Author: Duncan Geere
HEARTWARMING TALE: Kid takes up Archery after playing Age of Empires
Next time you’re being ranted at that videogames cause violence, point the complainant to this story. A 17-year old guy, Ryan Tyack, is competing in the Australian Youth Olympic Festival in Sydney. He’s the flag-bearer for the ceremony, and is competing as an archer, a sport that he took up in 2001 after playing Age of Empires.
Over to Ryan:
I just sat around playing Age of Empires all the time and my mum wanted me to do a sport and meet some kids. So I chose either fencing or archery as Age Of Empires had swordsmen and archers
Thing is, I sorta know what he means. That game has improved me too – I was a bit of an AoE addict, and I had no idea what a Phalanx, Trireme or Trebuchet was before playing. Now, having played tonnes of AoE and Civilization, I’m considerably more knowledgeable about ancient empires! Perhaps “edutainment” works after all.
(via Kotaku)
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95% of music downloads in 2008 were illegal, says IFPI
The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry, or IFPI, is basically an international version of the RIAA and BPI, who claim to act as a trade body for record labels, but seem to only exist in reality to head up the music industry’s anti-piracy campaign. True to that role, last night it released a statement claiming that 95% of music downloads in 2008 were illegal.
However, there’s some bright news for the labels hidden in there too – download sales are up 25% on last year, and now make up a fifth of all recorded music sales. The IFPI reckons that it’s worth £2.5 billion.
Perk up your cheap earphones with the Acoustibuds
What a stroke of genius! These “Acoustibuds” slip over a pair of cheap earphones to make them into a pair of expensive noise-isolating headphones. The guys who run CES agree, awarding them an innovation award at the show this year.
They also promise to stick in your ear better than standard earbuds. The flexible ‘wings’ hold the bud in place “even with perspiration and extreme physical activity”, claims the manufacturer. Not bad for $13 (£8.70), especially if you’ve got one of those awful phones with a proprietary connector meaning that you have to use the rubbish provided earbuds.
Amazon USA (via CrunchGear)
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YouTube Video of the Week: Western Spaghetti
This fantastic video was produced by a chap called PES, and is part of the 2009 Sundance Official Selection. It’s a beautiful piece of stop-motion animation using rubber bands, pick-up sticks, rubik’s cubes, and bubblewrap. Got a favourite YouTube video? Link us to it in the comments, and you might see it as a future Video of the Week.
Related videos: Insane Japanese Water Jetpack | Stellated Rhombic Dodecahedrons
Graphics cards are much better than CPUs at cracking Wi-Fi passwords
There’s a lot of software out there for cracking wireless passwords, and most of it’s legal. Why? Because it’s sold as a way for network administrators to ‘test’ their network’s security. Of course, there’s nothing to stop you ‘testing’ a network that you don’t own, in a coffee shop or airport, for example.
Most cracking programs use your PC’s CPU to do the hardcore number-crunching, but it turns out that the graphics card is actually far better at doing the kinds of calculations necessary. How good? Well, an above average quad-core CPU, the Intel Q6600 can only accomplish 1,100 passwords per second, whereas a similarly above-average ATI HD4870 graphics card can smash through 15,750 passwords per seconds.
Who woulda thunk it? Luckily, we might be seeing some of this power hit regular programs too, with Nvidia’s CUDA, ATI’s Stream, and Apple’s OpenCL frameworks. The graphics card isn’t best at every type of calculation, but if a program can intelligently route calculations to their fastest solver, then we could see blazing program speed increases in the near future.
(via HotHardware)
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Sony debuts wireless DB-BT101 headphones, and MDR-EX36SC two-in-one headphones
This morning, Sony quietly added the DB-BT101s to its online catalogue. These rather attractive phones are wireless, and connect via Bluetooth 2.1 + EDR, so they’ll happily work alongside a bluetooth laptop, PDA, mobile phone or MP3 player.
Those are the all the details we’ve got right now, but they do look lovely, so here’s hoping they’ll get some sort of Western release, along with some tangible specs, in the near future.
MySpace launching webmail service
Yahoo, Hotmail and Gmail will all be a little on the worried side this morning as the news broke overnight that social networking giant MySpace is launching a webmail service.
All MySpace users will be automatically assigned an inbox on the service, guaranteeing the site 125 million active users at launch – more than Gmail and AOL Mail, but fewer than Hotmail or Yahoo Mail. Let’s hope the interface is a little better than the terrible messaging service currently integrated into MySpace.
MySpace (via TechCrunch)
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First photo of Hudson air crash surfaces on Twitter
Score another one for citizen journalism. The very first photo of the plane crash in the Hudson was taken on a mobile phone, and uploaded to Twitter. The photographer was one Janis Krums, and he was on one of the ferries used to rescue the passengers from the stricken plane.
Although you could say he was in the right place at the right time, the quality of the photo is pretty damn good as well – well framed, and with plenty of detail. On a side note, though – you’ve got to wonder if it’s the first class passengers that are on the raft, while the economy plebs have to stand on the wing…
Twitpic (via Silicon Alley Insider)
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Video surfaces of the Android-based Dream G2
The good news is that the G2 seems to exist. I suppose someone could have installed Android on a random phone and added a Google logo to the back, but it seems like quite a lot of effort for a hoax. Unfortunately it matches the previous rumours in that it has no physical keyboard, relying instead on a stylus for input (eww).
Back on the bright side, though, Google Reader, Notebook, and Docs are all present. I’d kill for a decent RSS reader that syncs with a desktop or web-based reader on a mobile phone. Lastly, at about 0:48, check out the awesome green android charger! Omg, how cute is that!
(via AndroidGuys)
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CES 2009: Vuzix Wrap 920AVs
At CES 2009, Dan got his hands (or eyes?) on Vuzix’s Wrap 920AVs that I was getting excited about here. They’re every bit as awesome as promised, apparently, but Dan also managed to wheedle out a price from them – they’re looking at $399 (£274), and a ‘summertime’ release (for the US, presumably).
Related posts: Next-gen Vuzix VR glasses will be unveiled at CES | Vuzix Wrap 920AV audiovisual goggles – the full, actually quite awesome, details
