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Wonders never cease
The above picture shows one Stephen Fischbach, who suffers from cerebral palsy and is unable to walk or speak, enjoying a game of Wii Sports baseball with his family. It's a wonderful image, and one that we hope everyone, no matter their console allegiances, can fully appreciate.[via Digg]
DS Daily: Custom stylus
We've touched on the issue of the stylus before; many people use thicker, professional styluses from PDAs or whatnot, while others use some of the special edition ones seen around the internet. But it's a free-thinking world, guys and gals, and reality is such a ho-hum place.Let your mind drift and dream, and tell us, dear readers: in a penultimate world (that's a clever pun, see?), what would your stylus be? Any reasonably cylindrical shape will do. We're partial to the deadly eastern dragon above, of course.
Do you ever dream of WoW?
Imagine the scene: the boss has been defeated, and after five grueling hours you're finally able to step out of the instance victorious. You log out to catch some shut eye, and your mind fills with images of the mobs you've just defeated. You're now dreaming of WoW. A forum post about this subject really got me thinking. In fact, evidently even Eyonix dreams of WoW, which I guess isn't all that surprising really. I often dream that I am in game when I am happily zonked out. For me, I think it is a case of sensory input; I dream a lot of times about what I see and hear. A while back I prepared the night before a business meeting by printing out my reports and leaving them by the door so that I wouldn't forget them. I didn't, but in my dreams that night I did. The same is true of World of Warcraft. I spent so much time immersed in the game that it sometimes slips into my dreams as well. Do you dream of WoW? What sorts of in game elements slip into your slumber?
Magnetic signals could cure chronic insomnia
Make no mistake, there's a plethora of devices out there aimed squarely at rudely disrupting your nap, but a technique that utilizes a gaudy head wrap and magnetic pulses could make the process of conking out a whole lot easier. Apparently, scientists can use relatively standard medical equipment in order to "stimulate the brain with harmless magnetic pulses," which essentially penetrate the nerves that control a type of deep sleep called "slow-wave activity." By forcing the brain to conjure these waves, it helps trigger deep sleep in even the "most chronic insomniac," and researchers are hoping that these methods could be used to create a machine that lets weary individuals get one fabulous power nap. Until then, however, may we suggest wading through every last Intel roadmap presentation you can find without ever losing focus, as this little trick seems to work quite well in corporate settings.[Via Spluch]
Mystery sequel to be announced shortly?
var digg_url = 'http://www.digg.com/gaming_news/Mystery_sequel_for_Wii_to_be_announced_shortly'; Japanese mag Nintendo Dream (truly, if only such wondrous publications were here in America as well) has related a tantalizing morsel. According to a ghetto Google translation (check after the break), a successor to a famed and well-known Nintendo franchise is coming to a Wii near you. What could it be? Donkey Kong? Kid Icarus? Such teasing articles are better left unpublished; we lose sleep over this stuff, you know. Cold sweats in the middle of the night kind of stuff.There will be no posts between 3 and 4 today, due to therapy sessions.
Dream recorder
If I were giving out awards for creepiest Mac application Dream recorder would be the front-runner. This app, as the name implies, aims to help you record your dreams and get a sense for how well you are sleeping. As you can see in the illustration to the right, the proper usage of Dream recorder involves: Placing your Mac on a night table next to your bed (the Mac must have a camera attached to it). Take a picture with Dream recorder in the dark, so it can adjust its settings. Go to sleep. Dream recorder will take a picture of you every 2 minutes by slowly brightening the screen. Dream recorder will determine the best time to wake you, based on a range you enter and what sleep cycle you are in. When you wake up, hit the space bar to stop the picture taking and to start the audio recording (this is where you tell the Mac about your dreams). The developer has kindly uploaded a sample of what the resultant movie, constructed from all those pictures, looks like. Creepy, huh?There is a 15 day trial, after which a 3 license pack costs $45. Dream recorder requires OS X 10.4.8 and Quicktime 7.
One last Dreamcast game, over eight years later
Why go through the hassle (and lines of fire) to get your palms on a shiny next generation system when game developers are still popping out fresh hits for your Sega Dreamcast? You heard right, Sega's last flailing attempt in the console market still has a dream burning somewhere in Japan, as recent reports claim that "Warashi will be porting its arcade shooter Trigger Heart Exelica to the system." The game itself is a "side scrolling shooter" that utilizes a "three button system" (Genesis, anyone?) to take out your enemies. So if you're still hanging on to that (previously) antiquated console, and you don't mind games coming out some eight years after its release, then dust off the Shenmue and let it hold you over 'til the next big (and final -- right?) title lands on February 22, 2007.
My Dream App Winners Announced!
The votes are in folks, and the winners are Atmosphere, Portal, and Cookbook, with Portal beating out Hijack by only 5 votes. It looked like Hijack had Portal beaten, that is before the filtering of fraudulent votes. Fraudulent votes were defined as more than 50 votes for the same application originating from the same IP address. With a result this close, there are bound to be some sore feelings between winners and losers, but let's just try and remember it's not the end of the world, and life will go on. So did your preferred app make the cut? Let us know in the comments.
My Dream App final round voting
Eight o'clock (EDT) tomorrow night marks the end of voting for the final round of Phill Ryu's My Dream App competition. What started just over a month ago with 24 eager contestants and their software-concepts has been whittled down by four rounds of voting to the six best ideas as decided by thousands of people like ourselves. The masterminds of the three ideas with the most votes will receive a new MacBook and a contract to have their software made into a full-fledged OS X application, the revenue from which they get a share of. Keeping with tradition (and even going a bit above and beyond what we've seen in the past), everyone who votes in this last round will receive a free license for Overflow 2.0, PhotoPresenter 2.6, and $5 off one of the new Insanely Great Tees from Monkey Business Labs.Competition between the contenders has been brutal this round, with almost all of the ideas making it into the top three at one time or another over the past day, with Atmosphere (one of the app's I voted for, yay!) currently in the lead. The one contestant that has stayed consistent throughout the voting has been Blossom, of which Steve Wozniak has to say; "This would only be remotely entertaining if the plant was marijuana or opium and when you did certain things like actually work, you killed your crop. Maybe you could make virtual cash and compete online for the best cash crop. In order to grow the weed and heroin you have to browse certain web sites that would require you be smoking weed to start with; like the Microsoft.com Vista developer site."So get out there and vote! It only takes a few minutes, you get yourself some great free software, and in the process help decide the winner of a great competition that will eventually benefit you through new and interesting applications to play with.Update: "What, you mean today isn't Wednesday?" Thanks for pointing out my errors guys, I must be losing it.Update, the second: Ok, here's the deal on the whole "who's on first" business. I do have insider information when it comes to MDA, but not in the case of this vote. Without even really thinking about it, I made a (silly now that I think of it) assumption that the first, second, third etc histogram bars corresponded to the first, second,third etc applications listed below. I would never intentionally do anything to skew the results. Sorry about the confusion
My Dream App Semifinals voting ends tonight
Voting for the Semifinals round of the My Dream App contest ends tonight at Midnight (EDT), and with it, seemingly any chance of Desktop Wars (my original choice) making it to the final round. Digg founder Kevin Rose, Peter Cohen and Jason Snell from Macworld, David Pogue of the New York Times, and netcaster Leo Laporte are just some of this rounds Big-Name™ judges. Everyone who votes in this round will get a free copy of playful recording software Voice Candy.So get out there and Vote! Show your patriotism.... or something like that.
Breakfast Topic: Your Dream Gear
Ocelot Eyes in the WoW ladies LJ group has a dream-- and it is to dual wield Thekal and Arlokk's Grasps, two uber looking fist weapons that drop from the bosses in ZG. There's the gear we're all working towards right now on quests or drops-- and then there's the dream gear we all want.Sure, we'd all love to be walking around in Tier 3 (and for my little Gnome warrior, that's exactly what I would love to see him in), but for each one of us, there's probably some gear that just fits with what we want our characters to be. For my Shaman, it's the Tier 0 shoulders, the Pauldrons of Elements. Yeah, it'd be nice to have the Tier 1 shoulders (my guild is working through MC, and it's likely that I'll get them before long, to go with a few other Earthfury pieces I've already picked up), but the Elements, with those little hooky things, just seem like the perfect shoulders for my Shaman. Just seeing those on other characters was one of the reasons I rolled Shaman, and so even if I get better stuff, I just have to have them.Likewise, on my Priest I'm already determined to jump the hoops for Benediction / Anathema-- it's a tough (and long) quest, but that's just so the right weapon for my Priest, especially since I plan to keep her shadow specced. And I sent my rogue on many, many more runs through Deadmines than I needed to, just because I wanted to have the Defias Leather set early on.So spit it out-- what's your dream gear? What's that one piece or that one set of armor that you just have to have?
Nokia's aeon "full surface screen" cellphone concept
Nokia's research and development team have kicked it up a gear with an attractive "aeon" concept phone showing up in the R&D section of the company's website. The most prominent design feature of aeon is a touchscreen that stretches over the full surface area of the phone, similar to BenQ-Siemens's Black box concept phone we saw recently. Currently mobile technology isn't quite up to realizing this fantasy, but we'll sleep better tonight knowing that at least one of the cellphone industry's biggest names shares the same dream as we do -- BenQ's dream didn't count, unfortunately.
My Dream App Round 3 voting ends tonight
With only twelve concepts still in the running to be turned into someone's dream Mac OS X application, the My Dream App competition ends its third round of public voting tonight at midnight. As a reward for your input, everyone who votes will recieve a free copy of Musicast which allows anyone to stream music from their iTunes library over the web. And just incase you can't decide which of the ideas you like best, a panel of guest judges including Adam Betts and David Lanham share their opinions on each app up for votes.
Smash Bros. Dojo updated
Smash Bros. Dojo, the official Smash Bros. website, has updated the character section. Pit, star of the game Kid Icarus for the NES, and Meta Knight, rival to the gluttonous pink ball that is Kirby, are the first two of the game's characters to receive the star treatment with added screenshots and biographies.
