Left Turn at Albuquerque

Growing up in the 80’s and having an IBM computer at home I was fond of many video games on my computer including Digger, Round 42 and Agent USA. Digger in particular was a great game. The gameplay in Digger is very similar to the game Dig Dug where one must dig horizontal and vertical underground tunnels while collecting treasures and escaping from bad guys. The game has been remade as Digger HD for PSN. It has been out since last October but will be going on sale for $4.99 starting this Thursday. View the trailer above.

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On April 21, Sega is releasing Afterburner Climax for $10 on PSN and XBOX Live. This title will be the fourth in the Afterburner series. I’m very excited about the game, being a fan of the huge arcade unit that took up a corner of most arcade floors in the late 80’s. Check out the trailer above.

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To find icons for a website I used to just use Google images to search for them but I recently found a much better solution. Although not all icons on iconfinder are free, many of them are. Another cool feature is that all icons on the site are available to download as either an ico or a png file for a nice clean graphic. Icons on iconfinder are set to standard icon sizes (16×16, 32×32, 64×64, ext). There’s also a free icons section with over 100,000 icons for you to use for a website.

More @ iconfinder.

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One thing I never use in Photoshop is the fill function which automatically fills a selected area on my canvas because it was designed to be sensitive of the surrounding colors of the layer. Instead I typically just select an area I want to fill with the Polygonal tool and then manually fill it with a thick brush or clone tool for better accuracy.

Apparently the great people at Adobe are working on a new type of fill to come out in Photoshop CS5 due to come out in a couple weeks on April 12. This new feature entitled Content Aware Auto-Fill will make it much easier to accurately fill a user selected area of a canvas while taking into account and smoothly trying to match the surrounding pixels. Content Aware Auto-Fill could save designers and photo editors everywhere tons of time if the feature is done well. If it’s not done well then it will just be another Photoshop feature that sounds promising but once it’s actually used on the users end doesn’t really save any time or effort, synonymous with Photoshop tools with the word ‘magic’ in them.

One of the biggest requests we get of Photoshop is to make adding, removing, moving or repairing items faster and more seamless. From retouching to completely reimagining an image, here’s an early glimpse of what could happen in the future when you press the delete key. How might you use this new capability in your workflow?

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Mega Man 10 came out the other day which is impressive considering the orignal Mega Man came out 23 years ago but I think that just as impressive is this PS3 Theme related to the newly released game. While the buttons you push in no way control the outcome of the race, the price of the dynamic theme is only $2.99 and I will be downloading it soon.

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3D has been all the rage lately. First Avatar and Alice in Wonderland in the movies and now.. video games? Yesterday Nintendo announced that they will be releasing a new 3D gaming system later in 2010 or in early 2011. It won’t require that you wear 3D glasses to play and will be backwards compatable with DS and DSi games. The 3DS may also feature a new thumbstick controller to make it easier to navigate characters in a 3D space. Hopefully Nintendo has learned a thing or two since the Virtual Boy and will do this system right.

Here is the Press Release from Nintendo:

March 23, 2010

To Whom It May Concern:
Re: Launch of New Portable Game Machine

Nintendo Co., Ltd. (Minami-ward of Kyoto-city, President Satoru Iwata) will launch “Nintendo 3DS” (temp) during the fiscal year ending March 2011, on which games can be enjoyed with 3D effects without the need for any special glasses.

“Nintendo 3DS” (temp) is going to be the new portable game machine to succeed “Nintendo DS series”, whose cumulative consolidated sales from Nintendo amounted to 125million units as of the end of December 2009, and will include backward compatibility so that the software for Nintendo DS series, including the ones for Nintendo DSi, can also be enjoyed.

We are planning to announce additional details at E3 show, which is scheduled to be held from June 15, 2010 at Los Angeles in the U.S.

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In case of an emergency, walk do not run to the nearest exit. We see them at restaurants, stores, movie theaters and just about any indoor public place we visit. Exit signs are there to let you know how to simply leave a building but more importantly they’re designed for you to easily spot in case of an emergency. However just because we’re used to the red exit sign doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the best possible way to display that information. For example what if the person trying to rush out of a building is all alone and can’t read English? That sign won’t mean much to them unless they’re used to seeing it.

Perhaps the somewhat universal green running man sign makes more sense to more people because it’s just an icon and easier on the eyes. We may see the green man exit signs pop up more as they slowly make their way to the states in the next few years. To read more click on the topic, click the link below.

More @ Slate.

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Yesterday was National Pi Day and I know this because when I went to Google to search for something I noticed an awesome Google logo. In case you don’t know, Pi is a mathematical constant whose value is the ratio of any circle’s circumference to its diameter in Euclidean space; this is the same value as the ratio of a circle’s area to the square of its radius.

More @ Wikipedia.

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Apparently Mario & Luigi AKA the Mario brothers are done saving the princess and have decided to open up competing take-out joints in Manchester, United Kingdom. On top of the names, the colors of the stores are also the same of the Nintendo characters. Mario typically wears red and Luigi wears green while stomping on Koopa Troopas. Almost too many similarities for this to be a coincidence. Coming soon: Toad’s Tavern.

More @ Google Maps.

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There’s something special about driving to work in the morning and sipping on your cup of joe while knowing that the vehicle you’re riding in is getting it’s energy from that same magical ground up bean. Okay I’ll probably never own a coffee car but there is a real one in England that will be driven 210 miles between Manchester and London powered only by roasted coffee granules. In total, the trip will use the equivalent of 11,760 espressos, and the team will have to take ‘coffee breaks’ roughly every 30 to 45 miles to pour in more granules. Don’t get too excited though. Running a car on coffee costs between 25 and 50 times the cost of running a car on regular gasoline.

More @ Daily Mail.

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It’s been 10 years since the PlayStation 2 first came out in Japan. It is the best-selling console of all time, having reached over 140 million units sold as of September 30, 2009. New games are still being released on the system later in 2010. Kotaku made a nice little timeline of the PS2 history.

More @ Kotaku.

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Over the past couple years Facebook has really taken off to become the online resource for keeping up with your friends. It’s not just for college students anymore. My mom, sister, borther-in law, girlfriend and just about everyone I know is on it whether I want to be friends with them or not. Just like in real life there are friends that are annoying and do annoying things.

• Don’t become a fan of stupid things like Waving at security cameras or Stopping the microwave before it hits 0:00 to avoid hearing the “BEEP”s. (Yes those are really Facebook fan pages and I know people who are fans of.)
• Stop sending me group invites. I don’t want to join your group a protesting a Wal-Mart being built in Shaboygen, Wisconsin. We live in a capitalist society and you need to get over it.
• Don’t have 20 siblings listed in your profile. If you really have that many siblings then your mom is a prostitute and you shouldn’t admit it to your friends even though they probably already know.
• Don’t post status updates every 10 minutes telling your friends what you’re doing. I know it just snowed two feet and we’re all stuck inside for a week straight but we don’t need the constant updates on how bored you are.
• Countdowns are so ridiculously dumb. Why would someone need to tell everyone who follows them a daily countdown leading up to an event that obviously only they care about. If it’s such a big, cool event then I want to see other people excited and counting down to it. Sometimes they start it at day 20 too.
• If you post updates that are TMI, you’re history. Just because I met you that one time at a party and will probably never meet you again doesn’t mean I want to know about your rash or gyno appointment.
• If you play Farmville, Cafe World or the Mafia game and post game updates then I’m not your friend anymore. I know there’s a way to turn off specific status updates but I don’t care, deleted.
• Don’t post duplicate pictures. If you do then you don’t deserve to be my friend.
• Stop adding people you met online as your friends. As much as you want it to be, it’s not a popularity contest and you don’t really know 1,043 people as your Facebook profile suggests. If you do then you don’t have a real life and I don’t want to be your friend anyway.
• Wow you made a baby. Good for you. Stop begging for attention by posting 43 pictures of him with a puppy.
• Facebook, stop completely redesigning your site. A tweak here or there is fine but it’s annoying to get to relearn where everything is when you update the look every six months.
• And last but not least: DON’T ever, ever, ever,Poke me. Poke me, you’re gone. Not only will I remove you from my friends list, I will also block you so there’s no chance I will ever communicate with you over Facebook again.

More random stuff I hate:

• Stop IMing me in Facebook chat if I enable it for 10 seconds.
• Stop posting weird obscure updates that no one understands.
• I don’t want to have a Facebook pillow fight.
• I don’t know any of my friend recommendations.
• Stop getting in verbal fights with random people over random comments.

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Mr Yoshi Akai built a pretty awesome Lego sequencer which to get working in itself is an amazing feat but it goes even deeper. The different coloured Lego pieces each have their own sound and the higher the Legos stack, the more complex the sound. There are many more music related instuments on his website. Now Mr. Akai just needs to provide us with some step-by-step instructions on how we can create our own Lego sequencer at home.

More @ Yoshi AKAI.

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This iron is special because it won’t lay flat on the table due to the weight of the handle which forces it to stay upright. This makes this one of the safest irons I’ve ever seen. In addition to not starting house fires it also helps you prevent leaving an iron on clothes for too long and singing them.

More @ Yanko Designs.

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Although the release date is still unknown, Tecmo is soon to be coming out with a remake of Tecmo Bowl available for download on PSN and XBOX Live. Hopefully the gameplay will be as addictive as it was for the NES and SNES versions of the games released years ago.

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