Hasta La Gadget!

It’s a quiet book. One that will start your kids’ love for The Lord of the Rings early. The earlier you introduce them to the classic, the sooner they can be geeks in their own right.

This Lord of the Rings quiet book is a perfect starting place for their growing geekiness. This book tells the story quietly, hence the name, with little felt figures, felt pages and even lets your kids dress up Aragorn for adventure. How cool is that? Tolkien’s book was never this interactive.

If you want to make one for your geek in training, you can download the pattern for $10(USD) and make one yourself.

[via The Mary Sue]

This article was written on August 09, 2009 by CyberNet.

I told you earlier in the week that a redesign was coming today, and I wasn’t lying. Hopefully when you see it for the first time you recognize how much we were pushing for simplicity. We moved common navigation-bar items like “about us” into the footer since a majority of users will never need them, and at the same time we made subscribing to our site via RSS, Twitter, and email much more prominent in the header area.

My goal was to give you a design that flows easily with your eyes, and minimizes distractions as much as possible. This is a tough thing to balance because I need to make things convenient, but at the same time weigh what features I think people will use. And then I have to try and present those features in a way that won’t annoy the people who don’t want to use them.

–The Homepage–

Let’s start by looking at the homepage. Here I tried to think about what I’d want on the homepage if I was a reader. Previously we had about 7 articles on our homepage most of which could be read in their entirety without ever clicking a link. If you’re reading a bunch of articles all at once that works out great, but it can take awhile to load if we’ve included some large images in our posts.

To get over this obstacle I tried to find a good median. What I came up with was displaying the latest article in all its glory right there for you to read, and then all subsequent articles are shortened up in a way that lets your eyes quickly skim past them looking for topics that interest you. Plus you should see that the page loads significantly faster since your browser is downloading a thumbnail that’s pulled from the article instead of the full resolution images. To help put the significance of this into perspective: the new homepage that has 10 articles is about 55% lighter in size than our old homepage displaying 7 articles.

–Article Pages–

When reading articles you may notice that the content area is significantly larger than what it previously was. This gives us an opportunity to include bigger screenshots in our articles, and will hopefully mean we have to thumbnail photos a lot less.

The main thing that I want to highlight, however, is the “share” button located at the bottom of each article (assuming you have JavaScript enabled). In there is where you’ll find options for bookmarking an article, viewing tags, and seeing a few related articles. If you’re a registered user (and are logged in) this is also where you can turn comment tracking on/off or CyberMark an article. Here’s a brief overview of those features for those of you unfamiliar with them:

• Comment Tracking – This will let you follow new comments on articles and even get email notifications when a new comment is posted. You can choose to follow new comments on all articles, only articles you comment on, or only articles you explicitly select.
• CyberMarks – This is our own internal bookmarking system. It lets you save your favorite articles where you can go back and sort or search through them to find what you’re looking for.

Both of these features have been completely rewritten, and perform much better than they did before.

–Commenting–

Our comment system has received a rather significant overhaul. We decided to move to a threaded comment system, which means you can reply to comments that other users leave. There’s a downfall to a system like this that I’m very much aware of. Some commenters like to take advantage of threaded comments by always replying to the first comment on the page, which ensures that their comment will show up above many others. I hate that, which is why I made sure I have the ability to “de-thread” comments that are unrelated the parent comment.

Threaded comments also posed another issue for people tracking new comments. If you get notified that there’s a new comment on an article how are you supposed to know which one is new? Sure you can go through them all looking at the dates/times, but when comments are threaded this becomes very difficult. That’s why we now “flag” all new comments so that you’re able to find them in a heartbeat.

We also managed to rewrite our custom AJAX comment system to work with the threaded comments. It was a little trickier than I had anticipated, but I feel like it works pretty well. After leaving a comment you’ll also notice that the page scrolls to where your comment was just posted on the page.

And then there is comment editing. We have migrated to a specialized WordPress plugin for editing comments (with a few custom hacks I through in), and editing comments should be much more reliable for our registered users now.

Note: For avatars we dropped support for MyBlogLog. Now you’ll either need to use Gravatar , or registered users can head to the account settings to provide a URL for an avatar you want to use.

–Searching–

I knew I had to do something about our search system because even I got frustrated trying to find an article with our search system. So now our search engine will sort results by relevance making it a lot faster at hunting down what you’re looking for.

We also tried to put some intelligence behind displaying the search box on the page you’re viewing. For example, if you’re viewing our home page or an article you’ll see the search box tucked away into the pull-down menu at the top of the page. If, however, you’re going through our archives we assume you’re looking for something specific and will therefore expand the search box to aid in your hunt. And we know what a pain it can be at times to work with those tiny search boxes, which is why we super-sized ours.

–And More–

• We’ve thrown a few new elements into the sidebar, including a better summary of unread comments and recent CyberMarks for users that are logged in. A little further down the sidebar you’ll also see some of our most popular articles (by traffic) in the last 7-days.  
• The account management pages are the same in terms of functionality, be I rewrote all of them to make them perform better
• In the footer we still have a nice list of our active All-Stars. These are registered users that actively participate in commenting and send us tips.

–Conclusion–

So I hope you enjoy the new site! For the last month I’ve spent 40-50 hours a week working on the redesign (in addition to the 40-50 hours at my full-time job), which is why article posting slowed down quite a bit. I’ve got a lot of comments to catch up on, and I have a feeling you’ll be seeing some more great stuff roll out of our site in the coming weeks.

Drop us your thoughts on the new design in the comments below.

Copyright © 2013 CyberNetNews.com

The wild, wild west has always been the bedrock of many an interesting yarn to listen to, and even until today, there are young and impressionable kids out there who would love to live out the life of a sheriff, hunting down outlaws and making sure that those who practice a life of crime will not be able to reap the temporary rewards that accompany it. For that young one of yours who does seem to have a penchant for guns, the £14.99 Stixtoy Gun might be a reasonable purchase for the coming holiday season.

With it, you are more than free to come up with your very own rubberband toy gun, and it would be interesting to see dads fight with their kids for ownership of this puppy. I say, why not get two of these bad boys and run riot around the home? Those who can remember how in their younger days, they used rubberbands with twigs and branches to create their own “gun”, but why not let someone do all the work for you while you start to device your next “stick-up”? Who knows, it could very well be a raid on the kitchen for that prized cookie jar and its contents.
[ Stixtoy Gun helps your little ones get started young copyright by Coolest Gadgets ]

Who needs a plain old ceiling fan when you can have this WWII fighter plane nose on your ceiling, complete with propeller? I hope the pilot isn’t an Ace, otherwise you are toast.

It isn’t a real warplane nose and propeller, but is instead a fun recreation that is perfect for your mancave or for any kid’s bedroom. It is painted just like the P-40 fighter jets were when used during WWII. The triple “warplane” blades operate on a reversible three-speed 153-by-12mm motor for optimal air movement, but this thing will never leave the ceiling and start chasing you.

The unit also includes an integrated light kit, with a single 60-watt candelabra bulb that casts a warm, ambient glow. Fans of aviation will love it. It sells for about $261(USD) over on Amazon.

[via Geeks Are Sexy]

Recommended Reading highlights the best long-form writing on technology in print and on the web. Some weeks, you’ll also find short reviews of books dealing with the subject of technology that we think are worth your time. We hope you enjoy the read.

Stuxnet’s Secret Twin (4,176 words)
by Ralph Langner, Foreign Policy
Pocket

Stuxnet is a pretty nasty nasty customer, especially if you happen to be a centrifuge used in the enrichment of uranium. Amazingly, the story of the first publicly acknowledged cyber weapon keeps getting more and more interesting. Ralph Langner has spent the last several years poring over code and other details of Stuxnet’s history and discovered there was an earlier version of the virus, that was even more destructive than the one unleashed on Iran’s nuclear facilities. Instead of putting the centrifuge’s motors in overdrive, it over pressurized them by closing valves designed to allow gas out. It sounds like a perfectly logical avenue of attack, until you realize that the potential for truly catastrophic failure would have quickly blown Stuxnet’s cover.

Filed under: Misc, Science, Internet

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