Penny for Your Thoughts
300955
A  tiny 100 electrode chip was implanted in a 24-year-old quadriplegic's brain in June of this year. He's now able to send email and play videogames using only his thoughts. The whole package is dubbed BrainGate.
448943
Review Neat idea - shame about the price?
179029
Get greedy with your savings. Your future self will thank you.
305759
Tycho:  In case you are wondering, cats apparently need regular maintenance, like cars.  And, like an oil change, this juicing process can be done (I'm told) at home, preferably with the curtains drawn and a couple inches of sawdust laid down.  That's right: you can wring out your own cat's asshole.  This is the kind of helpful information you can expect when you visit Penny Arcade.  Don't everybody run home at once.    I've been playing a lot of Prism on the DS, even though the Zelda cartridge seems to squeal as I remove it.  I understand there's some kind of Ghost Ship?  I forget all of my cares, and also the cares of Princess Zelda, once those beams begin to refract.    They've ginned up some ridonculous crap about light eating space monsters to support their gameplay, which is very solid, and requires no extraterrestrial photophiles.  It's a puzzle game.  When I put pieces of a puzzle together, I never think about how alone each piece must feel, longing only to congregate with similarly knobbed partial images.  So, discard that.  Discard also the truly nasty presentation, no doubt a result of hard time done in already the Mobile and PC Casual markets.  Part these imperfections like tall savannah grass, and gaze into the game's rich core:  the creation of sometimes very complex circuits.     Inside each puzzle grid, the player is given some combination of Light Emitting Entities, Reflective Mirrors, Splitters, or Prisms.  You must jigger the aforementioned until light of the correct colors is distributed to targets around the edge of the field.  That's it, and the fun comes from how complicated this process can become.  There are quite a few cooperative puzzles as well - where each player has access to half the grid, and they must work together to route everything.  If you try this mode - and I request that you do so, as you only need one (1) cartridge and a willing accomplice - I recommend that you each turn your DS sideways, so that the UI is along the bottom.  That will make it so that "left" and "right" and "up" and "down" all mean the same thing to each of you.  Trust me, you want this.  The game is hard enough without the horror of fully relative terms.    Prism actually taught me something fairly significant about why I play games, and I think it's because the gameplay is so clean and the presentation so spartan that I could pick up on it.  I like games that generate communication.  This is why team-based shooters, roleplaying games, and tactical games are my delight - every one of these entails a suite of custom language to describe it, they require constant dialogue, and, most importantly, all other things being equal these games can be won by the efficient use of language.  Working out puzzles together in Prism has a strong logic component, but in large part the challenge was communicating ethereal notions succinctly.    I suppose this is also why I torment you here, thrice weekly: even when playing a game by myself, I am harvesting the experience so that it may be reconstituted here.  So, thank you for reading.  You dignify my leisure hours.          The Playstation 3 in the office has been more than acceptable for playing the sometimes short, often bad games that have arrived on it - but this holiday, with the titles to prove out the claim, I had to "get mine" in the bawdy parlance of the young.  What tipped my hand wasn't the four hundred dollar system on offer, rather, it was the three hundred and seventy nine dollar model.  These are probably mostly a mail order proposition, but any of those rare twenty gig models the platform launched with got bumped down by the new price.  It's inexpensive by PS3 standards, but it's positively cheap for a Blu-Ray device.  Now fully franchised, flexing all the rich benefits of Sony citizenship, you may expect me to be even more brutal in my critique.
653802
Go ahead and be contrarian. Just make sure you're right.
648206
Today's rude question: When does your money manager cost more than the taxman? Answer: Sooner than you think.
112247
Lance Knobel: "I'd install FlickrFan in every middle school and high school social studies class. I guarantee it would provoke endless discussion and ensure engagement in the issues of the day." I totally agree. It would be great to see it at checkout lines in supermarkets and on kiosks in BART stations too.
495764
Wishing is one thing. Who's actually buying?
591197
A sampling of ideas from the next generation of consumers--and entrepreneurs.
503344
Gabe: I had planned on making a couple posts last week but I ended up getting some kind of devil virus. It was the sort of sick where you don't really sleep. You just curl up in the bathroom and hallucinate that wolves are encircling you. I'm feeling better now though.I had wanted to talk about some stuff but I forgot almost all of it during my spirit quest. Let me see if I can remember anything. Sorry if this is sort of scattershot.I did go to the Pokemon Tournament and I ended up taking fourth. It was my first tourney and I was using a pretty crazy deck I'd built just a few days prior. Kiko also went and he took fifth even though we had the same win loss record during the day. They used some special Pokemon math to push me in to the final four and give him fifth. I pretty proud of both of us. It was a new level of competition that we'd never seen before and I think we played really well.If you're a fan of Transformers I highly recommend the new animated series on Cartoon Network. Some people might be turned off by the look but I think it's incredible. It's got a very Teen Titans look which makes sense seeing as it's by the same people. Even in vehicle mode these transformers are expressive and full of character. I read Amulet over the weekend (don't believe the date on his site, it is already in stores) and if you are a fan of comics I suggest you do the same. I don't want to say too much about it. I think that Kazu is one of the most talented individuals working in comics today. With Amulet he has created something timeless. I've collected all your Dickerdoodle pictures and there's some pretty great stuff in there. Give me some time to sort through them and I'll start posting my favorites soon. I'll get Tycho to help me pick a winner and we'll find something cool here in the office as a prize.-Gabe out
575960
I noted yesterday that there seems to be some media fanfare surrounding Amazon's launch of a digital book tablet. It occurred to me that the markets surrounding media such as books, music and movies bear more than a passing resemblance to financial markets, and as such, perhaps they were amenable to a similar method of analysis. Being the owner of a sizable collection of paper books, this led me to consider the drawbacks one faces when Digital Rights Management restrictions are put in place.
427671
Tycho:  Positive Sony news here, at Penny Arcade?  I know, right?  We shall redouble our efforts.  The story all this was based on has been changed to say that none of it is true, or that very little of it is true (depending on who you ask), but if you're asking me I think the original story hit pretty close to the mark.  The alternative - which is to say, that xFire technology would be used for a single game and no others - suggests that their service will be another briar patch of vendor "interpretations" of an online community, which can't possibly be true.  I refuse to believe that, in this generation, they would leave something like this to chance.
131344
Cheap for a reason, or great opportunities? We investigate.
202398
Oprah lives by it. Millions are reading it. The latest self-help sensation claims we can change our lives by thinking. But this 'new thought' may just be new marketing.
122128
In a recent online discussion, a questioner wanted to know whether there was a type of professional he or she could hire who would give unbiased advice on those everyday money issues that always seem to pop up.
25821
Views you can use to get clues on tomorrow's news.
210889
Further musings on holiday tipping, in response to questions and comments from readers of this blog.