disco
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Parrot's Disco drone takes flight as a fixed-wing ultralight
The latest in Parrot's stable of drones ditches the popular quadcopter format, opting for a fixed-wing design instead. The Disco -- in keeping with Parrot's musical naming theme -- is still in the prototype stage, with pricing and release date still up in the air, but aims to provide an approachable interface for beginners and casual users. Simply give the Disco a little shake to get the motor moving, then throw it into the air, where it will automatically take flight and adopt a circular holding pattern until you're ready to take control.
Fiesta Online's sixth anniversary celebration includes disco
What six-year-old doesn't want a big bash full of fun for his birthday? Well, Fiesta Online is no different, and the free-to-play anime game is celebrating its sixth birthday with a party that lasts the rest of the month! The festivities -- running from Friday, November 15th through Sunday, December 1st -- include a dolled up anniversary town, an open disco floor for getting your groove on, and a new multi-part quest that includes an exclusive Black Archon mount. Players can also dress up as popular townsfolk using new masks, compete in a GM-led dungeon-diving speed game, or collect Murumuru minipets. Get in the celebrating spirit with the anniversary trailer below. [Source: gamigo press release]
NZXT hosts rave in your PC case, charges $33 for entry
You've got the music, the air conditioning, and the chemicals. All you need now is Hue -- an RGB case light controller from NZXT that fills up a spare drive bay with dials to set the color, brightness and pulsation of a bundled two-meter, 24-LED light strip. Fake some ID, hand over $33 and reach for the lasers.
A giant pulsing blacklight for your iPhone or iPod
This has been out for a while, but in the same booth where Engadget found the Watch Your Bag crapgadget there's a giant blacklight dock that will pulse to the beat. Oh, and it has speakers. You can opt to leave the black light on if you want (no sync to music), or have it strobe. Naturally it'll work with iPods as well, so you can practically set up a nightclub in an instant. Provided you don't mind toting a 4-foot iPod dock around. At $149.99 from Sharper Image, I doubt these are flying off the shelves.
Google shutters Slide, founder Max Levchin moves to greener pastures
It's been barely a year since Google acquired Slide for a cool $200 million, but today comes news that the Mountain View crew has decided to dissolve its social apps unit, and that renowned entrepreneur Max Levchin will be leaving the company to "pursue other opportunities." Sources close to the matter told All Things D that the decision was announced at an internal staff meeting yesterday afternoon, and that most of Slide's 100 employees will likely shift over to YouTube. A Google spokesperson later confirmed that the unit will in fact be shuttered, but didn't reveal further details of where the displaced employees will land, saying only that the majority will remain onboard. Google didn't offer a concrete explanation for the decision, though Slide had been acting as a largely autonomous and peripheral branch, and was never fully integrated into the company's larger social team. Its apps, moreover, never really took off, and are due to be phased out over the course of the next few months -- including tools like SuperPoke Pets, Disco and Photovine. And then, of course, there's Levchin -- the man who founded the company just a few years after co-founding PayPal, and who currently serves as Yelp's chairman of the board. His immediate plans remain unclear, though we and the rest of the tech world will certainly be keeping a close eye on him, wherever he lands next.
Wizard101 goes anti-disco in the June producer's letter
The community at Wizard101 is still riding high on the recent Wintertusk world expansion, and according to the June producer's letter, KingsIsle wants to keep the good times rolling. Apart from relaying a few testimonials about the recent expansion, the producer's letter is all about the Benjam-- er, Crowns. Leah Ruben spotlights a couple of promotional sales from the company, including a Dragon's Hoard booster pack that has the potential to deliver rare goodies, and a GameStop card that unleashes a genie (among other things) in your Wizard101 world. Ruben says that a recent graphical issue known as "discoing" on older machines is now fixed. "While sometimes it's fun to dance the disco with flashing colors and lights," she jokes, "it's a bit distracting when you're trying to adventure through the new worlds." Finally, Ruben says that the UK version of the game has added a German language version for those who perfer to play in their native tongue. Assuming that you're German and not Swedish. Or Kenyan. Or... well, you get the point. You can read the full producer's letter over at Wizard101.
A primer on group messaging apps
If you follow our tech startup sister site TechCrunch, or if you've read any of the reports from the South by SouthWest (SXSW) conference this year, you've probably seen a lot of column inches given to current-media-darling "group messaging" apps. SXSW has a reasonable track record of predicting the Next Big Thing. It was where Twitter first came to many people's attention in 2007, for example, and it was an early success story for Foursquare in 2009, too. My usual reaction to hype like this is to roll my eyes and avoid the apps in question altogether, although that might just be because I've never blagged tickets to SXSW. Eventually, though, TechCrunch's relentless enthusiasm wore me down, and I took a look at one of the commonly mentioned apps, Beluga. To my surprise, what I found was a slick, well-designed app that solved a communication problem I didn't know I had. That'll teach me to be cynical! Before I explain what I liked about Beluga, an aside: there are a number of other significant group messaging apps, including GroupMe, Fast Society, Yobongo, the soon-to-relaunch Betwext Talk and the brand new, bought-by-Google Disco. However, international availability of these apps is spotty. For example, at the time of writing, only Beluga and Yobongo were in the UK App Store -- this is probably because these apps incorporate free-to-the-user SMS features that are tricky to make work cheaply internationally. As I'm in the UK, this means I can't do a detailed review roundup of all the apps. Look for this in a future TUAW post by one of our American bloggers. I'll use Beluga as an example to demonstrate concepts that are common to all the group messaging apps.
Slide launches Disco: Google's group texting app comes to iPhone, not Android
When Google acquired Slide way back in August of 2010, when it was warm and sunny and phones only had single-core processors, the plan was to "build a more social web." Now we know a little more about that plan... sort of. A new app from Slide has just hit the app store and an accompanying site has just hit the internets. It's called Disco, a group texting service that has an app and a web interface. When you sign up you're assigned a new phone number (ours was a 302 -- hello Deleware) and you're invited to send texts to a number of people, any people, regardless of whether they're Disco users themselves. Those people can then reply and things get bounced around all crazy like, so make sure those you add have opted for unlimited texting. Intriguingly at this point the app is only available for iPhone, and that's certainly the platform that takes front and center on the main Disco site. Given the Google parentage here we have to assume that there's an Android flavor coming here, but crazier things have happened at the club. [Disco Stu could not be reached for comment, but has in the past indicated an affinity for group texting.]
Apple's cheez-tastic 1984 disco promo video
For the viewing pleasure of those folks who were tuned into TUAW TV Live on Wednesday, February 16, we had a little disco inferno going. Tipped by a reader about a godawful Apple marketing film titled "We Are Apple: Leading The Way," it was so bad it just had to be good. Now we have a few more facts, including that this video was shown at the introduction of the Mac. There are some memorable moments -- like a guy carrying a 60-lb. Apple Lisa under his arm like it was a MacBook Air. Most of all, it's the screechy Irene Cara-like disco soundtrack, heavily copying from "What a Feeling" from the movie Flashdance, that makes your stomach churn. CrunchGear noted that the poster on YouTube noted that Apple dealers in attendance were so excited by the video that they ran to the pay phones (pre-mobile days, of course) to call their stockbrokers with AAPL buy orders. Here's hoping that their market savvy was better than their taste in music videos. The video can be viewed in all of its tacky glory by clicking the Read More link.
Sanyo glams up Eneloop batteries for fifth anniversary
How do you celebrate half a decade as the world's best loved and most efficient rechargeable battery? You throw a party, of course, which is exactly what Sanyo is doing with its Eneloop Tones Glitter limited edition set. Packs of eight technicolored AA and AAA Eneloops will go on sale in Japan on November 14, augmenting the brand's signature longevity with a dash (hell, make it a heaping) of glamorous style. For the functionalists out there seeking an excuse to jump on board, each box contains one of each color, meaning you can claim you bought them to color-code your battery management operation. Yeah, we'll believe you.
Spiritual Guidance: Discipline 101
Every Sunday Spiritual Guidance is liberated from the shadows by Dawn Moore, while Fox Van Allen is busy massaging the many tired tendrils of Alfonz, Dawn's loyal Shadowfiend. Dawn will reflect on the intricacies of priest healing for discipline and holy priests, while forwarding Fox's address to her gnomish allies. It was sometime in early 2009 that I was sitting in Dalaran, reading trade chat when someone asked "can disco priests heal?" Someone replied "lol, disc priests?" to which the original poster said, "yeah, disc. Can they?" I smiled when I saw the mistake. Then a few months later when I applied to a guild, I filled in my spec and class as Disc(o) Priest. In response this, one of my future guildmates told me he expected the 70s to be in full revival during my trial: I provided. I might have gone overboard since, but I was born for this. So here it is, Discipline 101. Just as was the case with the holy 101, this is not meant to be a comprehensive guide to every nuance of the discipline tree. Instead it will cover the basics of how to get started with gearing and playing a discipline priest in a PvE environment, and hopefully get you asking more questions that I'll be able to answer in future articles. If you are a veteran discipline priest please provide the newbies with any tips or tricks of your own in the comments.
Spiritual Guidance: Holy? Disc? We're all priests
Every Sunday (and the occasional weekday) Dawn Moore reinvents what "smitelol" means to her shadowy cohort, Fox Van Allen, by busting down a door with penance lasers and raising holy hell to a Tarantino soundtrack. In the column Spiritual Guidance she offers advice to holy and discipline priests on how to wield the holy light, with style. When I first started raiding, it was in late Burning Crusade. At the time I fancied myself a PvPer, shying away from raids due to attunements, and the long gear climb I'd have to perform in order to catch up with friends doing tier 5 content. Despite this, sometime during tier 6, a friend of mine convinced me to come along to a raid. How he convinced the raid leader though, I can't imagine. I remember standing there in my resilience gear, surrounded by players in their various shiny gear sets, and asking myself over and over, "what am I doing here?" I sheepishly put my talents into the holy tree, and tried to arrange my bars to accommodate the spells I hadn't cast in months. I was out of my element. And then I saw Baba. She was beautiful.
How to turn an 8-track into a speaker dock
I'm a fan of both silly iPod docks and re-purposing old tech gear, so this how-to at Unpluggd hit me in just the right spot. It's really more of a hack than a how-to -- the guy fixed his 8-track player just by replacing a corroded belt, and then used a cassette adapter to connect the 8-track to his iPod's audio output. But it does sound like a fun Saturday project, taking apart an old player, and the retro design of the thing is probably worth keeping around anyway. The sound quality, as he says, is "interesting," too. But there are probably benefits -- disco just doesn't sound the same through a crystal clear set of speakers playing a digital file as it does going through the dusty old 8-track wires. The funkiness works, in this case. [Via Cult of Mac]
Spiritual Guidance: Macros for priests
Every Sunday (and the occasional weekday) Spiritual Guidance offers holy and discipline priests advice on how to wield the holy light and groove to the disco night. Your hostess Dawn Moore will provide the music. /target reader /wave /use The Mischief Maker There. I love a captive audience. This week I'll be writing about macros for priests. I will touch on why and how to use them, then provide a few useful ones that readers sent in during the past week. This article will not be an introductory guide for the use of macros because... WoW.com already had one of those. Hit the jump for the link.
Spiritual Guidance: Making an Insightful meta choice
Every Sunday, Spiritual Guidance offers Holy and Discipline priests advice on how to wield the holy light and groove to the disco night. Your hostess Dawn Moore will provide the music. For my introductory article I dreamed of writing a stunning opener that would be attention grabbing and witty. After an hour of contemplating bad diamond clichés such as Earthsiege Diamonds are forever, or Lucifron and the Skyflare Diamonds (which really makes no sense), I decided I'm just going to come out and say it straight: I hate the Insightful Earthsiege Diamond. Despite my loathing, according to Armory Data Mining, the Insightful Earthsiege Diamond is the most popular meta gem selected by level 80 priests, both holy and discipline. So, I am going to shed some light on this mysterious meta gem by explaining its pluses and minuses, as well as discuss some alternative options should you choose to switch.
Patch 2.4.3 and having fun again
I'll be honest. I've been rather bored with World of Warcraft lately. As great a patch as 2.4 was, there was little in it for me except for a bit of money-making on the Isle of Quel'danas. Magister's Terrace, or Mr.T, as Mike fondly calls it, was fun and the quasi-Arena match is a cheap thrill, but you can only do so much of it. Specially when Kael'thas refuses to cooperate and drop his prancing white chicken. As cool as "of the Shattered Sun" title is, the ease by which players reach exalted with the Shattered Sun Offensive and the rapid Gold flow of doing the daily quests made it immensely unappealing. With every other character running around with the title, it's just not as enticing anymore.Even PvP, my favorite thing to do in-game, has become a bit stale. Grinding this last week of Season 3 in the pursuit of personal goals has been tiring and nerve-wracking. I no longer have as much time to run around in the Battlegrounds, but neither do I have much of a desire to. I log in to do my daily Battleground quest, maybe the Spirits of Auchindoun if I luck out on the time, and play some Arena matches with my team. Otherwise, the crash of my raiding guild, the quitting of my friends, and the long wait for Season 4 took quite a toll on my enthusiasm for the game.
Test the loot items on the PTR
We've never seen this one before, but then again, we've never seen a loot item as complicated as that Ethereal Soul-trader before. Blizzard wants to test those new Upper Deck loot items on the PTR, so if you go Landro Longshot in Booty Bay on the test realm only, you can input special test codes for each of the new items: 1111 for the Path of Illidan item, 2222 for the D.I.S.C.O. ball, and 3333 for the one everyone wants: the Ethereal Soul-trader.The only news coming off of the PTR is that the disco ball object still has the placeholder tag on it ("[PH] Disco ball"), which means the name might be a little more formalized when it actually appears on the live realms. But this testing might answer one of the more pressing questions we've got about the Soul-trader -- we already know that any player (not just the one who summoned it) can exchange the "Etherium" currency that you use to buy items off of the vendor, but does that mean that any players who kill mobs that give experience or honor near the trader can gain currency, or only the person who summoned?We'd assume that everyone can do it -- in that sense, getting this card is really like opening up a special vendor rather than just getting all the trader's items for yourself. And there's one more bit of news we can take from this: since these cards are going into stores on July 1st, we'll very likely see patch 2.4.3 on the live realms before then. To the PTR!
Upper Deck announces new loot items, including an Ethereal vendor pet
var digg_url = 'http://digg.com/pc_games/Upper_Deck_announces_new_WoW_loot_cards'; Upper Deck has sent news of the newest loot items in the WoW TCG, and yowza they're neat. These will all come in the new expansion, called The Hunt for Illidan and launching July 1st. The Path of Illidan, which is a super common loot card (like the Pet Biscuits), and will enable players to leave glowing green footprints around Azeroth and Outland as they walk around. D.I.S.C.O., which creates a disco party anywhere, along with a disco ball, lights, and music. And finally, most interesting, the Ethereal Soul-trader, who is a full-size Ethereal as a pet. Additionally, this card is actually a whole slew of items in one -- the Soul-trader will give you currency for creatures killed while summoned, which can then be traded off for other prizes, including special foodstuffs, a special alcoholic drink, a ball of energy (to throw in people's bags and play catch with), and even the Ethereal's outfits as wearable items. Pretty incredible. Upper Deck is hosting a preview of the next expansion on Saturday at various locations around the country, and the cards will be out, as we said, on July 1st. The Spectral Tiger Mount was great, but I think we have a new loot card winner with the Soul-trader. A mobile NPC with their own currency gained from killing mobs? Yes please.%Gallery-25476%
Barco's DML-1200 DLP projector doubles as concert lighting device
Talk about a novel concept. The Barco DML-1200 is being hailed as "the first moving digital light which can truly be used as both a high quality video projector and a super bright moving light source," meaning that you can use the same device to throw Mario Kart Wii up on a 70-inch screen and bathe your band in light at the local pub. Powered by a DLP engine, the unit features a SXGA+ (1,400 x 1,050) native resolution, lamp-life-killing 10,000 lumens, 1,000:1 contrast ratio, a pair of USB ports, VGA out and DVI / HD-SDI inputs. This sucka lights up the room courtesy of four 300-watt UHP type lamps, but don't expect them to last much over 750 hours. Not a peep on pricing just yet, but be sure to check out what the DML-1200 can do in the video link below.[Via AboutProjectors]Read - Barco DML-1200 videoRead - Barco DML-1200 release
Forum Post of the Day: What type of music do Azerothians make?
Acerba of Cenarion Circle started a pretty fun discussion the other day on her server boards: What type of music would typify various races and cultures of Azeroth? Sure, we all have our soundtracks for when we get tired of the in-game music, and the in-game music itself often has various themes that show again and again music to represent various concepts, but thinking about what music your character would listen to or what sounds you might here around a bonfire at Razor Hill (Well, besides L70ETC) or in a fine mansion in Silvermoon City is a really fun exercise. I'm one who often creates soundtracks for my PnP and MMORPG characters alike in order to understand this, so I find it a useful exercise for us roleplayers, as well.
