Archive for Cool
January 19, 2008 at 11:48 PM · Filed under Computers, Cool, Games
Sometimes, technology begets technology. Hand a hacker/creative/smart person some cool technology and watch them take it apart and/or create something new out of it. In this case, researcher, CMU Ph.D. student, Johnny C. Lee, has taken a Wii remote (Wiimote) and used it to create a desktop virtual reality head tracking system. Words don’t describe this as well as the video, so watch the video already. Obviously, this is the future of video games and possibly a precursor to immersing entertainment.
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November 24, 2007 at 1:27 PM · Filed under Cool, Games
This weekend, I had a chance to play the latest music play-a-long video game, Rock Band, which is the natural successor to the Guitar Hero line of games. Now, don’t get me wrong, Guitar Hero is an amazing game, but Rock Band blows it away because it’s so much more fun to get a bunch of your friends together collaborating on a game. It’s also more diverse, because now you get to try to master 4 different instruments/vocals. You’ll want to keep switching up so everyone gets a chance on everything (guitar, drums, bass and vocals). You’ll soon figure out who’s good at what.
Available for Xbox 360 and Playstation (2 and 3). Make sure you get the bundle with the drums, guitar, bass and mic if you don’t already have any instruments.
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October 1, 2007 at 10:36 AM · Filed under Cool, KJH News, Misc
There I was losing pretty badly at a Scrabble game, and with a last ditch gamble, I pulled it out on the last play of the game!
Click the image above to see the larger size of the game board at the end.
Here’s the post-mortem: 3 tiles left in the bag, I have [RUSHIS, blank] in my rack. Lots of words if I can turn that I into an E, and at least 1 place to play them. So I take a count of the Es on the board and decide to gamble.
I play the I in a 2-letter word, and pull. Got it! Got the E. My worthy opponent plays 3 tiles and empties the bag. I lay down ‘CRUSHES’ on the next turn. Game over right then and there. Yes, I intentionally chose ‘C’ for the blank tile. Hehe.
CRUSHES was worth 86 points, so you can see how far behind I was.
September 14, 2007 at 4:52 PM · Filed under Cool, Internet
As you are well aware, airlines change prices all the time. What you may not know is that if after you’ve bought a ticket, and the price drops, you’re actually eligible in many cases to get a refund or perhaps a voucher. Since you’re probably not willing to go (re-)checking flight prices every day or even more often, it was just a matter of time before a bunch of folks just like you thought it was time to automate that dang thing. Enter YAPTA. Weird name. Great service. Just sign up for a free account, and every time you buy a plane ticket, just enter that info and YAPTA will track it for you.
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September 13, 2007 at 3:13 PM · Filed under Cool, Internet, KJH News, Misc
Time for another plug for my side gig. This time, we’ve just stood up a Gizmos for Geeks version of Amazon.com’s extensive online department store. You can find it at Store.GizmosForGeeks.com.
In a nutshell, this is what’s called an affiliate site. Amazon.com was really the company that pioneered the whole affiliate marketing thing. Nowadays, you’d be hard-pressed to find any online vendor that does not have an affiliate program. Oh yeah, so what’s an affiliate? Anyone out there on the Net that gets accepted to a vendor’s affiliate program can stick up links that go to the vendor’s site. If anyone clicks on those links and then buys something, then the affiliate (like me) gets a % of that sale.
Amazon.com has an extensive set of Web Services that allow affiliate to build sites that pull back data from them in real time, so what you see on our site is what you would see if you were on Amazon performing the same browsing or searching.
You lose nothing, Amazon doesn’t lose much, as they’re quite willing to have their affiliates push even more traffic to them, and we earn income to keep our biz running. It’s a win-win-win situation. How great is that?
So next time you’re thinking Amazon, think GfG instead. Now go bookmark and get shopping. 
July 17, 2007 at 8:33 PM · Filed under Cool, Misc
I had to blog about a very recent experience I had with Sunbeam, a popular consumer product company. I had purchased one of their products last year from a popular retailer, and the product worked great until 1 day when I plugged it in and it simply did not turn on. So I wandered over to the Sunbeam website and poked around looking for some clues or answers. (I hate sending in complaints/questions without looking for the answer first.) Anyway, not much on my particular product, so I sent in a customer service request simply asking if they had any ideas. I was totally ready to just accept that my particular device ran its course and I needed to just go out and buy another one; after all, it was only about $40, and I felt that I had $40 of use out of it.
As I mentioned, I was only looking to see if they had an ideas. I didn’t request a refund, an exchange or was even angry in my note. I would have been content if they had just responded and said “Sorry, we don’t know without taking a closer look at your broken product.” I was pleasantly surprised to get this response:
“I apologize for the inconvenience you have experienced. I have placed an order for a <product x> that you will receive within 2-3 weeks.”
Wow! Now that is first-class customer service. No questions, just a can-do, the customer-is-always-right attitude.
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June 21, 2007 at 4:22 PM · Filed under Computers, Cool, Software
There sure are a lot of talented people out there with a lot of time on their hands. Owen Grace is one such gentleman, who decided to turn his Guitar Hero controller into something that could really play music, and taking it to its ultimate conclusion by forming a band (The Guitar Zeros) that plays gigs.
Owen didn’t electronically/electrically modify the guitar itself (although he put a cool Eddie Van Halen design on it), but mapped out the signals from the various buttons and then wrote a computer program that would interpret the keys and send them through a synthesizer to produce the sounds.
Take a look at this video where Owen explains how he did it and demonstrates playing. Obviously, he’s expanded the capability of this seemingly simple device a lot. In this picture, he looks like he’s playing some hammer-on/hammer-off or other advanced guitar technique.
Oh yes, if you want to do this yourself, Owen has put up complete instructions on the Web and made the software (called FretBuzz) open source.
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