything.

The problem with pint-to-line glasses is drinkers complaining that they're not getting a full pint if the head isn't practically sloshing over the sides.

Former bartender's perspective, yes.

I haven't tested it -- I intended to, but I don't actually have a linux machine set up to test it with.

Awesome comment.

Chromatic sedition abounds in that photo...

Yeah, Advaranaut's 3d message made it hard to even pick 4 -- his explanatory page alone is worth reading.

The short story writers were completely stiffed too, unfortunately.

So we'll be doing more 1k competitions with more focused themes, I think.

Video link's fixed. It's spectacular, worth the download.

I live in Pittsburgh; I feel (hear) your pain.

That's quite a competitive perspective, but I like it. I think we'll be repeating this theme again, very soon, as a series of stricter battles: 1 kilobyte game; 1 kilobyte image; short story in 1K of ASCII; and so on.

As it happens, I'm rustling up as many decent prizes as I can so that we can have plenty of reward for the entries we've gotten here.

Chipslug, I'm dismayed by your adversarial tone. It was your first comment here, and I apologize for assuming you had, therefore, registered just beforehand.

But, good news! You obviously changed your mind about not returning, and I hope you decide to hang around and, perhaps, find something to comment positively on.

Heim, yes, the guidelines are vague, but that's deliberately so, to encourage creativity (and boy, did we get it!). We're not going to be sticklers about anything, and were ready to accept basically any rationalization for the actual size of an entry, as long as it wasn't taking the mickey.

Decultured, you're right, and I've been trying to find the particular company that's doing the more advanced EEG helmets all afternoon! My google-do fails me.

O.K., Chipslug, Bye! Thanks for reading! It's a shame you registered just to say that.

This is workstation in the original sense, "An area, as in an office, outfitted with equipment and furnishings for one worker and usually including a computer," rather than the computer itself.

Artbot, I think your comment might be the first in the history of the internet where you not only did not read the article, but did not look at the picture closely enough to notice that it wasn't an iMac.

I propose a new acronym: LATFP.

Jenn, do you have those photos anywhere? I'd love to run them.

THIS IS JOHN'S FATHER. YOU PEOPLE BETTER STOP THIS RIGHT NOW OR BY IKE I'LL HAVE YOUR GUTS FOR GARTERS.

It comes with an external USB optical. Sorry I didn't make that clear.

I love the idea of building things into desks. A good candidate for this kind of thing at the simple, cheap doors at Home Depot.

They're completely plain, like IKEA's Vika Amon, with no doorknob hole cut, so it's perfect for use as a desktop. However, they're hollow, meaning you could stash anything you like inside it.

I was tempted to actually try and make a computer in one, using ribbon risers and the like to keep it all "flat" ... something you folks might like to read about?

Royaltrux, have a nap in that sci-fi spa chamber from a few days back...

We're almost there, Santos: still working on developing a giant database of mild-mannered reviews and an unnavigable homepage to hide them with.

Anonymous, naughty naughty.

He didn't say "nothing more." We're well aware that these devices do purport to measure things other than muscle responses.

They rely, however, on muscle movements, a point best highlighted by pointing out how if they were actually useful as brainwave monitors, no such input would be required at all. This is typically obscured somewhat by using a nice $10 word, "electromyography."

Neurosky admitted this about it's own headset: http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2007/12/neurosky-repeat.html#more

We're to the point with Atari Mindlink clones that skepticism about "brainwave reading" is a reasonable default position.

"And, forgive me, if you don't post at least a link to a sample video made with this thing, you're just giving away free advertising space, no?"

No.

That said, I might not have been sufficiently cynical and dismissive in my post: I shall now correct this error.

Based on its tiny chassis, rudimentary optics, gimmicky character and arse-end image sensor, this camera almost certainly produces complete garbage.

Ahah! Thanks for the correction.

Great work, everyone. I'll be putting up a gallery of entries tomorrow and figuring out a winner.

This word, "asshat," I am about three sightings of it away from creating an MT comment plugin that replaces it with the name of a random vegetable.

Alejandro! No internet for you for the rest of the evening!

@5 -- I though at first that Royaltrux was having a go at my unwieldy preposition-avoidance, but I think he's just pointing about that the dog *really will* BARKBARKBARKBARKBARKBARK all day long if it has one of these things at its disposal.

@3 -- "That's going to need regular deslobbering." Comment of the month.

Our dog has one of those short ropes tied at each end to resemble a bone. We call it the "Desert survival rope," due to the highly concentrated drool content.

Basically, it's just their marketing phrase for "shiny black plastic."

It *is* pretty, albeit with that greasy-fingers problem. The flatness wasn't, to my recollection, altogether successful. It feels much better than such overdesigned keyboards usually are--each key has a subtle curve that allows for touchtyping--, but would take a bit of getting used to.

"I don't understand why people are taking so much offense at this post."

Maybe it's because they think Joel, John and I are three normal, intelligent young men with sincere, considered, earnest beliefs about the subject matter at hand. This leads them to take us seriously--a most vulgar error--even when we tell them to buy UMPCs and other weird, useless, expensive gadgets.

Technogeek, I think it's a shame that some are content to condemn it like this. Perhaps it's useless to try and hammer home that it's a deliberately over-the-top screed -- a format that Brownlee's been rightly lauded as a master of, and which is certainly not cheap-shot material.

(It's certainly been hard to convince him that people will enjoy that style of writing away from his usual haunts, covering culture, sci-fi and the like)

What upsets me most is that few of those calling him out here notice when the same extravagant style is applied in praise rather than pejoratively--they would not be so assumptive and personal about their complaints if they had.

Hey, Downpressor, that's not fair. I'm not at all misanthropic! I can be vitriolic about terrible technology, sure. And often am. Every day.

What I love about Brownlee's writing is how it draws good humor from those who get that it's a kind of surreal fiction. There's nothing wrong with some of these reactions; we're delighted to have an articulate tribe of commenters, and we'll be bringing you in more and more as time goes by--much is planned!

Nevertheless, it shouldn't take a Genius to know hyperbole when they see it.

RE: comments that amount to "Why can't you be more like other gadget blogs and just provide information?" The best answer, I think, is because they're already there!

I see this system as a possible reward for getting rid of my non-deletion bad habits. It should ALL be sorted out of the inbox!

My real reason for commenting, however, is to express solidarity in the fight against foreign charset spam. I started getting this by the mille when I became a tech writer a couple of years ago; it's easily the most baffling spam I get.

Alas, that was just a Lovecraft quote... But thanks! Mr. Lovecraft offers an inexhaustible supply of that kind of talk.

Nice one. I imagine that also circumvents that ludicrous patent someone holds on burning CDs of a live performance in sutu.

Joel, the photo links to that article.

"Tickling the Dragon's Tail" was the name they gave to the dangerous manual experiments they conducted with the Demon Core.

http://www.cns-snc.ca/history/pioneers/slotin/slotin.html

Original headline was "...guilty of rm wife"

Airship -- So send in 200 words! (keep it under 1025 characters :) )

Thank you all again for your entries. We're astonished by the quality and ingenuity that's gone into them. It'll be hard to pick the best out tomorrow: I might do a poll, in fact.

I've changed the headline, since I just wanted to point to Wired's exemplary coverage and can't really be bothered with the comment nannies tonight.

"Most writers accept criticism, particularly if they can actually write. Brownlee's attempted metaphor was poorly thought-out, and not "literary" in the slightest (Sorry, Rob), and you had the audacity to point that out."

Tastewar's complaint was based on a trivial misunderstanding of the sentence. He or she simply misread it. You might not like the metaphor, but please have the basic decency to read what you're complaining about--or, indeed, what you think you're agreeing with.

Wankers.

I'm wondering about the forthcoming Mobile Internet Device standard. If they're lumbered with Vista, it'll be an interesting illustration of the strange gulf between what Microsoft sells and the hardware it sells it for. That point Technogeek made here about Microsoft being a marketing company that just happens to be market technology comes to mind.

It's *worse* than Windows ME, to my mind: that was the last revision of a dead OS, and MS could let it wither as the world moved to NT derivatives. But this time around, Vista has plenty of competition, not least of which is XP, which it's supposed to replace.

Enjoy your vacation, boss! We won't do anything you wouldn't do.

Haaz, you can configure the 8800 into any 24" config; I expect it's a chassis size issue.

But Charlie, was it better with Worcestershire or Soy?

Thanks, recent entrants! It's great to see coders getting in on it, too.

Glowing balls? Do you have twisted testicles?

Well, Joel, while you're correct, it's a trivial correctness that seeks to replace common currency with a tautology implied by it, namely that all futurism is retro-futurism, because it inheres the past from which it is projected.

However, your rhetorical ninjitsu sneaks around what seems to be an obvious point: most people reserve the term "retro-futurism" for examples where this temporal tits-up has become the work's defining characteristic.

Furthermore, fuck Star Wars.

Have you seen the rendering "bloopers" from the Shrek DVD? Terrifying.

Duggerize
v. To digg a website hard; to destroy a website with digg.
(portmanteau of "dugg," "buggerize.")

"I find it ironic that the picture you used shows that pixie or fairy or whatever (she's nVidia's mascot and has been in many of their tech demoes, right?) with extremely divergent eyes. This makes it look like she's been lobotomized, and that most of her brain is missing."

One might even suspect that the author of the post manipulated the image in order to create this impression.

John, perhaps he's one of those people that wants you to just list the specifications, and not be "over-literary."

The meconium is clearly spewing from the Eee's ass, not its umbilical cord.

Corrections are always appreciated. But deliberated misinterpretation simply as an excuse to complain -- who does it help?

Doesn't remove everything. Macs can have plenty of garbage in Application Support and elsewhere from deleted apps. Not that it matters, but if you're neurotic about leftover crap, there you go.

Or is it simply that futurism conceptually implies the past from which it's being imagined?

OK, so it's retro-futurism because it *becomes so* simply due to the arrow of time marching on? The specific speculative vision in the past is thus doomed to inherent retro-ness, even from the moment of creation -- it just takes us a while to spot its connection to the time that produced it?

Serious question: if you removed the "A long time ago..." intro from Star Wars, would it change anything?

Yep! It can draw more juice. 2.5 SATA drives typically need them to run: it's luck of the draw whether your motherboard/USB controller will supply extra current on demand.

Hubs, however, typically come with a standard cable, preventing the use of Y-cable devices "down the line."

USB 3, expected this year, should fix these problems by upping the power per device to 1.5A from 500mA.

Man, how could I have not discovered those before? Wonderful. Cheers!

Because toasters rule!

Sorry about posting an image from a discontinued line, BTW!

Shanefer, perhaps this is simply not the blog for you.

Nice idea! There are all sorts of novel uses. You could make an entire blog using this for all your posts! A very irritating blog.

I know, I can't stop watching it. The existential dilemma becomes worse when you realize it's a looping animated GIF instead of an actual finite movie clip, and therefore the same page over and over again being rescanned.

It is, isn't it?

Our contestant Mark steps up to the plate. Which word will he choose to claim is misspelled?

For 10 points, he can select scallywag, a modern bastardization long-divorced from a 19th century political milieu that no-one could conceivably care about in the context of Brazilian ATM thieves.

For 5 points, he can moan about subnotebook, a disgusting but useful 21st century construction used to refer to small, lightweight laptops.

For -5 points he can hit up "accouterment," which will just make him look as stupid as a spellchecker.

It's alarmist and smugly schadenfreudian, sure. But it's not *wrong*. You even point out the exact set of customers to be thusly buggerized!

Where's his class?

I'm a big fan of Logic Supply; I have Pico ITX motherboards in and have been meaning to get necessary stuff for it there.

"Southern Fried Anger" - what a splendid turn of phrase.

Yep, the trick is to discard any evidence of arbitrage tourism. I know it's hard with Macs and their beautiful boxes, but it's actually somewhat liberating to do so. Getting rid of your box, and those little sheets of translucent polystyrene, reifies the entire package's diffuse abstract majesty into the simple embodiment of the thing itself.

I have to go an lick up some dog vomit from the back yard. BRB.

But you can pretend to be a Norman Patton with this one.

Feel free to tell us about your own creative works! Either directly, or in comments, so long as it's contextually relevant.

Alas, it strips it.

Anyway, the thing should work fine, just type a longer quote.

Is it a very short quote? It won't turn on until you have punched in 10 characters.

Here's the raw embed code: just customize the variable "customQuote" in both the and embed code.

Use + instead of space

Excellent work, everyone!

Camillo, Seagate didn't place any conditions at all on shipping (and if they do, I'll ask them to ship it our way and we'll forward to Europe)

Exquisite!

O P, how much do you want for one of those Jornies? Drop me a line at beschizza at g mail.

You fucking fuckers with 100Mbit internet need to fuck right off.

Mr. Science, thank you for your wonderful and touching story. I often think back to things I've discarded and lost. All the open loops eventually demand closure.

Thanks for the comments and suggestions.

To update, the building manager says they've dealt with this before and I shouldn't have to pay the whopping $200 to have the inside lines checked over. The building has good phone wiring from demarc to individual units.

However, I'm going to give WWAN a try. I have a WWAN card sitting around from Novotel, waiting for an excuse to review it; here I go. Sprint has a 30-day money back guarantee. If it isn't up to snuff, I'll get DSL and suck it up.

I'll experiment with antennas to see if I can get a good connection, but at this point, that's more of an academic interest. Needs must as the devil may.

I see there's a lot of support for NetBSD on the Z50. I've been tempted for a while to fish out some older machines and see if they can be resurrected with CF WiFi cards, modern distributions and the like.

The best MobilePro, the 900c, is going on eBay for under $150. HP's similar but super-small Jornadas fetch a little more.

Joel, you should call on the power of Bear Grylls and sneak into nice comfortable hotel rooms every night.

SELECT TARGETS AND PAYLOADS

A million dramatic prairie dogs glare at you!

I dare say they will, Evil Jim. It was quite a success. I will never think of the Neverending Story in quite the same way.

The output was enormous, however, and might be difficult and time-consuming to edit into something publishable.

If memory serves, there wasn't an awful lot of hacking on the earlier medialounges from D-Link. No XBMC-type wonders, that's for sure.

Yeah, removing the screen didn't seem to make a difference. I'm pretty sure it's nylon from the weight and feel, but it's actually hard to tell because it's painted black.

I had to turn in my geek card on this one, I'm afraid. I'd have liked to get busy making a superior cantenna arrangement, but needs must as the devil may. So I ordered a unidirectional from MacWireless.com.

Cube, I think you're right there about the specifics. The problem, perhaps, is that Comcast's approach to disclosing these facts (and to support in general) encourages a cynical interpretation.

There's no excuse at all for refusing to put business communication in writing. Nothing says "we know what we're doing is questionable" quite like a refusal to go on record about something as straightforward and simple as a TOS violation.

Murray,

That would stand to reason where it not for the speed she got there -- she was an old pup, remember. We figure she must have gotten a lift...

The back-and-forth stuck-edges bug is fixed. I never thought anyone would care to play it more than once! Refresh caches.

Joel suggesting coating it in PAM.

Non-commensurate sides will be in the Intellivision version.

A few notes!

* You can angle the ball by bouncing it off the very edges of the bat.

* Passing arbitrary quotes to the game, bonuses and power-ups will be added the next time we roll it out.

* Watch for more exciting games in the BoingChoice Arcade.

It's not all my work: Joel created the logo and the custom "Vaus." And everyone insisted on gameplay improvements like ball-angling, so that the game would actually be tolerable enough to play through until the victory graphic comes up

Thank you, Charles!

GabrielM, wait until you face the dreaded lone hyphen!

Joel, your lede forces me to envisage a penis walking along on the extended lips of its urethral slit, as an anthropomorphised mop might do with its fronds in an old cartoon.

No, it was mine! Fixxed it[sic].

Nex is telling us a porkie.

This is getting better and better.

Not to disrespect those who have posted honest praise of this product's genuine utility, but see what I mean about astroturfing? Holy crap.

In England we still call these torches.

This always seems to amuse Americans.

Yeah, as much as I like the idea of a TZ hackintosh, XP is certainly a more reasonable proposition. It didn't come with downgrade disks (I'll check the box, though, to be sure) but you can specify it when you order.

Interesting comment. This happened last time I gave a Sony laptop a glowing review that included criticisms.

Perhaps it speaks strongly to the fanboy mentality: it doesn't matter how much praise you heap on something. If you ding the right thing, it's time for the random accusations of fraud, corruption, incompetence, etc.

Either that, or we have that rare beast, a Vista-defender upset that I might suggest (No!) that OSX is a better consumer operating system.

If this is true, please respond again so that we may measure and record the shape of your head for posterity.

Note that whenever someone runs a piece about this thing, the comments tend to get astroturfed.

I've still got a Linksys WRT-series running DD-WRT, so am tempted to get hacking on it for the hookup. However, I taped a cake tray to the back of the Airport Extreme, and it's massively improved the experience at the other end.

Photos forthcoming. This hideous rig, sat on top of a tall shredder by the window and spewing cables, has a low life expectancy. But it proves that a cantenna or a manufactured uni will work for me, and I thank you all for your suggestions.

SCIENCE, as Joel put it.

Phi, how difficult was it to get OSX running on the TX? If you could link to the guide you used and offer any extra tips for the Vaio T? series, I'll have a go at it here.

Ross, thank you :-)

Shazbot, you are my hero for the day! What a great idea.

Also, I really have been trying not to think of these things as like sex toys. You're not helping.

Hello, everyone!

I think I'll try the cantenna first, but I like TP1024's idea for trialing it. Cheers!

I actually thought about running black exterior CatV on the utility poles, and hoping no-one would notice.

"Th vrg ws cmptrs."

Yr pst rds lk cck nd bll stry, bcs y frgt t pt n nmbr t th crtcl pnt. t's lk yr mnd blnkd n th prt tht hd t b md p.

"Nw, wht wld b cnvncng nmbr? 'll dcd nc 'v fnshd th pst."

Jst syng.

Thank you for posting it, Cory!

"These are clever, but sort of pointless if they aren't pasted up in the same public spaces as the actual police posters."

Here is a high-quality PDF of my one ("Fearmongering") at A4 size:

http://www.scribd.com/doc/2221990/Fearmongering

It's not CMYK, but that can be arranged.

The thing is, we can scoff at the absurdity of banning chunks of plastic, but they'll do it.

In Britain, under the 1996 Offensive weapons act, is is illegal to have something with a sharp point in public, with an exception for leatherman/swiss-army style pocket knives no longer than 3".

Plastic combs have to have rounded tines.

Probably muscle-controlled, like the Atari Mindlink and the Neurosky. The "power of thought" marketing is simply a legal lie, in that all muscles are powered by thought.

http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2007/12/neurosky-repeat.html

I do not have a flickr account, but must bring this to your attention:

http://blog.wired.com/gadgets/2008/02/the-gallery-of.html#comments

Stop worrying about it, dude, and get on with making music.

The problem with letting people make their own decisions is that they may make the wrong ones.

It's also worth pointing out that an A-level is always *in* a specific subject, so whoever is looking at it won't be blind to silly or otherwise useless qualifications.

A programmer might grab him or herself A-levels in math, I.T. and communications, for example, while a med student might grab biology, chemistry and general sciences. If someone comes along with textile arts, scrabooking and McDonalds happy star A-Levels/GNVQs, they're not getting anywhere with them.

That the hat is *not* cool, despite it comprising many elements of cool, is testament to the warming effect of Oakley's branding field. The overall concept is almost scintillating, but look at each element of how it is realized: incongruity and a lack of consistent hat ideology throughout.

BAH!

Fuck CES in the neck.

No good for graphics work. Image quality on the prototype was grim.

The Post story is horrible mangled, yes, but TechDirt is wrong. The brief submitted by the RIAA lawyer is explicit: the "unauthorized copy" is made at the point of *rip*, a discrete crime from the copies made available at the point of share.

Paint a helipad on top of the crap radio for the crap helicopter to land on.

Ah, the existential panic lit by comparing cheap disposables vs. expensive rechargeables.

I eventually just throught "screw it" and bought a $15 charger (Duracell's) that does AA and AAA. I also bought about 12 of each size to go with it. The end cost was maybe $50, but I haven't bought a battery in 2 years, so there.

Would I change anything? I'd get a "slow charger" instead of the "1 hour" model I got, because fast-charging supposedly kills the batteries faster. None of mine have died yet, though.

(Or, indeed, eaten)

There used to be, in the hinterland between New Cross and Rotherhithe in South London, *Alaska Fried Chicken.*

I don't think that one can be beaten.

Watch out! The cake is a Portal meta joke!

Ad revenues far outweigh subscription revenues. Circulation determines ad revenues. The Audit Bureau of Circulation will let you include anyone paying 25% or more of the cover price as paid circulation. Therefore, for an ABC publication (most of them) 25% of the cover price is the real bottom line for subscription deals.

I think they really fired her for not for the funny stuff, but for saying London was a shithole and that the underground is horrible.

"There's a line, dick, and you just crossed it."

The odd noise you hear is the U.K.'s plans for a national ID system slipping its surly bonds.

Diligently and sincerely trying to explore London with ancient guides like that is a great game. It's like going on a vacation in a Peter Ackroyd novel.

OMG, it's like real-life Look Around You!

Lots of them are pretty good, though. I know Squidi is infamous for his innovative concepts of intellectual propriety, but don't want to let that get in the way of appreciating these ideas, even if he imagines that he can "own" them as a result of committing them to pixel.

The whole armchair general of game design thing is depressing me, though. How many of us are not only too lazy to make games, but too lazy to bother telling anyone about the games we don't make?

In other words, can someone make a Gradius RPG with randomly generated levels and a Total War-style strategy map, plez? Chrs!

Lots of them are pretty good, though. I know Squidi is infamous for his innovative concepts of intellectual propriety, but don't want to let that get in the way of appreciating these ideas, even if he imagines that he can "own" them as a result of committing them to pixel.

The whole armchair general of game design thing is depressing me, though. How many of us are not only too lazy to make games, but too lazy to bother telling anyone about the games we don't make?

In other words, can someone make a Gradius RPG with randomly generated levels and a Total War-style strategy map, plez? Chrs!

Automatic electric kettles are actually wonderful things, so long as the steam detector isn't too trigger-happy. I use a Breville for day to day use.

Of course, an old can on the gas range will do just as well. So long as the water is roiling around going "PLOPH LOPH FLPL SFPHLOPH BLOBLE PHLOPH" the instant before you pour it, it's good.

Yo. Eee for the weeen.