With Christmas in a couple of days there’s been a good amount of great memories being shared amongst my fellow geek brethren. I turned to my fellow PGM compadres and asked them to share their favorite geeky gifts that Santa delivered to them from a more simple, easier and fun time. Enjoy, have a Very Geeky Christmas (or whatever you celebrate) and feel free to share your own memories in the comments. We’ll be back next week with Show #00016 when we take a look back at our favorite things from 2010.
From Kevin:
Even now as a 32 year-old adult I’ll pick up the occasional package addressed to me that’s sitting under the tree and give it a shake. I don’t know what I expect to hear and tell from that act, it’s not like I’m getting a bunch of toys any more. I guess it’s just something that’s been ingrained in me since I was a kid: sleuthing around the gift pile trying to recognize the exact dimensions and shapes of certain things that I asked Santa to get me that year. My mother knew I did this early on and when my grandmother got me Zelda the Christmas it came out she put inside a huge box so that I wouldn’t know it was a NES game. (more…)
Something tells me we’re going to be seeing a lot more like this in the next few years. Personally I’d love to see what this type of technology could do on the Las Vegas strip or amusement parks. The application may be limited (so as not to become passe’) but hot damn after watching this video for 9 minutes mouth agape I’m excited to see where this all goes.
This whole project started off rather simply. I needed a new coffee table and everything out there was either too expensive or too boring. I wanted something unique but didn’t want to pay an arm and a leg. Not sure how it happened but the idea of building a table out of a pinball machine struck me one night and got the gears turning. The biggest problem is that I’m not exactly what you would call “handy” with power tools. Luckily my grandfather is and usually when I bring a cool idea like this to him we build it together.
So off I went to design and figure out how to cram a pinball playfield into my living room in the form of a table. The first thing I did was find an old beat up pinball table online. I searched over Craigslist, local classifieds and eBay and finally found one there for less than $50. It was just the playfield from a pinball game called Tri-Zone, which was perfect for me since I didn’t want to destroy a working or refurbishable pinball machine… they ain’t exactly rolling off the production line much these days.
We talked about Robert Kirkman’s excellent comic series back in Show #00003 and now you can check out the trailer for AMC’s upcoming small screen adaptation. Between Breaking Bad, Mad Men and now Rubicon, AMC has proven they know how to make some damn good TV. Let’s hope that keeps going.
Two interesting videos for this this Friday. In the first we see the popular and near-classic board game Settlers of Catan made digital and awesome for the Microsoft Surface touch screen table. Um, I want one of these like yesterday.
In the second video we have a real world rendition of the high speed Playstation racer Wipeout. This setup uses cardboard, r/c cars and a tilting arcade cabinet. It is also awesome. Have a nice weekend everyone!
