This is too good not to share. T-Mobile set up a catapult in a Barcelona square where people playing Angry Birds on a phone were controlling an actual live-action version of the game. Booking a flight to Barcelona in 3…2…1…
Category: Gadgets (Page 25 of 27)
We’re fussy about Red Carpet events here at Bullz-Eye central. That’s largely because as a lone, online writer you’re pretty much at the mercy of the publicity gods in terms of who you’re going to meet up with and you never know who that’s going to be. One condition we have is that we get to see the show/movie/what-have-you in question so, if all else fails, we can write about that or at least get a bit of entertainment and free food. In this case, that was a good thing. Not because we didn’t get to talk to anybody interesting, but because Spike TV’s “Guys Choice” presentation, which premieres on the network at 9:00 Eastern/6:00 PDT Friday is not your usual award show.
Right down to the sexy female dancers who liven up the breaks and its highly distinctive award statue, “the Mantlers,” it’s easily the most laid back and honestly silly awards show I’ve seen. It’s also the only award show we know of which contains R-rated profanity in one of its award titles: the “Funniest Motherf*cker” award, this year being given to Jim Carrey. It’s safe the say the show was completely irreverent about everything, except for its commendable commitment to drawing attention to the bravery and sacrifices made by members of our armed forces.
Speaking of Jim Carrey, the famed comic provided a remarkable bit of comedy dealing with the always absolutely never hilarious topic of..oh, Lord, we’d better just leave it alone. You don’t want to know. Carrey himself made it clear that children and other sensitive people were better off not hearing the routine before proceeding with a shocking and explosively funny performance, abetted by the sensitive stylings of violinist Neil Hammond.
More traditionally edgy and hilarious at certain points, but a lot longer, was a marathon bit by faux canine Triumph, the Insult Comic Dog, aka comic genius Robert Smigel. The latter merited a bad on-camera review from Sean Penn who between this show and his criticism of Ricky Gervais at Golden Globes, seems to be developing a side career as a real-time award show comedy critic.
Justin Timberlake less controversially proved himself to be, once again, no comic slouch, while promoting the charms of the co-star of his next flick, “Friends with Benefits,” the beautiful and talented Mila Kunis. Rolling Stones guitarist Keith Richards distinguished himself by simply being alive to pick up his award and being the innately humourous individual he is.
And so it went. I’ll have a few choice quotes from the show at the end of this piece. First, though, let’s talk about the folks we met on the Red Carpet.
Baseball fans love their stats, particularly fantasy owners looking for an edge. Whether you’re a certified stat geek or your fantasy league’s reigning champ, you could spend hours digging through the vast pool of information found in the Bill James Baseball IQ app. Created by Steve Selfors in collaboration with noted historian and stat savant Bill James and developer American Eagle, Baseball IQ sets itself apart from other statistics-based baseball apps by putting the sport’s endless stream of useful data into the hands of its most rabid fans with full color graphics that are easy to both navigate and understand.
Say, for example, you want to see how Toronto’s Jose Bautista, the game’s current home run king, has fared against Yankees ace CC Sabathia throughout his career. Well, for starters, that’s just too simple for this app. In fact, with a few clicks, you can see Sabathia’s lifetime stats against every hitter on Toronto’s roster (Bautista, incidentally, is 0-30 against the large lefty with 14 strikeouts…yikes). Want to see a location breakdown for Bautista’s 14 Ks vs. Sabathia? Check out the K Zone chart. Wondering how those numbers stack up against Bautista’s stats against other Yankee starters, or any other pitcher in the game over the last year? Last two years? Last three years? Check. With Hit Locator, you can see where Bautista is most likely to hit the ball in certain situations (against particular pitchers, in a specific ballpark, with an 0-2 count, etc.), and with Hit Zone, you can see the location of pitches in and around the strike zone where Bautista tends to get his hits. Of course, these breakdowns are available for every player in the game over the last three years, and the app also allows you to stack one player’s stats up against another’s over a set time period and against particular teams and/or pitchers. Pretty cool.
But we’re just scratching the surface here. The bottom line is, you’ll find stats on the Bill James Baseball IQ app that you won’t see anywhere else, giving you the knowledge you need to impress your friends at the bar while continuing to dominate those same friends in your fantasy baseball league.
With Father’s Day around the corner, we’ll be reviewing gadgets and other gift ideas. We just checked out the Whirl™ Desktop Laser Mouse w/ Anti-Gravity Comfort Pivot, and it’s a great item for anyone looking for an ergonomic mouse or an inexpensive gift for dad.
If you spend a lot of time in front of a computer, you know how important it can be to have an ergonomic setup at your desk. You want to be comfortable, and you don’t want to develop any pain from repetitive motions or an awkward work area. Minor changes can make a big difference, and it’s also important to break up your routine and take frequent breaks.
With that in mind, we tried out the Whirl™ Laser Mouse and came away impressed. This desktop mouse works with any computer, including laptops, and it features their patented ErgoMotion™ pivot system. The mouse pivots on a head while a flat surface glides along the muse pad, so the mouse moves as you turn your wrist. The end result is a comfortable unit that is very easy to use.
It’s December of last year. Christmas is creeping up on me, and I haven’t bought many presents for my lovely wife. So I did what I normally do and hit Target, because that way, I can browse as many of her potential interests in one stop. Out of the corner of my eye, I see that there is an updated edition of “Wii Fit,” titled, simply enough, “Wii Fit Plus.” It’s a no-brainer of a gift. It’s also very much of a Homer Simpson kind of gift (as in buying Marge a bowling ball with his name on it), as I probably spent more time on the original “Wii Fit” than she did. And as it turned out, I ran the “Wii Fit Plus” Island Bicycle game’s beach ball course nearly to the point of contracting plantar fasciitis, but that’s another story.
There are several new games on “Wii Fit Plus,” and ironically, the one I avoided playing at first was the Driving Range game, thinking it would be like hitting off of indoor Astroturf tees and give you false confidence. Eventually, curiosity got the best of me, and so I set it up to hit 20 mid-range shots. Now, the thing with most interactive golf games is that you don’t really need to swing like you do on the golf course, but for the sake of authenticity, I went at it from the approach that if they’re going to get the balance board involved, I probably shouldn’t goof off.
And, wouldn’t you know it, my mind was subsequently blown.
Quite possibly the straightest drive, virtual or otherwise, that we’ve hit in years. We heart Wii.
I hit the Wii balls just like I hit real balls – to the left (I’m a lefty), slicing nearly every ball into what they consider out of play (which it would be, on most golf courses). It said I was swinging too hard, even though I’m not a masher. It said I wasn’t rotating my upper body enough, and that was definitely true. I began to incorporate their suggestions into my Wii swing, and subsequently began crushing straight, long drives. Would it transfer to the real game?
Well, that part is still a work in progress. After all, golf takes lots, and lots, and lots of practice to perfect any single aspect of the game. However, based on my first experience at the driving range (it’s rained a lot here; I have kids, blah blah blah), the results were eye-opening, to say the least.
I started off like I always do, with my 7-iron. It’s a good warm-up club and if memory serves, “Tin Cup” anti-hero Roy McAvoy said is the only club you really need. I rotated my shoulders, and tried not to swing too hard. Pow, straight as an arrow and uncommonly long. Huh. Do it a few more times, and see if this is a pattern and not a fluke. Again and again (mostly), the balls were flying farther and straighter. All right, time to switch to the most important club in the bag: the pitching wedge.
The first two balls I hit were two of the highest, straightest pitching wedge shots I’ve hit in my entire life. Holy shit, I’ve cracked the code!
Not so fast. I went to my 5-iron from there, and all hell broke loose. Didn’t really hit a single ball flush with that club (my apologies to the local worms), so I went to the 5-wood. The results weren’t much better, but in swinging the much longer club, I noticed something that proved valuable: As I worked on rotating my upper body, I was inadvertently swinging around the ball, not through it, on my follow-through, and as a result began hooking shot after shot. The exact opposite problem that I was hoping “Wii Fit Plus” to fix, yes? Yes, and once I processed it all, everything came together.
I moved up to my 3-wood, and continued the swing that I had been using before. Sure enough, I was hooking the ball, something I had never done before. At that point, I was conscious of two things: slowing down my swing, and following straight through the ball. (Any golfer will tell you that it’s best if you don’t think about your swing, but they’re all lying to themselves. They are always thinking about their swing, especially when they’re swinging.) And just like that, the problem corrected itself. With a slower yet straighter follow-through, I was suddenly hitting some of the longest, straightest drives of my life. You think that silly balance board is just measuring how much you’re leaning toward or away from the ball, but let me be the first to tell you that it measures much, much more. You also burn a surprising number of calories swinging a golf club. Isn’t the joke about golf that it’s a sport for people who don’t play sports?
The obvious next test is to see how I fare on a course, going from one club to the next on each shot. Based on what I’ve witnessed so far, though, and with a little more practice on the virtual range, “Wii Fit Plus” has managed to fix a flaw in my swing that had been plaguing me my entire life, and it did so in about 10 minutes. Used copies go for less than nine bucks on Amazon. What on earth are you waiting for?
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