i just made it today, so all the posts on this blog will be up there within a few days.

Thanks!

*Sigh

Where do I begin?

If you have ever played an MMORPG (Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game), you know how much fun it can be. But let me tell you, your whole perspective of the gameplay gets totally re-written when you play this game. It is unlike any other game, regardless of the genre.

Let me go through the basics for you: You start out by picking either Horde or Alliance, this is what faction your character is in. The two factions are at war with each other, so you can not speak to another player in a different faction or trade with them or do any stuff that you can do with people of your own faction. You can only kill them.. but i wont get into that for now.

Anyways, within each faction there are 4 races to choose from. Alliance has Human, Gnome, Dwarf, and Nightelf, (and Draenei if you have the expansion pack). Horde has Troll, Undead, Orc, and Tauren, (and Bloodelf if you have the expansion pack). You also pick with class your character is, for example you can be a Hunter, specializing with taming beasts, and bows. Or a warlock, specializing with demonology, and shadow magic. Each class has it’s unique abilities and skills, and you can not change from one class to another once you start your character (but you can make multiple characters).

Once you create your character, you are submersed into a world that is totally unique to the Warcraft Series. You level up your character by doing quests or slaying monsters. You can purchase equipment, or weaponry, or even beasts to ride on (once you reach level 30). You can choose 2 professions, which will be the major source of your money. You can also auction items off on the in-game auction house, and purchase others’ auctions.

The game itself cost $20 for the original, $30 for the first expansion, and $40 for the 2nd expansion. After that, you pay $15 each month, but take it from me – this is by far the most entertaining investment i have ever made, and i am sure that you will agree if you decide to play it.

Bottom Line – Buy it

Rating: 10.0

I stumbled across this article on popsci and I decided to share it with you. I’m not going to go into many of the details, but apparently, MIT’s Icarus team managed to launch a balloon, with a camera, into the outer edges of the atmosphere, and they did it with only $150.

This is what they used:
Item
Weight
Cost
Sounding Balloon 350g from Kaymont
350g
~$20 +$20 (helium)
Parachute
~10g
~$3*
Motorola i290 Prepaid Cellphone
~90g, 3oz
~$50**
Styrofoam Beer Cooler
~15g
~$0
Duct Tape
~10g
~$0
Zip Ties
~5g
~$0
Canon A470 with 8GB SD card
~165g, 5.9 oz
~$40***
Insulation material- newspaper
~5g
~$0
Duracell USB phone charger powered by AA batteries
~20g 1oz
~$10
Instant Hand warmer
~5g
~$2****
4 Ultimate Lithium AA batteries
~15g * 4 = 60 g, 2 oz
~$5
Total
~800g, 28oz /w misc.
~$150

I also found out that a Canon A470 camera, with CHDK software took pics every 5 seconds, which permitted the students to capture the entire journey of the balloon, from start to finish. The launch itself took place on Sept 2nd, 2009, from Sturbridge, MA. The balloon reached a max height of 17.5 miles, which is at the uppermost level of the stratosphere. It then popped and returned back to Earth, safely gliding down with it’s parachute. This shows what creativity, junk, and a little persistence can accomplish.

other tech blog:

http://gadgetmeguru.blogspot.com

Hey everyone, here is another game review. This game wasn’t one of my favorites, but some will like it.

Background: IL- 2 Sturmovic: Birds of Prey* is named after the Soviet IL2-Sturmovik, called by some “the Flying Tank,” which helped check the tide of the Third Reich’s advance in the skies over the Eastern Front in WWII. Luftwaffe pilots feared it for its toughness and firepower, and the Wehrmacht dreaded its air-to-ground attack capabilities, although the console version doesn’t so much as concentrate on the Eastern Front as it delivers the entire war whittled down to small battles excerpted from history. You get to fly one in the game, but would-be pilots also get to handle a few others in their fights against the Luftwaffe.

The Good: Making up for the lack of visual flair elsewhere, the battle damage is very impressive, leaving holes and scarred paint in its wake, with a broken wing tearing away from a corkscrewing fighter as it falls to the earth and oil splattering the cockpit as you fly through a black plume of smoke. Bullets leave trails behind them, massive clouds of smoke rise up above burning streets, and just about every plane in the game has a unique cockpit filled with authentic details.

The Bad: Birds of Prey makes you go through a mandatory tutorial mode before you can take to the skies, although the lessons remain firmly grounded in the game’s serious spirit. There aren’t any stunt bonuses for flying beneath bridges, and there aren’t giant zeppelins, fanciful weapons or upgradeable planes either. You’ll fly with what you’re given for a particular mission, although what the enemy will throw at you can wildly vary. A training mode is also available, allowing the player to craft his own challenges down to what kind of planes that he wants to face.

Also, rather than feature a single pilot’s story, it includes fictional excerpts from each theater. Between each major battle theater, period film footage is played while the narrator fills in the details for the next fight, such as Stalingrad or the Battle of the Bulge, Nazi Germany’s last major offensive in the West. Kinda feels like a lecture..

Online multiplayer is somewhat empty during the day, although the evening hours provided a few more pilots who were ready to mix it up in the four game types. Dogfight pits everyone against each other, Team Dogfight does the same thing but with teams, and Strike has both teams attacking the opponent’s ground targets while defending their own. Capture the Airport is a unique type of mode where players need to fly down and land at an airport to capture it, much like a flag-based objective map. The more airports that have been captured by your side, the more “tickets,” or points, that you’ll be able to earn.

So Basically: IL- 2 Sturmovic: Birds of Prey isn’t for everyone, especially not players who expect this to be the next Ace Combat or something. Its emphasis on traditional dogfighting without frills, along with its low-key presentation, may seem a little dry alongside Jeremy Soule’s stirring soundtrack, but the realistic bent of its flight mechanics and gameplay will find an audience among flight sim enthusiasts and would-be WWII pilots who want a reason to plug a flightstick into their console.

Final Rating: 7.0

*info/pics also from worthplaying.com

Well, being another one of thousands of games made solely after a movie…my expectations were low for this game…and guess what? I was right! What a surprise!!

Garfield gets Real is a prime example of a licensed title that barely manages to make any remarkable use of the license involved, and it’s certainly not something I’d suggest anyone pick up and play, regardless of age or casual/hardcore sensibilities.

The game revolves around the recently released DVD featuring a CGI Garfield, and while it’s been quite a while since I’ve been a fan of the long-running newspaper comic, the character does hit an old nostalgic nerve in me, so I’m instantly hopeful to see something good come out of this. Ten minutes into the title, that hope was permanently dashed, and I realize that I’m stuck playing a series of mini-games meant to mimic a movie being filmed. The mini-games star Garfield in a series of bizarre and non-related events that I can’t imagine have much of a connection to the story that the actual film might represent. (If it does, I certainly don’t plan on watching the movie in the near future.)

Anyways, back to the game.

The stages are set in seven different areas, starting out in Garfield’s house and featuring the usual cast, notably Jon and Odie. A lot of the action is controlled via the touch-screen, but there are optional face buttons for just about every movement in the game, and each stage is a mixture of different play types, which contribute to the gameplay’s overall mini-game feel. One stage has you gathering breakfast items that Jon tosses behind him toward Garfield, and you must move Garfield back and forth in the foreground to catch them. It’s a pretty simple game of catch, and aside from the occasional plate that you’ll want to miss, it’s definitely easy. Along with that, it’s really boring and ends up setting the tone for the rest of the game, regardless of how differently each stage plays out.

When using the stylus, you can swipe it against the touch-screen on the DS toward the right, which will get Garfield walking. To get him to stop, you need to swipe down, or swipe up to jump. Right away, this method isn’t particularly precise, and I found it not registering certain movements all the time, so I opted to go with the d-pad instead. While this was definitely more precise, the idea of need to press down to halt Garfield’s movement feels unintuitive to say the least, and I’ve never played a 2-D side-scrolling anything that needed me to hit a virtual brake to make my player stand still. Why not just stop when I stop holding down left or right, like most games? Issues with the controls crop up often in other events, mostly stemming from the unresponsive touch-screen. If you ever insist on playing this game for whatever reason, do yourself a favor and automatically default to the d-pad and face buttons; you’ll save a little bit of that aggravation for the other design problems that you’ll encounter.

Visually, the game is unattractive, and while the character models are easily identifiable, the textures are a mess, and everything is blocky and ill-defined. The sound is grating, with a small selection of voices and some awful soundtrack music that will have you turning off the DS sound in a matter of minutes.

So, what have we learned here?

Garfield gets Real isn’t a good game and is one of the worst licensed titles I’ve played this year so DS owners, Garfield fans and gamers in general will do well to avoid this one. There’s nothing remarkable or enjoyable about the gameplay, so you should avoid this one at all costs and not give into the budget price.* In short, the game is blegh!

From :

http://gamereviewsguru.blogspot.com

other blogs:

http://gadgetmeguru.blogspot.com

http://sportsfifaguru.blogspot.com

*pics/info from worthplaying.com as well

Ferrofluids are one of the coolest things i know of, but in case you dont know what they are:
Ferrofluids are made up of tiny magnetic fragments of iron suspended in oil (often kerosene) with a surfactant to prevent clumping (usually oleic acid). The fluid is relatively easy to make at home yet extremely expensive to buy on-line ($165 a liter!)*

There are many commercial applications for ferrofluids–speakers and hard drives being the most common. The oily fluid prevents debris from entering hard drives when a small amount is placed between the magnets and shaft. In the case of speakers ferrofluids remove heat from the voice coils and help dampen the cone movement.

Using a magnetic ink developer (MICR) seems to be the easiest way to make a smooth ferrofluid at home.
All you have to do is simply purchase a bag of developer ($20) and add some veggie oil. Using a lower viscosity oil like kerosene or biodiesel along with a surfactant (citric acid, oleic acid, etc.) may improve the quality further.

Other blogs:

http://gamereviewsguru.blogspot.com 

http://gadgetmeguru.blogspot.com 

http://sportsfifaguru.blogspot.com 

*info from popsci.com

Some people say that its more a mobile device (with Internet), than an e-book reader, as it even allows you to open a browser on one page, and have a book open on another, OR to make a virtual screen appear on one page to have the feel of a notebook err…net book (considering it’s size).

*info gathered from popsci.com