U9O.net: You and I Know.

Especially compared to some of the other games that are currently free in the App store, like TapTap, CubeRunner, and Blip, Aurora feint will initially shock you with its slick graphics and production quality.

The game mechanics are simple– it’s basically a destroy the blocks type strategy game, cleverly using touch to enable you to move blocks with your finger for more than 1 space at a time. Playing for more than 5 minutes or so, one quickly realizes, and as the game’s developers promise, the game mechanics go way deeper. You level up by destroying blocks in order to purchase new abilities, the first of which includes the ability to gain combo-ing ability. In this regard, and taking advantage of the iphone’s internet connection, this game becomes an online strategy game RPG.

Aurora Feint promises to be an MMO (probably with some type of combat mode — I doubt in real time– although you can add your friends to your party) it already seems very interesting and deep. It would be nice for them to add some kind of combat mode.

You can initially only choose between a male and a female character, although it seems likely more enhancements and such will occur as time progresses.

Be sure to try tilting your phone to the right or to the left, if you get stuck. It moves the blocks in that direction!

Initial Impression: 8/10

Lovin’ it.

The new software will change your life. I consider this release a bigger step forward than measly GPS or faster internet. The new app store is truly the real killer feature of the iphone– it makes the iphone whole.

What I mean is that by unlocking the means to use the iphone’s killer UI features– multi-touch, accelerometer, and marrying it to a very slick and intuitive, and therefore useful internet connection, and slender enough to bring anywhere (and tying it to the phone, to make it habit forming), this device truly is indispensable.

Sure, Samsung, LG, Nokia, Blackberry, might create better phones in the future, but the saavy riding-of-iphone-hype only 1 year ago into complete and dominant acceptance of the Iphone SDK use by every major website parallels the Microsoft strategy in the mid 90s, with their enterprise and system development tools and community they created which is only recently being compromised.

Haven’t installed the new firmware yet? It should be released tomorrow, but Techcrunch.com has all the details.

Favorite free apps so far– built in Exchange syncing, Yelp, Facebook, Google Mobile, Twitter, AIM. In many ways, the mobile versions of these web sites are better than the actual sites themselves. They make the sites relevant and useful when you need it most– outside and socializing. For example, Yelp is best served when used on the fly. Press the geo-location feature and Yelp will give you the nearest restaurants, gas stations, and entertainment on the fly. With twitter, you can see who is close by and also twittering, and take pictures of your exact location. With other software, you can hold the iphone up to your mouth, hum a tune, and it will determine what song you are humming. Services like Jott, which is a free voice to text service, enable you to talk into the phone (maybe you have an excellent idea for a new business, or a screen play, or need to remind yourself to pick up some milk), and have the contents of your voice transcribed and sent to your email, or igoogle homepage.

It’s this level of integration that makes the iphone that makes me giddy with nerd fervor. It’s literally the last step to bringing the cloud of data and connectivity wherever you are. I’m no longer chained to the front of my computer to have all my data accessible to me. I can use google and facebook to have all my contacts, along with their birthdays, automatically synced. I can have my notes i take on my google homepage auto-update to my phone and vice-versa. I can take pictures all day long, along with geo-coding, and have it update on flickr or photobucket or facebook or wherever I want.

Different versions of the iphone will slowly improve textual input (and whatever the UI people come up with). Can you imagine some kind of future version that projects a keyboard and screen onto a table (multi-touch, no less)? I can.

Check out this article:
Read: Facebook’s iPhone App Almost Replaces My Contacts List

One thing gmail lacks is a keyboard short cut for deleting your emails quickly. It includes the “!” key for parking something as spam, but not everything is spam. This fine script for greasemonkey adds a delete short cut (the “T” key) to quickly delete emails. If you are using Firefox and you aren’t using Greasemonley, what the hell are you doing anyway? Download it now.

Greasemonkey modifies web sites you visit on the fly (on your computer, not theirs!) so you can customize the experience. Things like having multiple signatures for gmail, to getting rid of ads on sites, it sure makes things a lot easier and faster.

Download BugMeNot Firefox Extension here.

For those of you in the dark, BugmeNot is a great web site of shared logins for those web sites you just hate to register. For example, the latimes, or nytimes. Before, you had to actually go onto the site, but with firefox and the extension here, you don’t even have to do that. Just right click and it automatically fills the form with the appropriate login and password.

Bookmarks Synchronizer from - Geckozone, a french site.

Have you ever wished you could sync your firefox bookmarks throughout multiple computers? I sure did. This is a version that works with firefox 1.5, the latest version btw. You need an FTP account for this to work.

GameSpot:Video Games PC PlayStation 2 GameCube PSP DS GBA PS2 PS3 Xbox 360 PlayStation 3

SlickDeals.net [Home] - Your Daily Source for the BEST Deals on the Net!

I just ordered this 20 inch wide screen LCD for less than $350 with the coupon. This is a HOT deal. Will not last long. Especially now that dell is reducing the coupons available online.

Edit: Yup. Already gone.

Calvin and Hobbes - The last great newspaper comic strip. By Chris Suellentrop

Two Turntables and a Saxophone - How jazz plays off hip-hop. By David R. Adler

Great article.

Download for free, no strings attached: God’s Debris

Imagine that you meet a very old man who—you eventually realize—knows literally everything. Imagine that he explains for you the great mysteries of life—quantum physics, evolution, God, gravity, light, psychic phenomenon, and probability—in a way so simple, so novel, and so compelling that it all fits together and makes perfect sense. What does it feel like to suddenly understand everything? God’s Debris isn’t the final answer to the Big Questions. But it might be the most compelling vision of reality you will ever read. The thought experiment is this: Try to figure out what’s wrong with the old man’s explanation of reality. Share the book with your smart friends then discuss it later while enjoying a beverage.

‘Star Trek’ star George Takei comes out | News | Advocate.com

I never woulda thunk! Well, I’m glad you came out!

Ravedigital | Gadgets, Clothing, Music Reviews (and everything else)

I started up a new blog in addition to this one. Check it out.

[Via Freedom to Tinker]

Apparently, a few clever grad students have found a way to know, with almost a 95% accuracy, of everything you type given a sufficient audio recording of you typing away on your blog, or browsing porn, whatever.

They found that every key on a keyboard has a specific sound, and after assigning a numerical (or chracter, or whatever value) to every key stroke, they can run standard “Wheel of Fortune” type analysis on the sucker to determine with great accuracy what you typed.

For those of you who have read books such as Encyclopedia Brown, or Sherlock Holmes, or if you are a Mensa member who spent hours solving cryptograms, all of this should sound instantly familiar to you.

If it doesn’t, too bad.

A “bird” told me this still works perfectly. For those of you who want to retain your privacy, of course.

[via Boingboing]