Duck Goes Moo!

I have mentioned to quite a few people about a “secret project” I was working on with a “secret company” I couldn’t talk about. Well, I can finally drop all the cloak and dagger stuff and reveal all:

http://www.juggle.com/

I had a part as a contractor building a good chunk of the code and doing some design work for the site. It’s a knowledge network, which means its sort of a marriage between Wikipedia and Facebook.

Right now its at a Beta stage and you can only make an account byBT invite, but you can still browse around and see what type of information is stored there.

For example. check out the St. Louis page.

BTW, the site also directs you to places you can buy stuff, like if you go to the Nintendo Wii page you’ll see buy buttons to take you to places online where you can buy one.

So, there you are, no more secrecy. You can now all see what it was I was working on all last year… or at least what I and a whole gang of other developers and designers created.

For Christmas my brother got me a gift certificate to ThinkGeek and I bought myself two of the three Korg nanoSERIES controllers.

I got the nanoKEY and the nanoKONTROL, which they just started selling on ThinkGeek, and am anxiously awaiting their arival. I am going to try to use them with FruityLoops, which I hear works fairly well.

The nanoKEY is a 25-key, velocity sensitive keyboard that can communicate via MIDI with a USB slot. Its not something up to scale and sturdiness as a full proper keyboard, but the price is right and its extremely light and portable.

The nanoKONTROL comes with 9 knobs, 9 faders, and 18 switches. Once again it’s not up to snuff as a full and proper unit, and its not motorized, but for the stuff I am looking to do it is more than enough and an awesome price.

Here is a review of the nanoKONTROL which shows it being used with the nanoKEY:

SonicState review

I also want the nanoPAD, but will wait to get that after a month or so if I am still interested in making music and performing. Here is a review of the nanoPAD:

SonicState review

also:

“Mega Man 9″ was recently release by Capcom for the Wii as part of their “WiiWare” program, a download system for small games. The game is a tribute to the old 8-bit NES versions of Mega Man in all its pixelated glory. Even the music and sounds seem to be coming from a genuine 8-bit system; they even put in some code to bring back the “sprite flicker” you got when too many sprites got on the screen at once.

The end result is a genuine blast from the past and is still quite a bit of fun. They do throw in some modern game elements, like a save/load feature instead of the “dot-matrix” system they used before, plus there are now achievements and downloadable content, something no game seems to be without these days.

Also, this game features a new step in breaking the glass ceiling. Maga Man 9 features the first female “Robot Master” in a Mega Man game: “Splash Woman”. Hillary becomes the first female presidential candidate for a major political party, Palin becomes the first female Veep ( well, first Republican one ), and now we have proven once and for all that women can be evil robots bent on enslaving humanity too.

My only gripes about MM9 is that some of the elements introduced into the later games in the series are gone, like the ability to slide and the ability to charge up your main weapon before firing.

Still, it’s good retro fun and I’d encourage any fans of the original series who owns a Wii to try it out. MM9 is supposedly going to be coming out for the xBox as well.

3M has come out with a projector that can fit in your pocket. I may forgo buying a new phone and buy this dealy instead, though they say they’re trying to fit it into a phone… which sounds really, really cool.

I wonder if Steve Jobs is already trying to buy the patent from 3M to put into the next video iPod?

Well, Google has gone and done it and come out with their own browser, which is cool, but what is even cooler is that they hired Scott McCloud, one of my idols, to do a comic to introduce the how and why of Chrome:

Chrome Comic

I recently bought an expansion set to “SimCity Societies” called “Destinations” and one of the buildings you can build in the game is the St. Louis Arch! They call it a “Commemorative Arch”, but if you look at these screenshots I took after I placed it in one of my cities you’ll see that it is undoubtedly our arch and none other:

I’m tempted now to try to recreate St. Louis in the game, but I imagine someone else has done so and uploaded the map already.

Yes, one of my greatest wishes is apparently coming true: WiFi connections while you’re traveling mile high:

arstechnica.com

Sure, it’s not free, but the ability to check my email and play online games while flying is an incredible boon. I’d gladly pay an extra 12 bucks to get it, personally.

When I don’t have proper access to the internet I get all sore and achey.

These videos make me very happy. It’s all part of what I call “Web 3.0″, where the virtual world and the real world mix and combine in what is becoming known as Augmented Reality. With how well these demos work I think that my earlier estimate of ten years for this sort of thing to become mainstream may be a bit too long, and perhaps five years is more accurate.

I wonder how soon it will be until card games like “Magic the Gathering” will play much like these games, where when you plunk down a card a 3d version of the creature/event will take place, possibly even showing them battle and other neat effects.

I may need to find an investor, hehe…

Check out my new Mac Book Pro!

No, I didn’t actually get a Mac, or even install leopard. I just made my laptop’s desktop look like MacOS by installing RocketDock and Yahoo! Widgets, plus some shnazzy MacOS wallpaper.

The end result really does make it look like a Mac.

The RocketDock looks exactly like the carousel on the mac and acts exactly like it too:

The Yahoo! Widgets almost perfectly emulates the Widgets and Dashboard feature of MacOS. I can download and place Widgets on my desktop and with just a press of a button an alternate desktop is revealed where I can place cool stuff like newsreaders, music players, and even a hula girl:

Ah fun.

Yup, that’s right. Sims 3 in the year 2009 (supposedly).

Now your sims can walk right out of their houses and wander about the neighborhood, city, or forests, assumptively without any long loading screens.

It also seems to feature more ways to customize your sims appearance and personality:

Create realistic Sims with distinctive personalities. Select from dozens of personality traits and combine them in fun ways. The combination of traits you choose – brave, artistic, loner, perfectionist, klepto, romantic, clumsy, paranoid, and much, much more – help shape the behavior of your Sims and how they interact with other Sims. Your Sims can now rise above their basic set of every day needs. They are complex individuals with unique personalities.

Sounds pretty neat, but it’ll probably not come out until after Barack Obama’s first term.

Official Sims 3 Site

There was a saying in my parent’s house, “CURSE YOU MR. WIZARD!”

It was often shouted after I saw an experiment on the “Mr. Wizard” show and tried to replicate it at home.

DangerouslyFun.com is a site devoted to all sorts of dangerous experiments, showing you how to carry them out, and there are even YouTube videos of the end results for most of them:

Find Out Here

I’m not entirely sure if this is legitimate or not, but Texas Instruments is saying that they have developed a neckband that can pick up our nerve signals to our vocal cords and translate it into speech.

Sounds cool… but I think they should have developed it out a bit more before showing it to the public.

I wonder if anyone has a “Borg Clock” much like the “Doomsday Clock”. A clock counting down how long until humanity and machines merge into one. I think it would have just advanced to five minutes till Borgdom.

WANT!!!