Jan 28

Oregon Trail Comes To Facebook; Dysentary Fans Rejoice

Posted in: Miscellaneous Tech, Today's Chili, video games

oregon-trail.jpg 

The only game that literally deserves to be called “old school” is getting a social networking refresh. Yes, you’ll soon be able to relive those days of playing The Oregon Trail in sixth grade indoor recess, courtesy of Facebook.

The Learning Company, which owns The Oregon Trail, has announced it will be bringing the only game that ever made caulking a wagon popular to the 21st century. Complete with new graphics and the ability to form parties with your Facebook friends, you’ll be able to journey through the historic trail like never before. Start thinking of new things to write on your tombstone now.

The Learning Company also said it will be bringing a new Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego game to Facebook as well. Both will be available on February 2nd.

Via My Fox Boston

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Jan 27

Control Your Parrot AR.Drone with a Surface Table from Microsoft

Posted in: iPhone, Microsoft, Miscellaneous Tech, robot, Tech Toys, Today's Chili, Toys, videos
Most people have seen the Parrot AR.Drone at this point. It made a splash at CES earlier this month, and was the star of the show last year; the little iPhone-controlled quad-copter is a combination toy and reconnaissance drone is perfect for fun neighborhood spy missions. However, what if you could control your Parrot AR.Drone with a Microsoft Surface table? 
These French researchers from Winwise have created an app that uses the same commands as the AR.Drone’s iOS app, just laid out on a Microsoft Surface table that you sit in front of to control. They claim the idea came to them when they were thinking of a way to build a cockpit for the drone, and that the Microsoft Surface was a great way to blow up the image from the drone’s camera. 
The controls work well enough, but considering the drone retails for $299.99 and Microsoft’s Surface systems are “ask if you want one” when it comes to price, it’s unlikely we’ll start seeing them show up in living rooms anytime soon.
 
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Jan 27

Apple Recruiting College Students for At-Home-Advisor Program

Posted in: Apple, Miscellaneous Tech, Today's Chili

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Parents, start forwarding this to your kids. Apple’s hiring. As we know, a lot of college students are stuck with the same menial jobs their older siblings had years before them: working at a sub shop, coffee shop, Foot Locker, etc. Besides long hours and no time for homework, these aren’t exactly the type of jobs that give you benefits either. But wait! Apple is offering what sounds to be a dream job for students who are sick of asking customers if they’d like fries with that. 

Apple’s customer support group, known as AppleCare, offers a program for college students that allows them to work from home on a flexible schedule, and with benefits and perks. As an Apple At-Home-Advisor, you would help customers with technical support for Apple’s products and accessories — both software and hardware. We’re talking a full scale of products from iPhone to Apple TV.

These advisors don’t have to be a computer science major to apply for this job. Apparently, all college majors are considered for the year-long opportunity. And, good news: you don’t even have to be super smart — at least GPA-wise. You simply have to be enrolled in classes at a desginated college and have a cumulative GPA of 2.7 or higher.

Of course, salaries are determined on qualifications and experience, but we hear it’s about $10 an hour. Apple will provide you with a free iMac and telephone, and will reimburse you with up to $50 a month to pay for your Internet and phone service. You’ll also receive full health benefits. That’s a pretty good deal considering you can work in your pajamas, which you’ll probably end up wearing to class anyways. 

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Jan 27

Man Sues Facebook for $500,000 over “Religious Discrimination”

Posted in: Miscellaneous Tech, Today's Chili, Weird News

A Staten Island Facebook user is suing the social network after it cut off his account with apparently no warning. Thirty-nine-year-old Mustafa Fteja lost contact with his roughly 340 Facebook friends, losing a valuable connection to the world, his suit claims. And now the site won’t respond.

“You call, they don’t answer the phone,” said Fteja. “You write, they don’t reply.” The man also noted that he was Muslim in the $500,000 lawsuit, stating that religious discrimination may have played a role in the company’s decision. “I’m not doing this for money,” Fteja told reporters. “I’m doing this for justice. I believe there should be some, somewhere.”

Fteja’s account was cut off on September 24th. When he reached out to the site, he received a form letter stating that he had violated Facebook’s terms of service. “I know one thing,” says Fteja. ” I didn’t do anything. I didn’t violate anything.”

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Jan 27

Google Starts Censoring ‘Piracy Related’ Terms

Posted in: Google, Miscellaneous Tech, Today's Chili

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Starting yesterday, Google began a subtle censorship of “piracy related” terms from its instant and autocomplete services. The following “pirate” terms are now blocked from autocompete: bitTorrent, megaupload, uTorrent, rapidshareIf, and any combination of terms ending with the word “torrent.”

If you try to enter “utorrent” into the search box, it stops supplying suggestions after you type “uto.” However, you can still type out the complete word, and it will supply suggestions, including “utorrent download” and “utorrent search” and you type out the entire term, Google will complete the search. So, you can still access these sites through a search, you just have to type out the entire term. But, “uTorrent”, a popular piece of software, and “BitTorrent”, a file transfer protocol and name of BitTorrent Inc., are both completely legal, but they are nonetheless being censored. Maybe it’s just me, but that seems wrong.

Remember when Google fought against censorship in China? Google was all for freedom to information. But, apparently, Google thinks censoring against piracy is okay though. Supplying information and access to legal sites it not encouraging piracy. Our friends at PCMag, recently had a bit of a scuffle with the RIAA over a simple news article, which they requested PCMag retract (they didn’t).

Although this is new censorship is slight, the entertainment industries shadow is being cast farther. And it raises some questions: How far will it this censorship stretch? And will other industries be able to succeed in censoring certain terms and info on Google?

Via TorrentFreak

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Jan 26

Netflix Gains 7.7M Subscribers in 2010 Thanks to Streaming-Only Plan

Posted in: Miscellaneous Tech, netflix, Today's Chili

netflix-subscribers-2010q4.PNGNetflix announced its Q4 2010 earnings today and surprised us with its huge rise in sales. In the letter it sent out to its shareholders (PDF), the company said it had surpassed 20 million total subscribers in the closing hours of the final day of 2010. The big story is that Netflix added 7.7 million of those subscribers during 2010.

Netflix’s original prediction for subscriber growth in 2010 was 3.6 million. The letter says much of this growth stems from Netflix’s streaming-only plan that it added in November. The service is only $7.99 a month, and it accounts for one-third of the 7.7 million subscribers. About 3.1 million people subscribed in the fourth quarter alone, which would explain the rise in the streaming-only plans. Netflix says that very few existing subscribers are downgrading to the pure streaming plan.

Streaming is much bigger for Netflix than physical DVDs, in hours of entertainment delivered, and it’s growing much faster than DVD rental. DVD shipment and content costs are still very material, and Netflix says it expects year-over-year shipments to decline in the coming quarters. But for those who take advantage of the DVDs rather than streaming, there’s no need to worry. Netflix says, “even though we expect DVD shipments to decline this year, we want to be clear that we intend to continue to offer great DVD-by-mail service for many years to come.”

Interestingly enough, Netflix spent about 10 percent less in marketing than it did a year ago, yet its subscription numbers grew 63 percent over the year.

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Jan 26

Google Teams Up With Museum to Put Holocaust Photos Online

Posted in: Google, Miscellaneous Tech, Today's Chili

Google this week announced that it has joined forces with Israel’s Yad Vashem Museum to host photos and other Holocaust documents–130,000 in all, making it the largest online collection of such information.

“For some time, Google has been working to bring the world’s historical and cultural heritage online,” said Yossi Matias, the director of Google Israel’s R&D team. “The Internet offers a great opportunity to preserve and share important materials stored in archives.”
The news comes ahead of January 27th’s International Holocaust Remembrance Day, held on the anniversary of 1945’s liberation of the Auschwitz concentration camp.

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Jan 26

Molecular Cuisine Starter Kit Teaches You What Xanthan Gum Is

Posted in: Miscellaneous Tech, science, Tech Toys, Today's Chili
You’ve seen them as ingredients in your favorite foods and sauces: Agar-Agar, Soy Lecithin, Xanthan Gum, but you’ve never really figured out what they are, where they come from, and what they do. With the Molecular Cuisine Starter Kit from ThinkGeek, you have the opportunity to get started with the science behind molecular gastronomy and how you can apply those principles to make tasty eats. 
Molecular gastronomy is the science of understanding the relationships between chemicals used in or created by cooking. Chefs and scientists alike then use that knowledge to tweak their dishes to come up with new and interesting things, like foams that taste like beets or semi-solid bubbles that taste like balsamic vinegar.  
The Molecular Cuisine Starter Kit comes with five sets of additives that each have different properties, the necessary tools to get dirty in the kitchen, and a DVD with recipes and demonstrations so you’re not flying blind when you open the box. It’s available now for $69.99 list price.
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Jan 25

Tumblr Gets Fail Whale Courtesy of The Oatmeal

Posted in: Miscellaneous Tech, Today's Chili
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If Twitter has taught us anything (beyond what everyone we’ve ever met is doing at any one time), it’s the importance of dressing up your downtime. The company’s Fail Whale image has become synonymous with downtime–a welcome reprieve from the standard error messages (that is, at least, until we saw it for the 100th time in a week).

After a recent string of outages, multimedia blogging site Tumblr finally has its own adorable face of failure, courtesy of Matthew Inman, the cartoonist behind the tech-friendly Web comic, The Oatmeal. Inman suggested the above mischievous TumblBeasts, asking Tumblr to “please oh please” use the art for future error messages.
Tumblr obliged, and now you too can be visited by the little green monsters the next time the site goes down. Fingers crossed.

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Jan 25

This Dead Space Plasma Cutter Replica Won’t Kill Aliens but Looks Great

Posted in: Miscellaneous Tech, Today's Chili, video games
Dead Space Plasma Cutter

If you’re a hardcore survival horror game fan, you’ve probably already played Dead Space through to the end, and you’re planning on picking up your pre-order of Dead Space 2 as soon as you can today, now that the game is in stores. 
What you may be missing from your Dead Space collection however is this Dead Space Plasma Cutter replica, complete with scorch-marks on the front, light-up effects, and a beautiful display-case to keep it safe when you’re not whirling it around in your living room, pretending you’re being attacked by necromorphs. 
The plasma cutter replica is large enough to hold in your hand, and has a rechargeable battery inside with about 30-minutes of play time before you have to plug it back in. It’s just less than 3 pounds, and if you just have to have one, you can pre-order it now for $219 list price. Entertainment Earth says they’ll begin shipping in March.
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