Escape from Island is pretty cool flash puzzle adventure style game. Sort of reminded me of Escape from Monkey Island, an older DOS game. You move around the island picking up items that you can use to help you solve puzzles. For instance you might find a string, a stick, and a hook to make a fishing pole. You could then use the fishing pole to catch a fish, which could feed a bear. I hope you’re getting the idea.

A study that will appear in Environmental Science & Technology has spurred news headlines of the dangers of particle emissions from office laser printers. Congroug He, Lidia Morawska, and Len Taplin set out to explore the relationship between office and outdoor air in terms of fine-scale particulates, the sort that tends to penetrate deep into the lungs. Must to their dismay, there wasn’t any relationship. They did discover that particulates in the office were lower during off hours but rapidly increased 500% while the office was occupied. After eliminating the microwave and photocopier they ultimately fingered the office laser printer as the culprit. The discovery led them to test the 62 laser printers available to them and rank them into four category based on particle emissions. I noticed the age of the toner had an influence on both amounts of particulates produced and their average size. Page coverage played an important role as well, as the jump between a print that covered five percent of a page to one that covered fifty percent roughly doubled emissions. In laymen’s terms, it’s much worse if you print graphics.

I posted a link to Gravity Pods the other day, a additive vector-based physics shooter / puzzle  game. I could have really used a hint on a couple of the levels, but couldn't find much on the Internet. I snagged some screen shots of each level after I finished in case someone else gets stuck and needs a little help. There are multiple ways to complete many of the levels. I’m quite sure some of mine weren’t optimal, but if you are stuck it might help you out. 

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Gravity Pods is a vector-based physics shooter / puzzle. The objective is simple: shoot a projectile at a target. Of course, there are some barriers, and naturally there is a way around those barriers. By strategically placing Gravity Pods around the screen, you can bend the path your projectile takes, so that it goes around walls, down halls, curves back on itself etc. The trick is figuring out where to put them to lead the projectile to the target. The first levels are simple, but it gets progressively tougher as the courses get harder, and more elements come into play. 

A couple weeks ago, I posted “Create Your Own South Park Character” which allows you to create your South Park likeness. The images make great avatars for instant message clients and Internet forums. Well if you’re not a South Park fan but love the Simpsons you’re still in luck. Head over to The Simple Movie, and after it loads look for ‘Create You Simpsons Avatar’ at the top of the screen. It works much like the South Park version. One you customize your avatar to your liking you can download it as a small square avatar or download your complete cartoon self. My version is in line with this paragraph. You can also get an embed code to place a flash version on your website like the one below.

The computer virus has grown and matured over the past few decades. Its birth is considered by many to have been at the hands of John Walker in 1975. Walker created a subroutine called PERVADE as part of the program ANIMAL that ran on a UNIVAC. Animal was a computer program that would try to guess the animal you were thinking of by asking series of twenty questions. PERVADE was a subroutine that allowed ANIMAL to copy itself into another directory when played by someone. This sounds harmless enough. The only real potential for damage, so to speak, is that eventually the system would run out of space as more and more users played the game.

“Man arrested for accessing wireless network”, or something to that tune had been in the headlines a few times recently. Each time I read it, I question the validity of the laws used in these cases. I personally think the legal ignorance of technology is the problem. Around 6^th grade (stick with me here), I submitted a paper I had typed in Paperclip, my first word processor. I was stunned when my teacher wouldn’t accept it. I had printed it with a dot-matrix printer. Of course the paper’s computer generation was obvious and my teacher immediately conjured up the notion that my computer had clearly written my paper for me. My teacher’s position was that I need to do the paper myself, and consequently, she wouldn’t accept anything done by a computer. I reasoned that I had actually composed the paper, and the computer had not created the paper for me as she was implying. In the end I lost that battle but learned from the experience. She made a rule based in ignorance that was going to cost me – the price of a daisy wheel printer.

Someone I know recently had a brush with identity theft. Identity theft appears to be as rampant as ever. The thief had stolen various mail from their mail box or perhaps their trash. I’m told the pre approved credit card offers are their gold, as they often have enough information in them to be used to get a new credit card, in your name, mailed to a different address. You normally hear how you should invest in a personal shredder to destroy this type of mailings, but being the green guy I am, I began to wonder if you could just simply opt out of receiving the stupid things to begin with. Well you can. In the process of digging for that I found a few other places that can help you reduce the noise in your life. 

Keeping your computer kid safe has been next to impossible. Sure most of us need a virus scanner, but having the best virus scanner and firewall available doesn’t stop pornography sites from popping up on your screen. Solutions in the past have involved word filtering which is flakey at best. OpenDNS a relatively new service approaches solving this problem it in a different manner that works. I’ll briefly explain.

When you have about 6 minutes to kill, this is a great video about how every operating system sucks.