That’s No Moon…

Image: John Booth

…it’s a big Welcome to Star Wars Celebration V, suspended in the main entrance of the Orange County Convention Center in Orlando, Florida.

Being a first-generation Star Wars fan, I’m clearly excited about the next four days, and as a GeekDad, I’m equally psyched about this being my daughter’s first time attending one of these celebrations of the George Lucas space saga.

And though my favorite aspect of these things is always just meeting and talking with fellow enthusiasts, I’m really looking forward to the interviews I’ve got planned for GeekDad, and I’ve already red-penned several of the panels and presentations and made notes of some of the must-see exhibits.

Four days of Star Wars, both old-school and shiny new? Count me in. All the special focus on the thirtieth anniversary of the Best Movie in the Saga? That’s just Hoth icing on a delicious AT-AT cake.

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Happy Birthday Woz!

The Über-geekdad? The Proto-geekdad? The Ur-geekdad? Whatever you’d like to call him, Steve “Woz” Wozniak is one of the geekiest dads around, and he’s turning 60 today!

To celebrate, some friends of Woz told us about this video they talked rockcookiebottom of Song-A-Day into making for his birthday. Watch and enjoy!

And Happy Birthday Woz from the GeekDad team!

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Cyglo Tires Will Help You Live Out Your Light Cycle Fantasy

©Copyright Night Bright Tyre Ltd and/or Rocket Base 2010

Just in time for the release of Tron: Legacy, a British firm is gearing up to release a bicycle tire embedded with LED bulbs. While these lighted rubber tubes won’t lay down trails for your opponents to crash into, they may very well keep you safe. Cyglo tires are intended to create a highly visible ring of light to maximize cyclists’ visibility on busy roads. No pricing has been set yet, but we understand that the flying disc to destroy MCP will be sold separately.

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Dork Tower Wednesday

Dork Tower #855 by John Kovalic

Read all the Dork Towers that have run on GeekDad.

Find the Dork Tower webcomic archives, DT printed collections, more cool comics, awesome games and a whole lot more at the Dork Tower Website.

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An Insider’s Look At The MoonBots Teams: Just Ducky

The following is a guest post from Will Pomerantz, Senior Director of Space Prizes at the X Prize Foundation.

This post is a continuation of my series of profiles for teams competing in the MoonBots educational competition. In brief, MoonBots challenges teams of students (aged 9-18, with adult ‘team captains’) to essentially mimic the requirements of the $30,000,000 Google Lunar X PRIZE using free CAD software like Lego Digital Designer and Google SketchUp and, eventually, with Lego Mindstorms kits. Over two hundred teams from around the world entered the competition; only twenty finalists remain. You can also check out profiles of team Shadowed Craters, which also features some additional background on the competition; of team WEBstormers, our South Africa finalists; and of the New Hartford RoboSpartans, who have partnered with one of the Google Lunar X Prize teams.

Today, let’s meet team Just Ducky. The first major surprise about this team is that their mascot is actually a dog, not a duck. Mary Rose (9th Grade), Jake (8th Grade), Jacob (8th Grade), and Steffan (8th Grade) along with adult coach Keith and canine mascot Bear (A Ducky mascot that is a dog named Bear? I’m getting confused) all hail from Woodbury, MN, while Lars (8th Grade) comes from Eleva, WI. Like many of the other MoonBots competitors we’ve discussed here, all of the members of Just Ducky except Jacob are veterans of the FIRST Lego League robotics competition. In face, that’s how they met. In the words of Coach Keith: “As part of the [2008 competition], FLL recommended contacting other teams that were working on similar project topics. Through the FLL online forum, Lars and Steffan answered each other’s online research inquiry, and the correspondence and friendship began. [Steffan's team] traveled to Wisconsin to meet [Lars's team] and share research ideas.” Just Ducky is built upon that friendship.

MoonBots is proving quite a challenge–more on that later–but the team members have the boundless energy and creativity of youth, so they’ve been tackling some interesting and challenging side projects as well. They’ve built a Lego Segway and a motion sensing joystick already, but their biggest side project has been launching their MoonBots on a model rocket: Continue Reading “An Insider’s Look At The MoonBots Teams: Just Ducky” »

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Review: Big Book Of Why Answers Hundreds Of Questions For Kids

Driving west on I-70 towards the Rocky Mountains last week, my kids took turns laughing and challenging each other to answer questions found in Time For Kids’ Big Book Of Why. “Oh gosh!” my daughter giggled after reading Why Does Pus Form On A Cut, “The Big Book Of Why is interesting and disgusting at the same time!” It’s tough to find better praise from a carload of eight-year-olds.

The book contains answers to many of the questions you hear from curious young minds: Why Are Some Insects Attracted To light? Why Does Temperature Change? Why Don’t Sweaty Hands Smell As Bad As Sweaty Feet? And many, many more — hundreds of questions are answered across ten categories: animals, earth, space, humans, people and places, history, science, technology, art and culture and sports.

Additionally, Big Book Of Why includes a few additional facts in the back of the book (did you know infants only blink about once each minute?), along with a glossary of some of the words found in its 192 pages and a short list of suggested Web sites and books for further reading.

Even my wife and I learned a thing or two and were reminded of a few more. All told, Big Book Of Why helped get us past more than 140 miles of corn and wheat — without any DVD players or fighting — and that’s worth a lot.

Disclosure: Time For Kids Magazine sent a review copy of this book to GeekDad.

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Zombie Dice For The iPhone Feels Like A Low Roll

Earlier this summer, I reviewed Zombie Dice, a new game from Steve Jackson Games. I’d stumbled across the game at PAX East and had an absolute blast playing it. The first day it went on sale, I was at my local game shop to pick up a copy and I’ve given a few as gifts over the past couple months.

So I was very excited when I learned that Zombie Dice was coming to the iPhone and iPod Touch. As excited as I was about the actual dice game, I’m sort of disappointed with the app. First of all, gameplay drags a bit. This can be fixed in future versions, but it feels like there are too many pauses that last longer than they should. It makes gameplay a bit disjointed.

On the upside, the basic game is free (iTunes link), so you can learn how to play the game if you’ve never seen it before. But to get any sort of multiplayer experience, you must upgrade for 99 cents. This allows up to eight players, if you don’t mind passing your phone around because there’s no networked play. Upgrading also gives you more animations, sounds and levels of difficulty, which is good because the basic version is far too easy.

Maybe this is just a game that doesn’t translate to a screen very well or maybe it’s just a game that plays better with friends (and all the zombie-like, groaning role playing that goes along with it), but Zombie Dice on the iPhone and IPod Touch feels flat. Hopefully future versions will be better.

Wired: Free app

Tired: Slow play, no network multiplayer, not as fun as original game

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GeekDad HipTrax #56

GeekDad HipTrax Logo by Dave Banks

GeekDad HipTrax Logo by Dave Banks

Since folks seemed to dig our video game themed episode from last month, we’ve decided to do another show in a similar vein. This time around we’re touching on a trio of game-focused songs from a bit outside the traditional VGM scene.

Somehow, amid crushing technical difficulties, we manage to feature:

“crimson dreams (feat. Beefy)” by Doctor Popular vs. crashfaster

From the riveting soundtrack of browser game Knifetank – an album entitled, fittingly enough, Knifetank (The Albumhole) – comes this reinterpretation of the game’s theme. Building on crashfaster’s original composition, Doctor Popular provides appropriately murderous vocals, as does our old friend Beefy. Snag the album from Bandcamp, and play the game at the official Knifetank site.

“Limit Break” by Dale Chase

Weighing in at a healthy 12 tracks worth of hip-hop-flavored awesome, Dale’s Limit Break is as fierce as the name implies. Intelligent, soulful and uplifting, it’s an amazing effort that showcases the artist at his best. Better yet, it’s available as a name-your-own price download from Bandcamp!

“If I Had a Rocket Launcher” by Insane Ian & Possible Oscar

From the new Insane Ian and the MusicIANs album The Last Arcade, “If I Had a Rocket Launcher” is a parody of Barenaked Ladies’ “If I Had a Million Dollars.” Thus it is not, I must explicitly point out, a cover of the Bruce Cockburn tune of the same name. If Ian’s brand of humorous geek rock floats your boat, be sure to check out his extended musical family at The FuMP.

Need more? Subscribe to the GeekDad podcast in iTunes (see the button on the sidebar), or directly through the RSS feed. You can also download GeekDad HipTrax #56 via this link.

The HipTrax theme song was created by Snake Eyes. Like BNL and Bruce Cockburn, he too is Canadian.

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Brain Candy Is A Sweet Collection of Trivia, Tests And Truths

I’ve always loved trivia, fact, and almanac types of books. Whether it’s because I have a Renaissance Soul, undiagnosed ADD or a similar condition, I’m not sure. But anything I can pick up and indulge in just a few of its hundreds of bite-size nuggets of information, I am sure to enjoy. And that’s how I made my way through Brain Candy: Science, Paradoxes, Puzzles, Logic, and Illogic to Nourish Your Neurons, the latest from Garth Sundem.

Sundem, who previously penned Geek Logik and The Geeks’ Guide To World Domination, has collected hundreds of essays, hacks, puzzles and paradoxes on the inner workings of the brain and entertainingly tied them all together in Brain Candy. Some of them you may recognize, like the Hermann grid, but many others will be new and interesting to you. Few entries exceed much more than a page and by the time you’re finished with Brain Candy, you’ll have learned all about game theory, logic fallacies and brain biology — but in fun and fascinating ways that keep you engaged and reading on to the next article before you know what you’re doing.

Along the way, you’ll learn about Adam Wilson, who telepathically tweets just by thinking in 140 characters or less, how hummingbirds are like Chuck Yeager when it comes to courtship (plus, other economics of mating), how country music kills, and the relationship between engineering, autism and Lego. Plus, Brain Candy is packed with dozens of quizzes, tests, exercises and advice to help you train your brain. Where else can you learn about the latest neurological studies and psychological research on one page and glance over to read about insane and inbred European imperators on the next? It’s definitely an engrossing, quirky and fun book!

Disclosure: Three Rivers Press sent a review copy of Brain Candy to GeekDad.

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Pioneeer One is Crowd-Funded Sci-Fi to Check Out

Pioneer One is a done-on-the-cheap Internet-only series going the crowd-sourced route. The pilot below was shot for only $6,000 (with a lot of donated effort), and they’re raising funds to shoot the rest of the series. Indeed, they’ve already met their early goals and the series will continue shooting. Check out the pilot episode below, and then consider helping them out.

Found via Warren Ellis.

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