All in all, another brick
Posted: Tuesday, July 15, 2008 12:15 PM by Countdown
Filed Under:
Games
Folks who've spend any amount of time on a basketball court understand a brick to be a non-scoring shot that thuds awkwardly into the rim. I think I've heard "brick" used to describe particularly and unfortunately unintentionally dense bread. And "brick" or "bricked" is becoming an increasingly common term for gadgets that for one reason or other don't work. Previously I'd heard the word using mostly in connection with tampered-with gadgets. People would try to tinker with the software on a phone or camera and end up bricking it either because they did something wrong or because of company safeguards. But since the iPhone 3G debacle at the end of last week I'm seeing
"brick" as the word of choice for the shiny, heavy rectangular box that hundreds of thousands of people waited hours to buy only to have it do nothing more than be a shiny heavy rectangular box.
NOTE: Contains one pretty distinct F-bomb.
How to beat the claw game - I don't find this in Snopes so it might actually be real. Y'know how every once in a while there's a news segment that shows a little kid trapped in one of those claw games? This video shows how that happens.
Photojojo has instructions on
mounting a regular pocket camera on your bicycle handlebars. I'm not sure you really need instructions for this but there ya go. The problem I've had in trying to do this sort of thing is getting the camera to see what I see. That said, "jittery handlebar cam" video does have its charm. And what a good excuse to re-watch
this exhilarating NYC bike messenger race video from a few years go. (And hey look there's such a thing as
The Bicycle Film Festival.)
I've never been able to put AllTop to good use because it's a little too broad for my purposes at Clicked. Their new
Frienderati feature is worth a look though. They took the Friendfeeds of big names in tech blogging a put their 5 most recent items all on one page. It's still not a "top links" aggregator but you can spot trends as you scroll through it.
It doesn't do any good for one word to have
a really specific meaning if the word has so many syllables that it might as well be a sentence-worth of words.
I spent a bit of time last week playing with
Flowgram. I didn't try to make one, I just watched a couple of the
already built ones in the list but it's a really neat idea. It's sort of like an audio slide show but the slides are clickable Web pages. Actually, it reminds me of the "buddy surfing" idea I remember some of the instant messengers offering that let two people share a live browser window. In this case a Flowgram can allow you to give someone else a guided tour of Web sites while still giving them the freedom to click on their own. Can you imagine a Clicked like this?
Feist counts to 4 on Sesame Street. The two top favorites in my house right now are
Norah Jones and the
Goo Goo Dolls.
This is obviously wicked dangerous and if I catch you doing it you're grounded but what a great fun idea it is to
drive along side your RC plane and pilot it through a tunnel. I wonder how well it handles the turbulence created by other cars.
A big story I didn't get to mention last week is the judge's order for YouTube to
give its user traffic data to Viacom as part of Viacom's lawsuit against Google. The stand-out line for me: "Viacom wants the data to prove that infringing material is more popular than user-created videos, which could be used to increase Google's liability if it is found guilty of contributory infringement." I'm
less convinced than Helen that copyrighted bootleg material isn't the main appeal of YouTube. I think a lot of YouTube's success comes from the fact that traditional content producers were so slow or otherwise clueless about making an online video service as useful as YouTube. Separate from Viacom's lawsuit, what I'm wondering is whether traditional content producers will starve YouTube to death now that they're coming up with video solutions of their own. And if they (with sites like
Hulu) can add a user generated/social element to their legal video libraries, does that spell the end of YouTube?
Hey look! It's a recommendation from Ralph!
Battle of the Bands: Rock Band
Build your rock band and compete for the record contract. But be careful to hit your notes at the right time, or the audience will boo you off the stage!
This one's pretty fun. Maybe now, when I get Rock Band for my Nintendo Wii, I'll be ready for it! Hope you enjoy it too.
-Ralph
Will closes the browser in shame: Wow, I never play those guitar hero games and I seriously suck at this one.
