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Plain English Campaign wants to bring down walls of technobabble, rule the world
So look, we fully understand that not everyone "gets" technology-related lingo -- we've had to walk our mums and dads through setting up a WLAN router with a WPA2 password and 1337 encryption many, many times. But this... this is just comical. Peter Griffiths, who we can only imagine looks and speaks exactly like Peter Griffin (pictured), is hoping that his Plain English Campaign can knock down the "walls of techobabble" by "pulling our heads out of the digital clouds and using plain English." Ironic, really, given that most of the technologically illiterate wouldn't know that a digital cloud actually refers to an off-site storage hub where information is exchanged. At any rate, it seems the campaign is pushing to have flummoxing terms such as digital TV, phone jack, desktop and dongle (yes, seriously) changed, or at worse, have them defined clearly in a dictionary that precisely no one would ever read.
Scramble Live lets iPhone users play against Facebook users
Zynga has released a new iPhone game called Scramble Live, and while the game itself isn't anything really new -- it's Boggle, basically -- the technology is pretty interesting. They've already got a Facebook version up and running with over a million users, and the new app will let you play against other users, on both the iPhone and Facebook, in real-time. That's a pretty impressive hook -- rather than building up a new social audience, you can just carry away your Facebook friends and play with them while you're on the iPhone.Unfortunately, there's a catch (isn't there always?) -- the game's iTunes page says the live game is only available over 3G or Wifi, so us first-gen iPhone users are out of luck for that mode. But there's also a solo mode, as well as a "pass and play" version that you can use to play with people around you.The game's "on sale" at $2.99 until March 9th, when it'll jump back up to $4.99. If you're a fan of the Facebook version and want to try out some cross-platform gameplay, give it a look.
IBM ThamesBlue supercomputer uncovers antediluvian English words
Granted, we could personally think of much more amazing ways to put supercomputers to work, but maybe there is some sort of benefit to humanity by knowing precisely what our ancestors' first words were. All that aside, the IBM ThamesBlue supercomputer has been tapped by language masters at the University of Reading in order to find that 'I,' 'we,' 'who' and the numbers '1,' '2' and '3' are amongst the most ancient across all Indo-European languages. Comically enough, it was also found that words like 'squeeze,' 'guts,' 'stick,' 'throw' and 'dirty' were also markedly archaic, which sure says a lot about how men in particular, um, don't evolve. At any rate, these new computational powers have reportedly opened up another 25,000 years or so of language study, so we suspect the folks on this project will be occupied for some time to come.
Nov. 15 is 'National Gaming Day' at your library
The American Library Association, in a rather surprising diversion from its usual finger-on-lip hushing, has excitedly dubbed this Saturday, November 15th, as "National Gaming Day." At your library. Participating book bastions will open their doors to gamers of all types, promoting and celebrating "the educational and social value of video and board games." None of which are likely to contain poor approximations of Gandalf, Uhura and C-3PO, we're sorry to say.And hey, while you're there, you might just pick up a perfectly entertaining book (hint: be sure to pick one with a good cover). For more information, check out the official ALA site. Just make sure none of your macho friends see you typing in that particular URL.
Warning: text adventures contain text
This warning on the Harvey Birdman: Attorney at Law box is written, and is thus ill-suited for its audience. Unless you're shopping for games with a reader, you won't know until you get home that you have to read to play it. Non-readers probably shouldn't be playing T-rated games anyway, but then they don't know what the rating is due to the tragic use of an alphabetic rating scheme. Even our own warnings will go unheeded, because of our disturbing habit of writing the things we put on the website.According to Wiicast commenters, a bunch of Nintendo games have this warning on them for unspecified legal reasons, but most other Nintendo games aren't text adventures. [Via Joystiq]
Brain implant, software enables patients to think out loud
Truth be told, we've already seen instances where technology has enabled individuals to speak without speaking, but a brain implant placed into Eric Ramsey's head could certainly raise the bar in this field. The wireless electrode, which resides just six-millimeters below the surface of his brain, records pulses from 41 surrounding neurons involved in speech generation, and thanks to software developed by the associated team, those thoughts will hopefully be translated into words in the not-too-distant future. Currently, the group feels that they can accurately identify the word Ramsey is thinking up 80-percent of the time, and in the coming weeks, a computer will begin giving the patient real-time feedback so he can perfect the art of thinking out loud. 'Course, the team responsible isn't likely to be satisfied until an unadulterated conversation can take place, but it seems we're well on our way to seeing that come to fruition.[Via BBC]
iPhone 101: Hacks Vocabulary Primer
We here at TUAW are always on the lookout to help you, our dear readers, understand what is going on in the crazy world of Apple related technology. The biggest news, as of late, has been the continued efforts to hack the iPhone. A rich language has developed around the iPhone hacking community, and we thought it might be time for a primer of sorts. Never again will you confuse your jailbreaking with your bricking. Jail. The public areas of the iPhone or iPod to which, by default, Apple allows read/write access via USB. In Unix terms, this refers to the /private/var/root/Media folder. Jailbreak. The iPhone and iPod touch hacks that allow users to gain access to the entire Unix filesystem. In Unix terms, this refers to changing the root of the directory tree to /. Activation. The process that allows you to move beyond any of the various screens that instruct you to connect your device to iTunes before it can be used. On the iPhone, you can only make emergency calls until your iPhone is activated. Bricking. To render an iPhone or iPod touch inoperable. The 1.1.1 firmware update turned many iPhones into iBricks. Users could not reactivate their iPhone to get past their "Please connect to iTunes" screens. Although the phones could still be used for emergency calls, users were locked out from all normal iPhone operations.File system. The way your iPhone or iPod touch uses its memory to store data and applications. The iPhone and iPod touch use two "disks": a smaller private file system that contains the operating system and a larger public one that contains your media (songs, videos, etc), preferences, and data.
Breakfast Topic: What does that mean?
The people who play WoW share a common set of experiences and they naturally tend to talk a lot about these things in shortened language, using terms that most everyone in the game learns pretty quickly. In addition, WoW players are denizens of this larger group of people who just use the Internet and have developed many special ways of talking about that as well.But we often forget that some people coming newly to the game (or even the Internet) may have no idea what we're talking about. Also a lot of us learn the meanings of words like "pwnage" and "noob" without ever actually learning where these words come from.Are there any specialized words in the WoW community that, to this day, don't make any sense to you? Are there some words that you think you understand a little but not very much? Which words do you understand completely but wonder about how they came to be used this way?
E307: Nintendo Crossword kind of announced
Nintendo never got around to announcing this new game at E3: a crossword game tentatively called Nintendo Crossword. For sudoku fans, a "crossword puzzle" is a grid puzzle much like sudoku, but with letters instead of numbers, and completely different rules in place of the sudoku rules.Nintendo's presentation is much more staid than that of its competition, New York Times Crosswords, passing over odd color schemes and Comic Sans-alikes for a traditional newspaper-like display. It's boxy, but good.%Gallery-4773%
Tetris and Boggle's illegitimate love-child
Though we've already spent the afternoon filling your plate with enough puzzle posts to feed you for the next week, we'd be remiss not to mention today's full-version release of WordUp!, one of the finest homebrew games to ever hit the Nintendo DS. WordUp! follows the footsteps of other stylus-driven puzzlers like Tetris and Zookeeper, combining accesibility and portability for an addictive mix.Linguaphiles will take great pleasure in connecting the game's adjoining letter blocks, spelling out words to clear chunks of the playfield. The top screen serves as a window to your inevitable doom, colorcasting the continuous stream of blocks piling on top of letters you've neglected. The game ends if you go too long without clipping a column, but you're presented with a satisfying record of your longest word, the number of words rubbed out, and which word was repeated most often.In addition to its solid gameplay, developer Superpanic sweetened WordUp! with an unlockable arcade mode, three difficulty options, and an original and catchy soundtrack. Drop past the post break for more screenshots of this excellent game.[Via Drunken Coders]
Mojipittan will help you learn hiragana, humility
No, it's not another training game. Kotoba no Puzzle Mojipittan (Word Puzzle Mojipittan) is a Scrabble-style board game from Bandai Namco in which players use characters from the Japanese hiragana syllabary to spell words. Therefore, it's really, really, really hard to play if you don't know a load of Japanese words, and basically impossible if you can't read hiragana. Mojipittan has appeared on other platforms before, but as the Shockwave demo says, "The stylus makes it simple!" We suggest giving the demo a shot and seeing if you're up for some wordplay. The bouncy music and adorable tile mascots may convince you to enroll in Japanese classes.[Via GAME Watch]
Japanese hardware sales, 28 August - 3 September: verbose edition
As per our fine comrades at the affluent webcomic Penny Arcade, we residing at the fanboy congregated to bestow upon you a post of great vim. Certainly, the readership is quite familiar with the veritable monarchy that the DS Lite has been erecting via its accrued sales numbers; today, the standing ruler has evidently resisted its supplantation. The fact that the DS Lite might even transcend a neoteric console (in its third revision!) is a statement of certain verisimilitude, as we can easily ascertain from the following quantitative analysis: - DS Lite: 228,939 65,665 (40.22%) - PSP: 27,499 2,446 (8.17%) - PS2: 22,703 874 (4.00%) - GBA SP: 2,751 32 (1.18%) - Game Boy Micro: 1,791 28 (1.54%) - Xbox 360: 1,250 53 (4.43%) - Gamecube: 855 18 (2.15%) - DS Phat: 320 90 (21.96%) - GBA: 22 8 (57.14%) - Xbox: 0 12 (100.00%) One might even conjecture that the leading candidate was, at one point, an inscrutable conundrum. [Source: Media Create]
