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Jordan Mechner’s mostly frequently associated with Prince of Persia – sadly the only of his creations to get a feature film starring Jake Gyllenhaal’s immaculately sculpted biceps – but his mighty brain also gave the world Karateka and The Last Express. The latter’s brilliance is well-documented - if not incredibly well-known – but the former doesn’t get quite as much credit. Admittedly, in spite of its silky smooth rotoscoped karate flair, Karateka hasn’t aged nearly so well. But that’s what remakes are for, so Mechner’s paired with Liquid Entertainment to take a perilous, punch-powered journey back to the very beginning of his career. The end result’s part-brawler, part-rhythm game, all action. Or something. And you can snatch it from the hands of a wizened karate master using only a pair of chopsticks right now. By which I mean Steam. But you can still use chopsticks if you want.

(more…)

I probably need to leap back into Garry’s Mod. For about a year, it was one of my go-to games/game-like things. If I was feeling bored, I’d find the most elaborate ways possible to pit a single, pistol-armed human NPC against hundreds of languidly slithering legless zombies and cackle until my mental health was severely in question. Eventually, though, I squeezed all the grim carnage I could from even the juiciest of scenarios, so it stopped being my time-waster of choice. But now, it sounds like Garry’s wonderful toybox – in much the same fashion as an infinitely multiplying army of single-frightened-human-hungry Ant Lions – has expanded quite a lot. And more’s on the way. Kinect support, for instance, is right around the corner, and Garry’s released a video of how exactly it’ll work. Flail your arms wildly at the break until something happens. Or just click on it.

(more…)

Chris Klimas, the developer of revolutionary choose-your-own-adventure creator Twine, has been working on an open-source, beginner-friendly library for 2D games for Mac, Windows and Linux for quite some time now. Said engine is called Zoetrope and, as you may have already guessed, is already available on the Zoetrope site.

The engine is based on LÖVE and Lua and is not wholly dissimilar to Flixel. What's more, Zoetrope comes with some excellent documentation and one of the easiest to follow scripting tutorials I have ever encountered. Impressively it also supports animated sprites, physics, collision detection, tweens and delayed events, gamepads, saves and levels created in Tiled. Oh, and it's completely and absolutely free; even for commercial projects.

Bruno R. Marcos (Cavenaut) is putting the finishing touches on Maximus Action Carnage, a freeware tribute to Capcom's 1985 run-and-gun arcade shooter Commando.

Maximus Action Carnage was built using Marcos' Arcade Game Studio, a Windows-based tool specifically designed for making '80s-style arcade shooters, platformers, and maze games. The result looks very solid, and the final product will feature a variety of power-ups and music composed by Jake "virt" Kaufman.

A release date has not been announced, but Marcos assures that the full version will be released "soon."

“There ought to be a law against what I’m doing.”

- Vice president of the Downtown Council of Kansas City, on the incentives the local government gives to businesses. Nationwide, local governments give up $80.4 billion in incentives each year.

Reporter on the phone: “Can I call you back? I’m in the middle of an interview with Santa Claus.”

Reporter to photographer after coming back from crime scene with house camera: “I wish they had let you go out to the murder scene instead of the Christmas parade but hey, priorities.”

Dropbox, the online syncing and storage provider, plans to establish its first international office in Dublin, Ireland.

Dublin has become a popular spot for Silicon Valley tech companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter to set up shop due to costs, taxes, language, potential employees and other factors. Dropbox hasn’t chosen a specific building yet or appointed anyone to be head of its international operations, but it’s looking and recruiting now.

It’s appropriate for Dropbox to go international at this point in its life because the majority of the company’s users are outside the U.S., said CEO Drew Houston on Monday. Actually, it’s been that way from the beginning.

Today, a third of Dropbox’s users are in Europe. Its 100 million total users live in more than 200 countries.

For Dropbox, expanding into a faraway timezone is key, Houston said. The Dublin office will be dedicated to all sorts of workday-dependent businesses like sales account management, user operations and support.

What about engineering? “R&D will probably stay in San Francisco,” Houston said. “It’s important to keep everyone together.” Still, he said he feels it’s important that all Dropbox offices — make that both Dropbox offices — share the same team culture.

Internationalization has perhaps been less of a challenge for Dropbox than other companies. Dropbox is currently localized in eight languages, but Houston noted that sharing files and collaborating are a cross-cultural phenomenon. “The product is really simple,” he said, “so localization hasn’t been a barrier like with more complicated products.”

Pixel Pod Race by Brother Brain ★ 
Maybe the only example of FMV on Game Boy.
Star Wars Episode 1: Racer (GBC) LucasArts 1999.

by @olemoudi

Histology dessert plates available at the Street Anatomy store – $60 each

Thyroid dessert plate – $60

Testicle dessert plate – $60

Liver dessert plate – $60

Esophagus dessert plate – $60

Oh you like my dessert plate? It’s a beautiful pattern you say? It just so happens to be from a testicle specimen!

Histology is the study of the microscopic anatomy of cells and tissues. Performed by staining and examining tissue sections under a microscope, it often reveals beautiful patterns and organic designs.  Created using photos of real human tissues, these bone china histology dessert plates are 8″ diameter and available in 4 different human tissue designs:

• Testicle
• Liver
• Thyroid
• Esophagus

Medical illustrator and artist, Emily Evans, made these gorgeous plates from original slides of various human tissues provided by Michelle Spear, Clinical Anatomist at Cambridge University.  The plates were then fired by ceramic artist, Emma Smith.

A perfectly unique gift for the doctor, nurse, medical professional or student in your life! There’s no doubt that these histology dessert plates will be quite the conversation piece over any holiday meal. Brush up on your histology and impress family and friends with the beauty of the human body.

Available at the Street Anatomy store for $60 each.
Set of 4 plates for $200.

 

U.S. orders only. Please feel free to contact me at vanessa [a] streetanatomy.com with any inquiries!

 

blech:

Here’s a fun ngram: an OCR glitch that tracks the rise of Helvetica. books.google.com/ngrams/graph?c…

— Benjamin Schmidt (@benmschmidt) November 29, 2012

Edited slightly to go from 1940 to 2000, instead of the default 1800 to 2008.

The all-stock deal, Urban Airship's second acquisition, reflects the Portland company's ambition to soar into new markets in mobile technology.

Following our post about Japanese Mac site Kodawarisan's teardown of the newly redesigned 21.5-inch iMac, we (and commenters) were left with several questions. Chief among them was whether or not the new iMac would allow the installation of a third-party solid state disk. In its base $1,299 configuration, the 21.5-inch iMac comes with no SSD and no build-to-order storage add-ons; even the $1,499 model only has the option to add a 128GB SSD as part of Fusion Drive, which marries the SSD to the system's 1TB spinning hard disk drive to create a single volume. No SSD-only option exists, nor is there a way to add a standalone SSD.

Computer-savvy DIY fans had hoped to continue doing what they've been doing with iMacs for years by finding a place to mount their own SSDs somewhere inside the case, but it looks like this won't be happening. iFixit has posted its own thorough iMac teardown, and this set of pictures sits at the bottom of the third page:

Detail of traces for the proprietary SSD connector (left), with a retina 13-inch MacBook Pro's stick-style SSD placed atop (right). The connector itself is absent in the base 21.5-inch iMac. iFixit

At left is the position on the logic board that apparently would be occupied by the (likely Samsung 830-powered) Apple SSD. There are traces showing on the logic board that line up with an SSD plucked from a retina 13-inch MacBook Pro, as shown at right. However, the connector to actually plug in the SSD is missing. It seems that the connector isn't even added at the factory for the base model.

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Congratulations, text messages! It was 20 years ago Monday that the first SMS was sent. You’ve come a long way.

Pity that all the tech giants want you to die.

Facebook fired the latest shot in the war on SMS on Tuesday morning, as the company made its Messenger app available to Android users across five countries — regardless of whether or not they have a Facebook account. Download the Messenger app and sign in with your phone number, and you’re good to send messages to anyone else using the product.

It’s yet another move by a mobile-focused tech industry to undermine the cellular carriers’ stranglehold on the global text-messaging market. As carriers have reaped rich rewards from the high-margin SMS business, handset giants like Research In Motion and Apple have over the years developed their own SMS killers, opting instead to use customers’ data plans to send messages instead of SMS. Though Facebook doesn’t offer a smartphone (yet), the Messenger app is available for iOS and Android phones, yet another alternative to SMS.

To be clear, it’s not exactly sounding the immediate death knell for SMS. The upgrade is meaningful for those with Android phones who do not hold a Facebook account. And it still requires you to download the Messenger app to use the service.

At the same time, there’s potential for international expansion.

Consider this: Beginning Tuesday, the product update will initially roll out in five countries — India, Australia, Indonesia, Venezuela and South Africa. Those happen to be areas with extremely expensive SMS rates. Convince users — Facebook account or no — to switch to the free messaging medium, and you’ve got an entirely new method for expanding Messages users and potentially driving new Facebook sign-ups.

And to start rolling the product out on Android first is a no-brainer. It’s the fast-spreading smartphone platform that is taking over the world, available on high-end devices as well as on the slew of cheap handsets that populate developing countries. That’s yet another way to break into areas that Facebook hasn’t captured the majority of users in quite yet.

Apparently, Facebook wants to bring the feature to iOS users as well, though has no timeline to do so. I’d imagine that would be an unwelcome addition for Apple, considering that the Cupertino company would probably rather you stick to using iMessage than switching over to Facebook’s message system.

There’s certainly more on the horizon. The space is rife with competitors — especially fast-growing mobile messaging platform WhatsApp, which Facebook has previously expressed interest in (though it isn’t currently in talks to acquire, as we reported) — so I’d expect the social giant will continue to put the heat on at a rapid pace.

And there are still massive swaths of the market to be captured. While smartphones are exploding in popularity, the majority of the world still uses “dumbphones” or feature phones. As devices continue to become cheaper over time, it’s open season on those new audiences.

For now, carriers can continue to reap in massive returns in the SMS market. Happy birthday, SMS. Enjoy your party while it lasts.

Marley's Mellow Mood is promoted to reduce stress. The drink's nutrition facts say it may cause drowsiness and is not intended for children.

Sloth by Sebastian Gomez de la Torre

Print Isn’t Dead is an upcoming group art show at WWA Gallery that will feature original art prints from a large collection of carefully selected international artists. During this show, WWA Gallery and participating artists will donate 10% of all sales from the “Art with a Heart” exhibit to the American Red Cross for the Hurricane Sandy Relief Effort. The opening reception is Saturday, December 8th from 7 to 10 PM and both shows will run concurrently until Saturday, December 22nd at the WWA Gallery in Culver City, California.

Participating artists:

Alex Pardee, Alice X Zhang, Alvaro Tapia, Anton Marrast, Ashley Mackenzie, Bennett Slater, Bianca Green, Casey Weldon, Chase Kunz, Clint Wilson, Cole Gerst, Dan Barry, Darel Seow, David Chung, Derek Eads, Devon Smith, Drew Millard, Edward Robin Coronel, Emma J Hardy, Flora Chang, Gemma Correll, Gianmarco Magnani, Gina Kiel, HR-FM, Irena Sophia, Isaac Bidwell, Jamie Mitchell, JAW Cooper, Joe Carr, Joshua Budich, Julian Callos, Keegan Onefoot, Kristian Jones, Lukas Brezak, Matt Leyen, Michael C Hsiung, Michael Paukner, Nick Zutrau, Oliver Barrett, Oliver Lake, Rachel Caldwell, Randy Ortiz, Rob Bridges, Rob Faucette, Ruben Ireland, Scott Listfield, Sebastian Gomez de la Torre, Terry Fan, Tim Doyle and many more…

Revenge of the Ross by Casey Weldon

Power by Gina Kiel

Optimus by Joshua Budich

Twilight Owl by Rachel Caldwell

Reservoir Dogs and Kill Bill Volume One by Tim Doyle

Rayola Print by Alex Pardee

images via WWA Gallery and credit artists

This is the second article in my rather widely-separated series on three Lamentations of the Flame Princess products for GMs. The first was about Carcosa, a sci-fi/fantasy sandbox setting that would work equally well for D&D (and related games) or Call of Cthulhu; the third will be about Zak Smith's Vornheim (which Phil reviewed last year). As with Carcosa, I received a free copy of Isle directly from LotFP. Like my take on Carcosa, this isn't a review -- it's a spotlight on Isle of the Unknown, which is a fascinating little animal. Written by Geoffrey McKinney, who also wrote Carcosa, it's billed as "A setting designed to be placed in any fantasy campaign," but if that's all it was I wouldn't be writing about it. It's much weirder than that. (By happy coincidence -- I've been reading the book for some time -- Isle of the Unknown is half price on the LotFP webstore and on DriveThruRPG through December 9, 2012.)

What is it?

In one sense, the isle really could be placed in any fantasy campaign: It's an island, so all you need is a body of water where the PCs haven't been and in it goes. More importantly, it also doesn't make any assumptions about your campaign world -- really. That's one of the things that makes it such a unique book: the absence of stuff you need to change. It's also not at all generic or flavorless, which you might expect from a setting you can drop into any campaign. Here's how Geoffrey puts it:

To aid the Referee, only the weird, fantastical, and magical is described herein. The mundane is left to the discretion of the campaign Referee, to be supplied according to the characteristics of his own conceptions or campaign world.

That's not to say that it's devoid of context, just that it's devoid of much of the context you'd normally find in a setting book. The island is populated by 70,000 people, and their societies - as well as the flora, fauna, and geography of the isle itself - are based on 14th century Auvergne. It's also pretty substantial in size: 35,000 square miles. That breaks down to 330 land hexes, and the book presents one point of interest for each of them. One POI in 86 square miles means that whatever else is in the hex is up to you -- maybe nothing, but most likely quite a bit of stuff. As a GM, that immediately suggests two ways to use the book, which I'll circle back to in a moment. (As an aside, Carcosa is defined in part by its controversial elements, and based on the comments on my Carcosa article many folks reading this will be curious if the same or similar disturbing elements are present in Isle of the Unknown. They're not.)

What's in the book?

What's in Isle of the Unknown is a whole pile of weird stuff. Most of it probably isn't what you're expecting, and likewise won't be what your players are expecting -- which is why I like this book. Isle of the Unknown offers up over a hundred new monsters, dozens of magical statues, a couple dozen magic-users and clerics, a dozen or so towns, and one city. The meat of the book is devoted to monsters and magical statues, the hallmarks of the isle. There are no cultural write-ups, no nations or borders, no encounter lists -- nothing, in short, that's usually in books like this. Isle of the Unknown wasn't designed to be "just another setting book," but to be a setting book that surprises GM and players alike with the weird, peculiar, and even nonsensical. Nothing demonstrates that better than the monsters. Here are two of them: That's right, the POI for hex 0307 is a 5 HD weasel that can tunnel through solid stone, and which has four illusory vipers "growing" out of its back. And the POI for hex 0310 is a 600-lb. clam with the legs of a bird, emaciated hands, and the ability to crawl on walls and ceilings. Here's my favorite monster in the whole book: That one (hex 1316) feeds on fear, attacks by throwing its d4-shaped body against foes, and regenerates. And they're all like this -- funky hybrid monstrosities in the vein of Doctor Moreau, weird mishmash creatures that don't make sense, random-looking things with random-seeming powers, and the like. All beautifully illustrated by Amos Orion Sterns, all presented without names or -- and this bit's important -- context. And the statues are nearly as weird. Here's the fellow from hex 0910:

A statue of wood-hued stone depicts a man holding a hammer and a needle, bending over an empty table. Any damaged mundane item placed upon the table will cause the statue to animate and repair the item as swiftly as could an expert craftsman of the most consummate skill.

Weird, right? And that's the point, a point the book makes over and over by example: It's the isle of the motherfucking unknown. There's no context around all of these oddball one-off monsters, nor the magical statues, nor even most of the spellcasters; they're just there, on the isle, waiting to make your players very nervous. Hence "It brings the weird, you add the why."

Okay, this book is really weird. What do I do with it?

I would do one of two things with Isle of the Unknown: flesh it out by adding not only the "why" but also more towns, factions, NPCs, and other details as befits my game, changing nothing that's already there; or use it precisely as-is, without adding a thing. That first approach is probably the one that makes the book most useful. The most important thing to decide is the answer to this question: Why is the isle so goddamn weird? It reminds me of my Decamer campaign concept, which is based on the idea that you grab the 10 stupidest D&D monsters and are forced to make them the centerpiece of your campaign. Which isn't to say that the monsters in Isle are stupid, they're just weird, random (so much so that many look like they could have been created using Lamentations of the Flame Princess owner James Raggi's Random Esoteric Creature Generator), and unlikely to be to everyone's tastes -- much like the 10 D&D monsters I'd personally choose for that concept. I think this is a good thing. Not only because different strokes and all that, but also because once your players bump into their second monster on the isle they're going to be going "What the fuck is going on with this place?" And they're not going to know what a single damn monster on the isle can do, either. None of them have been used elsewhere, their abilities often have no connection to what they look like, and the most threatening in appearance aren't necessarily the most threatening in game terms. The second approach I recommend -- adding nothing to the isle -- puts that aspect of the setting front and center. With no additions, the isle is a weird and unsettling and largely empty place. Your players will likely need a good reason to go there and stay there for a while, but given that I strongly suspect they'll find it exactly as odd a place as it's supposed to be. Isle of the Unknown is a truly unique and unusual book. Without a bit of digging, it might even seem a bit dumb; I'd argue that the very stuff that could convey that impression is what makes it so interesting to me. It's bizarre, it doesn't explain itself, and it will surprise the pants right off your players. If you'd like to find out more about Isle and its author, Geoffrey McKinney, the Gamerati YouTube channel hosts a number of video interviews with him. If you have questions about the book, I'll be happy to answer them as best I can.

Mega Man 3 Remade by RushJet1

This remix album takes the music of Mega Man 3 and reimagines it as it would sound on an NES cart equipped with the VRC6 chip – the extra chip in Castlevania 3.

It sounds noticeably different! And awesome! I am now dreaming of a trend of just-barely-more-advanced remakes of all my favorite games.

BUY Mega Man games and more
VIA Destructoid

Verizon has filed a patent for a DVR that can watch and listen to the goings-on in your living room. In the application, the company proposes to use the technology to serve targeted ads appropriate to whatever you’re doing in the, uh, privacy of your own home—fighting, cuddling, or hanging out with your cats.

Verizon is far from the first company to think of this unassailably creepy use for a set-top box. Comcast patented similar monitoring technology in 2008 for recommending content based on people it recognizes in the room; Google proposed yet another patent for Google TV that would use audio and video recorders to figure out how many people in a room are watching the current broadcast.

Verizon filed for the application in May 2011, and it was just published last week. (By law, all patent applications are published after 18 months.) In the document, which was first noticed by FierceCable, Verizon gives two examples of the context-sensitive DVR’s use in a couple’s living room: sounds of arguing prompt ads for marriage counseling, while sounds of “cuddling” prompts ads for contraceptives. Charming.

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Super Mario Beads 3 is a wonderful 5 minute stop-motion animated short by Marcus and Hannes Knutsson of Lefvande bilder (creative studio) that shows their suburban Super Mario Brothers adventure. Each character featured in the short clip is completely hand made out of beads. You can watch the Behind The Beads video below to learn more.

images via Lefvande bilder on Facebook

via Tastefully Offensive

I just had the pleasure of meeting Tardar Sauce, the cat better known as the internet sensation, Grumpy Cat! Of course in real life she’s not grumpy at all, in fact she is one of the sweetest cats I’ve ever met. Tard is in New York City making the rounds, being photographed and “interviewed” by media and blogs. Yesterday she was on the TODAY show.

While visiting with Grumpy Cat, I shot a few photos of her. Her expression might suggest otherwise, but she was such a cooperative model. You can keep up with all of Grumpy Cat’s adventures on her website, Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr.

Grumpy Cat recently released a series of holiday cards that are available in the Grumpy Cat Shop.

photos by Scott Beale

Filed under: DC, Vertigo, News

In what can be described as seismic news from DC Comics, the publisher confirmed Monday that next year Karen Berger will step down from her position as the Executive Editor and Senior Vice President of the mature readers Vertigo imprint. It's a ... Read more

 

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Pro Gamer: The Game is a browser title that revolves around upgrading a gamer pad while playing a bunch of micro games that resemble Canabalt, Space Invaders, Frogger, and more. Completing the micro games gives the pro gamer money to purchase upgrades, and beating several in a roll yields a multiplier. The upgrade items allow the pro gamer to play more games in a row with more comfortable seating and earn more cash per game with bigger televisions.

Pro Gamer has a bit of a snarky bite, too. An upgrade of beanbag to a simple chair reads: "the backrest would be great, if I ever used it," or a Mountain Dude power up: "helps soul-dead journalists promote your game."

Pro Gamer: The Game won the Dev Island award ($6,000) at the Brazilian International Games Festival. Four teams had 24 hours to develop a game from identical instructions, without Internet access or contact with the outside world during the festival.

Who looks at a toothbrush and thinks, "Ooh, this could be a little more sonic"? Who looks at a toothbrush and thinks, "Ooh, this could be a little more sonic"? The Doctor does! This vibrating toothbrush will clean your pearly whites after you dirty them eating a whole box of Jammy Dodgers. $14.99

Verizon Wireless is pushing the “off” button on the pioneering mobile video service once known as Vcast Video.

The service, which launched in 2005, will go dark on Dec. 15, although the carrier will continue with its fairly recently launched Viewdini video discovery service. Mobile access to NFL games will continue through NFL Mobile for $5 per month.

Verizon’s move comes as it is also closing another former Vcast service, its Verizon App Store.

“Verizon Wireless is constantly working to bring the best experiences to our customers,” the carrier said on its Web site. “To better serve the demands of consumers, on December 15, 2012, Verizon Video will be shut down from use. This will allow us to focus on bringing you the best video experience in wireless.”

Platitudes aside, the video service was included in a number of the carrier’s paid service bundles, so those who are paying for the Smart Phone App Pack and other bundles might want to give customer service a jingle.

Are you a chess player that also loves design? If so, the type(chess)set by Hat-trick Design was made for you. Gone are the generic chess pieces that come standard with every set, instead you’ll find them replaced with typographic letters, like K for King.

The laser cut acrylic letters are based on the Hoefler Frere Jones typeface, Champion (Lightweight). To ensure stability, the Q and the P were redesigned.

Only 50 sets were made and are available for purchase here.

You might also like this Designer Scrabble set by Andrew Clifford Capener.

Share This: Twitter | Facebook | Discover more great design by following Design Milk on Twitter and Facebook. © 2012 Design Milk | Posted by Caroline in Home Furnishings, Style + Fashion | Permalink | No comments

Soon, you can get your hands on a Studio Ghibli adventure where you control the story.

Publisher Namco Bandai and developer Level-5 announced today that a demo for the Japanese role-playing game Ni no Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch is landing on the PlayStation Network tomorrow, Dec. 4, in North America and Dec. 5 in Europe.

Ni no Kuni releases in the U.S. on Jan. 22, which gives players plenty of time to explore the world that Level-5 and film company Studio Ghibli created. Joe Hisaishi, who composed the score for Studio Ghibli movies including My Neighbor Totoro, is providing the music for the game.

Level-5 is known for its fluid animation style, evident in games like Professor Layton and Dragon Quest IX: Sentinels of the Starry Skies, while anime fans revere the narrative excellence and visual wonder of Studio Ghibli films such as Princess Mononoke and Howl’s Moving Castle. The combination should work well in a story-driven video game.

In Ni no Kuni, a boy named Oliver travels into another world on a journey to become a wizard and save his mother. He befriends and tames many of the creatures he meets there, training them to battle more formidable foes.

The demo introduces players to two levels, each complete with a boss: the Guardian of the Woods and Moltaan. We’ve reached out to Namco Bandai for more information and will update accordingly.

Filed under: Games

Anyone who owns Nintendo's latest console knows just how disappointing the Wii U GamePad's battery life is. Thankfully, as soon as you get it in your hands you'll notice the battery pack is easily accessible. As you can see in the photo above, Nyko is already preparing an upgrade for the tablet controller.

Dubbed UBoost, the new battery extender works in conjunction with the Wii U GamePad's built-in battery and Nyko claims it can double overall playtime. The extended playtime is further complemented by the addition of a neat little kickstand, perfect for those times when you're watching Netflix or Hulu while others hog the TV.

The UBoost simply clips on the back of the GamePad, meaning you won't have to remove the existing battery or even the back cover. Charging is done using the same cable that came with your Wii U and those who bought the Wii U Deluxe set will even be able to use the standard charging cradle in conjunction with the accessory.

Best of all, the price tag Nyko has slapped on the UBoost isn't too obscene. Two color options are available – white and black – and it's listed on Nyko's own website for an easy to swallow $19.99. The only concern I have at the moment is the additional weight that will come along with an extra battery. Nintendo did a great job designing the GamePad to be light and easy to hold for long gaming sessions, but that could change with an additional battery pack. I guess we'll find out the UBoost hits shelves later this year.

Related posts:
'Little Inferno' Review - Setting The World On Fire
Nintendo Brings Holiday Joy To Some Littles

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A few weeks before the first presidential debate, Dan Schultz and his colleagues on The Boston Globe’s interactive team were trying to figure out what they could build that would make the newspaper’s coverage stand out.

“Many of the ideas involved being able to know what the candidates were actually saying,” said Schultz, a current Knight-Mozilla Fellow.

Even ideas that weren’t focused on the candidates, like analyzing how viewers responded, would have benefited from knowing what was being said in real time. “It is one thing to have a graph of how you and your friends felt over time,” Schultz said, “but it is entirely different to have a data set of the phrases and words that triggered those feelings.”

“Once you have this parseable stream related to video, you can start to build these contextual apps on top of that video stream.”

But figuring out what is being said on your TV right now (not yesterday, or an hour ago) is hard. Or at least, it’s hard for a computer. There are archives of C-SPAN out there, like Metavid, but there wasn’t a simple way to get text out of video in real time.

Schultz — who you may remember from another of his projects, Truth Goggles — has actually been hacking on this problem for a while. Before coming to the Globe, he built a prototype of a personalized TV news service called ATTN-SPAN, which culls important (to you) speeches and transcripts from C-SPAN. “I really needed instant, real-time information,” Schultz said, “so I decided that it would be easy enough to just build it myself.”

The result: Opened Captions. It provides a real-time API for closed captions pulled from C-SPAN. The system makes it possible to code against what’s being said on TV right now, and by solving this one really tricky problem, it makes a broad range of applications possible.

How Opened Captions works

Getting a live transcript requires three things:

• A video feed that can be connected to a computer.
• Something (hardware or software) to extract and parse closed captions.
• A server to push those captions to the web.

Opened Captions runs on a Mac mini connected to a DirecTV feed in Globe Lab, the newspaper’s skunkworks.

“When the Lab started, we were like, ‘We need a video feed in here,’ and we didn’t really know why,” Chris Marstall, who runs the Lab, told me. “But this really fits that perfectly.”

Between the video feed and the Mac mini is TextGrabber, a $300 converter (literally a black box) that extracts closed captions and feeds text over a serial port. The Mac mini runs an instance of the Opened Captions server, a Node.js application that pushes captions to a web server at MIT. If you connect to the Opened Captions website, you’re hitting that server at MIT, which acts as a proxy.

The beauty of this system is that, in theory, the captions feed could come from anywhere. Schultz’s grand vision for Opened Captions involves lots of inputs transcribing lots of channels. CNN, for example, could start feeding its own broadcast into Opened Captions (or it could run its own captions server).

So, live TV is hackable. Now what?

“Once you have this parseable stream related to video, you can start to build these contextual apps on top of that video stream,” Marstall said. (To see one idea, see the bottom of this article.)

The first thing Schultz built with Opened Captions? A drinking game where the candidates get drunk with you. During the second presidential debate, Schultz debuted both Opened Captions itself and its inebriated cousin: DrunkSAPN (the joke being that the app is too drunk to spell its own name right), a live transcript that counts drinks using keywords and adds drunkenness in the form of hiccups, misspelled words, and vulgarity. Leave the app running for a while, and you end up with something like this (contrast with the Congressional Record):

When i seeerved inhic the conhic*gress ni my first otur fo serviccc,e in the 1980′s, actually from 1979 to 1989, january of 1979 to jjjanuayr of 1989, i for several yearsss was a member of teh house intelligence committee. At thta*hic time the phrase homeland security or hte word homeland was never uttereeed. If you had uttered ti then it would be haev a foreing sense to it. Protect theee homeland, wasn’t that what hitlre was talking about?

The next app was newsier. At a hackathon before the last debate, Alvin Chang, Jin Dai, and Matt Carroll built CardText, which added context and stories from the Globe to a live-updating debate transcript.

“A lot of times, it’s going to so fast it’s difficult to see exactly what they’re saying and put it into context,” Carroll told me during the hackathon. “It’s hard to parse that stuff out when they’re throwing out 20 facts in 20 seconds.”

Where does it go from here?

With the election over, Schultz and the Globe are figuring out what to do with Opened Captions. (Also, Schultz’s Knight-Mozilla Fellowship ends in April.) The current setup is cheap to maintain, though Schultz calls it “fragile.” He’s the only one maintaining it, and he’s had to drive up to Boston from his home in Providence on a few weekends to restart the server, since the Globe doesn’t officially support Node.js. Intellectual property could also be an issue. C-SPAN allows non-commercial use of its video streams, but closed captions are something of a gray area (and the Globe obviously isn’t non-commercial).

The Globe could continue to be the official home and provider of Opened Captions, or Schultz could take it with him when he leaves and try to find funding to operate it independently. “If I were to apply for a grant right now, I would ask for $10,000,” Schultz said. That would be enough to add servers to increase stability, support additional content streams, and purchase more TextGrabbers. “And that would leave plenty of wiggle room for adding scalability as needed,” Schultz added.

For now, the Mac Mini is safe in Globe Lab. “It wouldn’t be too hard to keep it running in its current state. It’s kind of a perfect project on a lot of levels for the Lab,” Marstall said. “We do a lot of projects that are experimental or are an investigation of a new platform. We don’t know what the product is going to be but we want to stand up a hack on a new platform.”

Here’s an example of what Opened Captions can do: A quick visualization of the most frequently spoken words on C-SPAN since you started reading this story.