Hasta La Gadget!

Man who catch fly with chopstick, accomplish anything. Man who catch most sushi with chopstick, become ChopsticKing. That idea behind – I mean that’s the idea behind Chopsticking, an Arduino-based board game made by NYU ITP students Christina Carter and Jess Jiyoung Jung. It’s a two-player game where you compete to grab the greatest number of sushi.

Chopsticking consists of two pairs of chopsticks, a board with a circular receptacle and tokens that look like sushi. There’s a metal plate that obscures part of the bin as it rotates, making it harder to fish out the tokens. Before you play the game, you first have to hold the chopsticks in the proper manner – your index finger and thumb must be resting on the upper stick while the lower half of your thumb anchors the lower stick in place. The Chopsticking sticks have sensors that detect if your fingers are in the right areas, so no cheating by using a fork or your fingers.

When the game begins, you pick up sushi tokens as fast as you can, but you also have to dip them in “soy sauce”, which is actually an RFID reader that detects the tags on the sushi. The player is awarded two scores at the end of the time limit. One is for the number of sushi you were able to dip in the sauce while the other is for how well you held the chopsticks.

Christina and Jess showed off Chopsticking at the World Maker Faire in New York City. It must have been a hit-and-miss affair.

[Chopsticking via MAKE]

Colin Farrell has been in a number of movies, one of the most recent being the Total Recall remake that didn’t totally suck. Farrell is reportedly up for the lead role in a movie based on a video game, and an incredibly popular video game at that. Word is that Farrell could play one of the lead roles in the upcoming video game movie based on World of Warcraft.

The actress tipped to be in contention for the female lead in the film is Paula Patton. Patton was in this summer’s 2 Guns and was in Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol as well. Production for the film is tipped to begin in January of 2014. The film is slated to be directed by Duncan Jones, who created Moon and Source Code (and also happens to be David Bowie’s son.)

Producers attached to the film for Legendary include Thomas Tull and Jon Jashni. Charles Roman and Alex Gartner are also tipped to be producing for Blizzard and Atlas Entertainment respectively. It’s hard to pull off a decent video game movie, so here’s hoping this one does the popular video game justice.

[via Comingsoon.net

Replicate the opening credits of HBO’s Game of Thrones with this multilayered puzzle map of Westeros. Aside from the flat map of the war-torn continent, the kit also includes tiny replicas of cities and castles, plus a few other figurines. Make sure to hum the opening theme while you’re putting it together.

The map was made by 4D Cityscape, a company known for two things: building puzzle maps of cities and misunderstanding the concept of the 4th dimension. This definitively 3-dimensional continent puzzle is made of 1,200 pieces. Then there’s a smaller 200-piece puzzle that sits on top of the continent puzzle that outlines the “current landscape” of Westeros. I assume that refers to the layout of the land based on the TV series so far. The final layer consists of the aforementioned figurines of cities and castles. There are also “over 45 flags to mark famous landmarks, 10 sigils to mark the Houses, and 5 battle markers to learn the locations of five major battles.”

You can pre-order the puzzle map from ThinkGeek for $60 (USD), and you’ll have it in plenty of time as a gift for that Game of Thrones fan on your holiday shopping list.

[via This is Why I’m Broke]

I really don’t care for those reality TV shows where people walk around with metal detectors looking for junk. Most of them end up turning up crappy old coins and cans. But I have to show props to the guys on NatGeo’s Diggers for digging up something epic for once. They managed to find a long lost time capsule buried with stuff from Steve Jobs way back in 1983.

Jobs and other attendees filled the 30-foot-long time capsule with all sorts of stuff after the International Design Conference in Aspen, Colorado some 30 years ago. Most notable among their contributions was Steve Jobs’ mouse from an Apple Lisa he used for the day’s presentation – which apparently is still in mint condition. Bet that’ll fetch some serious buckage at auction.

Despite being known as the “Steve Jobs Time Capsule,” there were many other contributors to the capsule, then known as the Aspen Time Tube. Among them there’s an original Rubik’s Cube, a six pack of Ballantine Ale, some name tags, and a Moody Blues 8-track tape. I’m not sure what the deal is with all the aluminum foil pie tins though.

While they haven’t released images of everything inside, I’m sure you’ll be able to see everything they found in the capsule on an upcoming episode of Diggers on the National Geographic Channel.

[via C|Net]

When the new SimCity game launched earlier this year, it caught a huge amount of flack for requiring an Internet connection to play and bunch of server issues that prevented many gamers from playing for a long time. Those launch woes are behind the game now, and Maxis has announced its first expansion pack is coming on November 15.

The expansion pack will be available for PC and Mac gamers and is called SimCity: Cities of Tomorrow. The expansion pack is set 50 years in the future from the original game and brings a number of new technologies and planning techniques for your cities. Keep in mind that game does still require an Internet connection to play.

One of the complaints of the most recent SimCity was that larger maps were needed to allow people to build bigger cities. The expansion pack doesn’t expand the city size, but does introduce MegaTowers that allow players to build their cities vertically. The expansion also includes an exclusive disaster and a new villain in the form of a corporation that strip mines resources and pollutes the environment.

[via Eurogamer]