Hollywood, move it on over! The Hollywood Walk of Fame is now demoted to the
Walk of Lame compared to San Francisco’s Metreon sidewalk. The San Francsico Walk of Game is a sidewalk thunder stealer, and inducting members by the fist full.

The Walk of Game is gaining 6 more members, on behalf of Sony, the Metreon’s older brother. Starcraft, Final Fantasy, John Carmack, Sid Meier, EverQuest, and of course… the lovely Laura Croft.

October 2004, San Francisco, the WCG conference was held. I was there. Not as a player, but as a volunteer helper. The World Cyber Games is to gamers, as the World Cup tournament is to soccer, the Super Bowl is to football, the World Series is to baseball, the gold medal to ice skating. It’s the one, all the marbles. 64 different countries were represented last year, and this year 67 attended.

Some teams show up in matching jump suits, with handles embroidered on their breast and a team name, sometimes accompanied by a logo, across the back. Geeks Gamers of all shapes and sizes, ages and ethnicities, gather to compete in almost half a million dollars in prize money. This isn’t your neighborhood LAN party, we’re talking Seoul, San Francisco, and now Singapore. In the final standings, the USA placed 2nd overall. Korea took top for most overall wins. Brazil, Germany, and China filled the 3rd-5th spots. This isn’t a game anymore, these… games.

Next year it’ll be in Italy. Bonjourno!

It is a global village. With Avian flu it has become a global barnyard. But with Sony’s rootkit, well, it’s a less friendly place to compute.
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If you’ve got some extra time this weekend, and a free serial port (remember those?), this is a project to consider. Sure, there are many more elegant solutions for controlling your music player. My personal favorite is the Logitech diNovo Bluetooth Media Commander which has the added benefit of being wireless. However, for a home brew solution, this project looks pretty good.

“Nowadays, Winamp has full support to keyboard shortcuts. But some time ago, when Winamp didn’t have this feature, I was thinking in some way to make a easy way to change music by simply pressing one button, it would make things faster and would help me to change music during games. So I decided to make a external control panel, to make it easier to change musics, volume up or down, toggle shuffle and many other features by pressing just one button. I found one winamp plugin that shows how to configure a external control using the Serial Port, being able to make 4 or 15 buttons control. I decided to make this, step-by-step, how to do it, hope you enjoy.”

Disguised well, this could be the center piece of a “computer jukebox.” Who says that geeks can’t rock?

Ready to go? Here’s the link.

New technology often creates new problems. When Apple introduced the iPod, their scroll wheel was praised for its ease of use. Now music fans could scroll away to find just the tune they were looking for. Users loved it, and sales skyrocketed, and the rest is history.

However, folks may have scrolled too much. In what one site is dubbing “ipoditis,” doctors are seeing an increase in repetitive motion injuries involving the thumb.

“Music fans may enjoy the ability to spool through 10,000 songs on their iPods, but medical experts warn that jumping from tune to tune has its risks.

Carl Irwin, from the British Chiropractic Association, said: “This is a really serious problem. The action needed to move the wheel on an iPod is totally unnatural and effectively separates the joint in the thumb every time you use it.

“This causes inflammation in the thumb or fingers and can be very painful. We have also seen cases of iPod users where the problem has spread to their elbow and neck.”

Does this make an argument for just shuffling your tunes? I’m not sure, but this repetitive motion injury is on the rise. We’ve explored this before, here at LD, with our look at the Vertical Mouse.

“Hey, take a picture with my camera!”

“Oh, take a picture with my camera too!”

“Eh, just email me the pictures”

“Yea right, who actually emails the pictures?”

This is where Kodak swoops in with a red cape and a flashy camera, with a flash. The Kodak Easyshare camera solves your group photo problemos. That’s right kids, a camera that emails photos via WiFi.

Kodak assumes that the need for a camera that emails pictures fills a wide gap in the American lifestyle. I’m a bit skeptical. This could be a neat marriage of digital cameras and WiFi. But I’d like to see a three way melt of high quality digital cameras, mobile phones, and wireless data networks provided by the mobile phone carriers. Am I victim of wishful thinking? I already snap, send, and receive pictures with my phone, better quality is all I really need.

WiFi antenna have always been a bit of a home brew affair. First there was the cantenna, which was made from a Pringle’s can. This got one upped by the coffee can antenna. Over the summer, Popular Science published plans for a parabolic antenna.
Now the folks are getting serious. Engadget is showing the plans for an antenna made from a mini satellite dish. There are material lists, and photos of each step. This thing is quite strong. We’re talking 18 networks at once, from up to 8 miles away! Remind me to turn on the WEP on my router.

Ahh, the age-old profession of man-whoring. It’s pleasantly surprising to find out that it’s made its way into IT, thanks to “Ray Digerati,” who had the cohones to place an ad on Craigslist that included the words “Will Fix Computers for Sexual Favors.” Sync Magazine has a very brief Q&A with this the IT playa (it seems like an oxymoron, I know), where we find out about his quickest, erm, “payment,” as well as some revealing details about his pay scale.

See people? Today’s news moves seamlessly from Google Base to Craigslist to man whoring. Am I good or what? I think it’s time to find out how I’m connected to Kevin Bacon…