Hasta La Gadget!

In Your Flying Car Awaits, author Paul Milo discusses “robot butlers, lunar vacations and other dead-wrong predictions of the 20th Century.” Here are 10 calamitous tech failures. Even the ones that did make it aren’t anything like their original visions.

Cities Under Domes

The architect and all-around visionary R. Buckminster Fuller believed that one day, cities in cold-weather regions cold be encased under temperature-controlled geodesic domes. Although it might sound loopy, Fuller argued back in the ’60s that such a dome over New York City would pay for itself in 10 years, as there would be no more need for snow removal. In addition to temperature control, the domes were also supposed to contain germ filters that would have prevented us from getting sick too.

The Food Pill and the Algae Sandwich

In the 1950s and ’60s, when experts thought that conventional food production could not possibly keep up with baby production, some believed we would have to resort to factory-made capsules replete with all our daily nutrients; work on a true food pill, as opposed to a vitamin supplement, began about 100 years ago. Or, we might have to chow down on the most basic foodstuff of all: algae and plankton. One scientist believed we might all have algae tanks on our rooftops today. Another thought we could send out robotic “whales” to harvest kelp from the seas.

The Flying Car

For futurists, this one’s an oldie but a goodie. By 1909, forecasters believed that soon, someone would combine, like peanut butter and jelly, the newfangled airplane to the equally cutting-edge automobile. For a century the flying car has been one of those perennially just-around-the-corner innovations, and while work continues on a viable prototype, don’t expect to see your Honda become airborne anytime soon. Although NASA has done some work on creating a “sky highway,” an electronic corridor in the sky to be used by pilots of small craft, the effort is still at a very preliminary stage.

The Knowledge Pill

Scientists at the University of Michigan in the early 1960s trained worms to avoid an electric shock, then noticed that other, untrained worms suddenly possessed this skill too after eating their learned cousins. It was thought that acquired skills were kept in RNA, a chemical similar to DNA that performs the genetic functions in cells. This led some to speculate that knowledge is stored in our bodies in edible form and to conclude that one day, learning Spanish would be as easy as popping a caplet or dos.

Nuclear Bombs for Demolition and Excavation

In the 1950s, when nuclear weapons were still novel, there was a movement to find so-called “peaceable uses for the atom”—including using atomic bombs as excavation equipment for titanic construction projects. The effort was known as “Project Plowshare” (as in what swords get beaten into) and was intended to show the world that America, then as now the preeminent nuclear power, was not hell-bent on global destruction.

Man-Made Oceans

In the late 1960s there were plans to damn up the Amazon River and carve out some reservoirs (possibly using nukes such as the ones described above) to create an inland ocean that would have covered a huge chunk of South America. The project reached a fairly advanced planning stage before it was abandoned by the leaders of the nations that would have been affected. Among the many problems with this plan: a French engineer calculated that placing so much additional water near the Equator could actually slow the earth’s rotation.

Undersea Colonies

By the 1960s, engineers had figured out how to economically harvest the oil and other mineral wealth of the deep seas. Some thought that this would inevitably lead to the creation of underwater Gold Rush towns, communities that would at first house miners and, eventually, their families. A proposed, corollary innovation was the creation of artificial gills that would have enabled residents of these aquatic metropolises to breathe underwater without bulky gear. In 1964, at the second World’s Fair held in New York City, General Motors sponsored an exhibit depicting these undersea homes which, of course, had “sea cars” parked in their underwater driveways.

The Self-Driving Car

By now we were all supposed to be able to take our hands off the wheel and let our cars do the driving. At the 1939 World’s Fair in New York, one exhibit depicted future expressways filled with autos controlled by radio from a central tower. Sixty years later, near San Diego, engineers built a demonstration “smart roadway” that used sensors and computers to keep the traffic flowing. With the advent of GPS, advanced collision-avoidance technology and cars that can even parallel park without human assistance, this is one innovation we might actually be seeing pretty soon.

The Videophone

A combination telephone-television, engineers had been working on this one since the late 1920s, and actually built prototypes in New York City and Washington. But for a very long time costs were prohibitive: even after they figured out how to make it work, Bell Telephone offered the service 35 years ago for a hefty $90 a month (this was in mid-70s money, remember). Another problem: Bell’s own market research, dating from the late 1950s, revealed that people don’t always want to be seen as they chat on the phone.

The Safe Cigarette

When the US Surgeon General officially declared, in the early 1960s, that cigarettes cause cancer, tobacco companies responded by trying to come up with a truly safe smoke. Company scientists tried a variety of methods, including attempting to identify and filter out the harmful chemicals and even experimenting with smokable lettuce, but the effort proved a bust, and was finally abandoned following the successful cigarette company lawsuits of the 1990s.

Veteran newspaper reporter Paul Milo is now a freelance writer whose work has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Yahoo News, Beliefnet and Editor and Publisher. You can grab a copy of his enjoyable book Your Flying Car Awaits for around $10 at Amazon or find it anywhere else that books are sold.

Talking to a camera nerd—or even reading about new cameras—can feel like translating from a different language. But it doesn’t need to! Here, in this here post, is everything you need to know about cameras, without the noise.

When you buy a camera, you’ll be pelted with specs from a salesperson, many of which are confusing, and even misleading. You will cower, and may cover your head for protection. He will keep pelting. And really, he has to—spec sheets and jargon are integral to camera marketing, at least for now. Here’s what it all means, in one handy cheat sheet.

Types of Cameras

Before you set out to buy a new camera, or even just to get to know yours a little better, you’ve got to know the difference between the different types or cameras. Here are the ones you’re likely to come across.

Point-and-Shoots: Also known as compact cameras. If you don’t know what kind of camera you’re looking for, or what kind your have, it’s probably one of these. They’re the smallest style of camera, typically—at least in the last few years—trending toward a boxy, mostly featureless shape. The lens is non-removable. The flash unit is built in. They have LCD screens on the back, not just for reviewing photos, but to use as a viewfinder as well. When you press the shutter button on a point-and-shoot, there is a slight delay before the photo is actually recorded. Many new point and shoot cameras will take video, and some even manage to record in HD.

Bridge/Superzoom Cameras: These cameras often look like DSLRs, but don’t be fooled: They’re just juiced-up point-and-shoots. They will typically come with longer lenses and slightly more impressive specs than your average P&S, and will give you a bit more photographic flexibility to play with. Sadly, they suffer from the same picture-taking delay, or “shutter lag,” as point and shoots. The problem with bridge cameras, especially now, is that in order to get a decent one you have to spend at least a few hundreds dollars, at which point you may as well get a…

DSLRs: This unwieldy acronym stands for Digital Single Lens Reflex. Narrowly, this means that the camera has a mirror mechanism which allows photographers to see through the camera’s lens while setting up a shot, and which flips up, exposing the image sensor (the equivalent to film in a digital camera). Widely, this means that the camera will have interchangeable lenses, a larger sensor than a point and shoot, and to an extent, more image controls. When you press the shutter button on a DSLR, it takes the photo instantly—no lag, like in a point-and-shoot. Many new DSLRs at mid-to-high price points shoot HD video; some manage 720p, some manage 1080p, but all turn out impressive results, if simply because of the cameras’ lenses. That said, they’re not really ready to replace proper video cameras yet, because amongother things, no DSLR to date has got the autofocus during video thing right.

These are the cameras that photographers, or people who call themselves photographers, use. They’re also the ones that are capable of taking the best photos.

As a rule, DSLRs are more expensive than point and shoots. But they’re getting cheaper. Much, much cheaper. Olympus, Nikon, Pentax and Sony all have DSLRs that can be had for under $500—and these are real cameras—rendering the entire category of bridge cameras kind of pointless.

Micro Four Thirds/Digital Rangefinder: Micro Four Thirds cameras are interchangeable-lens cameras, minus the straight-through-the lens viewfinder that defines a DSLR. In other words, they have larger sensors like DSLRs, have swappable glass like DSLRs, but use an LCD screen as viewfinderlike a point-and-shoot. This saves space inside the camera, meaning that—at least this is the theory—it can be more portable than an equivalent DSLR, while maintaining the same versatility and image quality. Most of them record video, too, and they’re pretty good at it: They don’t have the complex viewfinder/mirror system of a DSLR, so it’s technically simpler to record video. Some of these cameras are styled like DSLRs, like the Panasonic Lumix DMC-G1, while some are styled more like portable cameras, like the Olympus EP-1.

This is a small category for now, and accordingly, prices are still high, starting at about $750. Panasonic and Olympus are basically the only game in town.

Sensors

The sensor is the part of the camera that actually records the image. In other words, it is your camera.

Megapixels, and image resolution: Megapixels have been central to digital camera marketing since the beginning (it just sounds like a 90s term, doesn’t it?). A megapixel, quite simply, is one million pixels. If a one-megapixel image (or sensor) was perfectly square, it would be 1000×1000 pixels. They’re usually rectangular, at 4:3 or 3:2 ratios, which means their resolutions look more like this: 2048×1536 pixels for a 3-megapixel camera; 3264×2448 pixels for an 8-megapixel camera, and so on.

As digital cameras mature, this number means less and less—it’s easy to cram megapixels in a camera, but without good optics and light sensitivity, it doesn’t mean that it’s going to turn out an honest, clean, high-quality images at such a high resolution. My cellphone shoots at five megapixels, but the images look like screenshots from some kind of ghosthunting show. My DSLR shoots at 10.1 megpixels, but turns out images more than twice as clean and clear as my phone. My point-and-shoot is rated at 12.1 megapixels, but on close examination, its images are effectively blurrier than those from the DSLR.

If you’re planning on making huge prints, or need to crop your images a lot, a high megapixel count is necessary, but beyond a certain point, the returns are minimal. You’ll read a lot of guidance from camera manufacturers about how many megapixels you need to print different sized photos, which you can ignore, because they seem to change with every generation of cameras. Unless you’re printing billboards or in magazine or something, don’t sweat it too much.

Aside from indicating how many dots a camera is capable of capturing, megapixels can be a helpful indicator of how old a camera’s guts may be. Megapixel count has been increasing fairly steadily over the years, so within a given manufacturer’s camera line, increased megapixels could correlate to newer sensors, which could, along with high resolution, take richer, less noisy pictures.

ISO: This indicates how fast your camera’s sensor collects light—the higher your ISO, the more sensitive your camera is to light, the less light you need to take a picture. And while high-ISO capability is most useful in low light, it also comes in handy when you’re shooting extremely fast exposures in the daytime, like at a sports game. With higher ISOs, though, comes more noise—some point-and-shoot cameras advertise extremely high ISOs, on the order of 6400. Shots at this sensitivity will invariably look like ass. DSLRs, which have larger sensors that are better at gathering light, can sometimes shoot at 6400 ISO and higher without too much noise.

It might help to think of it like this: ISO ratings are actually a callback to the days of film. You used to have to anticipate how you’d be shooting, and buy film based on how sensitive it was, as expressed in an ISO or ASA rating. The ratings got carried over to digital cameras, despite film getting replaced with sensors.

Anyway, don’t buy a camera for its ISO rating alone, because there’s a good chance its top two to three settings will be useless.

CCD and CMOS: From our previous Giz Explains on the subject:

There are two major types of image sensors for digital cameras and camcorders: CCD (charged-couple device) and CMOS (complementary metal-oxide-semiconductor, sometimes also known as active pixel sensor). We’re not going to get into the really geeky differences, because you don’t really need to know or care. What you should know is that higher-end digital SLRs (the big cameras with a removable lens) use CMOS because it’s easier to make bigger CMOS sensors; and mobile phones do because CMOS uses less power. That said, most point-and-shoot cameras and most camcorders use the more common CCD sensor.

Things are a little different now, and CCDs are common in DSLRs nowadays. The difference for consumers is minimal—don’t be alarmed to see either on your camera’s spec sheet. UPDATE: As some commenters have pointed out, this isn’t quite right: DSLRs are still trending more towards CMOS sensors, including most of the latest/greatest cameras. Anyway: still more of a curiosity than a purchasing point, for most people.

White Balance: Have you ever seen a set of indoor pictures that’s totally, inexplicably orange? That’s a white balance problem. Your camera can adjust to compensate for different light temperatures—tungsten lights have that orange hue, and sunlight will turn your photos kind of blue—and correct your image’s color accordingly. Virtually all cameras let you adjust white balance with presets, though it’s best if you can adjust it manually, too.

Sensor size, and crop factor: Some cameras have sensors that are roughly the same size as 35mm film, at 36x24mm. These are called full frame cameras. They tend to be more expensive—like Canon’s 5D and 1D series, or Nikon’s D3s—and their bodies tend to be a bit bigger. Semi-pro to pro equipment, basically.

APS-C sensors, on the other hand, are what almost all consumer DSLRs ship with. These sensors are about 22x15mm, which is significantly smaller than a full frame’s sensor. Why does this matter? Larger sensors provide more room for each pixel, which makes them better at picking up light. (A bucket analogy is useful here.) More importantly for APS-C users, though, is crop factor. A smaller sensor will pick up a smaller section of what’s coming through a lens, so: A 200mm lens on a full frame DSLR becomes a 300m lens on an APS-C camera, a 50mm becomes a 75mm, etc. Of course, camera manufacturers make APS-C -specific lenses which are designed for the smaller sensors, but the listed focal lengths aren’t adjusted—they’re still 35mm-equivalent numbers. Just be aware the any given lens will shoot differently from one type of camera to another.

Optics

The optics are the the parts through which your camera sees. They’re the eyeballs, basically.

Swappable lenses: There are two kinds of swappable lenses, generally speaking. Ones that zoom in and out, which are called “zoom” lenses, and ones that don’t move. These are called “primes.” They’re all classified by focal length. Strictly speaking, focal length refers to the distance required for a lens system to focus light. In real terms, focal length roughly correlates to physical lens length, and helps indicate how much a lens magnifies an image. 18mm focal length on a DSLR is considered wide, 200mm or more would be considered a telephoto lens.

Point-and-Shoot Lenses, and the X Factor: The second most prominently featured number on your point-and-shoot’s obnoxious feature sticker is the zoom rating. It’ll be expressed as a number, with an x: 5x, 10x, etc. You’ll also see a printed range, something like 5.0-25mm, which describes the focal length of the lens. Here’s a trick: Divide the larger focal length measurement by the smaller one. The result should match your “x” zoom rating, because, well, that’s all it is: the quotient of the maximum lens length and the minimum lens length.

This is misleading labeling. Mounted on the same camera, a lens that zooms from 50mm to 100mm would be called a 2X lens, while a lens that zooms from 18mm to 42mm would be called a 3X lens, even though at the longest, it doesn’t zoom in as far as the 50-100mm lens does at its shortest. Take this equation into account when comparing point-and-shoots, but most of all, try them. You’ll see the difference.

Shutter, shutter speed, and shutter lag: You shutter is the little door that opens up between your lens and your sensor, allowing for photographic exposure. Shutter speed ranges are advertised with the intention of implying that the camera will be useful at both ends: from the 10-second long exposure to the 1/4000th-second high-speed shot. Keep in mind, for both numbers, that shutter speed alone doesn’t guarantee anything. If your camera can shoot at 1/4000th of a second, but it’s got a small aperture and low ISO rating, your shots will probably be too dark.

Shutter lag is something else entirely. You know how on a point and shoot, there’s a frustrating gap between when you press the button and when your shot actually takes? That’s it. The lower the shutter lag, the better, though many camera manufacturers don’t even bother to advertise this.

Aperture: This is the hole through which light passes after its been through part of your lens, and before it hits your sensor. The bigger the hole, the more light gets in. The smaller the hole, the less light gets in. Larger apertures allow you to take pictures in lower light situations, but only allow you to focus on a thin plane—either your background or your foreground will be out of focus. Smaller apertures let you keep more of a scene in focus but they let less light through, and require longer exposure times. Apertures are described by f-numbers—these are the ration between the width of an aperture and the focal length of a lens. The smaller the number, the larger the aperture.

Optical vs Digital Zoom: Another scourge of the camera buyer is digital zoom. Optical is magnification by your lens—in other words, it’s true zoom. Digital zoom is just your camera taking the optically zoomed image and blowing it up, like you’d do in Photoshop. It’s only useful for framing shots and sometimes helping your camera focus properly. Otherwise, it’s a gimmick: Ignore it, shoot wide and crop your shots later.

IS, or Antishake: Image stabilization is fast becoming a standard feature on even the cheapest cameras, though you’ll find some sub-$150 point-and-shoots without it. The point of image stabilization is to correct for camera movements during an exposure, which cause blurry shots.

There are two types: Digital IS, which you’ll find mostly in point-and-shoots, corrects the image with software, and can be somewhat effective, though the results are often passable, not perfect. Optical image stabilization physically moves some part of the camera to counteract shaking. In some cameras, like Nikons and Canons, the moving parts are in the lens. In most other other manufacturers’ DSLRs, it’s the sensor that actually moves to stabilize the image. Optical IS almost always works better, but it’s not magic—you won’t be able to shoot a freehand four-second exposure just because it’s on, but you might be able to keep things together for a half-second or more.

Software

“Modes,” Face Detection, Smile Detection: Your camera’s modes are assistive tools,, not hard features. They’re generally just collected presets for settings that you can adjust yourself, like equalizer presets on your iPod. They can be useful, though you’ll be a better photographer if you manage settings yourself.

Face and smile detection, again, are like crutches. Face detection guesses when there’s a human in the photo so the camera can adjust exposure, white balance and focus to make sure that said human doesn’t end up blurry. Smile detection is a crude algorithm that measures facial features, and won’t take a photo until the subjects are judged to be SUFFICIENTLY CONTENTED, by which I mean they have vaguely crescent-shaped mouth holes. It’s a good way to ensure that nobody is ruining a photo with a grimace. Also, to ensure that none of your photos are ever interesting.

Image formats: You digital camera doesn’t have film, but your photos have to go somewhere. In today’s cameras, the digitally stored photos are either JPEGs or RAW files. JPEG files are compressed, which means that they are encoded in such a way that they don’t take up much space, but lose a small amount of quality. This is how point-and-shoot cameras almost always store images, and how DSLRs store images by default, generally.

If JPEGs are like photo prints (they’re not, really, but bear with me) then RAW files are like the digital negatives. (In fact, one popular RAW format, .DNG, crudely stands for “digital negative”). Raw files contain almost exactly what your sensor has recorded, which means you can change values like exposure, white balance and coloration after taking the photo, to a surprisingly high degree. It feels like cheating! There is a downside: larger image files. And, depending on the type of RAW file—different camera manufacturers have different ones—you may need special software to view and edit your photos. Shoot in RAW if you can, and buy a camera that’ll let you. This is a huge feature.

As a bonus, most cameras that shoot RAW will also let you shoot RAW and JPEG files simultaneously, so you have a lightweight, ready-to-print-or-upload file right away, as well as the RAW source, for later editing. It takes up a ton of space, but hey, space is cheap nowadays. Spend a few bucks on a bigger memory card, and live your life.

Video: Most new cameras, including some DSLRs, shoot video. But just because your camera shoots stills at 10 megapixels doesn’t mean that it’ll shoot anywhere near that kind of resolution in motion. The standard resolution for most point-and-shoot cameras is VGA—that’s just 640×480 pixels of video, which is good enough for YouTube—while DSLRs, and some nicer point-and-shoots, record in either 720p or 1080p, which are HD resolutions, which translate to 1280×720 pixels and 1920×1080 pixels, respectively.

Storage

Point and shoot cameras usually come with a small amount of onboard storage. This, I’m about 100% sure, is there so that the camera technically works when you buy it, making your inevitable extra storage purchase seem more like a choice, and less like a mandatory camera tax. Anyway, with any camera, you’re going to need to buy some memory, or storage.

There are a few peripheral memory card formats still kicking around (Sony, can you please just put Memory Stick Pro out of its misery? Thanks!) but there are only two that matter.

SD: Also seen as SDHC, or SDXC, these little guys are the card of choice for point-and-shoot and bridge cameras, and some newer DSLRs. They’re small, they works fine, and they’re available in just about any capacity you could ever want. Almost: Most cameras are only SDHC-compatible, a standard which maxes out at 32GB. SDXC, the next evolution of the SD standard, maxes out at a theoretical 2TB, though almost no cameras support it yet.

Compact Flash: These cards are chunkier, can be faster, and are more durable, and anecdotally less prone to temperature and weather damage. These are what you’ll find in DSLRs.

Speed ratings: Memory cards come in different speeds. These are advertised in a variety of different ways, for no good reason. You’ll see a couple of numbers on most cards, in the “133x” syntax. Ignore them—they are inflated, unregulated and therefore, basically meaningless. What you’re looking for on SD cards is a Class rating, from 1-6. The official SD Association chart:
For Compact Flash cards, your best bet is to look for an actual transfer speed on the card, expressed in MB/s.

Further Reading

Reviews: One gadget blog, try as we may, can’t cover the hundreds of cameras that come out every year. We’ll leave that to the obsessives. See:

• DPReview

• The Photography Bay

• Photography Review

• Photo.net

You really shouldn’t buy a camera without consulting these guys first. They have a habit of lapsing into jargon at times, but hey, if you’ve read this far, you’ll be able to get by.

Taking Photos: So now you’ve got your new piece of neck candy, and you feel awfully cool. You know what would make you cooler? Learning how to shoot, for god’s sake. A few of out recent guides:

• The Basics: Your new camera has been removed from the box. It has been fiddled with. You cat has been photographed multiple times. Now what?

• When Not to Use Flash: The answer: Pretty much always.

• How To Shoot HDR: Taking hyperreal photos by combining multiple exposures, without, as we call it, the “clown vomit.”

• For general advice, Photo.net‘s comically extensive set of photography guides provides instructions for virtually any scenario. Need to shoot some, say, nudes? In, say, Namibia’s uniquely harsh sunlight? They’ve got you covered.

And although broad guides are useful, I’ve learned more about photography and cameras from Flickr than any other resource. Join the Flickr group for your camera, and spend some time on the message boards. You’ll learn clever tricks for getting the most out of your hardware, but in doing so, with the help of a gracious community, you’ll learn just as much about photography as a whole.

Still something you wanna know? Send questions about DSLRs, P&Ses, B&Bs or BBQs here, with “Giz Explains” in the subject line.

It’s 9 p.m. and I’ve lost my fifth straight game of Madden NFL Arcade to the same person, each time by 30-0. My opponent has a gamerscore of more than 165,000. But it’s not because she’s good at football.

“I hate sports games,” Kristen says with a weary laugh, reminding me for about the fifth time this Thursday night “I had to ask someone what a sack was. They said it’s when you tackle the quarterback. I said, ‘Which one is the quarterback?'”

Only in name are Kristen and I playing Madden NFL Arcade. Instead we are “boosting,” – throwing games to each other, more or less, to rack up multiplayer achievements. I’ve already gotten 50 points the easy way. Now it’s her turn.

It is a substantial part of how Kristen, whose last name I’m withholding out of concern for her privacy, has become, according to one leading compilation, the No. 4 ranking woman, worldwide, in Gamerscore. Her tag is CRU x360a – go ahead, look it up. Kristen – CRU or Crubie to some online – is a 24-year-old stay-at-home mom in northwest Indiana. You call her extremely motivated. You can call her obsessed. You can also call her an achievement whore, like she hasn’t heard that from every piss-ant with a 5,000 gamerscore in the underground zone.

Bottom line, she’s is really effective at piling up her gamerscore. But she’s not sure when, or if, she will stop.

A Race to the Top

“It was a friendly race at the time,” Kristen says of the beginning, three years ago, when she got serious about her Gamerscore. “It was to 20,000. My buddy was at 15,000 and I was at 13, I was 2,000 behind him. I said, ‘OK, this might take years.’

Kristen had bought an Xbox 360 in early 2007 and, like most, it wasn’t because it offered achievements. She was a multiplayer gamer on a few titles she enjoyed – shooters mostly. Then she joined a Gamerscore league. And then she got into this side bet.

“Once I found sites that had guides on which were the easy games, I beat (20,000) in like a month and a half,” she says. “It got me hooked and it was like a drug. A bad drug. A bad habit.”

Soon enough Kristen managed to fall in with some elite players in the achievement grinding world. One, named Smrnov, who is the global No. 10 on MyGamerCard, praises Kristen’s team-spirited achievement hunting. “CRU was unselfish in the help she offered our team, and has always been reliable for getting the game time in, which is a very hard trait to find for spanning so many different games, versus a single one,” he says.

Stallion83, the global No. 2 on that list, played with Kristen in those early days, and was most recently her boosting partner on Damnation – a terribly received game. (“We managed to have fun talking about The Leprechaun movies,” he says. “Party chat has made some of these games less painful.”)

“She was just a nice person,” Stallion83 recalls,”like one of the dudes. Most girls cause drama and try to get attention. I didn’t see that with CRU.” Both he and Smrnov heap praise on Kristen’s FPS skill. “A great FPS player,” says Smrnov. “In addition, she’s very good about figuring out the best strategy for completing a game quickly and doing all associated research. She has both gaming skills and gamerscore skills.”

But that doesn’t keep Kristen from going after the kids’ stuff, too. Last week, Spongebob: Truth or Square put her over 165,000. It’s a cute detail but it barely scratches the surface of Kristen’s performance over the past three years. Nor does the four-game Gamefly subscription, in constant rotation. That’s to be expected. And the shelf full of games, many of them years old and still waiting to be played, well, what would you consider impressive? A hundred and sixty?

She bought Jumper: Griffin’s Story – one of the worst reviewed games ever in Xbox 360 history. The day Modern Warfare 2 was released, she spent all her time on Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs. American Idol? She put the microphone in front of a speaker and played songs into it to ace the performances that much faster. It didn’t work for Sing It: High School Musical or Hannah Montana, so, she had to belt those out herself.

“They’re easy enough songs; It’s not bad, there’s no one looking at me while I’m playing it,” Kristen says, “but my friends (on Xbox Live) see it, and all the guys can’t believe I’m playing that game.”

Remember that deal a few months back, when a someone tried to round up a 1,000 players to log in to NBA Live 07 and get the 100 gamerscore achievement for 1,000 players being online at the same time? Kristen was a part of that, with two versions of the game, one she had to go out and find for $3 at a game store, and the other playing on her Japanese 360.

Yes, she has an NTSC: J console. Kristen got that to play BioShock’s Korean version, which has a separate achievement list. She’s gotten 1,000 gamerscore in 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand. She’s gotten 1,000 gamerscore in 50 Cent: Blood on the Sand in Japanese. “I haven’t even opened the Saint’s Row 2 Japanese version, or the Saint’s Row 1 for that matter,” Kristen says. She’s eyeballing a PAL console, but even an Arcade will be close to $300 with shipping and, “Do I really need to play BioShock again?”

Some of the region-locked Japanese games she plays are bought by pooling money with Stallion83, Smrnov and others in the ultra-gamerscore crowd, and the group then trades the discs around by mail. One game, Clannad, was picked for its low-hanging fruit. It’s a “visual novel,” sometimes called a dating sim, but as the choices are all text-based the gameplay should be pretty easy, right?

“It’s a text game, and you have to choose A or B, you only have these text options,” Kristen said. “But I’m sitting there on Google Translate trying to translate these strategy guides and match up (Japanese) characters to make my choices. And I’m thinking ‘Why the hell did I buy a Japanese Xbox and this game, this is just retarded.’ It’s so embarrassing trying to match characters to a language I don’t even know. I’ve spent $400 on a game I can’t even read.”

It makes me wonder. These are called games. And technically, she’s playing them. But is this even fun? Is this ever fun?

“I definitely play more games I don’t enjoy than games I do,” she says. “Like, maybe 65 percent of the games I play I don’t enjoy.”

Kristen’s husband doesn’t even know why she sticks with it, if something like CSI: Hard Evidence is so unfulfilling for her to play.

“Sometimes I’ll be playing, and he’ll ask, ‘Did I have to buy that or did someone else buy it?'” Kristen says. “And I’m like, ‘Do you want the truth or do you want me to lie to you?’ And he walks away, saying ‘I can’t believe you’re playing that.’ To me that’s more embarrassing than playing Disney: Sing It.”

A Mother’s Work

Kristen is careful to remind me that she does have a life outside of gaming. “I’m an avid paintball player; I have my own gun, although that’s also another expensive hobby,” she says. “But yeah, I’d much rather go out to a bar, go bowling, play darts or pool than sit at home and boost games all night. I’m still young.”

She’s also the mother of a six-year-old girl. You can do the math there, it means Kristen became a mom at age 18. Before then, she was a rather typical kid, if a little tomboyish, and absolutely delighted by video games. Kristen says she’s played them since she was five. When she lived with her parents, new games and new consoles were common, especially around the holidays. When she had her daughter and moved out of the home, her original Xbox and her beloved NES – which she still has even though it won’t work – stayed behind. The Xbox 360 she bought a little more than three years ago marked her re-entry to games since having her daughter.

Sometimes mother and daughter play – Spongebob was one such example. But Kristen had to load up one of the five other gamertags she keeps on the console for family and friends to play. Boosting games might sound out of bounds to some gamers, but it’s entirely within the ultra-gamerscore ethos. What isn’t, however, is having anyone get an achievement for you. Even your six-year-old girl.

“She climbed up and said, ‘Let me play,’ so I said, ‘Just a second,’ and put her up with another (gamertag) and let her play,” Kristen says. “Sometimes she’ll say ‘Look, Mom, I got an achievement too!’ She gets excited.”

This isn’t something Kristen wants to encourage. “I don’t want her to get addicted like I am though,” Kristen says. “She doesn’t really see me play too much, actually.”

Her husband, Jeff, doesn’t game much at all himself. He owns a towing business that provides a comfortable lifestyle and accommodates both his interests and Kristen’s gaming. He’s rather mellow about all the time she spends with games, if not the money, and keeps both in perspective. Some guys have wives who spend a ton of money on clothes, or dislike spending as much time around the house as she does.

“I have some hobbies myself that are fairly pricey and I can’t really blame her for that,” Jeff says. “However, occasionally a string of new games will come out within a two day span and magically a few hundred dollars will be missing from the bank account. With as much time as she has allotted for video games and the kid I can account for her whereabouts at any given moment so I’m certain that she isn’t cheating on me.”

Even pressed for a ballpark estimate, Kristen doesn’t know how much her obsession with Gamerscore has cost in the preceding three years. “My pro system is $250, my Japanese console cost $400, the hard drive I put on it was $50 – I don’t want to see the number, and I’m sure Jeff doesn’t want to see it,” she says. “But I think it would be cool to know.”

There’s another number about which she seems even less enthusiastic, though. And that’s the next big milestone for her gamerscore.

Calling It a Career

Two hundred thousand. According to MyGamerCard, only one other woman has a total that high (with a second very close to reaching it.) And yet when Kristen brings it up, it’s with a tone of voice that ponders what she will do then. It’s almost like she doesn’t want to get there, for what it will force her to consider.

The simplest answer is by far easier said than done: Just quit. “I keep saying when I get 200,000 gamerscore, I’m going to retire,” Kristen says. “There are people who do that. I say it now, but I don’t think you can ever actually quit. It’s like a drug. It is addicting.”

And she uses that word often enough that I figure I should bring up the subject. Carefully. I would never say video game addiction isn’t real, knowing that real people do indeed battle it. I also believe it’s a topic given to alarmism. And I’m not a psychiatrist, so it’s not my place to go diagnosing other people’s behavior. But I ask Kristen anyway. Maybe, has she ever considered talking to someone about her gaming?

“I wouldn’t say I need to talk to someone,” Kristen says after considering the question for a long moment. “I’m not hurting someone by doing this. My family life is not being hurt. Granted, it’s like an addiction, but I’m not hurting anyone. Well, I’m getting little sleep sometimes, but that’s on me.

“Besides, I saw where someone had gone to be treated at a rehab center for video games, and it was something like $30,000 a year, and I thought, ‘Do you know how many Xboxes and games I could buy with this?'” she says, without a trace of irony. “I don’t think so.”

When Kristen is most at ease with her gamerscore is when it describes how she’s good at something. How she’s figured out a way to beat the system; or how she’s actually put in the time to get the “General” achievement in Call of Duty 3 – getting 40,000 points in ranked matches – to collect a rare 100+ gamerscore achievement.

“It’s very much a personal pride thing, being ranked in the top five in the world in something, whether it’s gaming or the fact I’m a female gamer,” Kristen says. “I’m never going to be in the Olympics, so I’ll be a great gamer. It’s something I know I’m good at.”

But I hope when she breaks 200,000 she can put the controller down. She spent the first three years of her adulthood being a mom. I suggest to Kristen that, maybe, she’s spent the last three in front of a console, trying to get some of that lost time back.

Kristen ponders this, and seems to agree. “Maybe,” she says.

Maybe then she can call it even.

I hear a lot about those damned netbooks as hot buys this season, but Prof. Dealzmodo suggests getting something that’s actually, you know…useful. HTPCs baby. There has never been a better time:

I say that because HTPCs have never been smaller, cheaper or more powerful. A little over two years ago, we were talking about how purchasing an HD-capable PC would leave you with an empty bank account. Take this Sony Vaio TP1 for example. The wheel of cheese design was considered compact and “living room friendly” at the time, but it is still probably twice as big as current nettop models. The specs are lacking even by 2007 standards and it started at $1600. Today I can easily go out and find a more powerful, feature rich nettop for less than $400. And it would be small enough to tuck behind your HDTV due, in part, to cheap, compact, graphics-friendly chipsets like Nvidia Ion.

Today’s Most Affordable HTPCs

Seriously…HTPCs for less than $400. Sure, you could spend a lot of cash on something more elaborate, and will have to if you want to access your own digital cable stream, or if you want to go with Blu-ray as your high-def source of choice, but if you simply want a compact 1080p device that competently opens up the entire internet to your HDTV, here is a good place to start:

• Dell Zino HD: The cheapest of the bunch at a base price of $230, the Dell Zino HD offers a range of AMD Athlon processor options, up to a 1TB HDD, up to 8GB of RAM and a choice between integrated graphics and an ATI Radeon HD 4330 512MB card. Plus you get HDMI, four USB ports, and two eSATA for easy expansion. Even with a few bells and whistles like a dual-core processor, a bump in RAM to 4GB or a boost in the HDD capacity, you can keep the Zino under $400. Adding a Blu-ray drive bumps the price up an additional $100. [Dell]

• Acer AspireRevo R6310: Features include a dual-core 1.6GHz Atom 330 processor, Nvidia Ion graphics, 2GB RAM, 160GB HDD, HDMI, eSATA, VGA, 6 USB ports, card reader and wireless-N in a $330 package. They even throw in a wireless keyboard and mouse for good measure. I have spent some time with the AspireRevo, and I can say that it is a very capable HTPC for the money. Power web surfing can be sluggish at times, as is Flash playback—but Adobe has promised support for NVIDIA graphics acceleration in Flash 10.1 that should remedy that situation. All-in-all though, it handles video quite well. It does not include optical drive option, meaning you will have to purchase a Blu-ray player seperately. [Acer]

• Asus EeeBox EB1012: A release date and price have not officially been confirmed, but the EeeBox EB1012 offers basically the exact same feature set as the AspireRevo—minus a USB port or two. Hopefully, when it is released, the price point will be even more aggressive than Acer’s. It does not include optical drive option, meaning you will have to purchase a Blu-ray player separately. [Asus]

As a side note, if you are interested in using a CableCard tuner to turn your PC into a cable DVR, that has become a lot easier for the average Joe. However, programs like Comcast’s upcoming Xfinity (formerly known as TV Everywhere) might easily bridge this gap by putting your current cable subscription online. Check out my article on living without cable or satellite to learn more about what programming and software is available to you online.

Remotes

None of the HTPCs mentioned above come with a remote control out of the box, but this can be easily and cheaply remedied. Most infrared remotes require only that you have a free USB port for the included adapter, so just about any PC with Windows Media Center can be converted to work with a remote.

If you are just looking for something basic, a remote like the MCE PC will do the job just fine—and it costs under $20. If you have an iPhone, you can also download apps like AirMouse (iTunes link) and MediaMote (iTunes link) to handle these tasks. Gmote is also available for those of you with Android phones.

Networking

Keep in mind that if your modem is far from your computer, and you’ll be relying on Wi-Fi to connect to the internet and move files between computers, you are probably going to want something capable of handling wireless-N (802.11n). Fortunately, all of the PCs mentioned above can do that right out of the box—although the Dell Zino requires a $45 upgrade for that option.

If you want to upgrade an older PC to handle wireless-N, all you need is a compatible router and a USB adapter. Decent wireless-N routers will run you about $60 on the lower end, and compatible USB adapters can be had for an additional $30 or $40 bucks. If you just plan on connecting to the internet and you live in a smaller home or apartment, you should be fine with 802.11g.

Networked Storage

Although not an essential component to owning an HTPC, at some point you are probably going to want a networked storage solution so you can dump all of your files in one place. Traditionally, setting up a home server to centrally store files from multiple computers (and multiple platforms, potentially) required another major investment, but things have definitely improved in this area. For example, HP’s LX195 Windows Home Server with a 640GB drive can be had for $250, and it performs quite well for the price. The same can be said for the Iomega Ix2-200 NAS. It runs on Iomega’s proprietary software as opposed to Windows Home Server, but for the money, it has a killer feature set that makes it a pretty awesome deal. Capacity runs up to 4TB, but the base delivers 1TB at $270 and it is user-expandable.

Even if you want to bake your own NAS server there is open-source software like FreeNAS that can help to keep the costs down. Maximum PC has provided a great guide to building a NAS server using these free open source tools. If you have the hardware lying around, it’s not going to cost a penny. Either way, building from scratch can be fairly inexpensive depending on how much storage space you need.

Avoid Expensive Set-Top Boxes

Amusingly enough, as I was writing this article, my father called to ask me about the Roku player his IT guy was raving about. Yes, Roku’s three models are priced between $80 and $130, a figure even the cheapest HTPCs can’t match, but the fact that they are still limited to Netflix and Amazon On Demand makes them less valuable. Would you say that Netflix and Amazon VOD are worth $130 of the AspireRevo’s $330 price tag? I should hope not.

There are certainly good reasons to pick up a $100 HD media streamer, like the Asus O!Play, if you’re aware of the limitations, but what’s the excuse for Apple TV and others like it? Apple’s set-top box costs $229. I have iTunes on my HTPC…so where is the value? Throw an HDMI port on a Mac Mini and then we’ll talk. The $300 Popcorn Hour player may play a ton of file formats and have an integrated BitTorrent client, but you have to pay extra to add a hard drive, and by the time you do, you’re squarely in HTPC territory.

To me, spending a little more actually saves money, because I don’t need to buy so many competing boxes. It’s like going to the grocery store and choosing between the regular-sized bag of coffee and the jumbo bag of coffee. The smaller bag costs lest money, but buying in bulk is cheaper pound for pound—and you know I will be drinking all of that coffee.

HTPCs Are Resilient

Forget about netbooks and elaborate set-top media boxes this holiday season. If your budget is anywhere over $300, go with an HTPC. Set-top boxes will always hold you to whatever content deals their makers can set in place (or whatever you can go through the trouble of hacking or modding in, yourself). And I’m not interested in netbooks until they handle HD well enough to be used as a portable HTPC.

It’s only a matter of time before everyone watches TV through the internet, so you had better get on the bandwagon while cable companies are still scrambling to figure out how best to screw you. No matter how weird it gets, at least with a PC you know you’ll be able to roll with it.

It still seems strange, on the face of it. iTunes is the ginormousest force in digital music, beaming out billions of bits a day. Apple paid $80 million (maybe) for Lala, a streaming site you’ve never heard of. Why?

First, let’s look at what Lala is. (Or was.) It’s three things, really: A CD trading site (its original emphasis), a streaming site, where you can “upload” your own music and stream it anywhere (your collection is matched with what Lala’s got, and anything they don’t have is actually uploaded); and a streaming site that’ll let you stream a song once for free, or pay 10 cents to stream it an unlimited number of times. In other words, It’s a music service that’s all about streaming and the cloud, both for the music you already own, and for finding and playing new music.

That obviously looks a lot different from iTunes—you pay for things, you download them, you have a library of stuff. It’s kind of a dated, restrictive model, really. Only being able to listen to the small slice of music that’s banked on my hard drive, it feels cramped and very 2004. Zune feels like a generation ahead with Zune Pass, which essentially expands my library ad infinitum, with full access to most of the service’s 6 million songs (plus I get to keep 10 a month, so the pass just about pays for itself). iTunes needs to refresh itself.

Okay, so Lala obviously fits into that need. But what’s Apple going to do with it specifically? Bring Lala under iTunes? Kill Lala and assimilate its features into iTunes? Keep Lala running? Well, there’s actually some pretty good case studies when it comes to Apple buying up smaller companies, historically, especially when it comes to iPod and iTunes.

iTunes actually began life as an acquisition. In 2000, Apple was looking to buy MP3 software and wound up purchasing a little program called SoundJam MP, along with its lead developer, Jeff Robbin—it was re-engineered into what you now know as iTunes, and Robbin is now the VP for consumer applications at Apple. Cover Flow, which is now slathered on top of basically every app Apple makes, was originally an independent program developed by Steel Skies. Apple bought Cover Flow, though not the company. The iPod itself was mostly developed by a company called PortalPlayer—again, Apple bought the rights to the hardware and software, but not the company (which was later picked up by Nvidia).

Finally, and most recently, Apple bought PA Semi, an entire chip company, likely so Apple can design its own chips for iPhones and iPods (we haven’t seen the fruits of this venture yet, though we likely will soon). So, there’s a couple different models here: Buy the tech, buy the brains behind it; buy the tech; buy the company, the tech and the brains. In each instance, though, the thing purchased became wholly an Apple thing, fully assimilated, as if its past life had never existed.

Looking at Lala, it’s likely true, as the NYT says, that Apple is “buying Lala’s engineers, including its energetic co-founder Bill Nguyen, and their experience with cloud-based music services,” as Apple did with iTunes so many years ago. But that’s not all Apple was after, not if they paid $80 million (or whatever) to outbid at least two other competitors, as some reports say. It seems clear, looking at the history of Apple’s iTunes acquisitions, Lala and its features are going to be integrated into iTunes in a very fundamental way.

After all, one of the central conceits of Lala—streaming your own music library anywhere—is something Apple’s been looking at for a while, and it doesn’t alter the fundamental iTunes model, the one that’s so deeply tied to your own music collection. It just expands it. Lala, actually, was even in the midst of getting its streaming iPhone app approved.

And that’s most likely what Lala is going to look like inside of the iTunes beast: You’ll be able to stream your own library anywhere. The other half of Lala, the true streaming service, with its 10-cent songs, as a part of a new iTunes too, would radically alter the entire iTunes model by introducing one organized around streaming—while still preserving that core tenet of paying for and owning songs. The kind of value hierarchy that Apple is devoted to still works—songs you have more ownership of, that stay on your hard drive, cost more (like when DRM-free songs used to cost more) while ones that stay in the cloud are cheaper—even as it completely changes the way we’d buy music from iTunes, and if history’s any guide, maybe digital music as a whole. (Oh, and iTunes’ new web interface practically begs to be a streaming site.) It’d be a big step, even for a company that killed their most popular iPod, the mini, to introduce a brand new one, the nano.

True, we won’t know precisely what Apple’s going to do with LaLa until they do it. But we’ve got some rough ideas.