Remember Strongbad?

Telltale Games is set to come out with a video game based on Strongbad. The game, aptly named, "Strongbad's Cool Game for Attractive People," is set to come out in June on the Wii. I love Strongbad, but I'm not too sure how this game will do...I guess we'll just have to wait and see.

Anyway, there are 3 trailers out for the game. Check them out.

Zoombak: GPS Trackers

Zoombak has released a new GPS tracking device so that we can always know where our cars, prized possessions, and pets are. The tracking devices are small, pretty much the size of a Zippo, and Zoombak is offering them in two packages--one for your car and one for pets. The only difference is that the Pet Package comes with a collar attachment.

This is pretty cool gadget. Car nabbing will be a little bit more trickier because the tracker is small enough hide practically anywhere. You use Zoombak's website to locate where the GPS tracking device is. All you stalkers must be drooling at this point. There is a hitch though.

Tracking people is a bit more difficult because the GPS receiver does not work well indoors. Apparently, they did a test and if you put the receiver in a pocket, it loses signal. That's pretty weak. I guess if you want to stalk a person, the best way is to stick with the cell phones with the GPS tracking feature. So you know where you at.

The car tracker is $249 and the animal tracker is $199.

The World's Smallest USB Drive: PICO-C

Super Talent just launched the PICO-C, the world's smallest USB Drive and my company, eWiz, is the only company in the world with the rights to sell them for now. I got to hold one a couple months ago and it is tiny.

You shouldn't be afraid of sitting on it and crushing it though--it's ultra durable and shock resistant. It uses chip-on-board (COP) technology which allows it to carry so much storage capacity on such a small amount of space. It measures in at 31.3mm x 12.4mm x 3.4mm and weighs less than a nickel. I'd get one myself but I don't have much use for a USB drive right now.

It's $36.99 with free shipping right now and it has a lifetime warranty. 8GB and it's pretty cool looking too. Probably the coolest USB around at the moment. You can check it out here. And it's an extremely hot product, in just 2 days we sold nearly 200 of these things.

Smartphones are the Wave of the Future

Nowadays, you need one device to call people, send messages, calculate things, listen to music, take down notes, take pictures and video, wake you up in the morning, read the news, and get directions.

Less than 10 years ago, to do all of those things, you needed a a phone, a computer, a calculator, a music player, a notebook, a camera, a video camera, an alarm clock, a newspaper, and someone who knows how to get places.

Today's 'all-in-one' trend is a fascinating one in that it will eventually signal the end of many industries and the beginning of new ones. What's equally amazing is the speed at which technology does away with entire work forces, industries, and older technologies (and by older, I mean a couple months older). It's just amazing.

The BBC News posted a story about "Why the World is in Your Hands," and is definitely worth a look. It talks about how smartphones are set to take over laptops in the next 12 to 18 months.

It's all about converging everything to the point where we'll have everything we need in our pockets. And there's nothing wrong with that.

German Robot Restaurant Replaces Waiters

A restaurant in Nuremberg, Germany has been the first to automate restaurant service. And by that, I mean that a customer orders from a touch screen TVs and their food is teleported to them via metal rails and tracks extending from the roof (where the kitchen is) to the customers table. Gravity provides the power.

The touch screen TVs can also be used to send texts and emails while you wait for your food. Apparently it's a real sight to see, because food whizzes down roller-coaster like rails all the way down to the customers down below. Apparently, the customers order a meal via touch screen TV's, the order gets sent to the cooks' monitors up on the top floor of the building, the cooks (which are human..no robot chefs just yet) cook up the meal, put it in a bucket, tag it with the customers respective table color, and send it down its respective chute. The food then goes flying down spirals and tubes to the customers table. People order bottles of wine, bratwurst, pancakes, you name it. Sounds pretty fun.

The place is called " 'S Baggers " and no, that's not a typo.

It cuts down on labor costs for the owner, and those savings translates into cut costs for the customer as well. What does this mean? Obviously, waiters aren't all going to be done away with which is the big story that the media (and I...I admit it) is pitching to get everyone's attention, though I'm sure we'll find a copycat restaurant soon in a city near you. Everything, sans the touch screen monitors, is powered by humans (the cooks) and gravity. So it's not as robotic as it sounds. What it does show us, however, is that anything that can be automated will, and as a result, there will be an increase in machines doing menial work and a decrease in humans doing menial work. I think that everything that makes us human- our ability to create, innovate, reflect- all those abilities will be the only things that robots won't be able to do for us. Artists, entrepreneurs, composers, even salesmen I think, jobs that require creativity on a daily basis will be the ones safe from our own self-inflicted techno takeover.

Another sad reality is that human interaction and technological progress have an inverse relationship. The more we progress technologically, the more we miss out on human interactions. And we can all wax philosophical about what that means.

And you can catch a video of this restaurant in action here.

The Grid: Will the Internet Soon Be Obsolete?

The Internet may soon be a thing of the past. The scientists who created the internet have now come up with something even better, called "The Grid." Apparently, it's 10,000 times faster than your typical internet broadband connection. As a result, you'd be able to download movies in seconds. And that's not all.

The Grid could also be used to "allow instant online gaming with hundreds of thousands of players...offer high-definition video telephony for the price of a local call." and transmit holographic images. Badass.

This summer, scientists are going to test it out. You can read all the geeky mumbo jumbo about how they'll do that here.

Unlike the internet which needs cables and routing equipment to operate, the Grid would use fibre optic cables and routing centers. There are 12 routing centres all over the world with 55,000 servers in total. It is estimated that the number of servers will increase to 200,000 servers in the next 2 years. The 12 routing centres are scattered throughout the world and are connected via fibre optic cables running from Cern (in Switzerland), to the US, Canada, Asia, and Europe.

The reason the Grid was created however, is not just so we can download whole seasons of our favorite TV show in seconds. The real goal that scientists had in mind when creating the Grid was to have it work with the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), a "new particle accelerator built to probe the origin of the universe." yup..

Anyway, by working together, scientists are hoping to track down the Higgs boson--the particle that "is supposed to be what gives matter mass."

The Grid isn't going to be released to domestic users as of yet, but there are plenty of companies and telecom providers that are introducing technologies based on the Grid. The biggest technology to take from the Grid that everyday users will probably get their hands on soon is something called "dynamic switching" which allows internet users to switch into a dedicated "channel" that would allow then to download large files. So we'd be able to download a movie in about 5 seconds.

The only people who are allowed access to the Grid are scientists, researchers, and academia for now. But can you imagine sending and receiving holographic messages? Last Star Wars reference...I promise

Literature has tried to predict the future in books like 1984 and the Brave New World. I find it ironic that, instead, the future is starting to sound more and more like a sci-fi movie.

Product Review: Super Talent Vidego28 MP4 Player

I recently got my hands on the Vidego28—a 4GB touch screen MP4 player. It’s priced at just about $70, and 4GB at that price with touch screen technology makes this product practically fly off the shelves at eWiz. Demand for this thing has been so high in the past couple months and I wanted to see what all the fuss was about. So I snuck into inventory and pilfered one to review. Here’s what I found:

+Design & Build: It feels like a good strong product and it’s much smaller than I thought it would be. It’s about 3.5” tall, 2” wide, and about 0.5” thick. It’s a really good size actually, perfect for pockets and stuff and much smaller and more portable than the Apple Touch. The build is really sturdy—it feels like if I dropped it, it would be fine so that’s nice. There’s three dedicated buttons on the bottom, 2 to control volume, and one to go back to the Menu screen. The touch screen is a tiny bit less than 2.5” by 1.8”. And it’s pretty light. Not too light to the point where it feels cheap, but light enough not to weigh your pants down. I was really impressed with this build as it feels much more expensive than it really is.

-User-Friendliness: This thing is only slightly user friendly. It’s easy to start up, and the menu screen is easy enough to navigate through, but figuring out where to find your files, manage your files, and delete your files are all slightly difficult tasks to figure out. I read through the instruction manual, but it isn’t helpful at all, quite frankly. It takes time to figure out where the device is storing all your recordings—it takes time to understand the logic to this thing. When the menu first pops up, it looks extremely similar to the iPhone’s Menu screen. Apart from the menu screen, all other screens are incredibly poorly constructed and cheap looking. Deleting things took forever to figure out. When you figure out how to select an item to delete, a “Delete?” screen pops up, you have to touch the up and down arrows to highlight Yes or No, instead of just being able to touch Yes or No. And the instruction booklet does not tell you this, among other things. I made a bookmark in my e-book, and I never figured out how to delete it. So, this thing takes some getting used to. Definitely not as intuitive as I wanted it to be.

+Price: Slightly above $70. This has got the be the biggest plus about this device. Even if it didn’t have touch screen technology, a 4GB MP4 player, with music, video, radio, ebook, radio & voice recorder, can store photos, and has Tetris is an amazing deal. You’d be hard pressed to find a regular MP4 player, without those features and without touch screen technology for the same price.

-Touch Screen: Not as cool as you were expecting. It’s semi-responsive, meaning it felt me about 80% of the time. I found myself poking at it over and over, however, because loading time on this player is incredibly slow sometimes. It takes up to a good 2 seconds AFTER touching the screen before the player responds. When deleting items, it can take up to 5-7 seconds to actually get this thing to delete a file. And 4 seconds to load a photo. I must admit, I found myself incredibly frustrated after playing with this thing for awhile because sometimes the touch screen wouldn’t feel me, or it would take a long time to respond, or both. It is a touch screen and they do equip you with a Stylus, but it doesn’t help much. It’s responsive to your finger just as much as the Stylus. The slow response and the fact that it tends to lock up when you delete things kinda got on my nerves though. Once you get the hang of it, however, the player becomes a lot more fun. It just takes awhile to adjust to the time it takes to process your commands.

+Speakers: The speakers on this thing are actually quite good. You have the option of using earphones, included with the player, or playing music out loud with the built in speakers. I really liked this part about the MP4 player, because it’s a portable player that can play music pretty loudly. The speakers sounded really great, I give this thing 5 stars in terms of sound quality. The only downside I see in terms of sound quality and speaker quality is that it has FM/AM radio on it, but you can’t get very good reception on it unless you have the earphones in. Then reception is acceptable. So don’t expect to be able to play the radio loud and clear on this thing. It plays MP3’s exceptionally though.

+Video: The screen has 320x240 pixels. In my opinion, the screen quality is great for the price. It runs videos smoothly. The only con is that the sample video already on the player is not synced with the music it plays. The sample video on the player is a Jessica Simpson/Nick Lachey music video, and the music slightly lags behind the video. That’s just the sample video though. The frame rates are good and the video is clear.

-Performance & Operating System: When you maneuver your way through the system, you become starkly aware that this thing is made in China. First of all, the default radio settings are in China, the welcome and goodbye screen feel pretty…uncool, there are grammer/spelling errors here and there, the sample songs and videos are all from the 70s, 80s, and 90s (nothing before 1998, LoL). Many things endemic of a bad localization program. It’ll tell you that it’s, “Deleteing” your file, when you want to trash something. What is super cool about it is that it comes with 2 songs already on the player, “Yesterday Once More” by Joni Mitchell and “Hotel California” by the Eagles. Jams, to be sure, albeit extremely dated jams. My parents would love this thing. Anyway, when you play those two songs, the song lyrics pop up, as the song plays. It’s like a mini-kareoke machine. The lyrics have also been pre-loaded onto the player, in the e-book section where you can upload text. The lyrics run along with the song, but apparently they didn’t put any breaks in the line of text, so when the lyrics are too long and it breaks into 2 lines, the letters just completely drop to the 2^nd line. For example:

You also can't skip around in a song. You can only skip the entire song, or replay the entire song. All in all, the operating system shows some pretty FOB signs, but it works. Another thing is that when you play any media, music or video, you press the Pause button. And then the media starts to play, the Pause button becomes the Play button, so if you want to pause the media, you have to press Play. Confused? I was too. Basically, they just got the buttons backwards, normally, you’d press the play button and while the media plays, the play button becomes a pause button. Again, all endemic of some pretty bad localization skills on the part of Super Talent.

+Features: Music, video, displays photos, fm/am radio, built-in speakers, e-book (basically you can upload txt files onto the player as well), Tetris, voice recording & radio recording. The radio recoding is pretty interesting. Reminds me of my middle school days when I used to record music off the radio. All what you pretty much expect.

+Battery Life: Battery life actually pretty good. I played with it for a total of 4 hours and only half of the battery was gone. A+ in terms of battery life

+Input/Output Ports: It’s got an input port for headphones, a slot for a mini SD card, which isn’t included (you can put a max of 4GB on this thing), and a USB slot. It connects to your computer via USB.

-Accessories: The box comes with a charger, USB cable, earphones, stylus, cleathing cloth, a velvet pouch that looks like it should belong to a fairy or wizard, installation CD, and a user manual, which you might as well throw away. A big con is that there isn’t anywhere to put your stylus. Unless of course you carry this thing around in your fairy velvet pouch. Seriously. It doesn’t attach to the player at all. You’d just have to carry it around separately.

PROS: The Price. A little over $70 for a 4GB media player. The build. It looks cool, it’s sturdy, the design looks like a dumbed-down version of the Apple touch. It’s highly portable because of that. Menu screen also looks awesome. I love the speakers and the fact that it can play music pretty loud without the earphones. The video quality was also pretty good, relative to the price, battery life was outstanding, and it comes with plenty of features.

CONS: All the things that make this feel really cheap: Bad localization (grammer issues, typos). I’m a stickler for those kind of things. The touch screen is not too responsive. It has a pretty slow response time, and sometimes it doesn’t feel me. I felt super frustrated a couple of times. Another con is the fact that it’s only kind of user-friendly. You can get around, but figuring out how to manage your files is a pain, and the user manual is not helpful at all. Lastly, it sucks that I can’t put the stylus anywhere except my velvet wizard pouch.

Conclusion: If you want a cheap 4GB MP4 player, this is it. It’s definitely no iTouch, though it does have a pretty good build and the menu screen looks like something from Apple. I wouldn’t get this thing if you’re thinking you’re going to get an awesomely responsive touch screen, because it’s not. Still, for the price, this is a pretty good deal. It would make an amazing present for someone looking for an MP4 player. It feels like a child’s version of the Apple Touch, actually. For me, personally, I think I’d stick with a 4GB MP4 player that isn’t touch screen, if I can find one, just because I’m too impatient and the response time on this would make me lose it. But if you want an entry level mp4 with touch screen capabilities, I don’t think there’s another one out there like this with a price as low as this one’s.

Call of Duty 4 Map Pack

I don't know about you, but I'm unhealthily excited about the new Call of Duty 4 map pack expected to be released this week. The release was supposedly postponed to April 10th, but Infinity Ward just contradicted that claim and promised to have it released April 3rd or 4th. Here's to hoping it really does come out today or tomorrow.

It's about time...I'm pretty much bored with all the other maps.

Some people hate the fact that game developers release updates or upgrades to their games because it's a way to keep making money off of one game. I guess I see their point, but when a game is as good as this, I'm happy to pay for upgrades, rather than get bored with the game itself and opt to buy another one that could potentially be a complete waste of cash. New maps, like new song additions to Guitar Hero or Rock Band, is a welcome reason for me to drop more dough.

There's going to be 4 new maps: Creek, Chinatown, Broadcast, and Killhouse. That's right. Killhouse.

Price? $10.

See you there.

Samsung Instinct: Sprinting Ahead of the iPhone?

Last Tuesday, Sprint announced the release of their version of the iPhone: the Samsung Instinct.
Which is better?

The Instinct brings a couple things to the table that the iPhone doesn’t. It features a 3.1” touch screen and has 3 buttons on the bottom—phone, back, and home. It is reported to be faster and also have more preloaded content than the iPhone. Let’s look at how it does in comparison to the iPhone.

Price: the Instinct is likely to be priced at around $200-$250 with a 2-year Sprint contract. You can bump up the storage to a maximum of 8 GB. The iPhone is still uncomfortably priced at $399 for the 8GB model.

Phone Service: the iPhone runs on an older, slower AT&T network. Fortunately, a faster iPhone is in the works, one that supports AT&T’s fastest data network. The Instinct uses Sprint’s fastest network and provides “faster online access than the iPhone.” Sprint has also reportedly been trying to persuade cable companies to deploy Sprint’s WiMax network which would offer faster wireless speeds than its competitors for a long period of time with a greater range than Wi-Fi.

Touch-Screen Technology: If you’ve ever tried the iPhone, you know its touch-screen technology is amazingly responsive. The iPhone allows for multi-touch abilities, where you can use multiple fingers to zoom in and out of things. The Instinct does not offer the same advantage, however the Instinct also offers a new touch-screen technology that the iPhone doesn’t: it uses “tactile feedback.” For instance, if you’re dialing a number or typing using the touch screen, the screen will vibrate in the areas where you press, making it feel as though you’re actually pressing a button. This is a pretty cool innovation—one which addresses many people’s complaints about touch-screen technology. The complaint against the resistive touch screen, however, is that it lacks the iPhone’s smooth response. It’s all up to preference, but to that good chunk of people who abhor touch technology because of its lack of feedback, the Instinct offers a solution.

GPS: The Instinct offers true GPS technology on it. The iPhone has a similar thing—you can use Google maps to get where you need to go but it doesn’t offer a real GPS.

Customizability: The Instinct is super customizable. You can create a list of favorites for your start-up screen and you can customize the main screen by swapping out icons. Third-part apps are also supported by the phone, so all BREW/Java apps for other phones should be easily ported onto the Instinct.

So back to my original question, which is better? I’d have to go out and play with a Samsung Instinct before I make a final decision, but based on the cold hard features, the Instinct seems to be a better choice in terms of value for the price. Of course, if you’re a huge iPhone fan, the Instinct will look like nothing more than a knock-off. And I think I prefer the iPhone’s looks over the Instincts’. But the Instinct is cheaper, has a better network, and offers a wide range of features and content like the GPS and 3rd party apps that the iPhone does not. And I want to play around with the new tactile feedback the touch screen offers. Whether or not the Instinct is a hit, it is, to date, the closest thing to the iPhone that anyone has to offer.

Best April Fool's Pranks for Nerds

In honor of April Fool's Day, I've once again lifted an article from Wired.com. It's pretty awesome, I'm not gonna lie.

Here are the top April Fool's pranks that'll really put the nerd in your life on edge. Enjoy!!