Tuesday: January 8, 2013
Engadget goes eyes-on with Samsung's new 85 inch television set.The company calls the stand a 'timeless gallery' frame, and indeed the set would fit right in with some of the more conceptual pieces at the MoMA. Still, that easel-like design could be a bit limiting for some living rooms, so you can remove the S9 and wall-mount it -- though the 2.2 channel audio is built into that frame. Unique design aside, this TV is all about the high-end specs.
Wednesday: March 17, 2010
Microsoft pulls the curtain back on Internet Explorer 9.The good news is that there will be better support for web standards and a brand new JavaScript engine that promises to improve overall speed and page loading times. Bad news is that it's still Internet Explorer. You can take an early version of IE9 for a test drive on the other side of the click.
Thursday: March 4, 2010
Samsung pulls the curtain back on Internet-capable fridge.A fancy new Internet-enabled refrigerator will set you back about two grand according to this Yahoo article. Your cold cuts can finally have their very own spot on the information superhighway. Welcome to the future.
Monday: March 1, 2010
An invisible world through the visible eye of Photoshop.As if ninjas and samurais weren't enough trouble already now you have to worry about invisible ninjas and samurais. For some reason the attached thumbnail shot makes me want to catch up on my 'Ask a Ninja' viewings.
Friday: January 29, 2010
Telltale might be porting all of their games over to the Mac in the near future.This is great news for Mac users if this turns out to be true. It's a little annoying to switch over to my Windows partition just to enjoy these games. There are also rumors that we may see Telltale on the iPad as well.
Friday: December 11, 2009
Apple offers up a free holiday sampler in the iTunes Store just for you.'Sampler' in my opinion, is the wrong word in this case as Apple is essentially giving away TWENTY tracks of free holiday music. Head on over to iTunes and snatch this up while it's still available. You'll get to hear Weezer do a rocking rendition of 'We Wish You a Merry Christmas'.
Thursday: November 5, 2009
Sesame Street celebrates forty years of being on the air.Sesame Street is still in my opinion the best children's programming you can find on television 4,186 episodes later. Looks like Google is getting in on the celebration as well.
Tuesday: October 13, 2009
Season Two of Sam & Max (aka Beyond Time and Space) to hit XBLA this Wednesday.1600 MS points will get you five episodes of some good ol' point and click adventure gaming. I've heard good things about Season Two although I still haven't quite finished Season One.
Thursday: September 10, 2009
Wondering which version of The Beatles remasters you should be buying?The post contains samples of both the mono and stereo versions (which is quite nice) as well as the reasoning as to why there are multiple versions of said remasters.
Thursday: August 13, 2009
Samsung pulls the curtain back on digicam with front-facing LCD screen.Taking self-portraits just got a whole lot easier. Whether or not that's a good thing still debatable.
Monday: July 20, 2009
The top five craziest uses of historical figures in video games.There are a couple of other good examples I can think of that didn't happen to make this list.
Wednesday: July 15, 2009
101 facts about The Muppets of Sesame Street you may not have previously known about.A fun way to pass the time during your lunchbreak. A la peanut butter sandwiches!
Thursday: June 18, 2009
Xbox Live Marketplace suffers spotty service after coming back from downtime.I experienced this first-hand last night trying to purchase Sam & Max Save the World. Purchased the game at 7:30pm but wasn't able to download it until 11:30pm. Also to Microsoft's credit there were no hiccups with my points total from many multiple attempted re-downloads of the game.
Monday: July 9, 2007
- How to hack Sesame Street's website for fullscreen Elmo.
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Here is a handy trick for my fellow geek parents who read this site regularly. Granted, I haven't posted to this section in quite a while (last post was 3 months ago), but I'll be getting back into the groove shortly.
Anyway, back to what this article is about: the Sesame Street web site (http://www.sesameworkshop.org). Let me start off by admitting that my kid is an Elmo addict. Everything Elmo, all the time. She loves that furry red bastard. Needless to say, the Elmo-based games on the Sesame Street website come as a great resource for keeping an active (or cranky in some cases) baby happy and able to learn at the same time. And ya know, it's Elmo, so it's kind of safe - even though he's a freakin' monster.
The problem: All of the games on this website are stuck in a very small 600 x 300 framed window within the Sesame Street template. If you have a fairly large newer monitor you will find this awkward to look at. Especially when viewed on a monitor capable of resolutions of 1280 x 1024 or greater (see screenshot to the left for example of what I mean - look at all that unused space). In some cases I have to squint to see what's going in the game, and in most cases my kid really couldn't get the big picture period.
The solution: Find the source path of the game's flash files to run it in glorious fullscreen. This is one of the rare cases that I am happy to see Adobe Flash deployed on a major website like this. It applies itself really well to the nature of the problem. Since everything is vector based, the desired game/application/plaything will look beautiful even when blown up to full screen - no real important details are lost. You can ignore the rest of the site and just play in peace with Elmo and the rest of the gang.
How to do this: To play various games on the Sesame Street website at fullscreen you will need to use the following URL template to access the flash files directly: http://www.sesameworkshop.org/ uploaded-images/ 9495524/ additional/ main_game-6.swf (this is an example). You can obtain this path by looking into the source code of the website. In Firefox you can do this simply by pressing CTRL + U on your keyboard. In Internet Explorer you have click in the View menu at the top of the program and jump down to Source. After that, you will be presented with a whole bunch of code. You will want to scroll down until you see the JavaScript portion of the source code (you'll see it labeled). Usually the game file is named with a prefix like 'main_' (see screenshot to the right). You can do a quick find for 'main_' using CTRL + F to get there quicker. In this case the following path can be obtained: /uploaded-images/ 9495524/additional/ main_game-6\. Simply plug this into your URL template, add '.swf' where the forward-slash is and behold the almighty power of Elmo at full width of screen. Entertained baby = happy baby and happy baby = happy parents. See? Everybody is happy.
Here are a couple more example links to get you started. Again, this method works for pretty much all of the games on the website - not just Elmo (so if your kid is a Bert and Ernie fan you can go nuts too - eh eh eh eh eh eh).
- Elmo's Keyboard-O-Rama
Path in Source Code: /uploaded-images/9495524/additional/main_game-6\
URL: http://www.sesameworkshop.org/uploaded-images/9495524/additional/main_game-6.swf - Limbo Elmo
Path in Source Code: /uploaded-images/11013038/additional/main_game-41\
URL: http://www.sesameworkshop.org/uploaded-images/11013038/additional/main_game-41.swf - Explore Elmo's Classroom
Path in Source Code: /uploaded-images/12529198/additional/main_game-9\
URL: http://www.sesameworkshop.org/uploaded-images/12529198/additional/main_game-9.swf
Happy geek parenting to all.
- Elmo's Keyboard-O-Rama