Let’s talk about Mass Effect. And how Commander Shepard can overcome anything.

When the universe needs saving, humanity (as well as the Batarian, Salarian, Krogan, Turian races) turn to no one else but Commander Shepard. Overcoming odds that the Citadel and the Illusive Man would call impossible, he was brought back from the grave to do a Chuck Norris against the forces of evil. Bioware’s script for Mass Effect stressed, from time to time, Shepard’s extraordinary ability to lead a team into the very gates of hell, through it, and back. It was the precise reason that the Illusive Man invested two years into bringing the commander back to life, building him piece by piece without a control chip installed.

Shepard is 29 years old and comes from a varied history as determined by the player. Despite the background, it seems that he can challenge the impossible — twice, cheat death and come back in one piece with little casualty to his crew. Why?
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If your significant other is a PA or home audio/cinema nut, then you could do worse than buy them this audio-visual tee-shirt from Threadless.

On the back of the shirt we have all the standard connectors you could want, from the (nearly) bygone SCART and S-VIDEO through to HDMI and digital inputs/outputs.

On the front, simply a standby button and a phones jack.

Sadly, this is just a printed shirt, with no working or moving parts (other than the human body wearing it, of course). I’m surprised it doesn’t come in an iPod version.

$18.

Tee (Via)

The winter 2010 Wonder Festival took place in Tokyo on February 7. Also known as Wonfes, the event is geared towards figure collectors (and makers) of various anime, mecha, and sci-fi series. Every year, thousands of people line up to get a chance to buy limited edition figures that aren’t sold anywhere else, but Wonfes also gives a chance for figure manufacturers to showcase their new and upcoming products.

Some of the products that caught a lot of peoples’ attention were new Black Rock Shooter (BRS) figures manufactured by Good Smile Company. For those of you not familiar with BRS, it started out with some artwork by a person called Huke with a character closely resembling Miku Hatsune, but with a darker aura, a sword, a rocket launcher, and a blue flame coming out from one eye. Eventually, a story developed and more characters like Dead Master were created. As with many people, the unique character designs were what drew me to BRS, and the Wonfes figures reproduced those designs perfectly.

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I am sure you have your hand raised – probably both of your hands even. In this day and age, batteries are as essential as the gadgets that they power. There is nothing worse than finding yourself out of juice in the middle of the day without any way to charge your mobile phone or laptop. And while battery life has increased in the past few years, we have to admit that it still has a long way to go.

A Japanese company is giving us hope though. Eamex says that it has developed new technology that will extend the life of Lithium Ion batteries. Just how much longer will they last? If reports are to be believed, these new batteries can be charged and discharged for more than 10,000 times. Even better, they will last for 20 years. That’s far longer than most gadgets will last the average person!

Just to give us an idea of how the technology works, Eamex says that they have solved the main problem of short battery life: the weakening of the bond between the particles of an essential part of batteries: the tin-coated resin. If this bond is made to be stronger for longer, then batteries will last more than they do today. Again, Eamex claims that it has solved this problem. The forecast is that by the end of this year, they will be able to launch the new battery. Now I wonder how much this will cost?

Now that iPods are mainstream they don’t turn heads anymore when you walk around holding one. If you want to draw attention to yourself you can do that with striking headphones. In an era that even tech must be fashionable you need to have the right headphones.

You can go with geeky/kid by getting animal earbuds, these are earbuds with animals on the outside so it looks like there are animals sticking out of your ears. There are a total of seven styles of which one is not an animal but a diamond or in other words, bling bling. I’m not sure I would want to be caught walking around using these earbuds, I already look young for my age, these earbuds would make it more obvious.

If you also want more sound quality then you have to go with UrbanEars which are totally retro looking. The UrbanEars has a remote and microphone on it that is compatible with the iPhone and other phones. While with earbuds you can easily let a friend listen with you by sharing one of the earbuds, the UrbanEars have a “Zound plug”. This plug lets your friends plugin their own headphones into your earcap to listen along.

I like the UrbanEars more, they are simple, retro(they remind me of “That 70’s Show”) and actually functional. The animal earbuds costs 15 dollars while the UrbanEars costs 68 dollars. Whichever your preference the choices of headphone styles are endless.

Animal earbuds page
UrbanEars page

Realm of Kings - Son of Hulk #1

Realm Of Kings: Son Of Hulk #1 offered for me quite a nostalgic flavour, with appearances of the Psyklop (who look quite freaky now), the legacy of Jarella (one of the Hulk’s former girlfriends), and former Micronauts Arcturus Rann and Marionette.  After the relaunch of those characters by Image Comics and then Devil’s Due, I remain confused as to who exactly owns the licence on these characters.

Still, while the majority of people’s attention is focused on the barbaric Skaar, the tale of Hiro Kala shows that the smaller of Hulk’s offspring is probably the more dangerous of the two, and definitely the most destructive, leaving the wreckage of Sakaar only to cause the destruction of a second planet Giausar, weakening the planet’s crust, causing it to descend into warfare and then dangling it like a doggy treat in front of the great devourer Galactus.

He is not a nice guy.  In fact he is the definition of the angry young man, rejected, formerly enslaved, abandoned and master of a power that he hates.

And now he is loose on Jarella’s world?  They have called the Hulk to save them from a new assault of the Psyklop, but of course the Hulk no longer exists as such, and anyway Hiro Kala and his crew were near the Fault, and thus are the next best thing. My childhood memories of great stories are quaking in the cupboard, simply wanting to survive.

I doubt they will.

This is not the best jumping on point for Hiro-Kala’s story, but I still recommend it, I’m sure any of the politics between this Son Of Hulk and his crew will soon become obvious.  But how can you turn down Micronauts and Jarella? (Well, her niece at least.)

The coming Realm Of Kings is looking more and more promising.  Especially since it looks like the Magus will be a player after all!

Amagawd! Every geek HAS to have PajamaJeans, I swear to the geek gods! It’s a must to enhance the lazy geek experience. Admit it, you guys have your slug days and moments, too. And slug days (lazy, do-nothing days) are never complete until you don’t take a bath, haha!

Rawr, I want one.

Just because I’m having a slug day doesn’t mean I have to dress like a slug! And sometimes, I have slug moments in my fiance’s house. I usually complain that it’s so bothersome to dress up when I’m just going to hang out at their place. What’s the point of me wearing uncomfortable denim jeans when all we’re going to do is lie down in his bed and watch DVDs the whole day. But then I really can’t dress down since it’s quite embarrassing if his siblings or worse, his parents see me in ratty pajamas. We might be engaged, but I personally think that’s way beyond my comfort zone, haha.

And the best yet, you can just jump out of bed, do errands and people won’t have to know that you literally just got out of bed! Unless they get a whiff of you, hehe!

Where to buy: PajamaJeans
Price: $39.95

For everyone whose other half has a touchscreen smartphone and lives in a cold country this is a cool Valentine’s gift idea. His and hers cashmere gloves with removable tips for the point and thumb finger.

How many times have you found yourself outside in freezing cold, taking of your glove to do something on your smart phone with touchscreen? Especially iPhone users who have to swipe the screen to answer a call.

A perfect gift for your geeky other half in this cold winter month. They come in various colors from the kinda tacky red shown above to the more classic and neutral colors; Cobalt Blue, Slate Grey, Mocha Brown and Black. This current model is made of 70% cashmere and 30% wool which makes them pretty expensive at 70 dollars a pair. They have less expensive ones but they are sold out or going like hot bread.

I find these gloves way better then the ones with all finger tips removed, obviously. Most of the other less expensive models are already sold out , by the time I get one it will be spring already. But this one is definitely one for the must-have list.

Product website

Here’s a charmer. In the same way that we enjoyed the antique fascination with the world of Machinarium, Jakub Dvorsky and his team (we’ve interviewed them before) are releasing the complete soundtrack of this wonderful game on vinyl. When you purchase the game online, you also get the digital version of the entire soundtrack (a really good deal!) but for any audio geek in the know, there’s no comparison to the quality of good old vinyl.

This is of course a limited edition run courtesy of Minority Records, on clear yellow and black vinyl. Every copy will be signed by Tomas Dvorak, creator of the Machinarium score. There are only going to be 555 copies available in this limited run. Each copy fetches a street price of 12.50€.

The paperless office that was promised back in the last century never happened, and despite our increased use of the Internet and electronic gadgets, plus the endless little green pleas about saving the environment on the signature of nearly every corporate email, we still love to print stuff out.

Printing technology, then, continues to evolve. Yet while most people are looking for better laser and inkjet performance, Hoyoung Lee has designed a printer that works using pencils.

Seriously.

OK, the first time I saw this printer I was hoping that the pencil was controlled on some kind of robotic arm in order to form the letters by drawing them (logical, right?). In fact, the concept would grind up old pencils and then use electrically charge the wood and graphite dust and fuse it to the paper.

As if that notion wasn’t just a little surreal, there’s also an eraser section that — yep, you guessed it — grinds up pencil erasers so that previously ‘printed’ documents can be erased.

The mind boggles.

Via

Buffy The Vampire Slayer #31

During a quiet and rather wet weekend, I was feeling more than a little nostalgic. So to recapture my lost youth (not that I lost it all that long ago), I decided to sit down and have a good read through IDW’s Buffy The Vampire Slayer: Season Eight. I had been following the series on and off since it began, but not frequently enough. Some issues in isolation were not fantastic and I let the reading slip.

However, taken in total they are a damn fine read. With the concluding episode of Buffy, a spell was cast so that thousands of Slayers were ‘Chosen’ across the world. This was not spectacularly received by the fans, at least the ones that I know or read of. However, in this Joss Whedon approved series, that aspect is played out nicely, even if it does rather force the Slayers into the role of the X-Men, protecting a world that fears and hates them.

In fact everything that used to occur in the Buffyverse in relative secrecy now appears to be making headline news. The vampire Harmony has her own reality TV show (how does she appear on camera?), the Slayers are seen as some evil cult, and the witch Amy and the now skinless Warren are working for the US government.(Cheney must be hiring again.)

I had forgotten just how infectious the whole Buffy-style (or more appropriately Willow-style) of speech was, until after spending an afternoon reading, I found myself uttering many such phrases myself. I soon, like, regained control of the speech-type thing, and by the next morning made no more word messiness. At all. Zilch. Nada. Complete absence of.

There are a number of points in the story that I’m not totally sold on, but the truth is that everything in the series progresses logically, and if you liked the original TV series, then I think you will like this, hopefully for the right reasons. Don’t be put off by the latest rather retro cover, because as ever, the surviving Scooby Gang members lives are really messed up.

My recommendations for this weeks shipping? Nova #34 (of course), the conclusion of Ghost Rider:Heaven’s On Fire, Realm Of Kings:Son Of Hulk, two more conclusions – Superman World Of New Krypton and Blackest Night Wonder Woman, and if you have any spare coins left, try out The Authority, about to embark on a whole new voyage, so now is a fairly good jumping on point.

Oh, and Buffy The Vampire Slayer #32 of course.

Frequent travelers would definitely find this portable pillow-bed cum speakers a treat. If you’ve ever found yourself stranded in an airport, you know how it feels. Unless you are fortunate enough to be a member of an exclusive travel club, you will probably have to bunk down wherever you can. We all know that airport benches are not the most comfortable places in the world!

With the MU Space portable pillow-bed, however, you can at least have the comfort something nice to lay your head on. Of course, since it is also a portable bed, you will have a layer of comfortable material between you and the hard bench (or floor). More than that, however, you also get the added plus of listening to music! There are rotating speakers inside, which will pipe in music to relax you as you wait for your flight. The unit is USB and memory card compatible.

As you can see from the picture, MU Space is easy to carry around, being a whole unit on its own. The casing actually reminds me of a bowling ball case or a makeup kit. To be honest, it doesn’t appeal to me that much – in terms of looks anyway; however, the idea of having a bed and pillow PLUS music (with no headphones, by the way) is just impossible to resist. And even if you don’t plan on traveling anytime soon, you can always stash the kit in your workstation and catch some zzz’s during your break!

Its the day after patch day! I call Patch 3.3.2 the 5-Man Dungeon Nerf patch. If you haven’t read the latest patch notes, the latest patch mostly dealt with the nerfing of some of the 5-man dungeons.

The Forge of Souls

• The Devourer of Souls will now cast Mirrored Souls less often.
• The Spell Reflect ability has been altered on several creatures. It now has a cast time, only has 2 charges, and has a 75% chance of reflecting spells.

The Nexus

• Anomalus will now use the Create Rift ability only once, down from 3 times.

The Old Kingdom

• Elder Nadox now only gets one Ahn’Kahar Guardian during the encounter.
• Jadoga Shadowseeker now only ascends once during the encounter.
• Several enemies between the Befouled Terrace and The Desecrated Altar have been removed or had their pathing altered.

Utgarde Pinnacle

• Skadi the Ruthless can now be removed from his drake with 3 harpoon strikes, down from 5.
• Svala Sorrowgrave now casts Ritual of the Sword 1 time during the encounter, down from 3.

I personally think the nerfing of some of the dungeons is a good thing. Badge farming is going to be so much faster, therefore making it easier to get better gear for our toons. And for those players who only log-in to do their Random Heroic Daily, its going to be faster for them to get their daily Frost Emblems x 2 as well. I know a few players who try to sneak in an hour of WoW playtime while at work, hehe!

My fiance was wondering why Blizzard making the game easier. He personally thinks its destroying the game. But I think that Blizzard is only doing this because the new expansion is just around the corner, and by nerfing something every patch day, it’s going to help new players actually catch up with the veterans, in terms of experiencing game content.

Hello, children of the 80’s. Remember the first Zelda on the NES? If you had the Japanese counterpart (The Family Computer of FAMICOM) or the special controller, you would have noticed that there was a microphone built into one of the controllers. Not too many games utilized this: Zelda was actually the “most popular game” that ended up using the mic for a special function: killing enemies by screaming into the microphone (it is given as a clue in one of the stages).

So the guys from GameJam Australia came up with a similar concept: a game that actually uses the mic to kill all enemies and get through obstacles. Since it looks a lot like the 8-bit Zelda we came to love, I’m sure these guys based their creation as a tribute. Of course, it’s so much more hilarious today as screaming or “gamer rage” is a necessary part in the overall experience.

Watch the video till the end and see how he deals with the bosses. Don’t lose your voice.

For homeworkers who don’t like sharing their living environment with their working environment there is now a solution. The OfficePOD, a standalone office that can be placed in the garden. This is a real great way to have an inspiring working environment, especially if you have a beautiful garden. You could also create a garden around the OfficePOD.

This great office comes at the very steep price of 14,950 pounds in the UK, including installation and tax. The OfficePOD has an integrated desk and storage, heating, cooling and ventilation. Also LED lighting, windows blinds and insurance approved lock which is invaluable considering you’ll be keeping your computer, printers, etc. in the OfficePOD.

As a homeworker myself I can see myself buying one if I had a garden and cash for it. I live in an apartment where you cannot shut out your work. I should make good use of Gmail’s filters to tune out work email when not working. But it isn’t a perfect situation. A cheaper alternative to the OfficePOD would be a work laptop only where you keep all work related stuff including email. So getting away from work is a matter of turning of the laptop and putting it away. But if you have 14,950 pounds lying around and garden space an OfficePOD would be the way to go.

Having the working environment pictured above would make it more a joy to work then being closed-in in an office surrounded by office noise and what not.

This way of homeworking might as well become popular in the future now that working from home is becoming more common these days saving people time otherwise spend tackling traffic-jams and bad weather like we have been experiencing lately. With an OfficePOD it would be a matter of stepping outside a few steps to your office and get to work.

Products website

What is it about some web designers that, instead of spending time on developing a great user interface and making the site look good, decide to add code that breaks basic functionality.

A couple of days ago someone sent me a link to an article about gadget discounts. When I visited the site, not only was the link to the manufacturer not hyperlinked, but the left mouse button had been disabled when the pointer was over text in order to stop copy and pasting.

I had to type in the URL because I could neither click through nor C&P.

Huh?

When I examined the code I noticed some other “niceties” such as a ‘ban’ on right-clicking over images.

The code looked for anyone using Internet Explorer or Netscape Navigator (seriously, what decade are we living in?) and, if they dared to right click on an image, a pop-up box spewed out a copyright message.

They hadn’t bothered to do a complete job on the code, mind, because using Safari I was quite able to copy the image.

That said, I would have been able to copy the images and text anyway. Automated scrapers would’ve managed it. Anyone intent on ’stealing’ content would have done so regardless.

The only people this tactic hurts are regular surfers who just want to use their PC and the web in the way it was designed.

Hyperlinks. Full mouse functionality. Copy and paste.

It really shouldn’t be too much to ask.

Web designers: if your client asks you to ‘protect’ their web pages, please politely decline, inform them that there’s no way to stop people determined to copy content, and then design to standards and principles that don’t crap all over your visitors.

Thank you.