Author: Serkadis

Christmas is the time of year for sitting on the floor and shouting ridiculous words at your family. Yes, it’s the dreaded board game. And if you’re puzzled by which ones you should be playing this year then help is at hand. Here’s a list of the very best for Christmas 2009:

Bananagrams

Yes, I know what you’re thinking. That looks like Scrabble without a board. And I have to say, I think I agree with you. It does look like Scrabble without a board. Except this is Bananagrams and there is no board. Each player takes a ‘bunch’ of letters, then races to form as many connecting words as possible. Then you must ‘peel’ which means taking some more letters from the ‘bunch’ and at some point shout ‘split’. I guess the loser is ‘yellow’ and the winner runs around shouting ‘nana-nanana’ extremely loudly and irritatingly.
Ages 7 and up
Price – $15

Bop-It

Bop-It is a colourful and noisy little game. It lights up and shouts out commands such as ‘spin’ and ‘pull’ and ‘twist’. Players must do exactly what Bop-It orders as quickly as possible. The higher the score the better the Bop-It. Kids can now download new commands and record their own voice with Bop-It download.
Ages 8 and up
Price: $25

Cranium

If you like your board games varied then Cranium really is the one for you. The sketching, sculpting, puzzling, acting, humming, quiz-based board game has pretty much everything for pretty much everyone in the family. The game lasts an hour, it’s very colourful and there’s plenty of fun for adults and kids alike. It’s been a huge hit and is sure to be played in thousands of houses on Christmas Day.
Ages 3 and up
Price: $25

Funny Business

Just as the free market is collapsing round our ankles a game pops up pleading with you to start believing in business all over again. And to laugh. Because business is fun. What you have to do is create hilarious and convincing names for a mall-full of new enterprises. So if a bakery merges with a barber shop, what name will you give it. Win votes from the other players and the business is yours.
Ages 12 and up
Price: $20

Game of Life Extreme Reality Edition

Life used to be so simple. You got born, went to school, got a job, had two kids, retired and then waved goodbye. But now life is more extreme. There are skydives, TV shows to be on, castles to live in, stunts to perform, sextuplets to give birth to. That’s life according to the Game of Life Extreme Reality Edition anyhow.
Ages 9 and up
Price: $30

Guesstures

There’s not much really very new in the board game world. Questions, answers, points… Oh and the miming one. Well this is the miming one. Based on charades Guesstures sees players act out four words against the clock. Fail and the cards get ‘munched’. Once the game’s over points are tallied to see who wins ‘Best Performance’. Trophy included!
Ages 8 and up
Price: $20

Pictureka Flipper!

Fancy spending Christmas Day with a penguin? Good, because in Pictureka Flipper! The penguin pretty much rules. I’m not sure if he, she or it has a name but Penguin flips cards onto the table and players must race to find the fun drawings which correspond with their ‘missions’. And all before Penguin quacks.
Ages 6 and up
Price: $20

Totally Gross

Kids aren’t interested in knowing who discovered penicillin or what the X stands for in X-ray, what they really want to know is what exactly is snot, who has the smelliest feet, and can mum or dad do the best impression of throwing up. Totally Gross is a science-based board game which will teach kids a bit about chemistry and biology whilst making them laugh until they spew. Eureka!
Ages 8 and up
Price: $20

Trivial Pursuit Team

The world is getting stupider. It’s a fact. And in accordance with this the brainy team at Trivial Pursuit have found a way of offering their extremely challenging quiz to an audience of complete dummies. Instead of the old strict rules: One question one answer right or wrong, in Trivial Pursuit Team you now have multiple choice options, points for nearly correct answers, closest answers and presumably lots of pats on the back. It’s still fun but it won’t make you feel clever.
Ages 18 and up
Price: $30

Watching online video may seem a very different experience to watching TV but, at least with some content, the trends are very similar. Hulu, the US online video outfit centered on TV content, saw a massive jump in viewership and audience in October in tune with the new TV season and the addition of ABC shows. AdAge, citing comScore numbers, reports that Hulu traffic jumped 47 percent from the previous month, the biggest rise this year.

The online video joint-venture between News Corp., NBC Universal, and Disney has seen its best month yet with people viewing 856 million video in October up from 583 million the previous month. That’s still way below YouTube’s almost seven billion streams, though this number comes from Nielsen which only counted 632 million streams for Hulu in October. ComScore gets direct data from Hulu so its numbers are more accurate.

In terms of unique visitors, Hulu is also doing much better growing by 10 percent to about 42.5 million viewers in the US. The audience numbers don’t follow the jump in streams. but this means that people were also watching more videos, something backed up by the numbers which show that the average user viewed 132 minutes worth of videos up from just 92 minutes in September.

While the numbers bode well for the video site, they’re not directly rela… (read more)

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Tomorrow’s Weather [bigertbergstrom.com] is a 8 storeys high (~37m) data sculpture which extends 2 arches made up of over 60 molecular globes, forming a double helix. The globes change color depending on tomorrow’s weather forecast so that the interior landscape of structured lights take form as a “premonition of tomorrow”. Tomorrow’s Weather combines modern technology with one of nature’s most basic expressions, the weather, so that its elaborate visual expression changes forever, capturing the volatile nature of climate and the future.

Reminds me of The Source, Electric Moons and Plastic Trade. Via Seed Media Group Blog.

Vietnam has been forced to devalue its currency, the dong, for the third time since June 2008.

The country’s pegged exchange rate will shift to 17,961 dong per dollar vs. 17,034 previously. The Vietnamese central bank will also hiking interest rates to 8% from 7% in an attempt to control inflation.

Vietnam’s situation is the opposite of the undervalued pegged currency China is lucky to have. Defending an overvalued pegged currency, the dong, is tough business since it drains dollar reserves rather than builds them.  According to the Wall Street Journal, Vietnam’s dollar reserves have fallen to $16.5 billion from $22 billion at the start of the year.

The dong has been under substantial pressure all year due to Vietnam’s rapidly expanding trade deficit, which hit $8.7 billion during the first ten months of 2009. Inflation has also been picking up, hitting 4.35% in November.

Yet it appears that gold arbitrage may have been the straw that finally broke this currency’s back:

NYT: The immediate reason for the dong’s weakness, traders say, is that demand for dollars has risen because the spread between gold prices in Vietnam and in foreign markets has widened. Vietnam lifted an 18-month old ban on gold imports Nov. 12 in a bid to curb panic buying that had sent the dong plummeting.

Join the conversation about this story »

See Also:

• ‘Google’ Brand Toilet Paper Found In Vietnam (PHOTOS) (GOOG)
• Vietnam Goes Crazy For Gold, While Broke Westerners Liquidate Their Holdings
• US-China Currency Dispute Forces Last-Minute Change To APEC Announcement

Yahoo doesn’t really know whether it is a search company or not, but it’s definitely not giving up entirely on this front. With all the focus on the interface and the way the search engine presents the answers, Yahoo has been steadily introducing new features and updates. Now the company has introduced an upgraded Search Assist feature across most of its proprieties with the notable exception of the main search engine. The tool will now show more than just search suggestions, it will offer information or custom actions inside Search Assist depending on the query.

“Today we are rolling out several new Search Assist features for the Web search boxes at the top of nearly every property on Yahoo!, including Yahoo! News, Yahoo! Sports, and Yahoo! Finance. These new features can take you directly to the information you need, whether it is real-time stock quotes or movie trailers. You can also get enhanced search suggestions and easily navigate to the Yahoo! property that fits your needs the most,” Linda Wang, senior product manager for Yahoo Search and Drew Geishecker, director of product management at Yahoo Network Services, wrote.

The new inline information is available for several types of searches like movies, sports, travel destinations, or stock price. Looking up a place you’d want to visit will bring up i… (read more)

Google would love a world where everyone is online all the time. In fact, it’s basing all of its strategies on this. We’re not quite there yet, so, in the meantime, it’s working on making its services available when offline. Gmail makes it possible to work offline with a Google Gears version of the service that has been available since earlier this year. But it’s not a complete stand-in for the regular version and one of the most requested features has been the ability to send offline attachments, something Google has finally introduced.

“One of the most requested features for Offline Gmail has been the ability to include attachments in messages composed while offline. Starting today, attachments work just the way you would expect them to whether you are online or offline (with the exception that when you’re offline you won’t be able to include inline images). Just add the attachment and send your message,” Andy Palay, software engineer at Google, wrote.

First things first, if you want to send offline attachments, you need to enable offline access in Gmail. Before you can enable the Labs feature, you need to have Google Gears installed for your browser, which you can get here. Gears is built into Google Chrome, so you can skip this step if you use this browser. Then, go to the Labs tab in the Gmai… (read more)

 Guerrilla Games will celebrate the fifth year anniversary of their highly successful Killzone franchise this November 26 by temporarily slashing…

The NY Times has an article about the rise of online “web series” shows that are suddenly popular, noting that many brands are creating such things as a way to produce interesting content online while getting some attention for their brand. It’s yet another realization that advertising is content and content is advertising. The key point, that many say they realize (and hopefully they live up to it) is that none of this works if the content itself sucks. So they’re working on these shows with a focus on making them good and enjoyable to watch first, and including the sponsorship as a secondary part of the effort. I’m sure there may be some backlash over this idea, but it actually makes quite a lot of sense. It gets more good content out there, and helps brands get themselves noticed and remembered not for intrusive and annoying advertising, but for sponsoring something cool.

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Michelle (comment #62), get out your box of tissues because your very own copy of Buckley’s Story is on it’s way to you! We hope you enjoy this beautiful tale of just how much animals can touch our lives.

Thanks to Ingrid King for sharing her story!

Japan, Asia | Unusual Monuments

Measuring around 600 feet high, this unusual tower is located at the Church of Perfect Liberty headquarters in Tondabayashi. The tower stands as monument to all the perished souls of war throughout all time. Within the tower is a shrine in which all known names of the lives claimed in human conflict have been recorded on microfilm and stored in a golden container.

The structure was originally designed using clay by the church’s late second founder. Built in 1970, the newly discovered technique of ‘shotcrete’ was employed in the creation of the tower, formed by spraying concrete on to a wire netting.

Once a year, the Church of Perfect Liberty headquarters is the site of one of the world’s largest fireworks show. Every July 6th, the members celebrate the passing of their first founder with what they call the “PL Art of Fireworks”. Unlike most fireworks shows which fire around 5,000 shells, the PL show consists of around 25,000 shells fired. During the finale about 7,000 shells are shot off in unison, nearly lighting the entire sky.

Square Enix has announced that Avalanche Studios’ highly anticipated action sequel, Just Cause 2, will finally hit the Xbox 360, PS3, and PC on March …

Wired has an article about a court dismissing a lawsuit by a guy who claimed the government was spying on him. The claims sound pretty much like your run-of-the-mill tinfoil-hat-wearing paranoid, so it’s no surprise that the government tossed out the lawsuit. But, as David Kravets points out in the article, what if the government actually did put someone under 24-hour surveillance. Would there be any way to prove it? Since the government won’t admit to things like who’s on the no-fly list and still supports warrantless wiretaps, it could very easily make anyone who really is under surveillance out to be a nutcase tinfoil-hat wearing lunatic. It seems quite unlikely that was true in this case (or in most cases of such claims), but it does seem bizarre that if you really were in such a situation, proving it would be almost impossible as well.

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Alerted in part by your letters and calls, Senators have begun to express concern over the secrecy and content of ACTA, while the MPAA, RIAA and other established groups rush to reassure them that ACTA — while of course they know nothing of its actual content — will be good for business and that “transparency is a distraction”. Once again, it seems like one incumbent subset of the tech, content, and communications sector is banging the drum for ACTA while claiming to speak for creators, consumers, and everyone else affected in those large and increasingly diverse industries.

Meanwhile, from within the negotiations, it seems that the US proposals for an Internet chapter did not receive instant assent from other countries. Inside US Trade (for-pay article here) reports that the negotiators may not have successfully settled on a text for the Internet chapter of ACTA:

At the Nov. 4 to 6 negotiating round of the Anticounterfeiting Trade Agreement (ACTA), ACTA partners reviewed the United States proposal for an Internet chapter but did not agree to adopt the language, sources said.

If pressure from the Senate successfully reveals the provisional ACTA text, what should you expect to see? Public Knowledge’s Sherwin Siy has an excellent piece on how dry diplomatic language can hide major IP changes, while Glynn Moody expands on the ratchet effect that occurs when countries decide to “harmonize” enforcement, but refuse to internationalize fair use or copyright exceptions and limitations.

The contrast between those two processes is evident in a current US Copyright Office Consultation on a proposed WIPO Treaty for the Reading Disabled, when the same groups that declared that it would be just fine that ACTA “codify best practices for enforcement” opposed attempts to codify the world’s system for the protection of the public interest, such as for copyright exceptions for the blind, visually impaired and those with reading disabilities.

In the U.S. Copyright Office’s WIPO treaty consultation, they are claiming that such a harmonization of standard copyright limitations would “begin to dismantle the existing global treaty structure of copyright law, through the adoption of an international instrument at odds with existing, longstanding and well-settled norms.” It makes one wonder: would rightsholders be as flippant about the transparency “distraction” if it was the Treaty for the Blind and Visually Impaired that was an executive instrument being negotiated in secret, and not ACTA?

Homebrew coder ant512 has released a new version of Woopsi, a handy Nintendo DS GUI library for creating homebrew user interface based on AmigaOS wind…

2009Nov24: 2009 will be one of the top five warmest years globally since records began 150 years ago, according to the Met Office (BBC).

Reference: BBC http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8377128.stm

Image Description: C.I.S.S. humanitarian tour to Sudan. Photo by Pier Luigi Bertola, 2008. Image Location: Wikimedia Commons http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Sudan_village.jpg Image Permission: This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License. In short: you are free to distribute and modify the file as long as you attribute its author(s) or licensor(s).

Walkman is a Sony brand originally used for portable audio cassette, and is now used to market Sony’s portable audio and video players as well as certain Sony Ericsson phones. The original Walkman introduced a change in music listening habits by allowing people to carry their music with them, a revolutionary concept for its time. The device was built in 1978 by audio division engineer Nobutoshi Kihara for Sony co-chairman Akio Morita, who wanted to be able to listen to operas during his frequent transpacific plane trips. The original Walkman was marketed in 1979 as the Walkman in Japan, the Soundabout in many other countries including the US, Freestyle in Sweden and the Stowaway in the UK. Morita hated the name “Walkman” and asked it to be changed, but relented after being told by junior executives that a promotion campaign had already begun using the ‘Walkman’ name and would be too expensive to change.

In this video courtesy of SonyLearnTV, we see the history of the Walkman (which celebrated its 30th anniversary this year) in just a few short minutes.

My familiarity with the Walkman brand is probably obvious to some of you who have been following my words for a while in my past ventures (Minidisc Community Forums and ATRACLife). Watching this video brought back many memories – what about you? Whats your favorite Walkman?

2009Nov24: Researchers at the University of California at Berkeley, found that across Africa, conflict was about 50% more likely in unusually warm years when the food supply is scarce. The study appeared in Writing in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). “Studies show that crop yields in the region are really sensitive to small shifts in temperature, even of half a degree (Celsius) or so,” research leader Marshall Burke, told BBC News. “If the sub-Saharan climate continues to warm and little is done to help its countries better adapt to high temperatures, the human costs are likely to be staggering,” Burke added (BBC).

Reference: BBC http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/8375949.stm

Read the full article – Marshall B. Burke, Edward Miguel, Shanker Satyanath, John A. Dykema, and David B. Lobell. Warming increases the risk of civil war in Africa. PNAS 2009 : 0907998106v1-pnas.0907998106 http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2009/11/20/0907998106.abstract

Image Description: Palm trees growing on the Ashu land in between the land inundated by the Nile called Gerif and the irrigated Saqiah land. Photo taken on Sherari Island in Dar al-Manasir, Northern Sudan. Image Location: Wikimedia Commons http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Ashu_land.JPG Image Permission: This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike 3.0 License. In short: you are free to share and make derivative works of the file under the conditions that you appropriately attribute it, and that you distribute it only under a license identical to this one.

 As we celebrate Thanksgiving this week, Sony has decided to bump up the PlayStation Network update a little bit early. This week’s lineup incl…