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Romanians in spandex base jump the Intel theme chimes
Oh, nerds. If we weren't one of you, we wouldn't have the faintest idea why you do the things you do. But we are, so we do, even if you're from another country. In an attempt to best Finland's record for World's Largest Intel Chime (done with human cannonballs), five employees at the chipmaker's Romanian branch learned how to base jump from the top of their office onto huge airbags to "hoot" the ubiquitous tones. A charmingly-accented software validation engineer named Iulian project-managed the whole thing -- here's hoping he makes VP sooner rather than later. Slightly disturbing video of humans being dropped after the break.
TUAW's Daily App: Chimes
Chimes is a beautiful and subtle game; its simple graphics and premise hold up some interesting gameplay that's somehow both frantic and serene. You're given five chimes of five colors to touch, and little drops of color will soon arrive on the screen and try to make their way to the bottom. Your job is to hit the chimes, and as waves of sound and color ring out, the little drops will be cleared when they match up with the right colors. Chimes can be added together as well, so when a red chime hits a blue chime, it makes a yellow chime, and so on. Drops can also have multiple colors, and when you start to realize that sending out waves of color can sometimes "paint over" the drops that are coming down, this previously simple game gets more complicated. It's a lot of fun, and it's free in the App Store. 1.1 added a few features to the in-app purchase that open up more modes and stages of gameplay. Even if you're too stingy to give the dollar, though, there's still plenty of gameplay to be had, even before you take the purchase plunge.
Intel fires employees out of cannons, flirts with supervillainy
If you had to play a five-note jingle in the most extravagant way possible, how would you go about it? Intel's answer is to propel five "engineers" through the air and into specially prepared jumbo-sized tubular bells. The result is the familiar "Intel Inside" tune, and for extra flair points the big bad monopolist also throws in a countdown done in Finnish which you'll definitely want to see and hear. The video lies after the break and yes, of course it's a fake -- even the engineers are just hired actors.
GPS-enabled wind chimes sound off while geo-tracking
If you think the Dandellas were outlandish uses of GPS technology, here's one that comes mighty close to one-upping even those. The GPS-enabled wind chimes have DIY written all over them, and while the chimes themselves where purchased (after a failed attempt at creating his own, notably), basically everything else that makes the system tick was homegrown. Utilizing Mologogo, servos, circuit boards, and a good bit of coding, the GPS chimes emit their music whenever the tracked individual's cellphone moves in a user-selected path, essentially acting as an alert that someone's headed to their domicile. Of course, the actual options here are a tad limited (albeit very intriguing), but the foundation of the project could indeed be used for a much broader geo-tracking scenario. Regardless, we know there are folks out there eager to give this a whirl, and thankfully for you, everything you need to know (including the oh-so-critical code) is just a Read link away.[Via MAKE]
