Category: GReader

Fringe doesn’t come back for another couple months, but we haven’t stopped obsessing about that baffling cliffhanger, and all the questions that the show has left us struggling with. More »

This cartoon is the latest to take aim at the BlackBerry maker… it’s funny, but in an unfortunate way.

Source: Joy of Tech
Via: CrackBerry

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1. Texting & Driving: Is this cartoon still reality in Canada?
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Avid watchers of tech know that Apple is almost as good at requesting patents (though, its record of defending them is somewhat less impressive) as it is at actually creating compelling products. Three years after initially filing for the design of a “portable multifunction device” with a multitouch interface, the USPTO has awarded the Cupertino crew a patent that’s sure to raise few eyebrows amongst its competitors. At a glance, the language seems to cover practically any device that allows touch input to control content in a frame on a webpage independent of controlling the rest of the page — which we’re sure Jobs and co. are excited to add to their growing stockpile of claims to gestures and capacitive displays. Of course, a rival would have to infringe on all elements of a patent’s independent claims before it’d need to fear the courtroom, so it’s probably best not to get too hot and bothered here. For those looking to pore over the specifics, that source link is a good place to head.

Apple granted patent for ‘portable multifunction devices’ with multitouch screens originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 22 Jun 2011 17:17:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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I was in the audience for a reality show once. It was for some pilot that never aired, a drink-mixing competition between bartenders that was similar to “Chopped,” but with a component where the bar patrons had a say in the winner. Obviously, I was there for the free drinks. But the free drinks weren’t worth seeing behind the curtain of reality TV: the long milieu between filming scenes, the false excitement we were asked to drum up, the “bartender” who knew nothing about scotch because he was just an actor looking for a break. All in all, I learned first-hand what I already knew: there isn’t much that’s real about reality TV.

That experience came to mind when I saw this image that a Redditor captured from a recent episode of Fox’s “MasterChef.” Those poor, desperate people who wanted to get on TV for a split second, cheering wildly at the urging of a production assistant. And yet that wasn’t enough, so Fox digitally doubled them to make it look like an actual crowd of people gave a sh*t about “MasterChef.” Why bother with extras at all? Just hire a tech geek to digitally create a crowd from scratch. And keep calling it “reality” while you’re at it.

Fun fact: I altered the original image in Photoshop to get rid of the Hulu video player button. WHEELS WITHIN WHEELS! NOTHING IS REAL! THEY’RE COMING FOR US ALL!

Have you ever missed an extremely important phone call or text because you were too busy finishing those TPS reports on your personal computing machine? There’s a Chrome add-on for that. We went hands-on with a new extension (and accompanying Android app) called MightyText, a free notification service launched today that syncs your phone’s texts and calls to your computer in real-time. The idea is crazy simple, yet adds unyielding convenience: incoming SMS messages appear on your screen as a pop-up, giving you the option to read and reply to them without touching or even looking at the phone. The full extension will show each conversation thread in its entirety, as well as call logs.

When sent from the computer, texts are still patched through from your phone number, so your colleagues will still see your messages coming through with your name on them. To make the service even more appealing, pop-ups alert you to incoming calls, so you can either hurry to find your phone or just send the caller a canned auto-text reply. It sounds like a great concept, but does it do the job? Head on past the break to learn our first impressions of the program.

Continue reading MightyText pushes messages and incoming call alerts to your computer (hands-on)

MightyText pushes messages and incoming call alerts to your computer (hands-on) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 22 Jun 2011 14:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This brings a whole new meaning to Right,Right,A,A,Left,UP,B,UP,UP. I can safely say that the average nerd guy out there still needs a cheat book to unlock the secret codes to these special levels. As much as I have enjoyed this and the Pokemon bra from a month or so ago, I’m nervous that some enterprising nerd girl is gonna want the guys to up the ante with some riske male controler speedos. Trust me, we don’t want to go there.

Via: That Girl’s Site

Canada may be moving to polymer-based currency, but mobile payment services like Square — which cater to classic plastic — haven’t yet taken time to trek to the Great White North. NetSecure is looking to offer similar convenience to the region with its new Kudos Payments service, which just so happens to ship with a shockingly curvy swiping dongle. Similar to Square, it creates a secure ‘point of sale‘ without a hard-wired transaction terminal, and charges a slightly higher 2.9-percent fee to users’ accounts for each exchange. Kudos has iOS, Android, and Blackberry apps to tap into the functionality and, even a version for Mac and PC — in other words, you and yours should be suitably covered. Any roving entrepreneurs who are interested in the service will be able to snag the $49.99 kit free of charge from the company’s website for a “limited time,” which may or may not expire before Google decides to open its own Wallet a few miles kilometers north.

Continue reading NetSecure Kudos Payments announced for Canada, is the half-circle to Square

NetSecure Kudos Payments announced for Canada, is the half-circle to Square originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 22 Jun 2011 13:23:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Most people are familiar with the general concept of fiber optic cables–light as a method of data transmission–but how do they really work? Find out in this informative video.

Bill Hammack, of Engineer Guy Videos, shows us how fiber optic cables work using–of all things–a bucket and a laser. Check out the above video for a glimpse inside how fiber optic cables work and how your analog voice can go to from your phone’s handset to a digital stream and then back to analog sound for the benefit of your friend on the end of the fiber optic transmission cable.

Fiber Optic Cables: How They Work and How Engineers Use Them to Send Messages [YouTube]

What is a Histogram, and How Can I Use it to Improve My Photos?	How To Easily Access Your Home Network From Anywhere With DDNS	How To Recover After Your Email Password Is Compromised

Q: What do national parks, female governors and Google Apps have in common?

A: Wyoming was the first state in the country to have each of them.

This morning, Governor Matt Mead announced that the state of Wyoming has completed its transition to Google Apps for Government. Since the state first declared its intention to go Google eight months ago, Wyoming has worked quickly to move all 10,000 state employees onto Google Apps.

For the first time ever, Wyoming’s entire state government now shares a common email, calendar and document system, making it easier for employees to find and collaborate with one another. By going Google, the state is also saving taxpaying Wyomingites approximately $1 million annually. Who knows which next great “first” they’ll put these savings towards?

You can view the live stream of the Governor’s announcement starting at 8:00am MT.

Posted by Scott McIntyre, Google Enterprise Team

Archos unveils bare-bones Arnova 7 Android tablet, priced at $99 originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 22 Jun 2011 08:47:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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You know that microSD card slot that’s been laying dormant in your Motorola Xoom? Provided you don’t reside in the US, that’ll be getting activated soon as part of the tablet’s Android 3.1 update, which is starting to roll out now and should have all of Europe covered within the next few weeks. Motorola explicitly identifies this as a firmware update for “non-US” Xooms, so Canadians would be well advised to check their software update utility, though the big question is why didn’t the American 3.1 update include microSD support as well? What tangled web of intrigue lies behind this selective activation?

[Thanks, Alan]

Motorola Xoom gets Android 3.1 update that activates microSD card support outside the US originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 22 Jun 2011 06:21:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Software

Google working on video chat for Chrome, Skype cowers in fear originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 22 Jun 2011 04:33:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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A long-simmering dispute over a new contract has turned into a strike by employees of the Saskatchewan Crop Insurance Corp.

In the movie Hook, there’s a period during which all the Lost Boys think Robin Williams is a total schmuck. But Williams proves himself to be the one true Pan over time by completing various Pan-like tasks: fighting, flying and crowing, as well as disparaging Rufio. And it all starts with one singular moment, when, while standing on the table filled with make-believe Neverland food, Williams stops a coconut from colliding with his head by slicing it perfectly in half in mid-air.

Fruit Ninja is kinda like that. Not the Peter Pan part, but the vicious dismemberment of fruit part. If you own a smartphone, chances are good you’ve played it — it’s a simple touchscreen game in which fruit flies across the screen and you have to draw a quick line through it with your fingers to slice it. The more fruit you hit at once, the higher your score. There’s an added layer of hectic craziness created by the inclusion of bombs among the flying fruit, which cost points earned, and additional points that have power-up effects like multiplying score, slowing fruit down so that it’s easier to hit, extending time and so on.

Excelling in simplicity and challenging but fairly mindless fun, Fruit Ninja has made quite a splash for its developer, Halfbrick, in the mobile space. Halfbrick has other successful games, but none seem to approach the simple joy of Fruit Ninja — which is likely why the game is starting to creep onto other platforms.

Fruit Ninja Kinect is the biggest move Halfbrick is making with the Fruit Ninja franchise. As the title implies, it’s a Kinect-enabled version of the game, where You Are The Controller. I got a chance to get hands-on with Fruit Ninja Kinect, so to speak, at E3 2011.

Obviously since it’s a Kinect title, there’s no touching with Fruit Ninja Kinect. Instead, the Kinect camera track’s the players’ movements by projecting a shadow on the screen, helping players to stay oriented as they use their hands, rather than their fingers, as their razor-sharp fruit-destroying weapons of choice. Without the touch interface, it was a bit awkward at first — a little more like Fruit Ninja Pretend Judo Chop! or Fruit Ninja Awkward Robot Dance than I was used to from my time with the iPhone game — but after a few minutes, I was able to get the hang of it and dice flying fruit almost as well as I can on the small screen.

Adding Kinect to the Fruit Ninja universe opens up the game quite a bit. The title is an Xbox Live Arcade downloadable, so it gets the full XBLA treatment, including Achievements. It also carries new game modes — a Battle mode, in which players compete each other for a high score, and a cooperative mode where scores are added together — and “heaps and heaps of unlockables,” according to Halfbrick Executive Producer Ben Vale, including new blades and aesthetically different shadows. Fruit Ninja Kinect also packs online leaderboards that get reset weekly in order to foster competition among players.

“This the first XBLA Kinect game, so it’ll be available for about half of what a normal Kinect game goes for,” Vale said. “And it’s the most responsive Kinect game we’ve seen.”

Fruit Ninja Kinect is being released as part of Xbox Live’s Summer of Arcade promotion, so Vale said he wasn’t sure what it would cost or exactly when it would be released: “Really soon, I guess.”

It only took one round to get a feel for Fruit Ninja Kinect, and one more to foster a serious sense of competition with someone else who was also receiving the demo. Games are short — just two minutes or so — but they’re both highly active and perfectly small-scale: pretty much exactly what you’d expect Fruit Ninja to look like if you were playing it by waving your hands at your TV.

The other platform receiving a new Fruit Ninja title is Facebook. That game is called Fruit Ninja Frenzy, and it’ll offer some different gameplay from other versions of Fruit Ninja, although it’ll be closely tied to an upcoming iOS title of the same name.

Frenzy is a Flash game played with a mouse with quick click-and-drag motions, right in a browser window, like other Facebook games. And like other Facebook games, it’ll allow players to unlock much of its content by paying for it. Frenzy works in a pay element by presenting players with three “slots,” which can be unlocked through by playing the game extensively or through purchases. Each slot allows players to add a power-up or a modifier to their game — for example, a player could plug a “no bombs” power-up in one slot to disable any danger in a playthrough, or use another slot to extend the time on a Fruit Ninja round by seven seconds to rack up more points. Like Fruit Ninja Kinect, there will also be additional blades, seasonal content, and other things that can be purchased.

I played a few rounds on Fruit Ninja on Facebook in a beta version, and it’s not bad. The mouse interface isn’t nearly the same as the touch slicing or even pretending your hands are swords when using Kinect — there was a lot of errant clicking, although I was also trying to play a computer game standing up — but after a round or two, I can see the short-term Facebook embedded appeal.

Players aren’t required to purchase the content they want in Fruit Ninja Frenzy on Facebook, but it is quicker than earning it. It’s also possible to rack up premium currency in the game a number of ways, such as by earning achievements. That currency can then be applied to unlocking new items in the game.

The whole idea is to foster competition and leverage the massive community on Facebook and the friends that most people are already interacting with using the social network. Like Kinect, Frenzy carries leaderboards that are reset weekly, basically creating a new weekly tournament in which players can take part. That sort of competition, coupled with the ease of playing Fruit Ninja (which is part of why it’s popular anyway), should do a lot to draw people into Frenzy.

The Facebook title goes into a closed beta this summer, and it’ll launch alongside the iOS Fruit Ninja Frenzy sometime later this year. The iPhone/iPad title will include all the same content as the Facebook game, and holiday updates and the like will hit both versions at the same time. The iOS version and the Facebook version will also share a leaderboard, so you can play while on the go and compete against Facebook friends.

So fans of Fruit Ninja, of which there seem to be many, will have some new ways to dominate fruit this summer, and they’re all pretty fun. We’ll keep you up to date when more information, like pricing and release dates, become available in the future.

Speaker wire is expensive if you buy it at retail, cheap if you just use a spool of electrical cable, but always, always an eyesore. Sure, you can pull it through the drywall, hide it behind some curtains — or you can just go wireless. That’s the option Cue Acoustics will enable with its PS1 bookshelf speakers, shipping this August. They’re a high-end pair, each internally amplified and offering a 5-inch downward-firing woofer, 3.5-inch mid, and .75-inch tweeter, covering all the acoustic hotspots with fanfare. More important, though, is that each speaker can run with only one cable: power. Full details after the break.

Continue reading Cue Acoustics PS1 wireless speakers do audio over DLNA, we go hands-on

Cue Acoustics PS1 wireless speakers do audio over DLNA, we go hands-on originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 21 Jun 2011 20:45:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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The NHL’s board of governors has approved changes to expand the rules on headshots.