Author: Serkadis

Reactions were a bit mixed when SCEA officially unveiled the North American box art for Heavy Rain. If you count yourself as among those who hated it, here’s some good news for you.

Ok, S&P actually downgraded California to A-. And since developing countries have some of the best balance sheets around, maybe the title is especially unfair to those countries.

The reason?

The budget situation remains horrible.

Dow Jones:

Due to uncertain assumptions of major portions of the budget, S&P said the state’s credit is more susceptible to adverse economic developments.

As a result, it lowered its ratings on the state’s $63.9 billion of general obligation debt by one notch to A-, which is four notches into investment grade. That is the lowest such rating for any state in the U.S. California also has a negative outlook, meaning future downgrades aren’t out of the question.

And while the budget proposal includes efforts to make some structural improvement to the state’s projected fiscal imbalance, S&P said it does so by assuming what it considers to be “significant increases in federal reimbursements and funding and reduced federal spending mandates–provisions over which the state lacks singular or direct authority.” It also requires voter approval of two ballot measures to allow the redirection of $1 billion in funds presently earmarked pursuant to two prior election results.

Read the whole story — >

Bonus: Now see the real state of collapsing state revenues — >

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• Now See The Real State Of Collapsing State Tax Revenues
• Now See The Real State Of The Commercial Real Estate Industry
• Jumbo RMBS Defaults Triple: California, Florida, And New York Lead the Way

No more free Cadis for Tiger. Earlier this week, Elin Nordegren was rumored to be trading in her Cadillac Escalade for a new whip — and with good reason. General Motors has ended its relationship with embattled golf star Tiger Woods, PEOPLE.com reports.

Gatorade, Tag Heuer, Accenture, and AT&T have also cut ties with the world’s No. 1 ranked golfer in the wake of a sex scandal that linked him to at least 13 mistresses. The company’s endorsement contract with the golf star ended in 2008, but his driving deal was extended through Decemeber 31, 2009. As of Jan. 1, Woods will no longer be permitted to drive GM cars for free.

Word is, the vehicles have already been returned to the manfacturer —including the 2008 Cadillac Escalade Tiger crashed into a fire hydrant last November —will be repaired and sold.

Filed under: Concept Cars, Convertible, Nissan

The 2006 Nissan Urge looks like a dead man walking. The three-year-old concept designed as a Mazda MX-5 competitor was once planned for the market, but then the market got really, really sick and so the roadster was killed. That didn’t stop Auto Express from claiming that the Urge would be coming in 2011 back in May.

Nor has the little two-seater’s deceased state stopped Nissan from trailering it hither and thither, right out in the open. And who was there to catch the incident? None other than motorcar rendering guru Jon Sibal. It looks just like it did at its Detroit Auto Show debut and it’s spotless in the photo, which makes us think they haven’t been hauling the concept uncovered for two years. Thankfully.

Click the link for the rest of Sibal’s shots, and have a look at it in the high-res gallery below. Maybe this means you’ll be seeing it on a show floor sometime next year… or not?

[Source: Jonsibal.com]

2006 Nissan Urge concept spotted uncovered on trailer originally appeared on Autoblog on Wed, 13 Jan 2010 15:29:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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In the Feb. issue of Shape Magazine, former American Idol finalist and bulimia survivor Katharine McPhee talks about her new healthy lifestyle.

Image Source….

“The more I focused on my weight, the worse my bulimia got,” the recently-blonde singing star recalls. “Now I’m more easygoing. I stopped fighting myself and became more forgiving of my body. Ironically, the weight came off naturally through exercise but no dieting.”

The new issue of Shape hits newsstands January 18. Katharine’s sophomore album, Unbroken, is available now.

Tired of sifting through the mountains of rumors leading up to the (still unconfirmed) debut of the Apple Tablet on January 27? Valleywag, the Silicon Valley-focused Gawker blog, has just announced a bounty for anyone who turns over legitimate photos and/or video of the tablet in action. The rewards range from $10k to $100k depending on the type of media submitted: $10,000 for pictures, $20,000 for video, $50,000 for a photo or video with Steve Jobs holding a Tablet, and $100,000 to “let [Valleywag] play with one for an hour”.

It’s certainly a tempting offer (at least, more tempting than submitting leaked photos and getting zilch in return), but Valleywag may be on the wrong side of the law. We spoke to a lawyer about the legality of the bounty, who says that Apple could have a claim against Gawker/Valleywag for inducing breach of contract, since anyone who has their hands on the tablet is certainly under a nondisclosure agreement. This could result in tort damages, with potential for punitive damages.

Gawker is no stranger to such bounties — they previously offered a $1,000 reward for photos of Nikki Finke, but there’s a difference between scandalous tabloid photos and breaching an NDA. That said, it’s unlikely Gawker’s Nick Denton would launch the promotion without investigating the potential legal consequences.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

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Startup Get Satisfaction has raised $2.3 million in funding according to an SEC filing. It appears that the startup is looking to raise a total of $3.5 million in the round. The company previously raised $2.5 million in funding.

Get Satisfaction makes a network of customer support forums where customers can post their own questions, ideas, problems, or conversations about a product. Companies can also claim their board and put their own employees on to moderate the boards. Zappos, Mint.com and Nike have all created customer support communities on the site. Currently there are over 25,000 communities that have been created on the Get Satisfaction platform.

The startup has also incorporated social media into its platform, incorporating Twitter into forums. A year ago, the startuo brought on a new CEO, Wendy Lea, to help the company expand its forums to a greater audience. And it looks like Lea is doing her job well; the startup was just invited to the White House to discuss government customer service practices.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

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Have enough friends on Facebook? They don’t think so. Today, Facebook has started pushing its Friend Finder tool at the top of the main News Feed when you log in to the service.

The feature, which it technically calls the “automatic Friend Finder” suggests you use it by showing you three friends you know that have already used the tool to find new friends too. After that, it has a link to the main Friend Finder tool, which has existed for a while, allowing you to find Facebook friends via email, search, IM, or its own suggestions. Facebook has long included friend recommendations in the Suggestions area of its main page, but never has it been so front and center.

The reason behind the push should be obvious: the more friends you’re connected to on the service, the more likely you are to keep using it over and over and over again. Thankfully, as you might imagine, you can close this new pop-up box to stop it from showing up again. The reaction thus far on Twitter seems to be positive to the tool.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

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I’m a simple man. I understand certain things. How ambient Wi-Fi signals could be converted into enough energy to charge a BlackBerry is something I do NOT understand. However, RCA not only showed off the technology at CES but the device will apparently be available by the summer and it’ll only cost $40.

OhGizmo! tells us the following:

The Airnergy Charger is amazing.

This little box has, inside it, some kind of circuitry that harvests WiFi energy out of the air and converts it into electricity. This has been done before, but the Airnergy is able to harvest electricity with a high enough efficiency to make it practically useful: on the CES floor, they were able to charge a BlackBerry from 30% to full in about 90 minutes, using nothing but ambient WiFi signals as a power source.

So here’s where things get convoluted. Instead of just writing it off as crazy vaporware, you can’t help but consider the following:

1. It’s got a brand name that people have heard of and they’ve put a date and a price on it already. Granted, RCA isn’t so much of a company nowadays. It’s more of a purchasable brand, but you’d hope they wouldn’t license the name out to just anyone.

2. The technology apparently exists (according to the nerds over on Slashdot), yet it hasn’t been powerful enough to generate the juice to charge anything worthwhile. In this instance, it charged a BlackBerry “from 30% to full in about 90 minutes.”

If it does indeed work, imagine future applications of this technology. Your cell phone battery would eventually have it all built in and it’d recharge itself all day – even at just a trickle – whenever you were within range of Wi-Fi signals. For many of us, that’s most of the day.

I can’t honestly say if it’s bogus or not. Most of the sentiment from the commenters on the various blogs who have written about this thing has been more on the negative side. I contacted Mr. Wizard for his take but, alas, he passed away in 2007.

Any geniuses out there care to weigh in?

RCA Airnergy Charger Harvests Electricity From WiFi Signals [OhGizmo!]

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The Onion, always good for a quick larf, just posted a list of great new devices launched at CES including but not limited to:

Radioshack—Big Sack of Adapters: The right one is probably in there somewhere

Bose—Noise-Postponing Headphones: Using Bose’s patented SoundDelay technology, these headphones store ambient distractions for up to six hours before unleashing them all at once against the wearer’s eardrums.

iTunes—”Taylor Swift Breathes”: Using nanotechnology, this new MP3 enables you to feel Taylor Swift’s hot breath on your neck as she sings

Interestingly, they didn’t mention the WristOffice which definitely gets our vote for best product of CES. You can read the Onion article right here.

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Zero carb is getting (relatively) popular. A handful of valued MDA forum members eat little-to-no-carb, and several others probably imagine it’s ideal even if they don’t personally follow it. I wanted to address this because there seems to be some confusion as to how a zero carb eating plan relates to the Primal Blueprint eating plan. To begin with: I think zero carb can be a viable option for some, but highly impractical for most. If one had access to and ate different animals, all range fed and without pollutants, and if one ate all offal (and stomach contents) it’s possible to approach zero carb… but again highly impractical. If you really, really love meat and fat and offal, and get genuine enjoyment from eating nothing but meat and fat and offal, have at it. On the other hand, if you are looking for a wider variety – and gustatory enjoyment – of the foods you eat, zero carb may be unenjoyable, impractical, unnecessary, and at worst (if not done just right) downright dangerous.

Let’s take a look at just a few of the reasons why vegetables are a part of The Primal Blueprint:

First, it’s highly unlikely that early man would have consciously avoided edible, available vegetation. We already know that current hunter-gatherers take advantage of anything edible within reach – plant or animal. We are adaptive capitalists, ready and willing to exploit any situation to our advantage. Humans are survivors and they’ll eat whatever is available. If you subscribe to the “out of Africa” model of human evolution – as do most anthropologists – the bulk of our evolution took place in the lush, fertile Africa grasslands where both game and vegetation were plentiful. Grok wasn’t throwing together multicolored salads every day at noon, but the precedent for plant consumption is there. The opportunity certainly was.

People have ranged far and wide across the globe, living in a variety of environments and ecosystems, each with different sources of food. Looking at the fossil records, it’s difficult to pinpoint the exact Paleolithic diet (whatever that means), seeing as how vegetable matter degrades and bone endures. But it’s safe to say that meat and fat have always been preferred by man, and our ancestors’ adoption of a meat and fat-heavy diet necessitated and prompted (in the cycle of positive feedback between culture and physiology that so often describes evolution) the smaller guts and bigger brains we enjoy today. Many like to take this point combined with examples of people surviving on animals alone as proof that vegetables should be restricted or avoided entirely. As I see it, when a carnivorous-predominant group does arise, like the Inuit, it is only out of necessity. They are an exception to the rule. The Inuit survived in a barren, arid environment by eating whatever was available: marine animals, fat, blubber, organs, and fish. It wasn’t by choice. They weren’t turning their noses up at bushels of berries and teeming fields of wild cabbage; the opportunity simply wasn’t there. In every other case, humans will eat both plants and animals if they are given the chance, and plant matter is mostly available all over the world, depending on the season.

The Inuit do, though, show us that an-all meat, zero carb diet has the potential to be healthy. It might even be desirable for certain people if (here comes the tricky part), as I said, they use organic range-fed whole animals – muscle meat, fat, organs, offal, stomach contents – to get the whole spectrum of fat-soluble nutrients and vitamins. All those thriving near-carnivorous traditional groups the zero carb crowd likes to throw around weren’t buying tubes of 80/20 Walmart beef and nothing else; they were eating spoiled organs, consuming stomach contents, fermenting full-fat dairy, drinking fish liver shooters, gnawing on still-beating bison heart, and feasting on a “guts and grease” diet. Stefansson’s oft-cited all-meat diet experiment wasn’t just muscle and fat; it was fried liver and brains, fish, and a whole host of animal products. As for the ground beef and water diets that seem popular in some ZC circles? You’re fooling yourself if you think that’s an optimum diet for health and longevity, and I’m not sure if some favorable lab numbers garnered after six months of eating nothing but burger mean much at all. Better than the standard American diet of chips, sodas, cookies, and rancid fats on top of the same burger meat? Maybe. Optimum? Not a chance. Let’s see what happens in thirty years. Staunch ZCer Danny Roddy’s strangely scurvy-esque symptoms following a purely pemmican diet should give you pause.

That sort of fear of macronutrients is silly and potentially dangerous. Avoiding grass-fed beef liver because it contains a few grams of carbohydrates is crazy (or did you conveniently forget that crucial aspect of the Inuit and Plains Native diets – organ meats?). Eschewing pastured eggs and all their yolky goodness because of a fraction of a gram of carbohydrates? Madness. Now, avoiding all carbs because you feel better without them? I can get behind that. Trying to maximize fat loss by going zero carb for short periods of time? Worth trying. Trying to prove your glucose-freebasing marathoner friends wrong by beating them on a ultra-low carb diet? I love a good self-experiment; do it! A complete zero carb diet is possible to get right, albeit a bit impractical and unwieldy for most people (if you think sourcing grass-fed beef is tough, trying finding a steady supply of pastured thyroid glands, kidneys, livers, brains, tripe, and heart!), but so is an omnivorous one. Which would you prefer? Which would enhance your quality of life? As long as you’re avoiding grains, legumes, sugar, and industrial vegetable oils, these are the important questions to dwell on.

But what of vegetables? Is there anything inherent to be feared? Most plants are, at the worst, harmless. Others, like the seeds of wheat and barley and legumes, really don’t want to be eaten and can cause problems. These guys employ various anti-nutrients, chemical defenses like lectins and gluten to prevent and dissuade consumption. Certain animal and insect species have developed tolerances, but we generally have not. It is necessary for proper health that we humans “deprive” ourselves of these foods. I get that. And people sensitive to nightshades should avoid them, just as the lactose intolerant should probably avoid even raw dairy, and people with a severe shellfish allergy should avoid shrimp. This is basic stuff. But to posit that humans are somehow wholly intolerant of all vegetables and fruits is nonsense. Leafy greens like spinach and kale, carrots, asparagus, broccoli, squash, even the occasional sweet potato – some people would have you believe these are poison. Unnecessary? Perhaps. Dangerous? No, and especially when eaten with plenty of fat, vegetables are excellent vehicles for delivering beneficial nutrients, vitamins, and minerals to the people consuming them (read a few of our Smart Fuel posts on vegetables for more info on this point). Leafy greens, for example, are great sources of magnesium and calcium. Sardines and mackerel are good sources, too, but do they negate the utility (or deliciousness) of a plate of kale, sauteed in garlic butter and topped with lemon juice? This, to me, isn’t a point not to be taken lightly.

There’s more to this picture. As long as you’re going to be cooking your meat there are good reasons to eat your steak with a side of veggies. A researcher named Joseph Kanner has spent a career looking at how the potential nastiness of cooked meats – oxidized fats, for instance – are neutralized in the “bioreactor” of the stomach with the inclusion of antioxidants from vegetables, red wine, and tea. Does this mean vegetables are required for safe consumption of cooked meat? Probably not, but unless you’re eating all your meat and offal raw, ultra-slow-cooked, or super rare, you may want to include a small salad, a bit of broccoli, or a glass of wine with that ribeye. Plant-based antioxidants (flavonoids, carotenoids, and other phytonutrients) in general provide a good line of defense against stress, inflammation, and the ravages of aging in the context of the former two conditions. A perfect zero carber who closely watches meat sources, gets plenty of sleep, good Primal exercise, and leads a low-stress existence is probably fine without piles of vegetables, but the average person who stumbles upon the PB and needs to drop a few dozen pounds, kick a few prescription meds, and maintain on inconsistent sleep? A Big Ass Salad (BAS) for lunch and some berries for breakfast (along with near carnivorous eating otherwise) will go a long way toward healing them – and they’d definitely be a huge improvement over what they were previously eating.

And this gets me to my final main point on the importance of plants. The Primal Blueprint eating plan supports vegetation in large part because it’s meant to be a sustainable regimen – for life. Our supportive stance on vegetation is meant to include, rather than preclude. I’m trying to positively modify as many individual eating habits as I can in my short time on this planet. My work is my work, but I’m passionate about it, and I don’t want to be a starving diet guru with an incredibly loyal but miniscule cadre of die-hard followers. I want to affect people on a huge scale. I refuse to water my message down (“drink diet sodas and avoid saturated fat”), but if including lots of vegetables attracts more people without detracting from the nutritional merits of the lifestyle, I’m going to keep doing it. I’m talking about the people who need our help the most. They are our parents, our friends, our neighbors, and they stand to gain the most from adopting a Primal diet. Excluding vegetables right off the bat would only turn people away and relegate us to “fad diet” status immediately. It’s already an uphill battle, folks, and we don’t need any more roadblocks. Please, though, don’t read this as some sort of vague admission that vegetables aren’t a critical part of a healthy eating plan. I only mean to note this added importance that veggies bring to the PB.

Before I wrap this up, let me speak specifically to how this relates to the official Primal Blueprint Food Pyramid – which is founded on vegetables, and to a lesser extent, fruits. Vegetation gets prime seating at the base as it makes up the bulk of an average PB meal, with meat and other animal products following up immediately after. When you take a look at the average Primal eater’s caloric daily breakdown though, fat and meat take the lion’s share. And when we publish a PB recipe, more often than not it features animal flesh proudly and prominently. Vegetation represents the foundation of the pyramid graphic but not the bulk of the caloric reality, which might seem designed to mislead.

It’s not, though. For one thing, the sheer volume of raw vegetation is immense. Three cups of raw spinach quickly become less than a cup’s worth when exposed to butter and a heated surface. A few cups of buttered broccoli might displace enough three-dimensional space to fill a plate, but it won’t fill you up; the ten ounces of steak to the left will take care of that. In that sense, vegetation can and often does form the foundation of a Primal diet, calories notwithstanding, but it’s not a ton of calories derived from plants. That would take kilos of greens and pounds of carrots, and we aren’t lowland gorillas with immense fermentation chambers in our protruding guts. To really get a sense of how many or how few vegetables and fruits the PB prescribes, though, look to the Carbohydrate Curve: it’s totally open-ended. At the height, it’s 150 g/day of carbs, from vegetables and fruits and natural starches. Athletes can even extend that and go a bit higher, depending on activity level and glycogen needs. It goes as low as zero carb, which I characterize as an “excellent catalyst for rapid weight loss.” You’ll also note that while I don’t recommend it for prolonged periods, it’s not because I fear ketosis, or that excluding plant foods will kill you; it’s because I can’t support the “unnecessary deprivation of plant foods.”

In the end, the PB comes down to maximizing quality of life. I want to enjoy every bite of every meal. I want to stay out of the rest home, avoid hospital stays, and stay active into my twilight years. Hell, I want my twilight years to be inundated with beams of radiant light. I don’t want my life to be a heavily regimented procession of pills and white coats. I want to have my sensible vices, like wine or dark chocolate. I want to eat vegetables because I enjoy them – not because I’m under the assumption that they’re magic. I have the means and the wherewithal to eat a complete, totally ideal carnivorous diet, but I prefer variety. I like my steak and my eggs (a gram of carbs doesn’t scare me) and my asparagus.

Let me know what you think PBers, ZCers and everyone else. Thank for reading!

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Related posts:

1. Unrestricted Low-Carb Diet Wins Hands Down
2. Fox News and Low-Carb Diet Talk
3. What’s Wrong With The Zone Diet?

Will there be a Sirius XM App for the BlackBerry? According to the always-great Orbitcast, yes! Rumor has it that it’ll be available this month, and that it will be pretty damn similar to the iPhone App. No Howard Stern, then. No big loss.

So the App, which will work with a few select BlackBerry models, will work like the iPhone App. You’ll need an online subscription to Sirius XM. A total of 120 channels will available, but the only channel you’ll need is XM 202 The Virus.

The App will work on: Storm 2; Storm 1; Bold (9000, 9700); Tour (9630); Curve (8900, 8520, 8530). I have a Curve 8900, so if and when the App drops I’ll let you know.

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Bad news, sports fans: Gran Turismo 5 has been delayed. Again. Go ahead and act surprised, I’ll give you a few moments. New release date? “To be announced.”

The game was scheduled for release in Japan this March, but Sony has stricken that from the record. “To be announced?” What does that mean?

Who am I to question Kazunori Yamauchi? If the man wants to delay the game, fine by me. Well, not “fine” by me, but I’m sure it’s for the best.

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Filed under: Aftermarket, Honda, Tokyo Auto Salon

For the aftermarket scene, SEMA isn’t the only show in town. Well, in that particular town – Las Vegas, that is – maybe, but not in the world. Europe’s got Essen, and Japan’s got the Tokyo Auto Salon. With the latter fast approaching, Honda has revealed what they’ve got up their sleeves for this year.

First is the Insight Sports Modulo Concept you see above. Based on the Insight hybrid, the concept demonstrates what Honda’s Modulo customization range can do for the company’s Toyota Prius rival. And if the idea of tricking out a hybrid seems strange to you, remember that this is the automaker that just gave us the CR-Z.

Alongside the Insight show car, Honda Access Corporation (the accessorizing division of the motor company) will also showcase tricked-out versions of its Freed minivan and Life kei car, and a handful of other customized vehicles Honda offers in the Japanese Domestic Market. Considering how popular Hondas are with the tuner crowd, that should come as no great surprise, but you can read about them in the press release after the jump and view them in the high-res image gallery below.

[Source: Honda]

Continue reading Honda to show Insight Sports Modulo Concept, more at Tokyo Auto Salon

Honda to show Insight Sports Modulo Concept, more at Tokyo Auto Salon originally appeared on Autoblog on Wed, 13 Jan 2010 15:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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BioWare has announced that the Dragon Age: Origins DLC pack, Return to Ostagar, can now be downloaded by Xbox 360 owners from the Marketplace. PS3 and PC owners, however, will still have to wait a bit.

A 30 percent loss of public funding contributed to a $300 million budget shortfall for the Chicago Transit Authority in 2010.

Staff reductions, mandatory furlough days and strict controls on spending, along with transferring capital funds to operating, are necessary to help fill the gap.

The sessions will provide information and resources for obtaining job interviews, training, health benefits and unemployment compensation.

Representatives from the Mayor’s Office of Workforce Development, Illinois Department of Commerce and Economic Opportunity, ICMA Retirement Corporation, as well as CTA representatives will be available to answer questions on topics such as benefits, unemployment compensation and accessing 401K and 457 accounts.

Every CTA employee who received a layoff notice was also provided information on the workshops. Employees also received contact information for various support organizations. The CTA has worked with its labor unions to provide the information for distribution as well.

Workshop dates are:

The Chicago Transit Authority is hosting a series of workshops designed to assist the more than 1,000 employees scheduled for layoffs next month.

In order to balance its 2010 budget, CTA will be reducing service effective February 7, consequently, there will be a corresponding reduction in the CTA workforce.

• Wednesday, January 13
• Thursday, January 14
• Friday, January 15
• Thursday, January 21
• Friday, January 22
• Monday, January 25
• Thursday, February 11

The workshops will be conducted at CTA Headquarters, 567 W. Lake Street.

There are three ways to tether your Android handset and get sweet internet love even where there’s no Wi-Fi in sight: the risky-but-free rooting method, the still-geeky-but-not-as-bad free route, and the $30 easy way. Here are the pros and cons of each.

Method 1: Tether Android with Apps that Need Root (Free, heavy configuration)

The Android Wi-Fi Tether application turns your phone into a Wi-Fi hotspot—essentially a MiFi—in one tap. The catch? You have to gain root access to your phone, a multi-step process that uses an unofficial Android add-on which can brick your phone if applied incorrectly. Rooting Android is doable for geeks and hackers with experience soft-modding hardware, but it’s not something most users could (or should!) do.

If you’re up for getting root access in Android, the Android and Me blog runs down how to do it. It’s a multi-step process that involves unlocking your phone’s bootloader, flashing a recovery image, and flashing an add-on to the default Nexus One firmware. Not for the faint of heart, but definitely doable if you’ve ever upgraded your router’s firmware or hacked your Xbox. Here’s a video of the process from Android and Me:

The pros of this method: it’s free and it makes your phone act as a Wi-Fi hotspot that any computer can connect to without extra software or messing with your computer’s setting. The cons: you can seriously screw up your phone if something goes wrong, and you may be sacrificing over-the-air automatic Android updates in the future. (If OTA updates cease, you can always flash your recovery image—but this just means your rooted phone requires maintenance a non-rooted phone does not.)

Method 2: Tether Android with Proxoid (Free, no root required, some configuration)

If you don’t want to gain root but know enough to get around the command line and use proxy servers, the Proxoid Android app can tether your phone for free. Proxoid turns your Android device into a proxy server that your computer uses to make internet requests. Proxoid is free in the Android market, but to get it working you have to install the Android SDK or device drivers onto your computer, tweak some of the settings, and then configure your browser to use a proxy server whenever you want to tether. Here are the installation instructions.

To connect to the internet via Proxoid, on the phone you tap a button to start the proxy server. On your Mac you enter a command in the Terminal and on Windows you run a batch file to start the tunnel, then you set your web browser to use that proxy.

The pros of this method are that it’s free and you don’t need to gain root, so it’s less risky. The cons are that you’ve got to install the Android SDK (something really only developers should have to do), and set your browser to use the proxy server each time you want to tether.

Note: Proxoid is the only method I haven’t tested myself on the Nexus One. Proxoid’s documentation is a bit rough—the Mac installation instructions are second-hand, as the author doesn’t own a Mac—and there isn’t a Nexus One-specific listing. Let me know if you’re successfully using Proxoid on your N1 and what OS you’re using.

Method 3: Tether Android with PDAnet ($30, no root required, minimal configuration)

Finally, the PDAnet Android application lets you tether Android using an app on the phone plus simple software you install on your computer.

PDAnet costs $30 if you want to access https ports (which the free version blocks). To connect to the internet via the phone, you tap a button to start PDAnet on the phone, and click “Connect” in the PDAnet on your computer.

The pros of PDAnet are that it’s risk-free, easy to use, and requires minimal setup. (You do have to enable USB debugging on your phone, which is the geekiest step it involves, but that’s just a checkbox in your phone’s settings.) The cons of PDAnet is that it requires the PDAnet software on your computer and that it costs $30.

---

What I’m Doing

Either I’m getting old and worn-out, or Jarvis is getting to me, because right now I’m with Chris: rooting Android isn’t a process I want to go through again or have to maintain. In that spirit of laziness, I also don’t want to have to mess with proxy servers or the command line when I tether; I want to click “Connect” and get online. So, I went with PDAnet, which was the simplest but not free option of the bunch.

How are you tethering your Android device?

Smarterware is Lifehacker editor emeritus Gina Trapani’s new home away from ‘hacker. To get all of the latest from Smarterware, be sure to subscribe to the Smarterware RSS feed. For more, check out Gina’s weekly Smarterware feature here on Lifehacker.

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One of the most popular and long-standing children’s shows in the country is set to get its own line of video games, courtesy of Warner Bros. The Associated Press reports that WB has inked a deal to make Sesame Street games. The games will star the well-known Sesame Street crew, including the likes of Big Bird and Elmo. No word has been revealed yet on actual titles or even release windows. But, the publisher is keen on using motion controls, which makes the games good candidates for the Wii, 360’s Natal, and Sony’s motion device coming later this year. “That makes it very easy and is developmentally appropriate for preschoolers, as opposed to dealing with a very complex controller,” said Sesame Workshop distribution VP Terry Fitzpatrick. “We also think that kind of technology will make it incredibly fun for parents with a preschooler to be engaged around a gaming activity together.”

The games are most likely to be targeted at an E rating from the ESRB, or even the underutilized E/C (Early Childhood) rating. E/C games are usually relegated to child-specific consoles like Leapster, but a respected franchise like Sesame Street might just let us see polished, child-friendly games appearing on the major consoles.

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