Distracted Boy Falls on Train Tracks While Gaming [Video]

This video shows a 10-year-old boy so absorbed with his PSP that he apparently fell onto the tracks at a rail station in Italy. With no train in sight, an off-duty cop jumps in and rescues him. More »

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/xz8r4toQ69s/distracted-boy-falls-into-subway-while-gaming

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Vacuum-Packed: Waterproof Case for Tablets

Take your iPad to the beach, the lake, the bathroom or the kitchen and keep it safe with this waterproof iPad case from DryCase. The clear plastic bag seals in your tablet and keeps the water out, and you can keep using it while it is safely sequestered within.
Attentive readers will remember my home-made effort [...]

Source: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/02/vacuum-packed-waterproof-case-for-tablets/

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Help save the earth in Survivosaur -- Time Waster

Everybody knows how the dinosaurs became extinct - you know, the big meteor and everything. But did it really have to happen? How would things have gone had you been there, dressed up as a huge dinosaur with a jet-pack and all sorts of projectiles, ready to save the day? Great question, and that's exactly what Survivosaur strives to answer.

The jet-pack is only the beginning here - you, the dino-protagonist, are tricked out to the max with alternative weapons, an optional shield, extra health and more. You use this massive arsenal to shoot at oncoming meteors and explode them in space, thus preventing the extinction of yourself and your kind. But not everything that comes from space is bad - you get bonuses (those little dollars flying in the screenshots), as well as health packs.

Once you amass enough lucre (say, $10), you can hit SPACE and access the in-game accessory store, where you get all of those fancy power-ups I just mentioned. Gameplay is super-simple - you run (or rather, circle the globe) with the arrow keys, and aim and fire with the mouse. But thanks to the power-up system, this game is surprisingly engaging.

Help save the earth in Survivosaur -- Time Waster originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 19 Jan 2011 12:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Source: http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2011/01/19/help-save-the-earth-in-survivosaur-time-waster/

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Daily Crunch: Pinpoint Edition

How The Glif Got Made: From Design To Sales In Five Months Fujifilm?s Anti-Counterfeiting Watermarks Are Just Cool-Looking Kinect + Minecraft = Full-Motion 3D Statues ICZ-R50: Sony Shows New Radio Recorder Further Leaks Show Off Potential Interface, Specs For HP?s webOS Tablet

Source: http://www.crunchgear.com/2011/01/25/daily-crunch-pinpoint-edition/

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Digg overhauled again in response to user demands

Digg V4 didn't receive the warmest of welcomes from faithful users when it launched last year. Now, the company is beginning the move to Digg V5 -- another retooling of the site's interface, which it says is based upon users' most requested changes.

The new look dumps the category sidebar and search box, and the overall appearance is less cluttered than Digg V4. Digg has also finished importing the rest of its V3 data, which should fix incorrect submission and comment figures. Digg is also changing the way it rolls out new features, and will do so via opt-in alerts which appear at the top of the site when they're made available.

What do you think Download Squad readers? Will changes like this be enough to re-stoke the community fires at Digg?

Digg overhauled again in response to user demands originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 01 Feb 2011 12:45:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Source: http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2011/02/01/digg-overhauled-again-in-response-to-user-demands/

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How Google Ambushed Microsoft and Changed the Subject

I wrote about the epic battles that are brewing between spammers and content farms?which are turning the web into a massive garbage dump?and search providers, which have to choose between profit and customer satisfaction. This is a serious problem. The content farms are ?dumbing down? the web by churning out thousands of mostly low-quality articles, every day, on topics that Google tells them they can make money from. All of these players are raking in billions of dollars at our expense. I had the opportunity to moderate a panel discussion this week between Google, Microsoft, and Blekko. The event, which I emceed, was called Farsight 2011: Beyond the Search Box, and was organized by BigThink and Microsoft.� As I joked, it seemed odd that Google was playing the role of ?evil? monopolist; Microsoft, the ?good? contender, whilst Blekko was a fly on the wall.

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/oXyk2uo3jBg/

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Google's Android Robot Goes Under a Gross Surgery for the PSP Phone [Video]

The cute and cuddly green Android Robot isn't supposed to go through torture like this. In a commercial for the Xperia Play, the PSP Phone, the adorable robot gets human thumbs sewn onto him in a seedy back alley. Gross. More »

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/CVoFvsn3X-8/googles-android-robot-goes-under-a-gross-surgery-for-the-psp-phone

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Scrabble-Like iOS App Crosses Platforms to Android

Before Angry Birds mania swept mobile device users everywhere, the masses were interested in words.
The Scrabble-like Words With Friends app, that is. An upcoming new platform release for the game may prove that while pigs may be dying in droves, words are still alive and well.
Previously exclusive to iOS mobile devices, the Scrabble-like Words is [...]

Source: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/02/words-friends-android-iphone/

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Daily Crunch: Squid Vicious Shot First Edition

Edible Concept: Tetris Sugar Cubes I Cannot In Good Conscience Recommend Buying This Yoda Robe Unfortunately, These Han And Greedo Bookends Are Sold Out Popping Popcorn With Lasers Is Awesome And Healthy Kickstarter: The PadPivot Might Be The First True Universal, Multi-Function Tablet Stand

Source: http://www.crunchgear.com/2011/01/15/daily-crunch-squid-shot-first/

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Vid.ly offers cloud-powered universal video transcoding for free

Vid.ly, a one-stop shop for uploading, transcoding and sharing video content for all screen-sizes and devices, has just come online. You'll need a beta key to sign up, which you can freely obtain from Mashable, TechCrunch or hacks.mozilla.org.

In essence, Vid.ly simply lets you upload a raw movie, and await an email notification to tell you that the upload and transcode has been completed. You can watch the process if you like, but other than a progress bar and a cute "console" style log, there isn't much to see. Not only does Vid.ly generate 14 very different versions of your uploaded video, but it also gives you a universal embed code, which serves up the best video format for the end-user. Visit the Vid.ly link in Firefox, and you get an HTML5 Ogg Theora stream -- but if you visit with IE8, you get a Flash video stream. If you're curious, check out our test upload on your desktop and smartphone.

Vid.ly also has the rather neat ability to transfer files that are already in the cloud -- or on FTP dumps -- into the Vid.ly transcoder. There are plans to provide an API, so that you can skip the website entirely -- but that will require the 'pro' version, which isn't currently available.

The best thing about Vid.ly is that it just works -- but considering it's a sister site of the excellent Encoding.com, that shouldn't really come as a surprise. What you're looking at here is possibly the most useful application of cloud processing power yet, and judging by the interview at hacks.mozilla.org with Encoding.com's president, there's a lot of cool things still to come.

Gallery: Vid.ly, one-stop video transcoding for almost every device

Vid.ly offers cloud-powered universal video transcoding for free originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 25 Jan 2011 08:10:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Source: http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2011/01/25/vid-ly-offers-cloud-powered-universal-video-transcoding-for-free/

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Auschwitz Must Change Domain Suffix to Avoid Blaming the Polish [Domains]

"Hang on a minute," you cry, "Auschwitz has its own website?!" Well, naturally—it may have once been a concentration camp, but now millions visit it every year, and no doubt visit the Auschwitz.pl website for information. More »

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/lVaDe2T0Bkc/auschwitz-must-change-domain-suffix-to-avoid-blaming-the-polish

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Vintage Posters Highlight a Century of Innovation

It may be hard to believe as you read Wired on your iPad, but heating oil and metal plumbing pipes were hot tech topics just 100 years ago.
They were businesses, too, on which inventors pinned their hopes and corporations placed their bets in the form of factories, salesmen, and marketing budgets.
For a peek inside 100 [...]

Source: http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/02/vintage-posters/

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Everything Is a Remix [Video]

Ever watch a movie and suddenly feel like you'd seen a particular scene before? You're not crazy and you're not imagining things—it's just that nearly every movie is somehow a remix. Don't believe it? Watch this. More »

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/YY0w5LILa1A/everything-is-a-remix

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Mozy kills unlimited backup, time to take matters into your own hands

Set-it-and-forget-it backups to the cloud seemed like a great idea at one point. With several providers offering good annual rates on unlimited storage, a silent, overnight upload was a good way to make sure your data was protected and stored offsite. Now, however, Mozy has dropped its unlimited plan and its prices are jumping to a level where cloud backup just doesn't make sense for users with a ton of data -- and it says its competitors will soon follow suit.

CNET's Stephen Shankland says that the 600GB of data he has backed up with Mozy will now cost him around $60 per month to store. That's a huge chunk of change over the course of a year -- especially when you can pick up 1TB hard drives for around $75. I only signed up for Mozy last month, but I'm going to bring home a USB SATA hard drive dock like the Thermaltake BlacX and a pair of 1TB drives and let Windows 7's built-in backup tool take care of my data from now on.

Mozy kills unlimited backup, time to take matters into your own hands originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 01 Feb 2011 07:10:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Source: http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2011/02/01/mozy-kills-unlimited-backup-time-to-take-matters-into-your-own-hands/

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Spotify secures deal with Sony BMG, moves closer to U.S. launch

Spotify, at long last, and after monumentally failing to hit is initial U.S. launch deadline of 'before 2011,' has finally signed one of the big four music labels.

Sony BMG, which represents 25% of the U.S. music market, is second only to the Universal Music Group. To enter the U.S. successfully, though, Spotify needs to secure at least Universal, and preferably both Warner and EMI too. There is no information about whether Spotify is close to closing deals with any other labels.

Microsoft's Zune, incidentally, has been available in the U.S. for some time. Zune, however, doesn't have a free option. Spotify lets anyone listen to up to 20 hours of music per week, absolutely free, with two levels of subscription: a £5/month option (which will probably be $5, if it launches in the U.S.) which removes the ads, and a £10/month option that both removes the ads, and lets you listen to your entire Spotify collection on your smartphone.

Spotify secures deal with Sony BMG, moves closer to U.S. launch originally appeared on Download Squad on Thu, 20 Jan 2011 12:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Source: http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2011/01/20/spotify-secures-deal-with-sony-bmg-moves-closer-to-u-s-launch/

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Bing caught copying search results from Google

In a case of Internet espionage that makes the antics of double agent Cold War operatives seem like frivolous child play, Bing has been caught stealing search results from Google with its Bing toolbar and IE8's Suggested Sites feature.

Google first suspected foul play in May 2010. By October 2010, with Bing results beginning to look uncannily like Google's, it knew something had to be done about it -- and so, in true, nerdtastic style, Google set up a sting to prove that Microsoft was actually behind the wholesale mimicry of Google's search results.

Google injected "synthetic" results into its search engine -- fake queries and results that no real user or engine would ever generate. Then, on D-Day, December 17, about 20 Google engineers were asked to run the test queries with Internet Explorer 8, Bing Bar and Suggested Sites. By December 31, some of these fake results began appearing on Bing. See the examples after the break -- it's damning.

For a full discussion of Bing's antics, and what repercussions Microsoft might have to face, read the original Search Engine Land post.

Continue reading Bing caught copying search results from Google

Bing caught copying search results from Google originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 01 Feb 2011 12:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Source: http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2011/02/01/bing-caught-copying-search-results-from-google/

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Apple adds subscriptions, auto-renewal, personal information sharing to iTunes Terms and Conditions

If you’re downloading The Daily, or any other app right now, from the App Store you’ll be presented with new Terms and Conditions to agree to that include the new subscription service, how it handles auto-renewal, and how Apple may ask to share your personal information with publishers: A new “In-App Subscription” section has [...]

Apple adds subscriptions, auto-renewal, personal information sharing to iTunes Terms and Conditions is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

TiPb - The #1 iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch Blog

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheIphoneBlog/~3/JblF78La5Pw/

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BMW's NFC Key is your ticket to ride, and you should care (video)

Near Field Communication (NFC) is shaping up to be one of the hottest tech trends for 2011 now that payment systems and new handsets (driven by the Gingerbread build of Android and presumably, a near-term iOS release) are making their way into the US and Europe. Add BMW to the growing list of supporters with its NFC key of the future. Bimmer researchers envision linking the key to the car's navigation and entertainment system allowing you to make hotel reservations or purchase train tickets, for example. You could then download the ticket directly from your car to the key which could then be used to board the train. Later, a key linked to your banking information could even be used to settle the hotel bill. BMW believes its approach is more secure than that of an NFC-enabled cellphone because its system is both closed and encrypted. Possibly. But we're still more likely to have our cellphone in a pocket while traveling than the key to a car parked a few hundred miles away. Of course, there's nothing preventing us from tapping the key to our cellphone and transferring the data -- it is still in the R&D phase for the next generation of ConnectedDrive after all. Click through for the video.

Continue reading BMW's NFC Key is your ticket to ride, and you should care (video)

BMW's NFC Key is your ticket to ride, and you should care (video) originally appeared on Engadget on Wed, 02 Feb 2011 06:14:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Source: http://www.engadget.com/2011/02/02/bmws-nfc-key-is-your-ticket-to-ride-and-you-should-care-video/

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Effing Meteors is a cataclysmic world-destroying physics Time Waster

Remember Effing Hail? Well, Effing Meteors belongs to the same genre, but with a couple of interesting twists.

You're looking at a side-view of a planet, complete with its layers of atmosphere. Above the planet, in space, there are meteors. These are hurtling towards the planet, but they're often not large enough to survive entering through the atmosphere, so they burn along the way.

Your job is to destroy the planet; or more specifically, destroy all living organisms on a given planet. You can do this because your cursor generates a gravity field. So you click one meteorite and hold; soon, that single meteorite starts attracting other meteorites in its vicinity and grows into something larger - a planetoid. Now when you smash that into the planet's surface, it does survive the atmosphere and generates quite a shock - perhaps even enough to destroy the population of that planet.

Once you destroy a planet, it simply "revolves", revealing a new planet. Each planet is different: Some planets shoot back; and there's a planet with dinosaurs that run away from you, and then flying saucers enter the picture and it all gets a bit hard to explain.

Bottom line: This is a really fun game, with innovative graphics. And sometimes you can win a level by simply doing nothing!

Effing Meteors is a cataclysmic world-destroying physics Time Waster originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 31 Jan 2011 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Source: http://downloadsquad.switched.com/2011/01/31/effing-meteors-is-a-cataclysmic-world-destroying-physics-time-waster/

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