For our friends in the greater New York metro area, I’ll be hosting a GeekDad family day at the Wired Holiday store, 692 Broadway at 4th Street, NYC from 1-4pm on Saturday. Bring the family and have some fun doing fun projects, building with Lego pieces and playing with all the neat stuff in the store. You can find more info here on the store site.
Leia the Riveter Design by Thomas G. Sullivan via Redbubble
Star Wars fans everywhere are showing their Geek Pride today. Jennifer D. at GeekMom has the details:
Friday December 10th is the day to show your Star Wars pride in support of our fellow Geekette, Katie. Back in October, Katie was suffering at the hands of Star Wars bullies. Thanks to the web, Katie has lots of love now from everywhere. Help show your support for Katie and all girls that like Star Wars by donating a Star Wars toy to your local toy drive and wearing your Star Wars paraphernalia! Join the Facebook event and support the future generation!
Even if you forgot your Darth Vader mask today, you can still donate a Star Wars toy to make some geeky child happy!
The best players of Magic: The Gathering that is…
The 2010 Magic: The Gathering World Championships is the culmination of the Magic year. Players from more than 50 countries will come together in Chiba, Japan December 9-12, to square off for the coveted title of “World Champion”.
Every year, Wizards of the Coast invites fans to experience an array of onsite activities including public tournaments, meet and greets with Magic creator Richard Garfield, Champion Challenge, Pro Tour Hall of Fame inductions, the 2010 Magic Online Championship, and much more.
Creator - Richard Garfield
What’s that? You do not happen to be in Japan? The rest of the world can watch the Top 8 on Saturday, December 11 at 8:45pm ET. The free webcast will be streamed live via wizards.com!
While it’s always great to meet geeks from around the nation, and the globe, I always find it thrilling to connect with local geeks doing amazing things. North Carolina-based Harris Educational is one of those such local connections, doing awesome science right here. The best part? The offerings from Harris Educational are both geeky and, well, as you might guess from their name, totally educational.
Sure, there’s a ton of science kits out there. But what I love about the Harris Educational products is that they allow you to do such cool and interesting projects with your kids. How about making a light bulb? Or a telegraph? These kits come with everything you need to do just that. I particularly like the steampunk angle, considering the approach to making these items are very old-school, yet the results are undeniably awesome.
[To learn more about this, another of Natania Barron's Awesomely Geeky Gift Ideas, visit GeekMom!]
Image Courtesy of The Discovery Channel
In a new show titled “Stuck With Hackett” the dangerous mind behind Jet Ponies and other rides your mother warned you about is pitting his skills against the elements. Chris Hackett is the director of The Madagascar Institute, a metal artist and an engineer. He is also the one man star of “Stuck With Hackett”.
The show puts Hackett in a tough situation and using his skills Chris does more than survive he lives it up in luxury. In the pilot episode he uses scrounged items, Hackett calls them obtanium, to build an air conditioner to keep cool in the Mojave. Along the way there are lessons in science, engineering and plenty of “Don’t try this at home” moments.
The reusing of discarded items, application of science and Chris’s wry sense of humor really make this show a Survivorman for makers. If you’re an engineering geek, like me, you’re going to enjoy this show. You may even find yourself looking at something your about to toss and realize if I was stuck this could come in handy. Keep an eye out for obtanium it’s all around us and watch “Stuck With Hackett” tonight at 10:00 PM on The Science Channel
Narwhal, Baringo, and Mandrill bags from GreenSmart.
It must be because I grew up reading Ranger Rick, but I take recycling pretty seriously. You know, I’m that annoying guy who notices the white paper in the office trash can and fishes it out for the recycling bin. At our local library, I got tired of all the paper that was thrown out each week and went and bought some bins for recycling—and I’m usually the one to go pick it up and take it out to the recycling center, too.
Of course, there are limits to my environmentalism, often due to my desire for new technology or inability to give up dead-tree books, but I figure recycling is the least you can do—it’s easy, and it generally uses less energy, water, and materials than making something new. Unfortunately, some recycled-materials products just aren’t as high-quality, and sometimes they have an aesthetic that’s more hippie than hip.
GreenSmart is a company that turns recycled plastic bottles into bags—backpacks, messenger bags, laptop sleeves and so on. They started off using conventional materials (under the company name Shoreline) but in 2006 they began to reassess their manufacturing process, and since then have made their bags much more eco-friendly. All of their bags have a little badge stating how many bottles went into them (the Mandrill backpack, for example used 40 bottles) and comes with a tag that explains briefly how GreenSmart gives plastic bottles a second life. What’s cool is that 100% of the fabric and lining of the bag is made from recycled plastic bottles, but you wouldn’t know it from the bag itself. Continue Reading “GreenSmart Bags: Eco-Friendly & Stylish” »
We’re well into December, and that means we’re down to about 2 weeks left until the big day. But don’t worry, plenty of time left, and you can always count on the intrepid writers of the GeekDad blog to give you the 411 on this season’s coolest gifts. Want to see what we featured in previous guides? Click on the gift guide graphic on the right rail.
Tonka Richochet
The Ricochet’s killer feature is a awesome lift suspension so you drive your car down low or up high in monster truck mode! The car is double sided with one design and color on the top and one on the bottom. Super tough and able to stand up to the tender mercies of any kid… or any dad (ahem). This thing sucks power like no one’s business, but a removable battery pack leaves open the possibility of getting a second to keep the play going — though only one comes with the car. Buy it from Amazon.
Q Workshop Dice
That’s right, the coolest dice ever, crafted in the secret subterranean forges of crazed genius Poles. Q Workshop have tons of different styles of dice ranging from Deadlands (undead Old West!) to giant d20s used for keeping track of life in Magic: The Gathering, as well as Arkham Horror, large 6-siders with Polish flags for the pips, and Cthulhu. One of their newest products are textured dice (pictured) whose entire surface has been engraved with sweet, baroque carvings. Buy them from Amazon.
Thingamagoop
Circuit benders and other music experimenters will love the Thingamagoop, the quirky synthesizer by Bleep Labs packed with tons of creative features including a square wave amplitude modulator, triangle wave pulse width modulator, it runs on Arduino code so you can code your own effects, and the coolest feature in my opinion is the photocell so you can control your music with light. Buy it at from ThinkGeek. Continue Reading “2010 GeekDad Holiday Gift Guide #6″ »
Dork Tower #900 by John Kovalic
Read all the Dork Towers that have run on GeekDad.
Find the Dork Tower webcomic archives, DT printed collections, more cool comics, awesome games and a whole lot more at the Dork Tower Website
In Douglas Adam’s book Life, The Universe, and Everything, he shares the secret of flying: it’s the art of learning how to “throw yourself at the ground and miss.” Tim Bailey teaches people how to do just that: throw themselves at the ground (in an airplane) and miss in order to fly.
Tim Bailey — Parabolic Expert
Professionally speaking, Tim wears a lot of hats. Although his LinkedIn profile gives his job title as simply “Catalyst”, it then lists 10 separate jobs under “Current”. To name just a few, he works on SpaceVidcast, Space Task Force, Yuri’s Night (The World Space Party), and is the co-founder and Chief Operating Office of Sky Fire Lab—an independent organization promoting space travel in the media. See a theme yet? But if you scroll down to the bottom of his lengthy list of job titles, you will see that he is also a member of the Parabolic Flight Crew for the ZERO-G Corporation. What’s that you ask? parabolic what?
Tim’s job is the closest thing there is to being an astronaut without actually going into space. He spends his days assisting and training people in aircraft flights that simulate a microgravity environment—effectively he’s a flight attendant teaching people how to fly—and he is one of only nine people on the planet qualified to do this.
Tim has performed over 150 such flights, each with multiple parabolas—where the craft goes up and down at a steep angles to create a “weightless” free-fall environment inside—equating to over 24 hours of his life that Tim has spent unencumbered by the Earthly bonds of gravity. This has led to Tim’s unique ability to, as he puts it, “execute some fairly bad-ass flips in any axis [x, y, and z].”
In addition to being an evangelist and trainer for manned space travel, though, Tim is also a husband and recent father. Judging by his recent Twitter posts, he spends a lot of time with his family going between Kennedy Space Center and Disney World—a true geek dad’s paradise!
I recently chatted with Tim about his job, his work advocating for manned space travel, and his own future in space.
Continue Reading “Dream Jobs You’ve Never Heard Of: Parabolic Flight Crew” »
Congratulations to our 1st Day of Geekmas prize pack winner Torri Martin! We kicked this year’s festivities off by giving away an amazing PSP Limited Edition Invizimals Entertainment Pack and a can of Crazy Aaron’s Putty. So what do we have in store for today’s giveaway?
Only a Star Wars-themed prize pack the likes of which hasn’t been seen since the great Clone Wars! Today’s winner receives not only his/her very own can of Crazy Aaron’s Putty – did I mention we love putty? – but also a pair of Star Wars-centric gadgets. Stoke the fires of fanboy jealousy amongst your fellow geeks with you own Star Wars TomTom EASE GPS Device, useful in making the all important Kessel Run. Today’s winner also gets a limited edition R2-D2 Motorola Droid 2 phone from Verizon Wireless, a super sexy Android OS mobile phone skinned to look like everyone’s favorite astromech.
Peep today’s GeekDad HipTrax Stocking Stuffer to hear Ken and me slobber over these amazing prizes as well as to learn more about podcast sponsor MapHook. You’ll also get to hear John Anealio’s totally appropriate “Millennium Falcon for Christmas” from his latest holiday-themed EP. Listen all the way to the end to discover the secret code word needed to enter today’s random drawing. (Our hearing-impaired friends can also find said code word in the podcast file metadata.) Enter that word and your personal information into the form below before 11:59 PM EST tonight to qualify.
Feel free to subscribe to the GeekDad podcast in iTunes (see the button on the sidebar), or directly through the RSS feed. You can also download GeekDad HipTrax Stocking Stuffer #2 via this link, or simply listen in the embedded player below.
The “12 Days of Geekmas Theme” was also created by John Anealio. He truly is our very own Geekmas angel!
Paleontologists recently unearthed bones, likely in Montana or Wyoming, of a new dinosaur species dubbed Stochastisaurus. “Based on surrounding species and the fossils themselves, there’s an approximately 88% chance that Stochastisaurus was an herbivore,” says the lead researcher. The new species of dinosaur more likely than not had something interesting about its head, perhaps heavy bone plating like Pachycephalosaurus, a frill like Styracosaurus, a crest like Corythosaurus, or a hollow series of tubes like Parasaurolophus. This interesting head feature is almost exactly equally likely to have been used for defense, reproductive competition, or as an instrument of communication with other Stochastisauri.
Debate continues regarding how Stochastisaurus walked—did it move on four legs like a Diplodocus or on two like an Iguanodon? “There are, in fact, twice the number of four-legged dinosaur species compared with the number of two-legged, two-armed species,” says the lead researcher, giving Stochastisaurus a 2-to-1 chance of walking quadripedally.
Though other researchers have questioned the finding, suggesting the fossilized bones are, in fact, an intrusion of hardened mud that proponents of Stochastisaurus have simply super glued into the shape of a hypothetical ancient creature, the species’ finder points out that, “the puzzle of dinosaur recreation frequently requires construction based on the most likely configuration of small pieces. For example, it’s almost certain Stochastisaurus had a tail, body, head, and legs, and our recreation faithfully constructs these body features.”
Similarly, researchers point out the infinitesimally small chance that Stochastisaurus had tentacles, two heads, or a cockpit where a human controller could sit, reminiscent of Kiryu. And sure enough, researchers’ model has none of these.
“This has a very good chance of being an exciting discovery,” says the lead researcher.
–Brain Candy: Science, Puzzles, Paradoxes, Logic, and Illogic to Nourish Your Neurons.
–Twitter: @garthsundem
The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, the first blockbuster adaptation of C.S. Lewis’ beloved children’s fantasy series, was a critical and box-office success when it debuted in 2005. It’s 2008 follow-up, Prince Caspian, was a more grown-up affair — and far less favorable received.
When the wind left the Walden Media franchise’s sails, distributor Disney jumped ship and that’s why the third installment, The Voyage of the Dawn Treader, has just now reached our shores as a 20th Century Fox release.
And we’re lucky that it did, because now we finally get to see the original cast fulfill the journey they began when they first took us into the magical land of Narnia.
Will I like it?
Do you like high-seas adventure with a generous dose of sorcery and swashbuckling? Thought so. More than all those things, Dawn Treader is a coming-of-age tale that shows, not tells, the value of being yourself. The Christian allegory of Aslan the Great Lion is stronger here and more explicit than it has been since his sacrifice in the first movie, but its execution is still universal enough that almost any viewer can appreciate it.
Will my kids like it?
See above. I took my two sons, ages 6 and 16, to the preview and both of them thoroughly enjoyed the movie — the younger one without having seen the first two Narnia movies.
Will we want to see it again?
Most likely! Moreso than its plodding predecessor Prince Caspian, Dawn Treader revives the nonstop fantasy action of the first movie, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe. Every moment oozes with magic, and the film’s 3-D enhancements are artfully done.
Isn’t this based on a novel?
The Voyage of the Dawn Treader was the third novel to be published in C.S. Lewis’ fantasy series The Chronicles of Narnia (though, plot-chronologically, it would really be the fifth tale). Continue Reading “8 Things Parents Should Know About The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader” »
Nintendo DSi XL image copyright Nintendo
Around this time of year, I look around my house and try to decide exactly what tech needs updating and what will last another year.
That includes consoles that might be obsolete e as well as games that my kids have outgrown.
When Nintendo offered a package of the new Nintendo DSi XL and several new games for me to review, I jumped at the chance to try them out and see if they were something we needed and that I could recommend to other parents.
My big question when the Nintendo DSi XL came out was whether it was worth spending the money.
I’d already shelled out funds to upgrade from the DS to the DSi. That was worth it, as my youngest son had great fun with all the new features, particularly the camera. But it seemed like the only advantage offered by the XL was a bigger screen.
Nintendo DSi
It turns out that bigger screens are worth it.
Both my sons said the graphics were far better on the larger screens and they enjoyed their games more on it than the smaller DSi.
If you have a DS right now, I’d say skip the DSi and go straight for the DSi XL.
It’s a tougher call if you want to move from the regular DSi to the XL. A quick check of Amazon showed the DSi available for anywhere between $145 to $182. The XL seems to sell for a more solid price of $179.99. If you have the DSi, you might not want to drop that much money for a larger screen and instead wait for the new 3D version which is supposed to be coming in March of next year.
I also received a new DS game to review for play on the XL, Pokemom Ranger: Guardian Signs.
My youngest son, who’s played nearly every Pokemon game including several made for the Gameboy Color, pronounced it a “pretty good” game. As in other Ranger games, Guardian Signs is based on protecting Pokemon from outside threats rather than out and out duels. With this game, you can now capture Pokemon with your stylus. My son said he enjoys that part very much but pointed out that it’s impossible to play if you lose the stylus. Having back-ups available is a good idea.
Continue Reading “Nintendo Products to Consider for the Holidays” »
Ok, so there aren’t any adders in the video below, but I wanted to prime you for the other math- and snake-based puns that you’ll find. A friend of mine sent me a link to this video about mathematical doodles (and doodles done during math classes) which is filled with all sorts of geeky references and manages to show you some very cool tricks about drawing interwoven shapes.
I have a particular soft spot for math doodles because (1) I was a math major in college and (2) pretty much the only notes I kept from my classes were the ones with good doodles on them. Also, I did take topology but I couldn’t really tell you much about it anymore.
So, without further ado, check out this excellent video. Maybe you’ll even learn something!
(via kottke.org—thanks to Nate for the tip!)
It's hard to deny Elmo's subtle charms.
When I first began hearing about Warner Bros. Interactive Entertainment’s Sesame Street titles for the Wii and Nintendo DS I was ecstatic. I’ve long lamented the lack of both substance and proper presentation in the kinds of shoddily produced systems and games currently on the market for pre-schooler-friendly play, but as a gamer parent it’s a hobby I’ve long wanted to share with my young daughter. Between Warner’s backing and the Sesame Street license, I had high hopes for the titles. Unfortunately they didn’t manage to wow me as intensely as I’d hoped.
On paper the true selling point of the Wii incarnations is a simplified control scheme that removes a lot of the more complicated gesture controls and constant button presses of other titles. Unnecessary buttons are covered by a character-themed Wii remote plushie that hides all but the center array (the -, Home and + buttons used for system navigation) and the 2 button (used to confirm in-game selections). In Sesame Street: Elmo’s A-to-Zoo Adventure, for example, a branded, non-skid Elmo cozy makes it easy for younger players to grasp the Wii-mote for game play. Continue Reading “New Sesame Street Games Chase Some Clouds Away” »
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