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SPLORT FART: DIY Atari noises

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Dear pre-teens: Want to piss off your parents? Buy and build this thing . It’s a mini Atari-esque noise generator that fits inside an Altoids tin (not included.) While it makes noises like the Atari 2600 used to, it does not make “sounds” per se, in that said sounds could be pleasing to the ear. These are definitely not. It’s only $25 and it’s totally DIY. It also sounds like you’re squeezing a gerbil through a clothes press.

Nintendo 3DS: Look who just innovated itself out of a paper bag!

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The beauty of the Internet is that it demands instant analysis of every single development to come out of Peoria. The Nintendo 3DS —out of Kyoto, which is not Peoria, I’m afraid—was announced overnight, time zone permitting. It will debut at E3 in June, and it will forever change the way you and I… do something . Something video game-related, methinks. If one thing’s certain, it does mean that 3D is here to stay. I’m sorry. Say what you will about Avatar , but it made quite a bit of scratch. Then CES came around, in January, and every single TV manufacturer held presentation after presentation, laser light show after laser light show, trumpeting their fancy 3D TVs. None of the TVs are compatible with each other, so if you buy Company A’s TV and your neighbor buys Company B’s, y’all can’t get together to watch the World Cup in 3D—the glasses won’t allow it. The GameCube barely displaced any water—what did it have, those Metroid games, Resident Evil 4 , a couple of Mario games? It did well enough, but compared to the PS2 (and Xbox , I guess) the GameCube was sorta a disappointment. Granted, comparing any other video game system to the PS2 is like comparing a light bulb to the sun, but you can only beat what’s put in front of you. Wii ! Yup, Nintendo got tired of the hardware race, so it slapped a Bluetooth sensor bar to white shelled GameCube, called it Wii, then sat back and let the money a-roll in. It completely changed gaming. Now, rather than relying upon the “hardcores” to buy the latest Earthbound , Nintendo could convince Grandma and Grandpa, and your girlfriend, to play Wii Sports till their arms fall off. You’ll note that it took Sony and Microsoft a few years before they realized, “Hey, this motion control business is quite nifty. Maybe we should get in on it?” And they have! I have no time for motion control—you can pry my mouse and keyboard from my cold, dead hands~!—but clearly there’s money to be made here. If Sony and Microsoft can’t make money selling Fling Paint , then there’s no money to publish things like God of War and Fable . So this 3DS thing (here’s the full English press release )… Nintendo describes it as letting you play games “with 3D effects without the need for any special glasses.” As someone who wears glasses—I’m blind as a bat, and nowhere near as cuddly—, let me be the nine millionth to say “Obrigado!” The 3D TVs at CES were largely pants, but I did get to play Battlefield: Bad Company 2 in 3D (thanks to some sort of Nvidia trickery ) a few weeks ago. It didn’t blow my mind or anything, but if given the option, provided it’s affordable—I’m not buying a $1,000 monitor and glasses and a new video card!—then why not? Nothing wrong, per se, with a little added depth as I try to left-click over a Bad Guy’s face. The 3DS, which should come out around this time next year, will be backwards compatible with your current DS library. My DS library is quite small ( Chrono Trigger and those Final Fantasy remakes), so I could give a toss about backwards compatibility, but I’m sure there’s those of you who have more than a few games, games that you wouldn’t want to “lose” when upgrading to the 3DS. Upgrading may not even be the right word, since the 3DS is totally new hardware. It’s not like going from the DS Lite to the DSi , or from the DSi to the DSi XL . The point is, this is Nintendo saying, “Hi guys! Remember how we made motion control cool, bringing it to the masses? We’re going to do the same thing with 3D now. Kthxbye!” And now we wait for Sony to announce a 3D PSP of some sort…

David Pogue talks pico projectors

Oh, Dave! You and your jokes! David Pogue shows off two crazy pico projectors in a real theater. While most of the video is apropos of nothing, it’s a jolly romp through the ridiculous world of pico projectors. via PicoProjector

Robot + iPod touch = robovie mR2 (video)

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Japan’s Advanced Telecommunications Research Institute (ATR) has unveiled robovie mR2 [JP], a cute desk robot that stands just 30cm tall and weighs 2kg. The cool thing is that users can place an iPod touch in his chest to control the robot (via Wifi or by touching the screen). ATR says he can use “information gathered with the iPod by means of gestures”. Other features include a CCD 3.4MP camera, two microphones, a mono speaker (2W), 18 joints (3 in each eye), and 18 servo motors. The robot can also be controlled via Bluetooth. ATR says the goal with robovie mR2 was to design a „likeable“ robot with particularly cute looks. The institute might actually commercialize the humanoid in the future. Here’s a short demo video (with English subs) showing robovie mR2 in action: Via Node [JP]

Taga: Bike to stroller in 20 seconds

Party people put your hands in the air because Taga wants you to know that their stroller/bike system is rockin’ the block. The company has been flogging their transforming bike for about a year now but it looks like they’re finally shipping in the US for $1,495 (!!!). As Treehugger notes, the video shows a sporty mom in a town with wide paths and few cars suggesting this might be good in Bruges but not so nice in Flint. My wife actually just uses this seat which sticks to her bike and instead of schlepping the whole thing inside she just locks it up and goes shopping. Also, remember folks: kids grow up. I don’t know that spending $1,400 on a stroller bike is a great investment when junior will probably explode out of it in about two years. However, the concept is cool and it would be nice to try if the price went down over the next few years.

Predators Trailer: “This planet is a game, sir”

What is it with these Predators? Don’t they have anything else to do besides hunting and killing human beings? Don’t they have some kind of Predator opera to go to or Predator literature to create? Anyway, this is the trailer for Predators that we’ve been waiting for and it looks pretty cornhole. You know it’s going to be a rough movie when 90% of the trailer dialogue is screaming. Why did Robert Rodriguez decide to make the movie? Kotaku blames money. “In one of my kids movies, one of the kids was playing a video game,” Rodriguez recalled at a panel discussion this month. Rodriguez asked the kid what he was playing. “He [the kid] goes, ‘AvP. Respect the classics, man.’ …That’s not the classics, I gotta school this punk right now. Okay, I’m doing the Predator movie.” Classics, huh?

This Brink trailer makes me want a TF2 Borderlands mashup

Don’t get too excited like I did. While Brink is really an upcoming game, it’s not going to be like the video above. It’s a full-featured console and PC shooting that’s supposed to come out this fall. But this trailer, made with the sounds and themes of Team Fortress 2, conjures up thoughts of how freaking cool the game would be as a TF2 mod. Make sure you watch it in 1080 fullscreen mode, too.

RunKeeper goes social

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I’ll let the video do most of the talking on this one but RunKeeper has improved its sharing service by building out a cool run sharing service that works like a social network for the preternaturally skinny yet surprisingly hungry. The system allows you to share runs with friends and/or strangers. You can turn off maps for privacy and selectively share runs with the world. For example, I have one visible activity while RunKeeper founder Jason has like 5,000 (actually 130). This means he is better than me and, in fact, better than most of us. The service now also offers live maps, which lets you follow your friends as they run their five milers or their marathons in real time. This also seems to be a great way to share runs with a partner. All of this points to a very cool system for workout tracking and sharing. The RunKeeper app comes in a free and $9.99 Pro version and the sharing service is free.

You wish you had this dude’s MS Paint skills

Hands on with the Alex ereader

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The Alex ereader is out and I got to look at it today for a few minutes. The top part is a real epaper screen and the bottom part is essentially a small Android MID. The device has Wi-Fi and is available now for $399, shipping in May. The company had a few interesting points about their sales strategy. Their goal isn’t to sell and ship devices, although their ereader will play epub, PDF, HTML, and TXT files out of the box. They are currently partnering with international publishing houses and periodicals and will work with those partners to create an web store as well as a unique UI for each device. In this way a newspaper could offer a branded version of its reader and offer it at a subsidized rate to online subscribers or a publishing house or book store could offer their own branded experience. The device is has a system for linking rich content to text. You can tap on a piece of text, for example, and view a video or you can make a link note inside a book that is available when reading. This goes hand-in-hand with their educational initiatives that would place university-branded Alexes (Alexi?) into the hands of students.