How can you not love a game that's called "Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket-Powered Battle Cars"?
OK, they're not actually all that "supersonic", as far as I can see. The game actually looks as if it's got something of an "R/C cars" feel to it, but there is of course nothing wrong with that. And c'mon, they're playing soccer!
(Here's a page where you can download the high-definition version of the above trailer.)
Now that I know that Stephen Fry owns a pink Nintendo DS, I cannot help but visualise him playing Animal Crossing: Wild World and writing exceedingly genteel letters of apology to teddy bears.
While wearing reading glasses.
(Actually, I think it'd be funnier if he were running around pwning n00bs in Halo 3.
m3g4d3aTh: "Fag!"
JeevesMelchett: "I really don't think that's relevant.")
I found Breaking the Tower via Rock, Paper, Shotgun. It's an interesting little game, and wonderfully nostalgic (big chunky pixels, and sprites that always face you as you rotate the playfield...).
If you're a gamer, you'll immediately peg Breaking the Tower as a bonsai version of The Settlers - you don't directly control the little dudes wandering around on the map, but instead just plonk down buildings for the little dudes to interact with.
If you're not a gamer then this'll all be new to you, but I strongly suggest you give Breaking the Tower a try anyway. It also strikes me as a very good game to point your non-gaming loved ones at, to give them an easily-digested first step into "proper" games, instead of the little Flash "casual" games which Breaking the Tower initially resembles.
Breaking the Tower has enough depth to be interesting, but not enough to be overwhelming, thanks to a variety of extreme simplifications of the usual dynamics of a game of this type. The little dudes, for instance, only consume food when they're created in a "Dwelling"; you need five food per dude, but after they appear they can live forever without taking another bite.
And there are no baroquely complex interrelationships to memorise. Gamers are used to taking a long and painful time to figure out that they need exactly three Baby Skinners per Novelty Shower-Curtain Maker, and that you don't need to build any Shin Guards if you haven't also researched Coffee-Table Technology. The few elements in Breaking the Tower, in contrast, are all right there in front of you all of the time.
So you still get the fun of figuring out how the parts of the game fit together, but you don't have to look up a FAQ to find out why your Peasants keep chopping the heads off all of your Nobles right after you add a Cakeworks to your Palace.
And despite its simplicity, Breaking the Tower still has the very soul of a good strategy game: Every time you think you've found something unbalanced that lets you just Build Lots of X to Win (Tons of warriors! No warriors, but giant population! Sweep the leg!), you'll find that strategy screws something else up. So you have to go for a more balanced approach.
Breaking the Tower is also very slow-paced. It's quite hard to finish a game - win or lose - in less than half an hour, and it's easy to take well over an hour to win. But you don't actually have to do a great deal in that time.
This is surprisingly great. It lets experienced gamers put a strategy into motion and then minimise the browser window and come back after ten minutes to see what's happened. And it lets complete newbies take all the time they need, without some awkward pause-the-game-and-issue-orders system.
(And yes, it also lets you keep on playing after you win, so you can do that other nostalgic staple, leaving a game running overnight to see what ghastly fate has befallen the little computer people by morning.)
I was intrigued when I read about the Medis 24-7 Power Pack, which is billed as "The World's First Consumer Fuel Cell For Portable Devices".
But, according to my usual habit, I also assumed it was a scam.
The Medis device is, you see, relatively cheap, and disposable - you use it until it's empty, then you throw it away. There are a few other cheap(ish) single-use "fuel cells" on the market today, and as far as I know all of them to date have actually been just zinc-air batteries.
But no; Medis don't just say this product is "a fuel cell", but actually call it a "direct liquid" unit, which I presume means it's running on methanol.
[UPDATE: My readers have wised me up on this subject, now. Clearly, this is a direct borohydride fuel cell. This explains the non-refillability and disposability; DBFCs use extremely alkaline fuel which is unsuitable for handling by Joe Average, and also don't need expensive parts like platinum catalysts, which it'd be crazy to use once and then throw away.]
The fact that you have to peel some tape off the Power Pack to activate it is standard for zinc-air batteries, but it could apply to fuel cells too. It beats me why you can't refuel the Power Pack if it's actually a methanol unit, but let's give Medis the benefit of the doubt here.
Because, I assure you, there are other reasons to be underwhelmed by the Power Pack.
The overall size of the Power Pack is, you see, similar to that of three D batteries. And three alkaline Ds - nominal series-connected output 4.5 volts - are also not short of the Medis pack's rated output voltage.
Medis's somewhat fluffy spec sheet for the 24-7 Power Pack (PDF here) has a confusing graph that appears to say that the Power Pack has a capacity of 20 watt-hours at a constant one-watt discharge.
To deliver one watt, three 1.5-volt D cells in series would need to output 222 milliamps. Let's say 250 milliamps, to allow for terminal voltage falling as the batteries empty. At that discharge rate, a standard Energizer D battery (PDF, data site) has a capacity of about 13 amp-hours. Three of 'em will therefore give you something in the order of 58.5 watt-hours.
The D cells will, to be fair, also weigh a fair bit more than the Medis device. It's 185 grams when full, and apparently less when empty; they're 148 grams each, whether they're fresh or flat. But the Medis device weighs 9.25 grams per watt-hour; the simple alkalines, into the same load, manage a significantly superior 7.6 grams per watt-hour.
And then there's the price. Three alkaline D cells will cost you, what, about nine Australian bucks from the supermarket, for big-brand cells?
The Medis Power Pack will cost you $US29.95.
So the Medis Power Pack costs about $US1.50 per watt-hour. The alkalines are about 13 US cents per watt-hour.
(The Medis price, by the way, doesn't include all the cables and plugs. You have to pay more to get those, but you can of course use them again with future thirty-dollar Power Packs. The Medis FAQ says the kit with cables is supposed to cost thirty bucks, with replacement Power Packs costing only $US19.99, but they seem to have not quite hit that price point.)
Ah, but Dan, I hear you say, that's all very well, but you can't buy an off-the-shelf gizmo that accepts three D cells and has umpteen device-charger plugs, can you?
No, you can't. Well, not as far as I know, anyway. It wouldn't be rocket science for an electronics hobbyist to hack together a battery-holder, regulator and cable to make at least a single-model-of-phone 3-D-cell charger, but I don't know of any off-the-shelf products. (If you do, please tell me in the comments - a gadget that ran from C or D cells, or even a six-volt lantern battery, could be a very useful and not-outrageously-large travel charger for all sorts of small devices.)
There are, however, quite a few other options. EBay's full of "emergency chargers" that accept a single AA cell and come with multi-plugs to charge various brands of phone - delivered price, battery not included, about $US7. These chargers apparently beat an alkaline AA to death in about 90 minutes, but that means they're probably getting about 600 milliwatts out of it (PDF datasheet), for a total of about 0.9 watt-hours.
A pack of four big-brand alkaline AAs is about $AU6 at the supermarket. So even in this inelegant application, you're still only paying about $US1.44 per watt-hour for the alkaline option, plus the trivial price of the charger itself. So even overtaxed AAs are value winners compared to the Medis gadget! (Admittedly, it's only by a few per cent - but you could widen the gap with bulk buys, or cheaper almost-as-good alkalines. The single-AA chargers will probably also work fine with rechargeable cells. And it'd be easy to hack a C or D cell onto one, to get far longer run time and a much happier battery.)
Heck - for easily half the price of a single Medis Power Pack, you can get a little solar multi-phone charger, with a built-in lithium-ion battery, delivered to your door from a Hong Kong eBay dealer! I doubt the poor little battery will last a very long time if you keep sitting the device in the hot sun to recharge (these things can usuallly also charge via USB). But I'll bet you you'll get a lot more than 20 watt-hours out of it. Typical battery ratings for these devices are about 1.3 amp-hours at five volts, so you only need three cycles before you've caught up with the Medis device's capacity. Everything after that is gravy, and you paid half as much in the first place!
One Gizmodo commenter pointed out that "Medis is the miracle promising company. It has promised cancer detectors, an anti-cancer vaccine, a surgery tool, an automobile motor [...household robots, flying cars...], and now this disposable fuel cells which at *last* year's CTIA it said it would be selling last year."
(Here's a Medis press release from 1997 which says that they're making great progress with their cancer detector and breast cancer vaccine!)
If Medis are indeed basically vapour-mongers, then I suppose it's perfectly possible that they're just selling zinc-air batteries with a sticker on the side that says "direct liquid fuel cell". If this thing is a real fuel cell, you'd really think you'd be able to refill it, and not just throw the whole contraption away when it uses up its fuel.
But, just as with the misleadingly-labelled zinc-air batteries, you can't.
[See the update above for why.]
So frankly, I don't care whether the Medis 24-7 Power Pack is a real fuel cell or not. Either way, it's lousy.
(See also this piece, about the similarly disappointing but much larger Voller Automatic Battery Charger.)
UPDATE: It's even worse than I thought. As "Techskeptic" points out in the comments below, when he tested some 24-7 Power Packs he found they didn't even come close to their sticker capacity.
The 85-watt compact fluorescent lamp I wrote about almost two years ago now still works fine. (Though the eBay seller I bought it from has vanished.)
But that lamp now looks a little... weedy.
This monster has a power rating - the actual power it draws, not the "equivalent" power that an incandesent bulb would have to draw to output the same amount of light - of two hundred and fifty watts.
(I found it in the eBay store of "DigiMate3". As sometimes happens on eBay, this store has a twin with all the same products, called CNW International.)
This lamp's output, in incandescent-equivalent terms, has to be something like 1200 watts. Since it's got the simple out-and-back design that doesn't get in its own way as much as a more compact (but in this case baroquely complex) spiral, I wouldn't be surprised if it actually shines as bright as three 500-watt halogen floodlights.
My 85W lamp lights the room it's in to about 205 lux, measuring on top of the spare bed that I use for most of my product photography. That's about half the brightness of outdoor light at sunrise or sunset on a clear day. This thing'd probably manage an easy 600 lux all by itself.
A few of these lamps would probably make fantastic workroom or warehouse lights. You could probably even power them from a normal domestic lighting circuit - many normal light sockets can deliver 250 watts safely, especially if they don't also have to cope with a 250-watt incandescent filament blasting away six inches away from the socket's plastic parts.
(You couldn't directly install these lamps in a normal light-bulb socket, because they use the big E39/E40 "Mogul" version of the Edison-screw fitting, rather than the bayonet fitting that's normal here in Australia or the "medium" Edison screw that most US light bulbs use. They're also obviously too heavy to dangle from a poor innocent domestic bulb socket, even if they'd otherwise fit; you can get simple screw-in medium-to-mogul adapters, but they don't magically make the bulb weightless. It wouldn't be a big deal to whip up a home-made luminaire to fit these lamps, though. You might even not electrocute yourself.)
You could even use these things as photo lights, though their colour rendering probably isn't all that great. The seller claims a Colour Rendering Index of 80, which ain't that bad, but might not be accurate.
I think most people who buy this things intend to use them as hydroponic grow-lights, though. I've written about this area of human endeavour before.
(Just think how much electricity would be saved if marijuana were legal, so people could grow it in their garden, instead of in their garage...)
Here's a hydroponic company being a bit sniffy about these "unbranded" lamps, which do indeed seem to be inferior to their similar...
...but even bigger product.
If you've found a CFL that's bigger still, do tell us in the comments.
UPDATE: It took some doing, but I managed to come up with something much more ridiculous than this bulb.
I'd completely forgotten about this.
Anne (un-updated blog here; note the post from when we got Joey) shot this video less than two months before Mickey died, with the intention that I could put it on a loop on my second monitor, as a sort of relaxing furry mental wallpaper.
I didn't, at the time, think it entirely necessary to subject my blog readers to five straight minutes of Mickey and Joey sitting in a box licking each other, even if it was in their usual could-turn-into-a-wrestling-match-at-any-moment way.
But now that Mickey's gone, I feel the self-indulgence is justified.
(Joey appears to be quite ready to bond with the new cats in exactly this way, but they're still growling at him. They're becoming more mellow every day, though.)
Update:
The aftermath.
Clearly, this box was not large enough to effectively measure the volume of two cats.
As I mentioned in my old piece about rare-earth magnets, there's a little cocktail-party physics demo I like to do.
(The deal is, I drink some cocktails, and then I do the demos.)
This demo shows magnetic eddy-current braking down the inside of a conductive tube. I take a length of aluminium tube, roll a plastic ball down it to demonstrate that it contains no gimmicks, and then drop a little rare-earth magnet down the tube.
You can hear the magnet going ting-ting-ting down the tube, but it takes a surprisingly long time to come out the other end. When I do this trick with a magnet that fits the tube quite closely, it takes about 30 seconds before it comes out. The plastic pellet takes only about 0.6 seconds.
You can also demonstrate magnetic braking with a chunk of copper and a decent-sized rare-earth magnet. If you slide the magnet up and down the copper, there's an oily feeling of resistance that gets stronger the faster you move the magnet. It fades away to nothing as the movement speed drops, though, which is why magnetic braking is such a great way to get precision balance scales to settle.
A more dramatic demonstration is to use a horizontal spinning disk of non-ferromagnetic, highly-conductive metal, preferably copper. It'll grab and throw a strong magnet that you bring close to it.
(More boringly, you can just use the magnet to slow down a less ferocious disk.)
In theory, you could even use this principle to achieve magnetic levitation. All you'd need would be two copper cylinders in the oh-so-safe "mangle" configuration, spinning like crazy around their long axes. Then a strong enough magnet could be suspended by the Lenz's Law eddy-current effect between and above the cylinders.
You'd have to be out of your freakin' mind to make such a thing, of course.
I give you: The one, the only, Bill Beaty. (More videos here.)
(Via. I should have noticed this when it was new, more than a year ago, but I didn't. I presume that in the intervening time at least one crank has decided that this, at last, must be the secret of antigravity/perpetual motion/free beer.)
Oh, and before someone asks me what a ball-bearing motor is: It's this.
And herewith, a more recent BillB video, partly just to get him a few MetaCafe hits (the older vids, like the one above, are on YouTube), and partly for "it's like cryogenic napalm":
Regular readers will know that Unique Hardware are the makers of the hilariously-named but great-looking and, more importantly, surprisingly-good-sounding "HUMP" series of USB computer speakers.
A while ago, I reviewed their NF01 and NF02 speakers, which differ only in the USB amplifier module. The NF02s...
...have an amp with buttons and an auxiliary input.
In brief, these tiny (but surprisingly heavy) speakers sound quite remarkably good for their size. Which really is astonishingly small.
When I reviewed them, though, they cost about 75 US dollars delivered, and you could only buy them on eBay.
You still can buy Unique Hardware speakers on eBay; the US ebay.com store is here, and the Australian-dollar version is here. The price is now down to about $65 delivered, which would be too much to pay for ordinary crappy plastic USB speakers, but is quite a good deal for the Unique Hardware products. They're unquestionably the finest "pocket sized" speakers in existence. If you ask me, their only weakness is that if you treat them roughly and fracture the cables - which you could easily do in less than a year, if you're chucking them into your laptop bag twice a day - you're going to have a dickens of a time repairing them.
I've recently updated the review to mention that ThinkGeek have started selling "Crystal USB Desktop Speakers" that're obviously actually NF01s, for only $US39.99 plus delivery. That's a great price, if you're in the USA and don't have to pay much for delivery.
Oddly, however, Unique Hardware tell me that they aren't actually wholesaling any speakers to ThinkGeek. In truth, they've been having some trouble making money on the product.
It's not likely that the ThinkGeek speakers are inferior copies, though. The rock-solid machined-acrylic cabinets that make the Unique Hardware speakers special also make them rather difficult to clone. Unique Hardware believe that ThinkGeek have actually bought a crate or three of NF01s from some other outfit that earlier bought them from Unique, then found the speakers hard to sell.
(If you're a ThinkGeek insider with more info, do feel free to fill me in.)
It's not surprising that people - including the manufacturers - have had trouble shifting these speakers. As I point out at the beginning of the review, little tiny computer speakers, as a general rule, suck. Sucky speakers that cost ten bucks are one thing; sucky speakers that cost more than $50 are quite another. When Engadget mentioned the "new" ThinkGeek product, they therefore quite reasonably assumed the Crystal USB Desktop Speakers sounded lousy.
But they really, really don't.
No, these little speakers don't have much bass, and no, they don't go up to party volume. But they really are a very great deal better than you'd think.
I invite US readers to buy up ThinkGeek's entire stock, which Unique Hardware figure isn't more than about 500 units. Then they may have to start buying direct from Unique, who deserve more business.
