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Puma’s first ‘active gaming footwear’ is a sock
Sports and fashion have gone hand in hand for decades, so it's no surprise that esports is slowly but surely making a similar impact. Nike has launched esports jerseys, Adidas has signed Ninja, and now Puma is getting in on the action with the launch of its "active gaming footwear." Or, more specifically, "gaming socks."
The After Math: Baby, it's cold outside
It's 50 degrees and raining here in San Francisco which, by West Coast standards, constitutes the second coming of Snowpacalypse. With this sort of weather the only rational choice is to stay inside and patiently wait for spring. But just because we're tied to the couch for the next few months doesn't mean we can't take a tour of the West Wing, knit ourselves some binge socks or play 16 new (old) XBox games. Because counting the days to spring is way easier if you do it by the numbers.
These DIY Netflix socks pause your show when you fall asleep
Passing out during a Netflix session is a very real threat. Especially with the incoming holiday season and all those requisite carbs pumping in your bloodstream. So Netflix's latest make it project attempts to solve the issue with motion sensors built into your socks. (Vaguely festive PR grab, check.) Netflix has provisioned some sock designs if you're a truly devoted binge-watcher, and offers up all the details for the intermediate-level electronics (Arduino, accelerometers, IR LEDs) needed to make it work. Your handmade wearables might not work all the time, but at least you'll be a little closer to find exactly which episode of Jessica Jones you unintentionally faded out from.
Pee-powered socks generate emergency electricity
A team of researchers from University of the West of England in Bristol, UK want you to pee in your socks. You know, in case of an emergency. They've developed a novel power system that leverages your own liquid waste to generate electricity in an emergency. It's essentially the same process as the still suits from Dune, just with electricity instead of water filtration.
Sensoria is bringing fitness tracking to socks March 15th
Happy 2014! If you had any doubt that the future was here, just check out these socks. It's hard to imagine we've lived through a time in which undergarments with sensors weren't the norm, isn't it? Fear not, because Sensoria's fitness tracking sport socks are set to start shipping March 15th. The wearables feature textile sensors that work with a Bluetooth anklet, tracking your steps, speed, weight distribution, foot landing and cadence. Naturally, they'll run you a tad more than the pair of Gold Toes you just picked up at Target, at $200 for a pair of four, along with the aforementioned anklet. Sensoria's also got textile electrode-laced sports bras and t-shirts coming in January and February, respectively, though you've actually got to pick up a third-party heart monitor from a company like Garmin to make the most of those. So, are fitness socks really that big an improvement over, say, a bracelet? We'll let you know after we see some of these wearbles in action at CES.
Daily iPhone App: Sneezies Match is a good idea made better
I know developer Gavin Bowman of Retro Dreamer (co-creator of apps like Velocispider and Duckers, along with artist Craig Sharpe) fairly well, having met up with him at a number of different conferences and events in the past. His studio released a game called Socks a little while ago, which was just a fun, simple puzzle game (meant for kids, really) where you matched socks of similar patterns. "It's fun," I told him after I played that one, "but it needs some more depth -- a real progression system." A little while later, Gavin showed me a new game he was working on that actually used my feedback (which, disclaimer, was freely offered and unsolicited), and this week on the App Store, Retro Dreamer released it as Sneezies Match, which uses the company's "Sneezies" characters in a simple matching puzzle game, similar to Socks, complete with a full power-up and progression system. You play Sneezies Match by dragging around lines of variously colored Sneezies, lining them up so that Sneezies of the same color are adjacent to each other. Once they're all together, you can tap on them, and they'll clear out and drop off into buckets below, scoring points and powering up extra abilities. The game isn't timed at all, which I really like -- instead, you just get a certain number of turns, and the goal is to score as high as possible within the turn limit. Sneezies is colorful and interesting -- there could be a little more depth to it, and it's sometimes annoying to have to re-align a whole structure of Sneezies if you want them to fall in certain powerup buckets down below. There are also ads placed liberally throughout the app, which can be annoying, though you can remove them (or buy more in-app currency) with an in-app purchase. But aside from those issues, Sneezies Match is a lot of addictive fun, and well worth a download. Just personally, it's really exciting for me to see Retro Dreamer taking feedback and doing something fun and new with it. Apps on the App Store are always growing and evolving, of course, but it's very cool to follow the line of a gameplay idea through the course of its evolution.
Breakfast Topic: Have you belonged to more WoW guilds than socks you've lost in the dryer?
Dwarven Baby Socks "At first you thought they were petrified. But no, they are just really crusty." Guilds are like socks. Some people prefer long, lovely stockings and guilds that go on for ages, while others prefer sturdy little footies and curtailed groups that ride below the water line. The fashionistas among us stick with a delicate swath of nylon to cradle their toes in their stilettos -- and a sexy guild name will do, thanks, with no need for all those nasty rules and raids. And some people, of course, don't wear socks or belong to guilds at all. See? Socks. Guilds. It's a thing. When I was working last week on our guide to a drama-free departure from a guild, one of my goals was to help players see that no matter how disappointed or frustrated or hurt they were, there was no reason to lob a guild over the back of the couch like a pair of stinky athletic socks after a day of rugby in the mud. Even when drama erupts and things hit rock bottom, a guild still represents a collective hope, a fellowship of something bigger than petty schemes and loot rules and social dramas. But when things don't evolve quite the way you'd planned and your efforts to effect a positive change have failed, it's time to move on. Sometimes more than once. Sometimes, over and over again -- until you find what you're looking for. At some point, obviously, you'll either figure out what you're doing wrong (whether it's unrealistic expectations or some issue with your own behavior that's throwing guild membership out of sync for you) or give up in frustration. But maybe you've just had a string of colossal bad luck. Or maybe your circumstances have changed quite a bit through the game's eras, or the people you play with have gone through their own metamorphosis. Maybe your realm slowly withered beneath your feet, or maybe That Guy showed up and drama-bombed things to hell and back. Repeatedly. Do you think you've belonged to a particularly high number of guilds over time? What was behind all the changes? Did the turmoil sour you on guild membership in general, or are you going strong in a solid guild home or in hopes of finding one? How did you find the One True Guild?
These Portal 2 thigh-high bootie socks will kill you with cuteness
Have you seen these things? You may have, once, but most likely your brain's cuteness centers automatically short-circuited and you blacked out, banged your head against the hard wood of your desk, accidentally unplugged your computer's power cord and eventually woke up, dazed, drooling and slightly dumber, with no recollection of these adorable Portal 2 Long Fall booties from J!NX. Prepare yourself this time, and to guarantee you don't forget them, go ahead and buy a pair. At $10, go ahead and buy five pairs, and wear them all at once, for padding when you look down, realize how cute your lower body is, and you short-circuit, black out and fall. Depending on your height and where you're standing at the time -- 6'4", on top of Mount Rushmore -- that could be a long fall.
Official Minecraft... socks?
So, you've got your $302 Minecraft Vans Slip-Ons crafted by KyozoKicks, which is a good start, but in our opinion your feet still don't seem Minecraft-y enough. Look at your ankles! We can see them and everything. It's like you're not even trying. Nope, this simply will not do, especially when Swedish "sock powerhouse" Happy Socks has three different pairs of official Minecraft socks available for the low, low price of fifty whole damn dollars. Sometimes, we think you want to disappoint us.%Gallery-131889%
Apple beats Street estimates; 16M iPhones, 7M iPads sold in Q1
This just in: Apple's financials for the first fiscal quarter ending December 31, 2010 are in, and Apple easily beat the Street. Revenue for the first quarter rose to $26.7 billion, with earnings per share at $6.43. Apple's gross margin, which is always quite high, was at 38.5%. Wall Street estimates were modeling $24.43 billion in revenue, and EPS of $5.40, with a gross profit margin of 27%. During the quarter, Apple sold 16.24 million iPhones, 7.33 million iPads, 4.13 million Macs and 19.45 million iPods. More news coming up shortly during our liveblog.
How to guard yourself and your Mac from Firesheep and Wi-Fi snooping
The prevalence of free/cheap and open Wi-Fi networks in coffee shops, airports, offices and hotels is a great boon to the traveling Mac or iPad user; it makes connectivity and remote work much easier than it used to be. Unfortunately, since most of those networks don't employ WEP or WPA passwords to secure the connection between device and hotspot, every byte and packet that's transmitted back and forth is visible to all the computers on the wireless LAN, all the time. While certain sites and services use full-time browser encryption (the ones that have URLs beginning with https:// and that show a lock in the browser status bar), many only encrypt the login session to hide your username and password from prying eyes. This, as it turns out, is the digital equivalent of locking the door but leaving the windows wide open. Firesheep is a Firefox extension which makes it trivially easy to impersonate someone to the websites they log in to while on the same open Wi-Fi network. It kicks in when you login to a website (usually in a secure fashion, via HTTPS) and then the site redirects you to a non-secured page after login. Most sites that operate this way will save your login information in a browser cookie, which can be 'sniffed' by a nogoodnik on the same network segment; that's what Firesheep does automatically. With the cookie in hand, it's simple to present it to the remote site and proceed to do bad things with the logged-in account. Bad things could range from sending fake Twitter or Facebook messages all the way up to, potentially, buying things on ecommerce sites. That process is known as "HTTP session hijacking" (informally, "sidejacking") and has been a known problem for several years, but many sites have not changed to protect their users. Firesheep has made this process of sidejacking very easy, and a reported 104,000+ people have downloaded it. It is important to realize that the security problem exists for users of all browsers. Firesheep is available only for Firefox, but that's just the exploit side; it will gladly harvest cookies from Safari, Chrome, IE or anything else. Unfortunately, you've got to assume that any unencrypted site you go to while on an open Wi-Fi network is susceptible to compromise by this attack. Read on for some suggested ways to combat this security challenge. Photo by adactio | flickr cc
Willow Garage PR2 robot learns to sort socks for $10k prize (video)
We've been following the evolution of the Willow Garage PR2 robot for a little over a year now, watching as it learned to mooch electricity and hustle pool sharks. That, as it turns out, was only the beginning. The robots are now up for general pre-order should anyone want one (priced well into the "if you have to ask" range, surely), and to celebrate that Willow Garage founder Scott Hassan put up $10k to sponsor a video contest of the PR2 robot doing some impressive things. The winner is a video called "Sockification" from a crew at UC Berkeley in which the PR2 shows some... enthusiastic sock sorting skills. You can see that one embedded below, along with our personal favorite: an ode to StrongBad and his lightswitch rave.
Happy Father's Day from WoW.com!
This was so cute we had to share -- that future Alliance kid at right is Cara's son Riley, no doubt owning it up on Daddy's Death Knight in the battlegrounds. That's right -- the DK who rolled over you with Howling Blast in Wintergrasp yesterday was actually played by a 9.5 month old baby. How's that burn feel? Cara tells us, and the pic was part of a "WoW you're a great father" theme for Riley's first Father's Day.From all of us here at WoW.com, here's a shout out to all of the fathers out there, both Dads of players and Dads who are players themselves. Take a break from taking down Ulduar or grinding out those Argent Tournament quests and make sure to give your Dad a call (and/or the usual tie or socks) today. Or just send him an in-game email for those of you who play with your pops. Happy Father's Day!
Palm Pre data tethering is a go, Sprint be damned
Well, that was fast. Just a couple hours after we noted Palm warning against hacking webOS to allow data tethering on the Pre, the first set of instructions has popped up. It's not the cleanest hack we've ever seen -- you need to root your phone, enable SSH, and then configure your browser to run through a SOCKS proxy -- but it'll certainly get the job done in a pinch. Just don't go crazy, alright? We've got a feeling Sprint's watching Pre accounts with an eagle eye.
Ion-mask military waterproofing technology coming to civilian garb
Gore-Tex is fine and dandy, but the real argonauts out there know it still buckles under the most extreme conditions. Now, however, adventurists that happen upon a ridiculous amount of water could soon ford rivers (à la Oregon Trail, of course) without worrying about soggy socks. The technology, dubbed ion-mask, was originally crafted to "ensure soldiers' clothing remained impermeable to chemical weapons," but now shoe maker Hi-Tec has inked a deal that will being the solution to a smattering of its kicks. Reportedly, ion-mask can outperform "commercial waterproof fabrics such as Gore-Tex by more than a factor of 100," and in testing, it maintained its breathability / waterproof abilities even after 100,000 flexes. No word on when full suits will be doused in this stuff, but hopefully you'll be able to wear the same outfit to the office and the jungle here shortly.
Tether your iPhone, wirelessly. Maybe. (updated with video)
We're not sure how this one got past Apple's App Store censors, but the clever kids at Nullriver have released what appears to be the first tethering solution for the iPhone. The $10 NetShare app is just a SOCKS proxy that links an ad-hoc WiFi network to the iPhone's 3G or EDGE connection -- and if we could get it to work, we'd probably think it was a fine, if hacky, solution to a major limitation of Steve's baby. As it stands, though, the instructions are pretty sparse, and while we can get the app to recognize a connection, we're not able to actually load anything. We're not sure how long this one's going to last -- anyone else willing to give it a shot before it gets yanked?[Thanks, Zoli; Warning, link opens iTunes]Update: Aaaaand it's offline. Shocking.Update 2: We've added our own video hands-on after the break.
You can't get fit without fit socks
Isn't Nintendo just so thoughtful? They're always looking out for gamers, especially the ones that review their products. That's why they've sent out these official Wii Fit socks as a promotional item along with the game, protecting reviewers from others' Balance Board-infecting foot fungi. I'm sure the people who got this promotional extra were happy to have a defense against diseases like athlete's foot aside from, uh, wearing their own socks.It's a shame that these bad boys aren't for sale, though. Now, you won't get to be the cool totally geeky kid on the block who owns his or her own pair of Wii Fit socks.[Via Gemaga]
iPhone hacked for untethered EDGE data on laptop
While this would be all the more sweet on a 3G iPhone, a new series of hacks will now give you untethered EDGE networking from your laptop. Starting with jailbreak as any proper iPhone hack must, the latest hack installs a new SOCKS server on your iPhone. Join your iPhone and laptop to the same ad-hoc WiFi network and you're pretty much good to go. The procedure is a bit cumbersome if this is your first hack attempt so be sure to check the YouTube video-how-to before you get going. Check it after the break. [Via MacRumors]
