Chris.castaldi

Here, we get to witness a rather extreme approach to farming (at least compared to the Farming Sim 2013 trailer). Heck, even the video title on YouTube is in all caps. Must be the effects of making the console leap. In any case, Farming Simulator is hitting PS3 and Xbox 360 in "the first week of September."

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It’s been over a year since we had cause to mention first-person music synthesizing game Fract OSC, but I saw the team talk at GDC in March, and it was clear a lot had been happening in that time. Not all of it good. The takeaway message from their presentation, however, was that while they had experienced all kinds of difficulties in the months following their IGF successes, they were finally back on track. That seems to have more than empty rhetoric, too, because Indie Fund, who have been steadily backing many of the most interesting and successful indie projects out there, have announced they are helping bring Fract OSC to neony fruition: “…when Phosfiend Systems sent out the signal that they needed help getting it across the finish line, we jumped at the opportunity to make that happen for them!”

A feast of light and sound await in the most recent trailer, below.
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Yes, that headline is correct.

The $249 Foc.us is being advertised as “a tDCS [transcranial Direct Current Stimulation] headset for gamers” that allows users to “overclock your brain to increase the plasticity”.

The result? Allegedly a user’s synapses “fire faster”. Or in other words – “Faster Processor, Faster Graphics, Faster Brain!” Amazingly, the Foc.us also comes with an iOS app meaning the headset “can be controlled manually using the touch sensor”.

The Sydney Morning Herald reports that “the company says the headset is not a medical device and is not regulated by the US Food and Drug Administration” and that “the device meets all regulated safety standards but warns against its use by epilepsy sufferers or anyone with implants”.

Does anyone else find this as utterly terrifying as MCV does?

The University of New South Wales’ Professor Colleen Loo certainly has some reservations.

''It's a bit like having an accelerator and brake in a car,'' she explained. ''Neither is bad and both are very useful but applying them judiciously at the right time and in the right context is absolutely essential. I think stimulation of yourself with do-it-yourself kits is potentially quite dangerous.

''Even with a single session, I am concerned about people doing some mischief to themselves… if you did this while playing a game and then you went out and drove a car and had an accident, did it affect your reaction time, your co-ordination?''

Memories of its time under the command of THQ linger while playing Saints Row 4. Featuring content that was once slated to launch as a premium DLC expansion for Saints Row: The Third, the latest game from Volition was transitioned to a full retail product by its former, financially unstable publisher.

THQ has since disappeared and publisher Deep Silver lords over the dildo waving, running into traffic, beautiful monster franchise known as Saints Row. But for the first time, a new Saints Row game hasn't seen a significant boost in terms of technology or mechanics. The game, on those levels, picks up exactly where it left off ... it's only crazier.

Though it borrows ideas from movies like The Matrix and games like Crackdown and Prototype to inject alternative worlds and superhuman abilities into the mix, Saints Row 4 feels like the DLC we didn't get that's wrapped, at least in the beginning, around a tired alien invasion story.

Continue reading In Saints Row 4, what's old is new again

In Saints Row 4, what's old is new again originally appeared on Joystiq on Wed, 03 Jul 2013 12:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Spread some of this goodness on your next sandwich. It’s fucking delicious. And it lets you double up on your protein sources and cut down on the fat. Shit, don’t limit yourself to just sammies. This is a choice dip so grab some carrots and cucumbers. Afternoon snack: FUCKING DONE.

SUNDRIED TOMATO SPREAD

¼ cup of sundried tomatoes (don’t buy that shit that comes packed in oil. They are way more expensive. Find the kind that look like dried fruit. They will be near the olives or the canned tomatoes in the grocery store)

1 cup warm water

¼ cup chopped white or yellow onion

1 ½ cups or 1 15 ounce can of cannellini beans (any kind of white bean works, like navy or great northern beans. You just want a creamy kind of bean)

1 clove of garlic

2 tablespoons olive oil

1 tablespoon lemon juice

2 teaspoons red wine vinegar

½ teaspoon tamari or soy sauce

½ teaspoon dried basil

½ teaspoon dried oregano

 

Put the sundried tomatoes in a small bowl and cover them with the warm water for 15 minutes.

 

While the tomatoes soak, cook the onions in a small pan with a little bit of olive oil until they begin to look brown and smell awesome, like 5-8 minutes. Take the tomatoes out of the water and chop them up into pieces but save the water they were soaking in; no need to waste shit. Chop up the garlic into little pieces. Put the beans, sundried tomatoes, onions, and 2 tablespoons of the water from the tomatoes in a food processor and chop that shit up real small. Add the rest of the ingredients and blend it all together until it starts to look creamy. Add more of the soaking water if it looks a little dry. It’s cool if there are still some bigger tomato bits hanging around, just call that shit “rustic”. Add more spices if you think it needs it and serve that fucker up.

 

This will last a week in the fridge if you are good at keeping delicious secrets from your roommates.

Yes, last night's rumors were true. Pebble just announced that it's sealed an exclusive retail deal to sell its iconic smartwatch at Best Buy locations nationwide. The wearable device is available online right now (source link below) and will land in stores starting July 7th for $150. Color choices include Jet Black today followed by Cherry Red in August. Pebble will continue taking pre-orders for the other colors (orange, grey and white) directly on its own website. The partnership with Best Buy also brings new retail packaging (above) to store shelves. We've sure come a long way since Pebble launched its Kickstarter campaign -- one of the most successful ever -- back in April 2012. Check out the promo video and full PR after the break.

Filed under: Cellphones, Mobile, Apple, Google

Comments

Source: Best Buy

We've shown you how to get your Google Reader data now that the service is dead, but you don't get everything available. If you really want to sweep up all that data from Google Reader, Reader is Dead is a tool that helps you do just that.

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Nathaniel McClure thought his resume would make it easy to break into the indie game industry. He worked at Activision for years, starting in 2002 with QA and quickly rising to producer on a host of AAA games, including Star Wars Jedi Knight 2, Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory, and a lineup of Call of Duty games.

By 2007, McClure wanted out.

"It was 3AM when I woke up on my keyboard at the office," he told me. "I was a few milestones in, working on my fifth Call of Duty title on my fourth straight year of promotion, when it hit me. If I was to keep loving what got me into making games I would have to quit one of the largest and most popular video games in the world, something I dedicated years of my life to."

McClure resigned that year, when he was a producer on Modern Warfare. He started his own studio, Epicenter, with the goal of making games that he - and other people, he hoped - would want to play. But indie development came with its own brand of bureaucracy, and dealing with publishers, platforms, funding and legal matters made McClure's journey more complex than he imagined.

"I thought my Call of Duty and Wolfenstein credits would land me a dev deal no problem," McClure said. "I was an idiot - it doesn't work that way, and I am grateful that it doesn't."

In 2009 - two studios, a handful of unfulfilled publisher promises and a few indie releases later - McClure founded Scientifically Proven. This year he'll finish development on a gothic, eye-catching action platformer, and what might be his favorite game ever: Blood of the Werewolf.

Continue reading Call of Duty to Blood of the Werewolf: Nathaniel McClure's indie tale

Call of Duty to Blood of the Werewolf: Nathaniel McClure's indie tale originally appeared on Joystiq on Fri, 28 Jun 2013 09:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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This week’s edition of Back To Basics is going to focus on the part of your device that you’re spending almost all your time looking at. It’s time to talk screen technology.

No two displays are the same, but there are a few guidelines that can help you choose the right screen for you. From the screen resolution, pixel density, type of display, to even the size, there are a lot of factors that determine whether a display is good or not, but fear not, read on as we explain what to look for in a smartphone or tablet display.

Screen resolution and pixel density

The first thing you might hear about your display is the screen resolution and pixel density or PPI (pixels per inch). Due to the vast size and price range of Android devices, there are a wide variety of screen resolutions, so we’ll cover the most popular ones.

Screen resolutions are commonly written as width x height (e.g: 800 x 480 means that the display is 800 pixels wide, and 480 pixels tall). Here are some of the most popular screen resolutions:

• 240×320: This screen resolution is most commonly used on really small screens, and/or on budget phones.
• 320×480: This screen resolution is also used on really small screens (sub 4-inch), and/or on budget phones.
• 480×800 (WVGA) : A few years ago this was the premier screen resolution and as such was found on many high-end phones like the Samsung Galaxy S2, but now it’s usually reserved for mid-range smartphones with displays that are smaller than 5-inches.
• 960×540 (qHD): This was also a high-end screen resolution a few years ago, but is now reserved for mid-range smartphones.
• 1280×720 (HD/720P): To be classified as a high-end smartphone last year you would need a HD display. Some mid-range and high-end smartphones and tablets will be found with this screen resolution.
• 1920×1080 (Full HD/1080P): Usually reserved for TV’s, Full HD smartphones have come up in a big way this year. A Full HD display is currently exclusively available on high-end smartphones and tablets.
• 2560×1600 (WQXGA): This is an insanely high resolution which is currently found on the Nexus 10, and is exclusively available on high-end tablets.

When it comes to screen resolution there are a lot of factors. On smaller displays and cheaper smartphones you’ll see lower screen resolutions, and on larger displays or high-end devices you’ll see higher screen resolutions.

Pixel densities are important when it comes to the overall sharpness or the display, which is important for reading web pages or e-books. Pixel densities vary due to the screen resolution and size. If the display is large, but the resolution is low, the PPI (pixel per inch) count will be lower.

A pixel density higher than 300 PPI is great, a pixel density lower than 100 PPI is considered poor, and a pixel density between 200 and 300 PPI is considered reasonable.

It’s a widely held belief that a pixel density above 300 PPI is considered great, and most won’t be able to see any jagged lines, or pixels. A pixel density lower than 200 is considered poor and is usually found on low-end devices, and a pixel density between 300 and 200 is considered reasonable and is usually found on mid-range devices

What is an LCD display?

LCD stands for Liquid Crystal Display, and is the most popular display type for mobile devices. This is due to its relatively low power consumption and good image quality.

TFT Display

The most popular type of LCD display is the TFT display, which stands for Thin Film Transistor display. This display tends to be the best type of mobile LCD displays.

TFT displays provide greater contrast and improve response time, however are more expensive, and less power efficient.

It has a transistor next to every pixel, and therefore allows each individual pixel to be turned on and off. This improves response time and provides greater contrast than other types of LCD displays. However, they also tend to be the most expensive, and less power efficient.

IPS panels

Some high-end smartphones and tablets use an IPS (In-plane switching) panel which is a type of TFT panel, but improves upon some of the drawbacks of a regular TFT LCD panel. IPS panels produce consistent and accurate color from all angles. Therefore, they have wider viewing angles than regular TFT displays, which is great for people who watch videos with a group of friends.

Super LCD

Manufactured by Samsung, but used mostly by HTC, Super LCD is a display technology which removes the air gap between the outer glass and the display elements. This reduces the glare, and also consumes less power and has better outdoor visibility than regular LCD screens.

The latest version of Super LCD is Super LCD3 and is said to consume less power than previous versions. It is found on the HTC Butterfly, HTC Droid DNA and HTC One.

What is an OLED display?

OLED stands for Organic Light-Emitting Diode, and an OLED display consists of organic polymer which lights up when charged with electricity. It offers many advantages over LCD displays as it is thinner, brighter, more power efficient and provides wider viewing angles. They also provide much better contrast and response times.

The most popular type of OLED panels on mobile devices is AMOLED technology. AMOLED stands for Active Matrix Organic Light-Emitting Diode and is even more power efficient than standard OLED displays.

The largest manufacturer of AMOLED displays is Samsung, which markets its displays under the Super AMOLED moniker. Most of Samsung’s high-end and flagship smartphones use Super AMOLED panels, however some use LCD panels.

Samsung has sometimes used a PenTile matrix on its displays. This uses two subpixels inside every pixel in a RGBG (Red-Green-Blue-Green) structure, instead of the standard RGB (Red-Green-Blue) structure. Some have criticized PenTile displays for overall fuzziness, but most agree that at higher pixel densities the fuzziness is not apparent. The PenTile matrix is used by Samsung for longer life of display, as the blue subpixel degrades faster than the other subpixels in OLED panels.

AMOLED VS LCD: Which is for you?

Both display technologies offer advantages and disadvantages. AMOLED screens have higher contrasts and deeper, true blacks, but LCD’s tend to offer more accurate colors. While AMOLED displays are brighter, LCD panels can be viewed more easily under direct sunlight.

AMOLED displays tend to be more power efficient overall, however, LCD panels are more power efficient when it comes to displaying web pages. AMOLED screens have better viewing angles, but LCD panels tend to be sharper on lower resolution panels thanks to the use of the RGB structure instead of PenTile RGBG.

Of course, people looking for a budget smartphone won’t find many devices utilising AMOLED displays (unless they are older Samsung Galaxy S smartphones), so they would be looking at LCD panels. People looking for mid-range devices will face the same situation, however, there are a few devices available using AMOLED displays. In the high-end market for smartphones there is a bigger question on which display technology is best.

Wrap up

Overall, it depends on whether you prefer the true blacks and high contrast of AMOLED displays or the accurate colors and direct sunlight performance of an LCD panel. In the tablet market there is no doubt as to which display you should use, since the tablet market almost exclusively uses LCD panels.

If you’d like a direct comparison between smartphone displays you can check out some of these links:

• Samsung Galaxy S4 VS iPhone 5: http://www.androidauthority.com/displaymate-galaxy-s4-vs-iphone-5-display-197900/
• iPad Mini VS Nexus 7 VS Kindle Fire HD: http://www.androidauthority.com/ipad-mini-nexus-7-fire-hd-display-comparison-128846/
• Huawei Ascend D2 VS Sony Xperia Z VS HTC One: http://www.androidauthority.com/hd-screen-comparison-232558/
• Samsung Galaxy S3 VS Samsung Galaxy S2 VS Samsung Galaxy S: http://www.androidauthority.com/samsung-galaxy-s-smartphone-displays-head-to-head-s3-panel-unsurprisingly-top-101830/

We’ll be back next week with another edition of the Back to Basics series, but if you have a question about Android, head over to our AA Q&A page, where our team will answer your questions every Wednesday, or just drop your questions in the comments below and I’ll be happy to respond.

Cash-strapped Americans looking to save some money on their monthly bills are increasingly ditching pay television and relying on free over-the-air television instead. GigaOM points us to a new study from GfK Media & Entertainment showing that 19.3% of all American households now rely on free over-the-air broadcasts as their primary source for television, which translates to around 22.4 million households encompassing 59.7 million viewers. As GigaOM reports, this marks a significant increase in cord cutting since 2010, when just 14% of American households relied on over-the-air broadcasts. The growth in over-the-air-only households is strongest among "younger households, lower-income families and minorities," GigaOM notes.

We got a pretty good look at the HTC Butterfly S this morning via HTC's official first-look video. But seeing as how there's very little chance of it being released in the U.S. (we've got the HTC One, after all), it's worth another look.

We've got a bevy of official shots -- as well as the full specs list -- after the break. Enjoy.

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On Monday, Apple revealed the latest version of iOS to the press and developers at its annual World Wide Developers Conference. Apple showed off a lot of new features on iOS, many of which are iterations on ideas from other companies. Unsurprisingly, I saw a lot of people complaining on Twitter that Apple was claiming to reinvent everything and that they stole everything from Android. The truth is that they took ideas from Android, webOS, Windows Phone, and a handful of jailbreak tweaks and, most importantly, iterated on them. Apple didn’t claim to be reinventing anything (they’ve avoided that claim for years now); instead, Apple claimed to be iterating. iOS 7 really is the biggest change to iOS since the iPhone was released in 2007.

Influences and Theivery

I think iOS 7 looks like a balance between webOS and Microsoft’s design language (which I’ll call Metro, like everyone else outside of Microsoft). It is not completely flat and squared off like Metro, the UI is not multitasking-based like webOS, and it doesn’t fit content into cards like Google Now (and Google+, the Play Store, Google Play Music, etc.). While Android fans have often complained about Apple stealing ideas from Android, this version of iOS seems to be devoid of influence from Google in terms of design.

In fact, if there is any clear influence in terms of design, it is clearly coming from Redmond, not Mountain View. Google’s emphasis on using cards to show content, a dark and bright color palette, and the free-form organization of content through cards give Android a very different design language. Android’s home screens and apps feel more like a messy desktop (that can be cleaned up) compared to iOS’ restrictions on how information and apps are displayed. Apple absolutely stole some ideas from Android (calling live wallpapers “dynamic” isn’t exactly innovating), but the majority of the changes made by Cupertino are clearly influenced by webOS and Windows Phone, not Android.

To see this clearly, look at the lock screens on webOS, Windows Phone, Android, and iOS. On the lock screen, largest similarities are from webOS, especially with the way that notifications appear on the lock screen. Apple’s new version of multitasking in iOS 7 is even more blatant. Instead of doing half the work like Microsoft did with Windows Phone and instead of shrinking down the cards and swiping from the x-axis like Google did with Android, Apple straight up copied Palm’s implementation of multitasking and added app icons.

iOS 7 isn’t just influenced by webOS and Windows Phone, though; Android’s donations are clear in a number of areas. Notification Center is still, for all intents and purposes, a crummy version of the Notification Drawer in Android with a few cues from the Me tile in Windows Phone. AirDrop is essentially the same thing as Wifi Direct, DLNA or NFC sharing (sans the bumping). Quick Controls is similar to Quick Settings except it has a heavier emphasis on media and looks more like a messy jailbreak tweak that Ive’s team mocked up in Photoshop for 10 minutes and then coded the night before WWDC. Tabs in Safari is a complete rip off of tabs in Chrome (although I will say that Apple’s version of it makes differentiating between tabs much, much cleaner).

Layers Beneath the Glass

iOS 7 uses transparency, shadows, and parallax to communicate depth and layers. When you unlock the phone, the whole lock screen slides to the right and then the icons fall on top of the wallpaper. Regular wallpapers will shift on a z axis behind the rows of apps to show that the apps are floating above a layer above the wallpaper (parallax). Quick Controls and Notification Center slide over the icons in a translucent shade to show that the home screen is behind those features. The result is that the iconography and typography may appear more simplified and refined, but the OS itself does not.

The use of translucency throughout the system gives iOS 7 a depth that Android, Windows Phone, and webOS lack with their purely digital implementation of the GUI. While each OS has pull down menus and notifications that hover over content, they use solid, flat colors and little to no depth, which makes each layer feel more like stacked sheets of paper than panes of content that are hovering over one another. This use of layers, translucency, shadows, and parallax leads to an operating system that looks and feels more real that the skeumorphic aspirations of iOS 6 could ever accomplish. The shift is subtle, but important. Instead of trying to make content and features look and feel real by making them ape physical object, iOS 7 adds layers of depth perception to make them feel like they exist on separate levels beneath the glass.

Balancing Borrowing with Innovation

Apple, like Google and Microsoft, is good at taking ideas and iterating on them. I cannot emphasize this enough: companies do not come up with every idea on their own. Google, Microsoft, Apple, Palm, Blackberry, Nokia, HTC, Samsung, LG, and Motorola all design software and hardware that is based on designs and ideas that come from elsewhere. Objectivity doesn’t exist; we are all influenced by the things we see, read, hear, smell, and touch.

Xerox essentially invented the mouse and the GUI, but Microsoft and Apple have been refining both ideas for decades through mouse hardware and Windows and OS X respectively. Apple didn’t invent the smartphone, but they dramatically changed the way we thought about smartphones and what they can do. Android was designed to take on RIM and Microsoft; when the iPhone came out, Rubin and his team adjusted course to compete with iOS. Everyone looks at their competition, examines their iterations on ideas and concepts, and either steals them or improves upon them. Some people call that preparations for patent lawsuits, others see it as how innovation works.

As iOS 7 gets closer to release and discussions about its design and features continue, I hope Android, iOS, and Windows Phone users (and the 12 webOS users left) recognize that every OS builds off of the ideas of its predecessor. Whenever someone mentions something that Android borrowed from iOS, Android fans get upset about it and insist that Google did not just take the idea; they iterated on it and made it their own. For the most part, I think that’s what we’ve seen Apple do as well. Every company does its fair share of stealing and innovating. We can sit around and be upset that companies steal ideas from each other, or we can continue to be inspired and buy products from companies who are working extremely hard to compete with each other to make some of the best products we have ever seen.

I’m excited for this new direction with iOS. I think Apple did a great job overall in changing the look and feel of the OS without abandoning its familiarity. Between Holo, Metro, and iOS 7 I think we have three really great design languages that borrow from each other while continually iterating and competing to make the best mobile operating system. I can’t wait to see how iOS 7 influences Microsoft and Google to continue to innovate and improve their respective products.

Good Artists Copy; Great Artists Steal [Opinion] is a post from: Droid Life

Here’s a look at the all-new design in iOS 7. If you’ve got screenshots you’d like to send us, shoot us an email at tips@9to5mac.com. We’ll be updating this post as we get more images.

A few changes to note: Newsstand can finally be tucked away in a folder, and the Clock app finally shows the actual time on the icon.

Thanks Alec, Will, Nick, Zach, Michael, and Frederik!

While there are plenty of heroes out there who got there powers from being dosed with radiation (usually under less than controlled conditions), this isn’t a campaign that convinces kids that chemotherapy will give them superpowers. What it is, is one that might make them feel less scared about a pretty scary situation. After all, not everybody is old enough to appreciate xkcd’s epic reframing of cancer treatment.

In case you’re wondering how the copyright agreements on this were worked out, it was pretty simple: international ad agency JWT happens to have both Warner Bros. and the A.C.Camargo Cancer Center in São Paulo as its clients. They mediated a collaborative refurbishment of the Children’s Ward, IV bag covers, and matching comics that frames their child patients’ treatments as a superscience cure for a superhero they know and love. From their press release:

Covers for intravenous bags were constructed based on characters from the Justice League, creating…a child-friendly version of the treatment. Co-developed with doctors, the covers are easy to sterilize and handle and meet all hospital hygiene standards.

(The) experience went far beyond the covers by also providing a new look to the entire Children’s Ward: the game room was turned into the Hall of Justice, corridors and doors were decorated in the same theme, and the exterior acquired an exclusive entrance for these little heroes.

Comics were also created in which Wonder Woman, Batman, Superman, and Green Lantern are laid low by their greatest foes, and depend on a superformula (delivered in an IV pouch just like the real ones the kids use) to regain their fighting strength and defeat the bad guy.

If that’s not enough to make you think there’s onions in the room, just watch this video:

You can check out some more pictures of the A.C.C. Cancer Center and their superheroic work at Buzzfeed.

Are you dishwasherless and trying to find a way to streamline meal cleanup without resorting to paper plates and disposable cutlery? If so, your search is over. This easy to use kitchen accessory from Jokari snaps over your sink's sprayer, adding a ring of stiff bristles letting you scrub and blast dirty dishes clean. As long as you're not stuck with a hefty utilities bill at the end of the month for excess water usage, the Spray Scrubber is $8 well invested. [Jokari]

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The Advent of the Raspberry Pi has seen an explosion in the market for ARM dev boards, sometimes even with pinouts for Arduino shields. The UDOO, though, takes those boards and ramps up the processing power for some very, very interesting builds.

The UDOO comes equipped with a dual or quad-core ARM CPU running at 1GHz with 1 GB of RAM. Also on board is the Atmel SAM3X8E – the same chip in the new Arduino DUE - and has pinouts for all those Arduino shields you have lying around.

In addition to serving your next project as a souped-up Raspberry Pi, UDOO also includes 78 (!) GPIO pins, Gigabit Ethernet, a camera connector, one SATA port (on the quad-core version), and an LVDS header for attaching LCD monitors. Basically, the UDOO is the motherboard of an ARM-powered laptop with the pinouts to handle Arduino shields. It’s just like [Bunnie]‘s laptop, only this time you can actually buy it.

The UDOO doesn’t come cheap, though: on the UDOO Kickstarter, the dual-core version is going for $150 while the quad-core is priced at $170. Still, if you need the power to run a pair of Kinects or want to build an awesome torrent box, you’d be hard pressed to find a more powerful board.

Filed under: ARM, hardware

What the internet giveth, the internet also taketh away. More »

Iron Man's HUD has always been one of the cooler details in any sci-fi movie. The way it pops up, the way it shields the face, the way it works—it's fantastically unreal and yet completely believable. And the beauty is in its impressive details.

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1. 6 tech companies’ plans for ridiculous new digs (GeekSugar)
2. And so the Internet rallies around a tea kettle that looks like Hitler (Mediaite)
3. UFC fan defeats carjacker with MMA hold (Guy Code Blog)
4. Geoff Johns slipped some interesting tidbits into his Green Lantern finale (The Mary Sue)
5. Classic books annotated by famous authors (Flavorwire)
6. Goal disallowed due to streaker, obviously not appreciated by players (SportsGrid)
7. Burger King burglars find getaway car burgled by Burger King employee (HyperVocal)

(Title pic via Reddit)

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I’ll just start with the one that dropped my jaw. Like all fan recasts, there are some here that you’re probably going to disagree with (personally, I think it’s imperative to pick actresses for Faramir and Boromir that look like they could be siblings in order to recreate the uncanny family resemblance between Sean Bean and David Wenham), but we’ve put the ones that we found most interesting in a gallery.

And seriously, Katee Sackoff as Samwise the Brave? I am already crying tears. You can find the rest of this fancast on LiveJournal.

(via io9.)

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CallyKariShokka on Deviantart makes puggles. What are puggles? Well, they’re, uh. These round, soft, felt creatures, that uh. Have ears? And no limbs.

Look, they’re round and cute, and she makes a lot, and I mean a lot of them to look like Transformers characters. I’m not sure any more description needs to be delivered.

(via Neatorama.)

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There was no new episode Game of Thrones this week, but the show's famous opening title sequence—recreated with StarCraft II units in the game's cutscene editor—might ease the pain.

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E Ink has demonstrated Spectra, a new type of display that adds a third color to the company's grayscale electronic paper found in e-readers such as the Kindle. The current Spectra screens feature black, white, and red "microcups" that move to the surface of the display as required, though E Ink says other colors will be produced in the future. Engadget reports that the company is also producing displays with blue and green pigmentation.

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Gamers seem to hate the Xbox One. If you wade into a comments section or ask a man-on-the-street at your local Mountain Dew distributer, you’ll hear a variety of reasons why the Xbox One is not for gamers—why it’s a horrible misstep, presumed dead on arrival. Some of these criticisms will ring a little truer than others, but none really tap into what’s really eating at the gaming elite. They’re mad that they’re not the center of attention.

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It seems that Neverwinter’s had a bit of a weekend. The game was offline for five or six hours after very naughty players discovered an exploit that allowed them to make billions of the game’s in-game currency, Astral Diamonds. While that may at first seem problematic, but not too serious, this in-game currency can be used to buy “Zen” from other players, Perfect World’s virtual currency bought with real-world money. This sudden flooding of Astral Diamonds into the game’s economy broken everything. So the publisher is scrambling to fix things. By turning back time.

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When you’re an old fogey food blogger like me, dinner comes in one of two categories: 1. something you’ve already blogged about and 2. something you’ve never blogged about.

The sad truth is that more often than not, lately, I feel like cooking things that I’ve already blogged about because I love making them. It’s harder and harder to come up with something that I really feel like making that’s new enough for the blog. How to overcome that? The best way is to go to the farmer’s market to find a new ingredient or to wander into a great meat and seafood store, like McCall’s in Los Feliz, to get inspired. I did the latter yesterday when I found beautiful looking clams for $8 a pound. One dish popped into my head that I’d never blogged before: Linguine with Clams. I bought a pound of clams, a box of linguine and got ready to rock n’ roll.

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From the first teaser ABC has released for Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., the show about the humans who work with the superheros Marvel is telling stories about in its feature films, like the Iron Man series and the forthcoming The Avengers 2, it’s clear the network wants you to know two things about its new drama. First, there’s a lot of punching people in the face, which makes sense, given that the characters are regular human beings rather than superpowered ones, and Marvel’s profits aside, it would be extremely expensive to do the kind of special effects that mark the action in the movies for the small screen every week.

Second, Agent Phil Coulson (Clark Gregg), one of the best creations of the franchise, who showed up as a dorky but insistent civil servant in Iron Man, taking on the thankless job of tracking down emerging superheroes, and who was thought to have been killed by super-villain Loki in The Avengers is actually alive and in charge. Simply from a character development perspective, putting Coulson at the heart of the show is a good sign. He was a really terrific original addition to the superhuman universe, a patient, surprisingly funny, likable liaison to a strange new world, and it’ll be good to see him get to wrangle S.H.I.E.L.D. agents without needing to put up with the whims of a Tony Stark or live under the shadow of S.H.I.E.L.D. director Nick Fury (the scenery-chomping Samuel L. Jackson). Maybe there will be some subtlety amidst the punchings:

But as enthusiasm for this project kicks off, it’s also worth looking at Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. as a story about corporate interdependence. ABC, which has substantially built its brand on shows that appeal to women, like the nighttime soaps Revenge and Nashville, has Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. on its roster because it and Marvel have the same parent company in Disney. One of the logical main characters in the show should have been Maria Hill, Fury’s subordinate, and a S.H.I.E.L.D. with a rich backstory in Marvel comics who was played by Cobie Smulders in The Avengers. Especially given some of the scenes of Hill disagreeing with actions made by her superiors that were cut from The Avengers, it would have been particularly interesting to see Hill have a larger role in the show, and potentially to see her pursue those rifts between herself and Fury, and her doubts about her own actions in the battle against an alien invasion that was the centerpiece of that movie. But Smulders isn’t available because CBS renewed How I Met Your Mother, the hit romcom sitcom that she’s has starred in since 2005, even though this was expected to be the last season of that show. In other words, this may be a show that a lot of us are excited to get. But it’s not necessarily the show that would have been made in perfectly independent conditions, for a partner network that has experience with action, and with the real freedom to integrate characters from the Marvel universe.

Eric Ruth, developer of fan-made "de-makes" of games including Halo and Team Fortress 2, has turned to Indiegogo for crowdfunding of his first original game project, Hauntlings.

According to the title's campaign page, Hauntlings is a browser-based MOBA/beat em up hybrid built in HTML5. Players will set up accounts on the game's website in order to play, save progress, manage their play settings and set up or join game lobbies.

Ruth plans to launch the game with 20 different Hauntling characters, similar to champions like in League of Legends, each with their own skills sets and combos for use in combat. Battles are fought in cemeteries and are won by being the first to destroy guardian statues on your opponents' side of a map. Ruth is...