Spaceman Stickers
Finally, after much waiting the honourable spaceman (and all his pals) have arrived today! It's been a lot of fun making spaceman our iconic logo so far and now he has a physical place on laptops, street lamps, underground carriages, pool tables, bus stops and lockers.
Sorry for the fluff, the stickers have little teeny pieces of paper stuck to them where they were die-cut. I just threw them on the scanner and hit GO!
WIP Space Illustration
I thought maybe it was a little much showing this illustration so early in its development, but then I thought, why not. It's been so long since we've actually been able to share things with you we should make it up some how.
So, this is part one of some kind of space illustration I'm working on. Right now there's no ship and that car was just plain lame-sauce so I decided to draw over it.
Captain Piccard Takes Flight
Well, not exactly. Solar impulse is a project engineered by Captain Piccard and his team, a project that on paper sounds impossible: Perpetual flight.
But that's exactly what Piccard aims to achieve with his ground breaking, ultra light-weight Solar Impulse (pictured) which recently managed to get off the ground using purely solar energy.
In it's current form, it's obeying test flight conditions, travelling 1,150 feet just 1 metre above ground level but this is certainly laudable, incredibly so since it's proves in these early stages that a grand idea such as perpetual flight is possible. As long as the sun keeps rising.
"What does the future hold?" is a question I always ask myself when reading about technological feats such as this and it's simple: fuel-less flying. Once the technology has been further developed, imagine flying without impacting the environment whatsoever. It's not impossible, it's certainly futuristic and it's already beginning to happen.
Hats off to Captain Piccard.
Playing as Sherlock Holmes?
We never let a great game go un-noticed on our blog, so, something you can spend hours pouring over and enjoying multiplayer with your friends over facebook is 221b.sh — it's the prelude story to the upcoming Sherlock Holmes movie that, considering how much time I really do spend in Baker Street, am really excited to finally watch come Boxing day.
Let us know how you get on with it, we’ve had a blast so far.
Play 221b.sh now (requires a Facebook account)
The NEW Johnny Two Shoes
We've just finished the transition to the new and improving Johnny Two Shoes look and feel. You can tell from the navigation that we've re-focused, our games take pride of place, then it's the players (you guys) and finally a place where we can all chat and share fun internet things, our custom forum.
For all unregistered players, there's a lot different. Registration is now a lot more comprehensive, it will guide you through what medals are and how to earn them along with introducing new registrations on the player page so existing players can get involved a lot quicker.
Once notes are introduced, the process of making friends and getting new players involved will be a lot easier and it's something we're really excited about.
We hope you enjoy the visual update, please, if you notice anything funky then get in contact with us in these comments, in the forum, via email or twitter and we'll happily straighten them out.
Game: Small Worlds
Small worlds is a game of discovery and of suspense. You start off knowing nothing and the game is presented in an 8-bit format, revealing the image of the level as you play. Use the arrow keys to jump around and let me know your thoughts.
Design Transition
Today I will be transitioning the site to the new design, if you don't know what I'm talking about then you'll see soon enough.
If the site looks funky at any point, you might need to hard refresh with CMD+R (OSX) or CTRL + F5 (Windows).
See you on the other side!
UPDATE: I've hit some rendering issues between Safari and Firefox, the two browsers that are usually on my side. I'll have to re-think my current method to get the design looking consistent across those browsers.
You can take a look what I mean by checking out this image (Safari text is too low).
UK Disconnected
At a time when internet innovation is sky rocketing, the UK government is trying to introduce something called the Digital Economy Bill. Sounds pretty harmless? It's actually a terrible nightmare in disguise and it will hamper innovation pretty sharpish.
One of those bills that tries to slip through government at the behest of media conglomerates, what does it mean for you? If anyone is even accused of file-sharing in your house, your internet can be terminated without notice and you'll be slapped with a £50,000 fine. They don't even need evidence.
ISP's would effectively be forced to spy on our internet traffic, ISP's that fail to co-operate will be smacked with a £250,000 fine. Ouch.
The tragedy is, this is just the beginning.
"Peter Mandelson, the unelected Business Secretary, would have to power to make up as many new penalties and enforcement systems as he likes. And he says he's planning to appoint private militias financed by rightsholder groups who will have the power to kick you off the internet, spy on your use of the network, demand the removal of files or the blocking of websites, and Mandelson will have the power to invent any penalty, including jail time, for any transgression he deems you are guilty of. And of course, Mandelson's successor in the next government would also have this power" — Cory, Boing Boing
And in somehow if that's not enough, under the same act the government will also introduce age ratings on all boxed video games aimed at children aged 12 or over.
There's no way that this is a forward thinking goverment, you might as well disconnect the UK from the internet altogether — as soon as what we say is spied upon, controlled and people are jailed without evidence I'll no longer feel like a citizen of the modern world.
You can help stop this bill going through by telling your MP just what you think of the Digital Economy Bill, a great website called WriteToThem is set-up to make the process as easy as possible, just enter your postcode, select your local MP, type out a succinct message and hit send.
Thanks for your help, if we stop this we've averted a digital disaster.
Grab and Share with TinyGrab
We all love to show each other things we find on the internet or on our computer but because most websites stop what's known as image leeching, often, broken images come back and it's all a bit of a nightmare.
Enter TinyGrab, a small piece of software for Windows and Mac that let's you screengrab any part of what you can see (like Jing), only it uploads to the internet and gives you a url you can just paste into a browser/forum/blog without having to press more than one key.
What's more, it's FREE to use it for 10 images a day — if you want lifetime premium use, with FTP functionality and file management it's only £10 to buy.
Flash Player 10.1 Pre-Release
All our games on this website run under the guise of Flash Player, so it's always good to have the latest and greatest to squeeze the best out of your hardware, but remember, this is pre-release software and it is likely not free of bugs (although, you can argue that flash player is never free of bugs).
If you want to submit yourself to the testing process at the possible benefit of a performance boost, go ahead and download the latest Flash Player, version 10.1 from Adobe Labs. We have.
Get Flash Player 10.1 from Adobe Labs
UPDATE: Just tested this new plugin under OSX and I'm seeing a massive performance increase, Anandtech has posted results from Windows at it looks to be over 100% performance boost in some cases.