John Brownlee - page 204

Garry’s Mod started out as a simple modification for Valve Software’s Half-Life 2 that allowed players to goof around with the physics, models and other assets inside the game files.

Over the last six years, however, Garry’s Mod has taken on a life of its own, supporting every Source engine game under the sun, including Half-Life 2, its episodic expansions, Portal, Counter-Strike: Source, Left 4 Dead and Left 4 Dead 2, as well as blossoming into a full retail title.

Now it’s on the Mac, having been released by Valve through their popular Steam for Mac digital delivery service. Steam is having a 50% off sale on the title right now, so it costs only $4.99… although you should be aware that to actually use Garry’s Mod to make elaborate Rube Goldberg machines or — as in the videos embedded above and below — absolutely hysterical internet videos, you’ll need to own at least one Source engine game.

Check out some of the more classic products of Garry’s Mod after the jump.

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oAWqUtR9QIM

Are you the owner of an iPhone 3G who is disappointed that you can’t run deathmatch with friends through Apple’s new match making service, Game Center? A jailbreak and some hacking could get you up and running, if you’re feeling bold.

Over at Redmond Pie, Taimur Asad goes through the process of getting jailbreak running on an iPhone 3G… which is (coincidentally for this experiment) the only iPhone that can currently be jailbroken under iOS 4.1 right now.

Look at any of Apple’s newest iPods — the new Shuffle, the touchscreen nano, the iPod Touch — and you will find three devices as tiny, svelte or both as Cupertino can possibly make them. In fact, all of these devices are scarcely thicker at this point than the width of their widest single element —the 3.5mm audio jack — which means that if they are ever going to lose any more chunk, that audio jack is going to need to get even smaller.

It turns out that is exactly what Apple is currently working on, according to a recently filed patent. The new audio jacks uses deflectable “pogo pins”, instead of the usual cantilever beams which extend into a jack cavity and are pushed out of the way when your headphone plug is inserted, allowing audio and electricity to be transmitted.

Think Geek — those purveyors of gadget accessories you never even knew you needed — are now collecting preorders for this awesomely clever iPhone case with flip-out keyboard.

Although we arch an eyebrow at those who simply can’t get over the lack of physical QWERTY keys on the iPhone, the TK-421case is perhaps one of the more cleverly designed accessories to bring some thumbable texting buttons to Apple’s touchscreen handset that we’ve seen so far. The keyboard flips out from where it is hidden at the bottom of the case, solidly clicking into place and pairing with your iPhone through Bluetooth so that it can be used like a thumbpad to answer texts, respond to emails or type in blog posts.

The Tk-421 comes in two separate models which will both ship in November for $49.99, one for the iPhone 3GS and one for the iPhone 4. If you have a 3G or lower, though, you’re out of luck. As Think Geek notes: “. Yes. We know that the iPhone 3G is the same form factor as the 3GS but unfortunately Apple decided that the 3G was just too slow to add Bluetooth™ keyboard support into the OS… go figure.”

When Steve Jobs first unveiled the new AppleTV on September 1st, he promised the new streaming-only AppleTV would ship in the next four weeks.

It looks like Apple’s going to make its deadline: we’re now hearing reports from our readers and from other sites that people who have preordered the new AppleTV are starting to have their credit cards charged.

Apple usually only starts pushing through credit charges on preorders when they are actually ready to ship out hardware, so it seems pretty obvious that the AppleTV is about to start dropping onto people’s porches fairly imminently.

Any other readers getting payment notification for their preorders… or, even better, shipping confirmation? Let us know in the comments.

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=of2GBIqP9eA

If you need to take the G Train in New York City or pay for a cab you’re jumping uptown, you now have a new way to pay for your ride: with your iPhone.

Visa has just announced that they have inked deals with the New York City subway to let you simply display your iPhone in front of a kiosk or turnstile in select locations as part of a trial of their payWave system.

What’s payWave?It’s essentially just Visa smart chip circuitry that allows you to wave a credit card or payWave-equipped device in front of a cash register, no signature or pin codes required.

Since the iPhone doesn’t have payWave circuity installed by default, if you want to use it with your iPhone, you need to use a specially designed payWave case to graft the functionality onto your handset.

If you’re willing to pick up one of those, though, you can start helping VIsa test out the service Think of the possibilities! While all those other suckers wait in line to recharge their Metro Cards, you’ll be able to breeze past the turnstiles with an Obi-Wan-style wave of your iPhone.

Pretty neat, but eventually, you can probably expect your iPhone to handle this sort of thing natively. Apple’s been doing some hiring and some research into Near Field Communications, and that, more likely than not, means that a few years down the line, you won’t need a special case: your iPhone will be your credit card.

Apple’s new, iOS-driven Apple TV is largely selling itself to consumers as a box that will allow them to stream all of their favorite television shows for 99-cents a pop whenever they want, but that price point is facing some notable resistance from network executives, and may quickly inflate once the device begins shipping at the end of the month.

Although Apple has inked deals with News Corp’s Fox and Walt Disney’s ABC to make shows available for $0.99 when the Apple TV launches, NBC Universal chief Jeff Zucker does not intend on following suit, claiming that the price point was setting the bar too low.

“We do not think 99 cents is the right price point for our content. … We thought it would devalue our content,” Zucker said at a Goldman Sachs investor conference.

The value of a dollar just keeps on climbing.

Though Apple CEO Steve Jobs is still paid only a buck a year for his Cupertino duties, the latest Forbes list of the top 400 wealthiest Americans pegs his worth at $6.1 billion… up a billion dollars from last year.

As usual, most of that wealth does not come from Apple, but rather Jobs’ position as the primary shareholder of the Walt Disney Corporation: his stocks there are valued at roughly $4.4 billion. That fact alone never ceases to amaze me. From a pure income and valuation perspective, Apple is basically Jobs’ hobby. None the less, Apple’s stock has continued to soar over the last year, closing at a record high of $287.55 per share just this Wednesday.

All in all, Jobs managed to claw his way up a spot in the rankings from last year, now coming in as the 42nd richest American and 136th richest man in the world. Rather embarrassingly, however, Jobs was overtaken by several ranks in this year’s list by Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg. Here’s hoping Steve smacks that sweaty, frog-eyed little upstart down the rankings a few dozen spots in the years to come.

More and more, the publication of Apple’s App Store Review Guidelines is starting to seem like it might be a promise of the end of arbitrary app rejection. Following the surprise about course by Apple when it comes to allowing Google Voice apps on the App Store, it now appears that they’ve also rescinded their long-standing ban on App Store ringtone makers.

Pretty much since the App Store’s inception, applications that allowed users to make ringtones from the songs on their iPhone have been verboten. Exactly “why” has always been up for debate: although Apple did sell ringtones through iTunes, they clearly didn’t mind users rolling their own, as evidenced by GarageBand’s Export Ringtone feature. Whatever the reason, though, it was plenty hard to sneak a ringtone maker by Apple up until recently. Since the publication of Apple’s App Store Review Guidelines, though, no less than five ringtone makers have gone live on iTunes… seemingly ending the arbitrary blacklisting.

Google Earth has long been one of the most impressive apps on iOS, but the software just got an entirely new and subaqueous dimension: in Google Earth 3.1 for iOS, you can now explore underwater landscapes (or, as Google calls it, “ocean bathymetry and ocean layer content.”

Dive below the ocean’s surface to explore underwater canyons, or travel to the ocean’s deepest point, the Mariana Trench. Once underwater, simply swipe the screen with two fingers to “look around.” You can always reset your view by clicking on the north arrow on the iPad, or on the compass on the iPhone and iPod.

First person out there to spot R’lyeh, please let me know the coordinates: it seems like I’ve spent all morning searching the Pacific depths for the non-Euclidean city in which dead Cthulhu “wgah’nagl fhtagn.”

Google Earth is a free download on the App Store.

In the past, Blackberry makers Research In Motion have had questionable success in updating their handsets to be competitive in a post-iPhone world, but that’s not about to stop them from challenging Apple’s iPad: the company is expected to debut their own 7-inch tablet at next week’s RIM Developer Conference.

Rumored to be named the BlackPad, RIM’s iPad-clone is expected to run some variation of the the QNX operating system instead of their own Blackberry OS 6. At 7 inches, the BlackPad would be closer to the (still untested at market) form factor of the Samsung Galaxy Tab than the iPad’s 9.7-inch display, and would likely be similar to the Galaxy Tab in other key specs as well, such as dual camera capability.

Interestingly, sources speaking to the WallStreet Journal say that RIM is going a curious direction when it comes to 3G: the only way you will be able to access cellular networks on a BlackPad is by tethering it to a BlackBerry smartphone.

With AT&T’s exclusive hold on the iPhone due to end soon by many accounts, many are wondering if Verizon will get their own version of the iPhone early next year… and how much that will hurt AT&T. According to analysts, a Verizon iPhone wouldn’t hurt AT&T very much, and now AT&T is echoing the sentiment themselves: we’re not worried.

AT&T Chief Randall Stephenson recently spoke at the Goldman Sachs Communacopia Conference in New York City, Stephenson stated that while the iPhone was a major success for AT&T, two-thirds of iPhone purchases came from previous AT&T customers and were not likely to switch to another network just because the iPhone opened up over there as an option.

More to the point, Stephenson says that the iPhone 4 was such a huge success that they’ve locked in a huge chunk of their existing customers into new two year contracts. Added together, Stephenson thinks it’s unlikely that a Verizon iPhone would lead to a mass defection of users.

He’s probably right, at least immediately… but this isn’t about a cataclysmic migration of users that occurs the second AT&T’s iPhone exclusivity ends. This is about the long tail defection of individual users over a period of a couple of years who are so fed up with AT&T’s clumsy service and incompetence that the only thing keeping them there is the best phone on Earth. Unless AT&T takes the quality of their service more seriously without the iPhone exclusivity than they did with, there still may very well be trouble for Ma Bell down the road.

Are you wondering how a company like Nokia can, on the one hand, claim that it is selling more smartphones every day than the iPhone, and yet be kicking its CEOout the door like a mangy dog? These pie charts ought to make everything crystal clear.

Advisory firm Canaccord Genuity told investors to buy, buy, buy Apple stock on Tuesday, targeting Apple’s price at $356 per share… and to give investors an idea on why they were so excited about Apple’s prospects, they accompanied their note with the following observation: even though Apple only sold 17 million handsets in the first half of 2010, Apple has pulled in 39% of the mobile sector’s profit.

Meanwhile, Nokia, Samsung and LG sold 400 million phones last year — over twenty times as many handsets as Apple sold iPhones — and yet their profit was dwarfed by Apple’s in the same period.

As Canaccord Genuity analyst T. Michael Walkley notes, “[W]where most handset OEMs struggle to post a profit or even 10% operating margins… we estimate Apple boasts roughly 50% gross margin and 30%+ operating margin for its iPhone products.”

No wonder the boards of companies like Nokia are lopping off their key executives’ heads and bowling them out the door.

Cervantes Mobile’s latest iPhone accessory, the Jorno, is basically technology that’s been floating around for nearly a decade: a folding keyboard for serious writing on a handheld device. I had something just like this for my old Dell Axim PDA back in 2002, and while the Jorno docks with the iPhone through Bluetooth instead of a physical connection, otherwise it’s pretty much identical.

I can’t make any bones about the Jorno’s price: at $79, I’d say it’s too expensive by half for such old tech. That said, I will say that the Transformers-like process of folding one of these keyboards was such a clickety-clacketing delight that I still count my old fold-up Axim keyboard as one of the best gadgets I ever owned, and this is pretty much the same thing. If you want to have an easily pocketable yet full-sized physical keyboard to do serious writing on your iPhone or iPad, then, you could do worse than giving this cute like keyboard a shot.

It is natural to be confused by the image above, but before I explain what exactly is going on here, I’d like to give you a moment to come up with your own possible narrative. It’s clear that the Japanese man on the right is doing something with the iPad on the left through the wires hooked up directly to his brain, but what, exactly?

I look forward to hearing your first thoughts in the comments, but my immediate guess was that the Japanese man was using his iPad as some sort of extreme constipation-relieving device, during the usage of which he spontaneously had a quadruple heart attack that simultaneously struck each and every chamber of his heart. What other explanation could explain that man’s facial contortions?

The true explanation is just about as weird, though. As you can see in the video below, this is an iPad game that was demonstrated at last week’s Tokyo Game Show.

After scratching his head for awhile and wondering what to do with a Macintosh Classic II , Maker Matteo from Ithaca, New York repurposed his old faithful Mac into a shelf-top clock.

From appearances, it looks like the clock — which Matteo rather laughably calls “steampunk” in style — only came into being after its creator accidentally doused his Mac Classic in acid then shot with a bazooka, but the innards of the admittedly ugly timepiece work well enough: a 16MHz CPU, 4MB of RAM and a 20MB hard drive running MacOS 7 and a dozen different shareware and freeware clock programs, including one that counts down the seconds to Matteo’s death.

Yeah, it’s hideous, but we love it: this is just the kind of bizarro clock I can imagine discovering thirty years from now in the basement of an elderly and now quite eccentric Steve Wozniak. Great work, Matteo!

Earlier this month, a member of the Chronic Development Team announced that he had discovered an exploit that would allow any iOS device currently on the market to be jailbroken forever, no matter how Apple patched it through software. Christened “SHAtter,” the exploit is widely anticipated, not only because it will allow versions of iOS 4.0.2 and above to be jailbroken, but because the only way Apple can fix it is through hardware. Once SHAtter is released, all current iOS devices will essentially be jailbreakable forever.

Here’s a warning, though. The SHAtter jailbreak still isn’t out, which means that any website or program claiming to be capable of jailbreaking a device running iOS 4.0.2 or above is likely a scam unless it was released by the Dev Team themselves… and chances are, it’s something much worse.

According to security researcher Costin Raiu at the Kapersey Labs, there is a new exploit in the wild that is being circulated as greenpois0n, a purported iOS 4.0.2 or above jailbreaking tool. Instead of actually jailbreaking iOS devices, though, it instead steals your passwords.

It’s easy to forget after the remarkable ease of August’s JailbreakMe exploit that jailbreaking your iOS device is actually a complicated process and not one that should be conducted by amateurs. As always, remember that the only real source to trust when it comes to jailbreaking your iPhone is the iPhone Dev Team… and unless they have released a tool directly to jailbreak your device, you should stay far, far away.

Massively multiplayer online games, or MMOs, pander to the obsessive. There’s always another dungeon to explore, another raid to launch, another auction to cash out. Unfortunately, it’s that very addictive quality of MMOs doesn’t mesh well with a mobile, connected lifestyle… given that so much of an MMO’s gameplay is unsuitable for mobile devices, how do you let obsessive players feel connected with their in-game avatars from their iPhone or iPad?

The upcoming MMO Guild Wars 2 by ArenaNet has an answer for that… and it’s an app. Their application will let players stay connected to in-game chat even when on the road, while also allowing them to help out their fellow Guild Wars 2 buddies by guiding them towards quest destinations, cities and towns.

It seems like a great step to connecting MMOs to devices that aren’t quite powerful enough to run them… yet. Of course, an approach like this is probably going to be irrelevant in a few years, when someone finally makes a mobile MMO that challenges World of Warcraft’s numbers. Until then, ArenaNet’s approach to bringing the iPhone into the MMO experience is refreshingly useful.

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5pCRh7gcAOs

iOS 4’s introduction of app folders is a welcome addition to the operating system in that it’s a fantastic tool to use to wrangle a large app library, but it only takes a few minutes of playing around with the functionality to discover its sad limitations… which in my case rests mostly with the folder systems’ inability to support multiple pages in folders, or folders nested matrioshka-like inside one another.

That’s why I’m so excited about FolderEnhancer, a Cydia tweak for jailbroken iOS 4.1 devices that adds a host of new tweaks to the default foldering system, including sub-folder hierarchies, pages and moving multiple icons at a time.

Sure, this isn’t for everyone, but I’m envisioning a happy future in which my multiple overflowing games folders are united and subdivided into meticulously delineated genres. I’m just keeping my fingers crossed for free: all of the best Cydia tweaks lately have had price tags attached.

Is your MacBook’s 250GB hard drive just not cutting it? SeaGate has just unveiled their newly updated FreeAgent GoFlex external hard drive, boasting two huge features that make it easy to recommend to on-the-go Mac owners with large media libraries, or those looking for a beefy and portable Time Machine repository.

First of all, there’s the size: the new FreeAgent GoFlex is the world first 1.5TB portable drive. Better, it’s entirely bus-powered, which means no power cable or dual-USB cable.

Even better, though, is that Seagate’s new drive comes standard with the company’s USB 3.0 adapter… a standard which no Macs support now, but definitely will sooner rather than later. In the meantime, the GoFlex is backwards compatible with both USB 2.0 and — if you snap on an adapter — even FireWire.

The SeaGate FreeAgent GoFlex comes formatted for Windows’ NTFS file system by default, but you can either reformat it with Disk Utility or avail yourself of the included NTFS driver for Mac. The price is quite reasonable too: it’s available now for just $229.99, which is $20 less than the MSRP.

Starting in November when iOS 4.2 drops, we’ll finally be able to print directly from the iPhone, iPod Touch or iPad through AirPrint. At the beginning, AirPrint will mostly only work with printers shared on your network, but eventually, AirPrint-certified printers will appear that can sense nearby iOS devices out-of-the-book.

In the meantime, though, we’re going to have to settle for some printers kludging iOS printing… namely by assigning each printer an e-mail address to which documents can be sent for printing through your iPhone or iPad’s built-in Mail.app.

HP’s just announced three such printers: the HP Envy e-All-In-One, which will cost $249 and do the whole smorgasbord of home printing duties including printing, copying and scanning; the HP OfficeJet Pro 8500A Plus, an all-in-one office inkjet with wireless connectivity; and the HP PhotoSmart eStation, which costs $499 and is capable of printing photos of up to 9600×2400 dpi, and comes with an optional (blargh) Android tablet.

They’re all attractive printers, and they are all technically “AirPrint-compatible” in that when AirPrint rolls down the software update pipeline, they’ll at least be shareable from your Mac. If you want a truly AirPrint compatible printer, though, best wait for a spell longer.

While this Etch-A-Sketch case for the iPad brings back all sorts of fuzzy memories of early-80s morning spent meticulously squiggling drawings of Optimus Prime in sharp ninety degree angles on the first tablet I ever owned, I can’t help but be disappointed by the vestigial nature of the knobs.

Surely if you’re going to go to all the trouble of licensing the coveted Etch-A-Sketch brand, you should go the whole hog, hook the knobs up to the dock connector and use them to interface with an official Etch-A-Sketch app. I’d easily spend twice as much as this case’s $40 asking price for that functionality, especially if I could finally save my aluminum powder masterpieces for future generations to admire.

It’s still a fitting fusion of brands, though. I’m hard pressed to identify the most magical tablet I ever owned, my iPad or my first Etch-A-Sketch… and come to think of it, they have more than that in common, since my delinquent (and now drunken) brother recently proved that just as he did with my Etch-A-Sketch so many years ago, he also enjoys bursting into the room when I’m playing with my iPad, ripping it from my hands and insanely shaking it above his head as he fills the air with his cruel, taunting laughter. Ah, memories.

The role of iPods and earbuds as inner-cochleal deafening devices has been debated for years, with recent studies suggesting very strongly that hearing loss in children and teenagers is much higher than it should be thanks to the likes of Apple’s portable media player.

It might not be quite time to strike a new iPod off of your child’s Christmas list, though: a new study suggests that the prevalence of young people suffering from hearing loss thanks to loud music may be much lower than it has seemed.

According to a report done by the University of Minnesota’s Department of Speech-Language-Hearing Sciences, the conventional hearing tests are producing false positives for hearing loss at a rate of about ten percent.

That’s not enough, obviously, to throw caution to the wind. Cramming ear buds down your aural holes, putting on some Iron Maiden and then wildly spinning your iPod’s volume wheel until brains start dripping from your tear ducts is still going to have some consequences.

That said, it seems that the threat iPods pose to the hearing of our nation’s youth is about the same as it ever was: as long as you listen to your iPod at a lower, more responsible volume, you’re fine

If you’ve ever wondered what killed off AT&T’s unlimited bandwidth plans, look no further than the App Store.

The study was performed by Finnish analytics company Zokem, which analyzed the mobile web usage of over 10,000 smartphone users across 6.5 million sessions in sixteen countries over the past year.

What Zokem found was that while a smartphone’s mobile browser — Safari, in the case of the iPhone — is still the biggest bandwidth hog on most smartphones, apps are now taking up 50% of mobile data volume. Predictably, the most popular apps across all smartphones are Facebook and Twitter.

Keep in mind that this study was not aimed at any particular platform, so iPhone users were lumped in with Android, Palm and Windows Mobile customers as well. Given how well-developed the iPhone’s App Store is compared to its competitors equivalent marketplaces, though, I wouldn’t be surprised if iOS device users use up an even larger percentage of mobile data through apps. At the end of the day, though, the disparity between app and browser usage is only going to get more profound as more media — and perhaps iTunes itself — enters the cloud.

httpvhd://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6qq3-5Vajw8

Perhaps more than any App Store publisher, Gameloft is just the master of the quickly dashed off tie-in game: a huge chunk of their 123 game strong iTunes library are entries into popular gaming franchises like Splinter Cell, Rayman or Prince of Persia.

What’s awesome about Gameloft, though, is what happens when they can’t get the rights to a gaming franchise. For example, when Gameloft couldn’t get the rights to the Resident Evil series, they just released Zombie Infection, which looked and played exactly like Resident Evil 5. Their title Gangstar: West Coast Hustle is a similar knock-off on the Grand Theft Auto series.

The trailer for their latest game, Dungeon Hunter 2, is obviously one of their latter genre of game knock-offs… this time of Blizzard’s Diablo series. That said, the first Dungeon Hunter is still one of the most competent hack-and-slash RPGs on the iOS platform, and now that Dungeon Hunter 2 is adding co-operative multiplayer into the mix… this is one of my most anticipated iOS games no matter how stupid “Gothicus: land of fear, land of destiny!” sounds when you actually think about it.