The Flash speeds into DCUO

Maybe it’s just the resident comic book nerds here at Massively, but as soon as we saw Geoff Johns announced as part of the team involved with writing the story for DC Universe Online, we just knew The Flash had to show up. Sure, it makes sense to have him in there since he’s a major part of the DC license. He’s also the perfect choice to show off super-speed as a travel power, too. But Geoff’s work on the Flash storyline was absolutely awesome, thus having him in the game is something we’re pretty psyched to hear confirmation of.

SOE explained his spot in the game a bit further in the press release noting that we’ll be dealing with the Wally West incarnation of the Flash, who "easily runs at light speed, vibrates through objects, create explosions through friction – and, when at agonizing top capacity, can manipulate time and bridge dimensions." We just wonder if a high-level speedster will be able to manipulate time and bridge dimensions too. Can you imagine how cool that would be? For now, enjoy some concept art for this newest addition to the DCUO cast!

Gallery: DC Universe Online Concept Art

This post has been written by Krystalle Voecks on May 24th 2009 at 8:00PM couresy of massively.com.

Leather hip pouch from Urban Threads

[Photo from Urban Threads]

There is a nice set of instructions for the project on Urban Threads:

For embroidering or sewing on leather, you’ll want to pick up some leather needles. The thing about sewing on leather is that the holes your needle leaves behind won’t be invisible like when you sew on regular cloth, and you want a small, special needle to keep the damage and tear-age to your leather at a minimum. Large needles can actually perforate your leather enough that you basically just punch off a section. Not what we’re going for here.

The photos and text are informative, and the design could be rolled out to meet many different needs.

Make a whole bunch to slip on a belt and you’ve got one sweet utility belt. A pouch this size will fit everything from credit cards and cash to a passport if needed, and makes a great travel pouch. Make a smaller, daintier one for more dressy outfits in need of a little spice. You can customize it to any shape or any need.

[From the MAKE Flickr pool]

This post has been written by Chris Connors on May 24, 2009 04:59 PM couresy of makezine.com.

BenQ GP1 LED pocket projector reviewed: loved, possibly lurved

The universal acclaim for BenQ’s GP1 LED projector is deafening. Naturally, some trade-offs were made in brightness, contrast, and resolution in order to squeeze things down to a palm-sized 5.4 x 4.7 x 2.1-inch footprint. But at just 1.4-pounds, it won’t cause your bicep, atrophied by pantywaist netbooks, too much strain. Thanks to a LED light source with a 20,000 hour lifespan, this $499 DLP projector manages to spread 100 lumens across 858 x 600 pixels with a 2,000:1 contrast — specs that give solid results when projecting a 40-inch image in a bright, shades-drawn room on up to 80-inches in near-black environments. Better yet, pop in a USB stick loaded with images (JPEG, GIF, BMP, TIFF) or videos (MPEG4, MJPEG, xvid, 3ivX) and the projector will automatically launch a media playback menu — no laptop required. The lack of zoom, an ailment common in all these tiny projectors, will limit placement and a measured 38dB (from a distance of 30cm) operational hum will be distracting to home theater buffs or cubical monkeys forced into the sleepy corporate dens of PowerPoint. But all-in-all, BenQ’s come up with a winner, and truth doesn’t make a noise.

Read — TrustedReviews

Read — TrustedReviews (video)

Read — SlashGear

Read — iLounge

This post has been written by Thomas Ricker on May 25th 2009 at 5:14AM couresy of engadget.com.

World’s first camera goes on public display in Macau

If you thought the golden anniversary of Olympus’ Pen camera was something, get a load of this. From now until August 23rd, an elaborate exhibition entitled ‘The Invention of Photography and the Earliest Photographs’ will showcase some of digital imaging’s earliest tools, including the planet’s oldest camera. The wooden sliding box shown above will undoubtedly be the centerpiece of the Macau-based expo, though it will be surrounded by 250 photography antiques and 180 old photos, which were collections lent by the Nicephore Niepce Museum and 12 other museums, cultural institutions and private collectors around the world. Anyone planning on making the trip over? Make sure you take a few snapshots with your 90s-era point-and-shoot, cool?

This post has been written by Darren Murph on May 24th 2009 at 4:23AM couresy of engadget.com.

Rumor: Partial script for Driver film adaptation leaked

"DRIVER, 25, a test driver for Audi Germany in his mid-twenties — a little Beckham, a little McQueen – with munchy hair and intense blue eyes that show a focus that’s laser-like."

These precious words constitute the first sentence of the Roger Avary-crafted screenplay for the (currently on-hold) film adaptation of the Driver series. The first five pages of the "HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL" script (written circa fall 2006) were recently leaked to superannuation, an anonymous (but extremely reliable) gaming news source. We have no idea who did the leaking, nor are we entirely certain of the script’s veracity. Still — a blogger can dream. If you have the literate faculties to do so, please take the time to lose yourself in this all too brief masterpiece.

Update: The mastermind behind superannuation contacted us, informing us that he (or she?) was the one who actually discovered the script. Good find, sir! (Or madam!)

This post has been written by Griffin McElroy on May 23rd 2009 at 10:00PM couresy of joystiq.com.

Weird Science flees food poisoning, ends up in Hawaii

Let’s not eat at that island again: What prompted the greatest migration in human history? Food poisoning, if we’re to believe one recent publication. The Polynesians covered staggeringly vast distances in the Pacific using nothing but open boats, all with no guarantee that they’d wind up someplace that was any better than the one they left. The authors of a new paper show that there are indications of abrupt shifts in diet among the occupants of many islands, which they ascribe to algal blooms that made the local seafood inedible. According to the authors, "the celebrated Polynesian voyages across the Pacific Ocean may not have been random episodes of discovery to colonize new lands, but rather voyages of necessity."

When it comes to thieving whales, the data finds you: It’s been difficult to study the sperm whale, primarily because it’s hard to actually find them, given their tendency to spend much of their time at significant depths and away from shore. So, instead, a study of the whales took advantage of a case where the whales came to us. Apparently, the animals have figured out how to safely pluck bait of the lines of Alaskan fishing boats. Researchers were able to film this process, because the fisherman wanted to know how it was happening. It turns out the whales have learned to grab the line well upstream of the hook and shake it until the bait falls off. For their part, the researchers now have a better sense of how the whale’s vocalizations correlate with its body size, which may help them track these whales in the future.

Zeroing in on the wolfman gene: Lots of mythical creatures probably got their start in reality, and it turns out a wolfman may have been one of them. There is actually a genetic disorder that results in uncontrolled hair growth all over the body; there are some indications that this may have produced some of the bearded ladies famous from carnival shows. Now, researchers in China have tracked the gene’s inheritance through three different families and identified a stretch of DNA that’s missing in all of them. Oddly, some individuals with a sporadic case have an extra copy of this section of the chromosome (a situation known as a CNV, or copy number variation), suggesting it’s the dose of genes that counts. Apparently, there are at least four genes in this area, so we don’t know which is responsible yet.

Or maybe we’re just all going insane: I’m a little hesitant to post this item, because it’s based on someone’s PhD thesis which I haven’t had the opportunity to examine. Still, the press release is intriguing and provocative: the tests we used to perform to detect signs of impending dementia, for the most part, don’t work any more. If that holds up in further studies, it would suggest that, as the role of and expectations for the elderly have evolved, the behavior of the elderly has evolved as well, and it’s made tests based on their behavior functionally obsolete. The only thing that still works as a test, apparently, is forgetfulness. Definitely looking forward to a publication based on this work.

Think you never forget a face? You may be right: Apparently, a well-defined segment of the population is actually incapable of remembering whether they’ve seen a face before. The condition is apparently common enough to have picked up both a formal name—prosopagnosia—and the informal term "face blindness." Now, it turns out there may be an opposite condition, one where individuals have an uncanny ability to recognize when they’ve seen a face before. Researchers at Harvard put four individuals who claimed to have this ability to the test, and the people did indeed have an unusual ability, one that fell well outside the range of recognition seen in the general populace. So, the next time you hear someone claim they never forget a face, it’s just possible they’re right.

Testing psychologists’ backpack test: While searching for the paper in the previous item, I came across a different study that will be published by the same journal. The work involved is a bit meta—it’s using a subject population to test a test that’s normally performed with a subject population, if that makes any sense. In any case, I read it simply because I was curious about the procedure itself, called the "backpack test." Basically, researchers have used the test to show that, if you put a heavy backpack on someone, they exaggerate things like the slope of a hill or the distance between two places.

The new study suggests that this may be true, but it’s because the subjects realize they’re part of a psych experiment, not because the weight was influencing their perceptions. If you tell subjects that the backpack is being carried for a good reason—it’s filled with medical equipment, for example—the backpack effect goes away.

Tourists may be HIV’s best friend: Researchers have sequenced samples of HIV isolated from 16 European countries and used differences among them to track the spread of the virus across the continent. Among the many aspects of the spread that became apparent, the authors noted that some countries act as net sources of the virus: Greece, Portugal, Serbia and Spain. Three of these are notable for being major holiday destinations, leading the authors to suggest that "intervention strategies should also address tourists," among other populations.

This post has been written by John Timmer on May 23, 2009 2:00 PM couresy of arstechnica.com.

Our First Taste Of Magma

A few weeks ago Rocketboom founder Andrew Baron gave us a glimpse of his next project: a new video portal with an emphasis on analytics and social interaction, dubbed Mag.ma. But aside from some nifty screen shots, nobody has really gotten a chance to play around with the site until now.

Earlier this evening Baron included us in a small batch of new users invited to try out the site, and we’ve been testing it out for the last few hours. To be clear, this is by no means our final review of the site, as it is very much a work in progress and some of its most key features haven’t been implemented yet. But even with some missing elements, at the very least, it’s clear that Magma is going to be a great place to kill some time.

In his original post on Magma, Baron outlined three main use cases for the site. The first, and the one most people will be using Magma for, is as a comprehensive guide for what’s currently hot in web video. Open Magma’s homepage and you’re shown a grid of 10 “Must-watch” videos – clips that Magma has deemed to be the hottest on the web, as determined by data from sites like Digg, Reddit, and Twitter. Below this grid, you’ll get an at-a-glance guide to the most popular videos across a dozen different web services, which include everything from YouTube to CollegeHumor. Finally, the very bottom of the site lists some of the clips being shared by other users.

It’s a lot of content to absorb, with over 100 video links on the homepage alone. Fortunately Magma does a good job at laying out the video links so that they don’t become overwhelming. Magma certainly isn’t the first site to try to aggregate what’s hot in web video – in fact, many of its sources like YouTube and Digg also try to do exactly that. But Magma has done a great job taking all of these sources and presenting them in an easily consumable format, which could make it one of the first sites I visit when I’m looking to kill some time.

That said, good design can be easily copied. Fortunately for the company Magma has some other core functionality in the works, but these other main features are still very much in the work-in-progress stage. Its stat tracking, which will allow you to watch in real-time as a clip’s hit count goes up and ‘buzz’ comes in from various social channels, is not yet active. And the social sharing features, which allow you to follow the videos shared by your friends, is still limited if only because there are currently so few people using the site. But these features will be ramping up over the next few weeks, and we’ll be following the site as it matures up to its public release. For the time being, Magma is looking promising – now it just needs to show that it’s more than just a nice looking content aggregator.

CrunchBase Information

Magma

Information provided by CrunchBase

This post has been written by Jason Kincaid on May 24, 2009 couresy of techcrunch.com.

MAKE Flickr pool weekly roundup

From the MAKE Flickr pool

• DIY bike helmet fan

• Rock Band axe in a box [above, top-right]

• Anybody lose a lightning bolt? [above, bottom-right]

• Music box plays solenoid beats [above, top-left]

• Maker’s Notebook 555 cover

• Etch A Sketch, automated, wireless [above, bottom-left]

This post has been written by Collin Cunningham on May 24, 2009 02:00 AM couresy of makezine.com.

Steampunk MMO Gatheryn opens closed beta registration

The developers at Mindfuse have been hard at work on Gatheryn, a steampunk MMO that Massively got a preview of at GDC 2009. The HeroEngine-powered Gatheryn will incorporate casual and minigame elements in addition to standard MMO game mechanics. Now gamers will have a chance to see what the title has to offer in the Gatheryn closed beta, for which Mindfuse has announced they’re taking registrations.

Closed beta applicants accepted in this first wave of invites will get the first glimpses of Gatheryn offered to the gaming community, but getting your info submitted early puts you in the pool Mindfuse will draw from with future beta invitations. If you’re interested in checking out the steampunk MMO, you can sign up on the Gatheryn beta registration page.

Gallery: GDC09: The World of Gatheryn

This post has been written by James Egan on May 23rd 2009 at 8:00PM couresy of massively.com.

Jetpack API Debuts From Mozilla Labs

Mozilla has announced a new Mozilla Labs offering called the Jetpack API. Jetpack is from the virtual lab development team within Mozilla Labs. Jetpack is described as a browser enhancer using open web technologies.

EWeek reports that the new API allows developers to write Firefox add-ons with security as a main focus. The API is listed as an experiment by Mozilla and uses a foundation based on web development languages and scripts like HTML, JavaScript, and CSS. Those will be other only tools required to develop using the API.

The core principal of Jetpack is "develop once, run anywhere" reports eWeek. Add-ons build using the API are intended to be run on Firefox Mobile, Thunderbird, and in other browsers.

Mozilla states, "Add-ons will work through a version’ed facade-pattern so that you won’t be in a constant struggle to keep your extension working with the latest FF edition."

Security is a big focus with the API and to help make code more secure, only access to the privileges are provided. Possible security issues are presented in social terms as well rather than more complex and difficult to understand technical terms.

A blog post by the Jetpack development team states, "Short and easy to review code ensures that potential security issues are shallow, and review times short."

The architecture of the Jetpack API allows for the inclusion of reviewed and versioned third-party tool kits like jQuery or Dojo to be added as well as APIs like Twitter, Delicious, or Google Maps. The development team does point out that the third party applications could pose potential security hazards.

A warning page about third-party features of Jetpack states, "The features referenced here have not been reviewed by Mozilla. They may contain malicious code, so use them only at your own risk."

Internet Explorer is still the top browser in the consumer and business market, but Mozilla’s Firefox browser is steadily gaining market share.

This post has been written by Shane McGlaun on May 22, 2009 12:09 PM couresy of dailytech.com.

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