A Little Ludwig Goes A Long Way

• Cutting the Cord on Cable. Wish I could get there but live HD sports still keeps me stuck to cable/satellite provider. I’ve tried the streaming options and they are weak — poor selection of games/sources (I need ESPN/ABC channels + BTN + Fox Sports channels + upcoming Pac12 network), lots of stutter, not HD content. I will probably be one of the last cable subscribers in the country.
• Men with deep voices lack sperm. I was a tenor in choir.
• Do programming puzzles in interviews work?. I don’t think I’ve ever asked these kinds of questions, or at least not in 20 years.
• Gamification sucks. Respect your users.
• The Verge and The Wirecutter — good tech sites.
• If you are busy, you are doing something wrong.
• 10 new-ish programming languages. WOuld like to learn more about Chapel, haXe, X10, OPA.
• DSLRs are a dying breed. Not another “camera phones are going to win” article, but a smarter take on the mirrorless trend.

We always pick up a new board game at the holidays, in the past Settlers of Cataan and Ticket to Ride have been huge winners. This year it is Survive which is a great game — super easy to learn, quick to play, and a great level of conflict. It has the Settlers attribute of a new board layout each game which keeps it fresh. If you like board games, recommended. If you were raised in the USA and think board games == Monopoly (barf), give one of these a try.

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare sets first day sales record. What stunning numbers. I don’t think Skyrim will do the same but a huge week for online entertainment. There is clearly huge demand for great entertainment content, pretty much insatiable demand. And why not, these games give hours and hours of entertainment, the per-hour price is super low.

I don’t need or want any of this stuff actually but am drawn to all of it…

• Car map light. Ok who looks at maps anymore, but this is nicely designed!
• Multimeter Clock. Love the reuse of old tech here. Wish I had the skill/vision to create things like this.
• Carol Kipling Plates. Love the platter but $2800 is steep…
• 14 wheel skateboard so I can suck at skateboarding 3.5 times as much.
• Tourbillon vase — awesome organic-looking glass.
• Urban Balance Wave Hammock — can this possibly be stable? But cool.
• Designer Scrabble I love board games and I love nicely crafted items. I have a great cribbage board, would love to buy great boards for other games — Catan, TIcket to Ride, etc.
• LaserPegs. Lasers make everything better, including construction blocks.
• Freesia Book Stands — these look awesome, seems like a great item to have.
• Chemically Accurate Crayons. OK these are just labels you stick on crayons you buy, so kind of dorky, but I love the idea. “Could you please pass me the Yttrium Oxide crayon”?

GameBrowser – Sorted By Rank | BoardGameGeek. Rich asked me where I get board game ideas, I default to BoardGameGeek. The page referenced has games by average rating, as well as a hot games list.

• Hanging Gardens, The | BoardGameGeek. OK it seems like this could be a fun game and we started to enjoy it, but the game exploded into a major argument about the rules. The rulebook is not the strongest.
• Tzaar — fun and quick, but only two player. It is part of some series of games called Project GIPF that interrelate in some fashion, need to learn more about
• Wasabi! — some liked, some did not. The winner liked, shockingly. I thought it was fun tho I pissed everyone off by playing the Wasabi! card late in the which really put the brakes on the action.  Late in the game, gameplay really slows down as the board gets cluttered which is a problem.

CrunchGear » Archive » Rogue for iPhone: nerdgasm. Installed.

Late 1982, I am killing myself chasing two degrees at CMU. In the mornings I was at the business school, classmates all wearing power suits and reading the WSJ and the Financial Times during breaks. Afternoons spent in the EE department with classic geeks.

After midnight in some lab deep in the bowels of the EE department, debugging some realtime ASM code for speech processing, and this lank-haired guy next to me asks “Hey, do you know how to kill a 12th-level necromancer?”

That was my intro to Rogue.

• Brett on Stuff » Distilleries of Scotland. A reason to hike Scotland
• WOW — stronger authentication than your bank. What does that say about the world.
• Running DC thru the house. An idea whose time has come again?
• Indie games DB. Often way better than mainstream games
• Guided Bullets. Why not.
• Thingiverse. Kind of an open source design site.
• Denhaus — awesome pet furniture
• Nitrogen-infused golf clubs. Golfers will buy anything.
• Dutch 5 Euro coin. Awesome, wish I could order. Not the first time I have been blocked from ordering a euro product, wish I could sign up for a forwarding PO box in Europe.
• Mini Magnetosphere. Maybe we all need one of these

The eyeballing game. Angle bisecting and right angling are apparently my special skills.  I pretty much suck at finding circle centers and making parallelograms tho.

Quite addictive. And the exchange of creatures online adds a great element.  Recommended.  Yeah the amazon reviewers are all going apeshit over the drm on the title, but it is fun.

• Every time I plunge into a game, I inevitably choose the most Cro-Magnon, “Hulk smash, Hulk destroy” strategy possible.
• But what happens if the second self you create inside videogames turns out to be a total dick?

CrunchGear » Archive » Canadian movie theaters rent screen time to gamers — not sure this will ever pencil out or how it would even work, but the idea of playing Halo or COD4 on a giant movie screen is pretty awesome.

BuckeyeXtra – The Columbus Dispatch : Ohio State football results. — nice new service from the Dispatch.  9-11-1 against USC all time, 0-5 in last 5 games.  Let’s hope Tressel can reverse this trend as he has reversed others

Verbinski to direct BioShock film — I will run to see this. How many films are about Ayn-Rand-ish Objectivist paradises gone horribly wrong? On the bottom of the ocean? If you haven’t played the game, you should.

MAKE: Blog: National Rube Goldberg Machine Contest 2008 — oh would this have been a blast to go to. Mousetrap had to be my all-time favorite game as a kid.

C-jump will teach your kids how to program » Coolest Gadgets

• ViaCrunchGear ? Archive ? It’s Wednesday, time to waste your employer’s money, play all your old NES favorites online
  
• Top 3 indy games to watch for — and here is the IGF website

Not sure any of these will reduce my COD4 playing time but still…

Just ordered Amazon.com: Advance Wars: Days of Ruin: Video Games based on the NYTimes review today. Have to wonder — when will we see a DS with wireless integration like the Kindle? I don’t buy games that often, cartridges and manuals are a pain, why can’t I just download the games wirelessly?

Camera Shy? Pentagon Builds a Portable Lens-Destroying Laser and also linked in this article, technology for automagically finding sniper scopes.

some of these in nytimes this week.

• Cursor*10 (nekogames) — oh this thing is crazy
• Excit.
• Portal. 3d version is of course way more fun
• Spot the Differences