Month: December 2012

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From Engadget: Archos GamePad now shipping for £130: Android 4.1, 1.6GHz CPU and a bona fide D-pad

Archos GamePad now shipping for 130 Android 41, 16GHz CPU and a bona fide Dpad

You’ve waited long enough, haven’t you? The low-cost PMP leader has kept the mantra alive with its GamePad, which is now shipping to those interested for £129.99. Put simply, it’s a widescreen gaming handheld that runs Android 4.1 (Jelly Bean), replete with a 1.6GHz dual-core processor and Mali 400mp quad-core GPU. There’s a 1,024 x 600 resolution touchpanel, physical control buttons and analog sticks, and the whole thing checks in at just 0.3-inches thick. Unfortunately, there’s no word on battery life, but even the optimist in us can’t predict a number that’d be worthy of boasting about. Hit up the source link to make plans for purchase, or click past the break for the full presser.

Update: Anandtech reports the device will come within range of US gaming thumbs early next year, though there’s no dollar price to go with that information.

Continue reading Archos GamePad now shipping for £130: Android 4.1, 1.6GHz CPU and a bona fide D-pad

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From Droid Life: Tip: Search With Your Camera in New Google Now

With the newest Google Now update, Google built in a new Voice Action that allows you to scan barcodes with your camera. All you have to say is, “Scan barcode” after hitting the voice search button. But if the voice search button isn’t handy or you don’t want to speak out loud to your phone, you can access it another way.

If you open Google Now, scroll to the bottom and hit the 3-dotted menu button in the right corner. As long as you have updated your Google Now, you should see a new option that says “Search with camera.” Tap that, and find something to search for with your camera.

So far, I’ve had good luck snapping photos of text, but logos or objects, not so much. Give it a shot!

Cheers Nishant!

from Droid Life

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From Discover Magazine: The catfish that strands itself to kill pigeons

In Southwestern France, a group of fish have learned how to kill birds. As the River Tarn winds through the city of Albi, it contains a small gravel island where pigeons gather to clean and bathe. And patrolling the island are European catfish—1 to 1.5 metres long, and the largest freshwater fish on the continent. These particular catfish have taken to lunging out of the water, grabbing a pigeon, and then wriggling back into the water to swallow their prey. In the process, they temporarily stran

from Discover Magazine

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From Ars Technica: Portal’s physics engine rebuilt in 25KB—on a graphing calculator

A 20-year-old college student has rebuilt Portal, Valve’s 2007 space-bending game, from the ground up, on—wait for it—a graphing calculator. In a display that puts the old calculator versions of Mario and Tetris to shame, Alex Marcolina posted to a gaming forum and reddit on Sunday about his re-engineered version of Portal. It took three years to build and cannot, due to resource constraints on TI-83/84 calculators, execute more than 16 kilobytes of code.

When Marcolina set out to rebuild Portal on TI’s graphing calculator platform, he was 17. Now, he’s a 20-year-old game design major at UC-San Diego who programs games mainly for computers, but likes to dabble in graphing calculator games on occasion because it’s “a fun challenge to make a game for a platform that is not supposed to even support games.”

The native language for the TI-83 and 84 calculators is called TiBasic. But when it comes to making games, creators favor a language called Axe, developed by a member of the calculator and PC gaming forum Omnimaga. Marcolina points out the syntax for Axe is “very loose, but it allows for good optimization in the translation from code to assembly.”

Calculating with Portals

To represent portal travel, Marcolina told Ars he had to create two separate sets of variables: x and y for regular space, and i and j for “Portal Space” (when the player is moving through a portal). i represents how far into the portal the player is, and j the side-to-side movement relative to the portal.

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from Ars Technica

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From Ars Technica: CA to app devs: get privacy policies or risk $2500-per-download fines

They had a month—and now it’s over. Any California mobile-app developers who don’t have a privacy policy obviously available to consumers need to get one and fast. If they don’t, they could be facing potentially massive fines: up to $2,500 per app download.

On October 30, California Attorney General Kamala Harris started notifying dozens of mobile-app developers that they weren’t in compliance with a state law that requires all “commercial online services” that gather personal information to have a clearly displayed privacy policy. State lawyers are going to send out a wave of “up to 100” letters warning the developers to get in shape or face those fines.

Since the law applies to any service provider who collects information from “any Californian,” it’s basically a regulation of the entire Internet. Earlier this year, Harris’ office made it clear that she intended to apply the law, called the California Online Privacy Protection Act, to the burgeoning world of mobile apps. In February, her office struck a deal with the big platforms, like Microsoft, Google, and Apple, to help get the apps they sell to be compliant. And in July, Harris created a specialized group of six lawyers to concentrate on enforcing privacy laws.

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from Ars Technica