Granted

An animated documentary explaining the inventions from time-sharing to file-sharing, from arpanet to internet. Via Read write web.

From Fresh Creation: Tan Le, co-founder and president of Emotiv Systems, gives a live demo of a mind control device that uses a person’s thoughts to input computer commands.

I love Wikipedia. Sometimes I’ll end up referencing it several times in one day – and I bet you do too. It truly is an invaluable resource – and well worth supporting. Go on, click on the button below and donate a little cash to keep one of the best parts of the net going.

Funny…

A nice overview of the current state of gaming if you haven’t been following the industry too closely lately.

Some quick takeaways:

• Over 50% (US) adults now play video games. 40% + are female.
• Gaming industry is worth 34 billion worldwide – bigger than movies, music & books.
• Closer ties between gaming and movie industries. Gaming starting to pull talent from the film industry as well as create it’s own entertainment franchises (including movie spin-offs).
• World of Warcraft really is a phenomenon. With 10 million+ active subscribers, it’s over 10 times more popular than any other MMOG.

If you’ve got an iPhone or iPod touch I’ve got three words for you: Buy this game. Galcon is smart, challenging and deep, and makes the most out of the iPhone’s touch-screen and internet connectivity.

If you’ve ever played the boardgame RISK you’ll be familar with the gameplay: take over the map by moving your troops from territory to territory, the bigger the territory the more extra troops you’ll get from it. But where RISK is turn-based and slow, Galcon is realtime and pure frenzy. In this way it crosses the line into what can only be described as “action-strategy” – an ever-elusive gaming genre that’s so hard to get right, but so good when it’s pulled off.

While Glacon is a fun single-player game with a few different modes to keep things interesting, it’s in multiplayer mode that it really shines. The unpredicability and emotional involvement of human adversaries makes the game endlessly replayable. So far I’ve always found plenty of online opponents, and because of the game style you never have to wait long for a game.

Although I rate Galcom as the best game out there for the iPhone at this time – Rolando is due out soon, and judging from the trailers looks set to be extremely entertaining and popular. We’ll have to wait and see.

I’ve often thought that games are good at teaching you how to code, because they force you to identify and order game rules and rule patterns in your brain. But this fun little puzzle game called Light-bot literally gets you thinking like a programmer by requiring you to string together movements into reusable functions to complete each level. Oh and I’m stuck on the level above, can a real programmer please help me!

UPDATE: I managed to get past this level eventually, of course I was looking at it all wrong. Out of interest, this was level 10 of 12, so it’s a fairly short game and well worth putting aside half an hour or so to have a play with. I managed to get through the whole game by only using 185 moves – if you can beat that you’re bloody legend!

Over the past few months I’ve been plugging away at a new project of mine called Make it Share it. It’s a website that lets you easily make a drawing or animation and put it up your own website, blog or profile page.

I’ve worked on a few personal and client projects in the past that have involved drawing tools. They’ve all been really fun to work on and especially fun see what others create with them. I also noticed that although there’s a few drawing tools out there I couldn’t find any that let you create cell-based animations in such a simple way.

One of the things I’ve aimed for with the site is to have as low a barrier to entry as possible. This extends to the drawing tools, the sign-up process and the overall usability of the site. I’ve made it so new users to the site can just dive it and create an animation or drawing and save to the site without having to sign up. After they’ve saved their creation they can decide to sign up or not.

So why not check out the site for yourself. I hope you have as much fun with it as I have had making it.

This from the seller:

“When I opened the package. The phone was on. There were no cute buttons, no touch screen… Instead, there was a blurry image of Steve Jobs burned into it.”

More info here. Pity it was pulled by eBay. Why I wonder? If only Fake Steve Jobs was still around, I’m sure he’d have a thing or two to say about this.

Although I’m a sucker for just about all Star Wars parodies, this one has got such a great twist to it it has to be shared.