I was pleasantly surprised by this. My daughter was eager to use the Zamzee. She found excuses to bike and run around outside more often, and she loved uploading her data to the Zamzee website to see how she did and win rewards. Huh. I guess it counts as a cool toy.
Continue ReadingFirst off, Lucas is probably the worst person to write or direct Star Wars sequels, so I guess we should all be relieved that he’s no longer in charge of it. I’m still afraid of baby Boba Fett playing with baby Chewbacca and the Ewoks, but Disney hasn’t made a baby Avengers movie yet, so there is hope.
Continue ReadingI’m not saying we ban any books. I’m just saying there are some fantastic books and series out there that are entertaining, disturbing, thought-provoking, and just plain better written. Sometimes it’s harder to find a female protagonist in young adult fantasy, but it can be done. Here are ten great young adult books or series for starters.
Continue ReadingGoogle is celebrating their 14th birthday. Can you believe it? Google is old enough to be a freshman in high school.
Continue ReadingWalls 360 makes stickers. Does that sound too boring? Okay, they insist that they don’t make stickers. They make re-positionable, self-adhesive fabric that doesn’t leave residue and sticks to just about any surface. You can wad them up, unfold them, and stick them to something else. They stick to brick walls, painted or not. They’ll stick to the outside of buildings. I stuck one to my purse for over a month, and I only removed it out of boredom. They are possibly the most geeky stickers I’ve ever seen, and that’s not even getting into the prints. There’s also a little geek pride in knowing the co-founder and creative director, Yiying Lu, is also the designer of the Twitter fail whale.
Continue ReadingOne of the biggest myths I hear about 4-His that it’s only for farming families. While it’s completely true that the organization was set up as a tool to promote “modern” farming methods through after-school agriculture clubs, that’s not the whole picture. There’s still a lot of farming in 4-H, yes, but there’s also a lot of science and art. In fact, there are even rockets and robots.
Continue ReadingAfter a summer of waiting, Google finally emerged with details on their new Kansas City Fiber network. The price for Google Internet starts at free. That’s right, for the $300 installation fee, Google will give you free Internet at “today’s speeds” for at least 7 years. If you’re used to thinking of these speeds as fast, take a gander at this comparison and then imagine seven years of technology innovation.
Continue ReadingMarissa Mayer is a big deal. She’s Google employee 20, the first woman engineer, and the highest ranking woman there. Well, she was. As of yesterday, she’s a Xoogler. Mayer quit Google in order to become Yahoo’s new CEO. As if that weren’t enough, the same day she made the announcement, she tweeted that she and her husband were expecting a baby boy in October. That’s right, Yahoo hired her with a visible baby bump.
Continue ReadingJosh Rowe, the creative director for Build with Chrome, let me in on a little Easter Egg. Legos come in all sorts of colors, but not so for Build. It turns out there were some issues with “WebGL shaders work and the complexity of the 3D scenes.” In other words, they could make it fast, or they could offer 150 colors. They went with fast. I’d say that’s a good call. Here’s how you get pink back.
Continue ReadingSam Raimi, who will always be known as the director of Evil Dead in my mind (even if Disney would rather I mention Spiderman), is set to direct Oz The Great and Powerful. This one focuses on the origins of the wizard in the Wizard of Oz, as played by James Franco. I don’t know about you, but those two sentences alone make me excited to go see this move.
Continue ReadingLawrence, Kansas is a great place to be a geek. It’s home of the University of Kansas and the Center for the Study of Science Fiction. Every year since 1979 they’ve handed out the John W. Campbell Memorial Award for the best science-fiction novel of the year, and in 1987, they added the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for the best short science fiction of the year.
Continue ReadingI’m a proud resident of Lawrence, Kansas, but 30 years ago they pretended to blow it up.
The Day After was filmed in the middle of the Cold War and tried to show just how devastating a nuclear attack would be by showing it from the perspective of one town in the midwest. A bomb goes off in nearby downtown Kansas City, leaving Lawrence partially destroyed and full of injured survivors.
The Google I/O conference officially kicked off with the keynote this morning. They introduced the Nexus 7 tablet – already leaked before the conference, but they also introduced a Nexus something new. The Nexus Q aims to build on the connected entertainment environment. It’s a tool designed to allow you and your friends to control your home music and movie experience.
Continue ReadingIf you’ve got kids or just really like Lego – that pretty much includes everyone, right? Use your Chrome browser to navigate to Build with Chrome and start grabbing a piece of virtual Australia or New Zealand. The rest of the globe will still have to wait.
Continue ReadingThis book in the Maker series is not intended as a weight loss book. It’s not really even a book for the Couch to 5k crowd. That isn’t to say that there aren’t plenty of fat loss tips in there as well.
Continue ReadingI gave up on trying to take notes in the dark fairly early on as I watched Brave, but one of the few I did manage was, “a princess donea stuff her gob.” Why was that noteworthy? Because they left it in.
It would have been all too tempting for Disney to step in and take the dialect out of Brave. Instead, Pixar encouraged the voice actors to make suggestions. There are a lot of vocabulary words that would be totally unfamiliar to the average American child, and there’s even a character that speaks in an incomprehensibly thick Doric accent. Rather than translate him – or anyone – the characters react and move on. That is as it should be.
Continue ReadingI used to tabletop game many years ago. And then I had kids, and all my games got shoved into the back of the closet and away from swallowing and scattering little hands. These days, there are many things that prevent me from doing it, including time, messy living room, storage space, childcare arrangements, and geographic proximity to other players. Tabletop Forge doesn’t have any time travel technology to give me a couple extra hours for gaming, but it can help with the other problems.
Continue ReadingOn Mother’s Day, they tend to advertise a lot of things like vacuums and ironing boards. I think that’s a little mean. It’s like giving someone a gift that says, “Clean my house!” I’ll admit that I’m occasionally guilty of doing this for Father’s Day, although my gifts usually say “Cook for me!” He likes cooking, and I like eating, so I refuse to feel guilty about it. This year, I received a review model of the iDevices iGrill, and I wanted to see if it qualifies as good gift encouragement for tasty smoked meats.
Continue ReadingI’ve been going through a bunch of styluses lately. It turns out they mostly suck. Picture trying to write something with a hot dog encased in metal. Not exactly an artists dream, and usually I just give up and used my finger. You know, one of the ten styluses Steve Jobs said we carried with us all the time? The Hand Stylus ended up not sucking. Hooray!
Continue ReadingThe summer hasn’t even really started, but I’m already declaring it to be the best summer, ever. This year I was invited to attend a parent and child weekend at Space Camp. Yes, this is the same Space Camp that, if you were like me, you dreamed about attending when you were a kid. I’m happy to report it’s every bit as awesome as you’d imagined it would be as a child, except for the part where a series of mishaps mean campers must go on a real space mission to save the planet from impending doom.
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