This is Sand

All of us who were once kids (which is all of us) have made those sand art bottles, where you fill a bottle with layers of colored sand. Well, this is the digital version and equally as addictive. Bring your inner 8-year-old artist back to life and play in this sandbox. Oh, and don't forget to check out my piece in the gallery. :)

thisissand.com

1-UP Mushroom Burger

Combine the love of old-school NES paraphernalia with grilling in your back yard on a warm summer day and what do you get? The 1-UP Mushroom Burger. Quite simply, this is a burger that looks like the 1-UP mushroom from Super Mario Bros. This Instructable is for vegetarian mushroom burgers but if you're as carnivorous as myself and don't mind missing out on the irony of your 1UP mushroom burger consisting of actual mushroom, you can use plain ol' hamburger meat instead. And you thought grilling was for nerds!

"1UP Mushroom" Mushroom Burger! - Instructables

Indie Video Game Designers Finally Catch a Break

Here's a great article on how game console companies like Nintendo, Microsoft and even Sony are doing things to help independent game developers make their mark. I'm so glad I'm an applications developer and not a game developer. You guys have it pretty rough.

Indie video game designers break through - CNN.com

WARNING FOREVER!!!!

WELCOME TO OUR FIRST INSTALLMENT OF CRAZY HAPPY FUN POST!!!!!! This is the first of a new segment of posts that will bring you some of our our favorite crazy, happy and/or fun things from Japan.

Bored? Want some crazy Japanese video game fun from 2004? Go download Warning Forever.

Daily Link Roundup of Gamers and Non-gamers

Lighting for LEGO Sanyo Xacti DMX-CA8 water-proof to 10 feet Knife Hooks Keep Up The Trend Of Dangerous Household Items 7-Inch LCD Monitor Tries To Make Your Wii Portable Weekend Project: Kitchen Floor Vacuum Former Home Made Moped Runs On Fresh Air RIAA's lawsuit against homeless man not going entirely smoothly Gamers More Social than Non-Gamers -- Study Wii Fit to be in short Supply Super Mario Theme Played On Wine Bottles By RC Car

Daily Link Roundup of TV Stands and Hulus

Ex-Googler Launches Search Engine Community, Topicle Automatic Etch-A-Sketch Clock The Idea Behind "Can Google Hear Me" Thanko Motorized TV Stand For Getting Your Wii On - There are lots of Wii gadgets popping up. Oil paintings inspired by Internet memes If It Doesn't Rot, Don't Eat It - I guess that means no more Mountain Dew. Asus MS71 - USB Flash Drive and Mouse - Good combo. CSS Minifier : A simplified and performant version Bringing down an ASP.NET Application for updates Hulu to offer lulu of a video selection

Daily Link Roundup of MacGyvers and Kijijis

Google Sees Fifty Times More Traffic From iPhones Than Others Manage Your Del.icio.us Account from Your Desktop with Netlicious Motorola Dips Bluetooth Headset in Gold and Rolls it in Diamonds - Made for the Paris Hilton wannabes. Watch out Craigslist, Sister Site Kijiji Is Taking Off. - Our first look was promising. Rinspeed Creates Car that Drives Underwater Can Scotch Tape Really Boost iPhone Signal Strength? - Picked for the awesome pic of MacGyver. BBtv: Speed Cabling -- competitive ethernet detangling sport. PDFEscape: Free, Easy, Web-Based PDF Editing Add On-Screen Display and Key Triggers to iTunes with iTunesControl - Getting this today. CompUSA Employees Jerking Off As They Await Store's Death Pocket-Sized Guitar Hero from Basic Fun Lets You Rawk Out on the Subway - We all know a Guitar Hero junkie.

Daily Link Roundup of Crates and Players

UK tries to sneak in redonkulous new anti-piracy legislation Swift does mobile blogging for the LEGO generation My Weight Loss Coach For The Nintendo DS To Include Pedometer Accessory - Maybe our nation will lose some weight. Who Owns What: Keep Track of Web 2.0 Mergers Casulo: Complete Furniture in a Crate - I want one. Send Text Messages With The D:Scribe Pen Bill Gates gives up on Facebook Blackberry Email Server Malfunctions, Takes Down User Email and Net Browsing MySpace Quietly Launches Games Site Going Paperless at Home? - What paper do you "have" to keep? Energizer's "Light on Demand" LED Rechargeable Lamps Dynaflex Powerball Docking Station Seems Like Cheating JotYou: Location-Based Mobile Phone Messaging - Never again forget the milk. Sick: Heart-Shaped MP3 Player For Devoted Lovers of Tastelessness - Perfect Valentine's gift for YOUR MOM! Microsoft Responds - It's not over.

Daily Link Roundup of RFIDs and Halitosis

Funny story about computer confiscation in Denmark Finally, a Web-based PDF Viewer That Does Not Suck (Issuu) Ford truck with RFID tool tracker - Useful application of RFID. Socket Sense Expanding Power Strip FBI to build $1Bn biometrics database Facebook to Punish Stupid Applications, Reward Good Ones E-Paper Music Score Concept Targeted At Musicians Lego iPod Speaker Relieve Blackberry Thumb Pains With The Xtensor - HAHAHAHAHAHA. Review: THX Razer Mako Advanced Desktop Speakers Bring The Sonic Ruckus Halitosis Detector - Do You Smell Something? - Again, HAHAHAHAHA. Myst Fades Away

Daily Link Roundup of Radiation Detectors, Solar NES, and a Big Digg Fix

As a new feature of the Daily Link Roundup, we're going to start highlighting the best and most important articles of the day in bold. That way, if you only have a second or two to check today's links you'll know where to start!

Nanotubes Help Advance Brain Tumor Research The "Work From Home" Generation Cell Phone Sensors Detect Radiation To Thwart Nuclear Terrorism Last.fm Offers Limited Full-Track Streaming and Moves Towards Subscriptions - The key word here being limited. Solar Powered NES and Gameboy Emulator: Everything Included Sega Dream DX Is Just Like A Real Dog, Only Not Really Virgin Galactic’s SpaceShipTwo Officially Unveiled - The first commercial passenger spaceship. Lindo Works Like A Desk Attached To Your Hips Digg Changes Algorithm: No More Group Voting Up Stories - Hopefully it actually works this time. Is Comcast really blocking P2P? EFF + SF Weekly conclude: yeah. - My conclusion: duh. Get SMS Alerts for Your Favorite RSS Feeds with Pingie Playyoo: YouTube For Mobile Games Goes Beta Wall Cleats - Another Tool For The War On Cables BedJump.com - Hotel Bed Jumping - Not exactly tech, but neat pics of people jumping on hotel beds. Laser-cut book is a scale model of artist's house Find Popular Google Reader Shared Items with ReadBurner Use Apropos to Learn New Terminal Commands

Daily Link Roundup

Today's Daily Link Roundup is dedicated to Wei Wenhua, and the inalienable rights he exercised by blogging.

CES: USB Massage Mouse - Yes, that's massage, not message. CES: I-mu I-Jerry 3D Tetris in Flash - One dimention more difficult than regular tetris. Lend Me Your Ears, And The World Will Sound Very Different - Understanding our understanding of our acoustic environment. Silence Your Xbox 360 with a New Fan Hands-On With One Of Those USB Fingerprint Reader Thingies City made of shiny disposable plastic objects from $0.99 stores Chinese Blogger Beaten To Death By Government Officials Cell Phone Reception Bars Are Meaningless Car Hacking with Gale Banks - Visit the workshop of this multiple land speed record-holder. Roly-Poly Pot Tips Over When Plants Need Water

Daily Link Roundup

ATAX Survival Tool The MP3 speaker jacket - Although jackets integrating MP3 players are nothing new, this is the first we’ve seen that makes wearers look like they’ve just washed up from a shipwreck. CES: Big, Bad-Ass Speakers We Wish We Could Afford Review: Eye Fi 2GB SD Card Wins CES Award For a Good Reason Nintendo cross-stitches Tiny Camera Stand Is Flexible, Fits On Your Keychain Dreamflyer - Personal Flight Simulator Machine Network Solutions Using Questionable Tactic to Sell More Domain Names - aka DO NOT SEARCH FOR DOMAIN NAMES THROUGH NETWORK SOLUTIONS! Import Your Hotmail Messages into Gmail Nintendo Wii Mii-Shaped Chocolates for Valentine's Day - The figures aren't based on your own Mii avatars... Sorry. Steal Download Music From Any Shared iTunes Library with OurTunes Flyby Of Mercury Coming Up In NASA's Messenger Mission - Exploring some of the last unexplored terrain in the inner solar system at 141 thousand mph! Video of people from 1 to 100 hitting a drum - Not exactly tech-centric, but rather neat. Swedish MPs call for legalized file-sharing - Seven Swedish Members of Parliament from the Moderate Party have written a stirring call for the legalization of file-sharing. CES best of show winners from ZDNet.com

Daily Link Roundup

Today brings us some gorgeously geeky artwork, a brew baking Bender and (of course) more new neat gadgets from CES.

"Supersonic" Zeppelin-Shaped Theremin by Björn Schülke - Visit the link to his site for more geek-savvy sculptures. Take Screenshots of Complete Web Pages with Screengrab (Firefox) CES: LG Watch Phone Prototypes - A watch phone that doesn't suck? Saitek’s New Cyborg Gaming Keyboard Lets You Assign Colors To Key Zones CES: Flir's Predator-Vision Security Cam Defends Conference Hall Table The beer brewing Bender replica - Robots and beer! Naps Help Your Memory, New Study Suggests CES: Hands-on with the Philips 'WOW vx' 3D Display - True 3D without the glasses. CES: Panasonic's Enormous 150" Plasma TV Dwarfs All Competitors Case holds stun gun and iPod Bombshell: Google and Facebook Join DataPortability.org - The group is working on a variety of projects to foster an era of Data Portability - where users can take their data from the websites they use to reuse it elsewhere. Sceners Threaten to Destroy BitTorrent, “One Step at a Time” TV star publishes bank details in anti-privacy editorial, gets ripped off

Top 5 Articles of 2007

2007 has been a great year for the Grinn Blog. We've had some great feedback from all of you, and launched two new series articles, This Weekends Tech Deals, and Historic Tech from Today. But the articles that keep you guys coming back are exactly the ones we wanted this blog to be all about: The articles that help you be more productive with your tech, and keep the tech from keeping you down! With that I bring you a review of the top 5 most popular articles of 2005:

1. Incorporate Google Calendar Into Outlook
Published way back in April of 2006, this still remains our most popular article. It is a detailed how-to for syncing your Google Calendar with Microsoft Outlook using a program called Remote Calendars.

2. Add to Google Calendar by Talking Into Your Cell
You guys sure like your Google Calendars. This article introduces our Jott2GCal application that allows you to add (and now retrieve) Google Calendar events using the popular Jott service. Since then Jott has released their own Google Calendar implementation, but you guys seem to like ours, so we'll keep developing it!

3. Your Connection to the Server Has Been Lost
We had a problem and had a heck of a time finding the solution. So, when we did resolve the issue, we posted about it to share that solution with you. This article serves to correct the infamous "Your connection to the server has been lost" issue with Battlefield 2142, and apparently it serves it's purpose well because it claims the #3 spot on our list.

4. How to Fix the Azureus Disk Read Error
Yet another case of us sharing in an issue. We found a compatibility issue between the popular P2P application Azureus and Google Desktop. Here, we tell you the simple measures you can take to resolve this issue.







5. 10 REALLY Weird Instructables
If you have yet to visit "The world's biggest show-and-tell", instructables.com, you should start with our list of the wierdest. Does anyone else find a list making the list of our 5 most popular articles a little ironic?

Your connection to the server has been lost

If you come by Grinn Productions around 2:00 pm, you're likely to find our software developers spending their lunch break playing Battlefield 2142. Although "Hot Pockets and Battlefield" is now the routine, it used to be "Hot Pockets and figure out what the hell is wrong with Battlefield." For some reason, my machine would randomly get dropped from whatever server I was on. Sometimes it was right when I connected, sometimes fifteen minutes into the game. After extensive Googling we were eventually able to get the thing stable. My problem had something to do with a little thing called "CPU Affinity", but it seems people reporting the same issue found their solution elsewhere.

Below we've compiled a list of all the various solutions to this problem that seem to have worked for someone out there in internet-land, starting with the solution that worked for us. Trying each of these one at a time will help you deduce which solution (or solutions) is the fix for your problem.

• If you're running multiple CPU's or a dual-core CPU such as the Intel's Core 2 Duo, or our AMD Athlon 62 X2, you might be experiencing the same issue as us! To correct this problem:
1. Start Battlefield 2142
   
2. Hit Alt+Tab on your keyboard to get back to your desktop while BF2142 is running.
3. Pull up your Task Manager by right-clicking on the task bar and selecting Task Manager, or hitting Ctrl+Alt+Del on your keyboard.
   
4. Under your Processes tab, find your BF2.exe. Right–click on it and select “Set Affinity...”.
   
5. In the resulting dialog you will see CPU0, CPU1, and perhaps several other CPU checkboxes. Each enabled checkbox represents an individual CPU core. Uncheck every checkbox other than CPU0.
6. Hit OK and close your Task Manger.
7. Go back into the game. You'll have to do this every time you start BF2142, but you'll be able to play!
• Manually update PunkBuster by clicking on the Software Updates link on this page.
• Disable any firewalls you are running. Apparently you should try disabling the Windows Firewall as well, however having it enabled doesn't seem to cause me any issues. Direct from EA, here are some instructions for disabling the Windows Firewall:
1. Double click "My Network Places" on your Desktop or in your Start Menu
2. Click "View Network Connections"
3. Right click on "Local Area Connection" and Select "Properties"
4. Click the "Advanced" tab
5. Make sure to uncheck the box under "Internet Connection Firewall"
• If you're behind a hardware firewall or router, try circumventing it altogether by connecting your PC directly to your cable modem. Although this may seem impractical, if you don't have issues while directly connected, you've probably found the source of your problem.
• Be sure to open the following ports on your firewall and/or router:
  UDP 27900 Client Server
  UDP 29900 Client Server Standard Server 29910
  TCP 80 Client Server Standard port for Gamespy
  TCP 29900 Client Sever
  TCP 29901 Not in use yet
  TCP 29900 Standard port 29920
  UDP 27901
  UDP 27900
  TCP 28910
  TCP 4711 4711
  UDP 55123
  UDP 55124
  UDP 55125
  UDP 1500-4999
  UDP 16567
  You may be able to find instructions for configuring your specific model of router here.
  
• EA also suggests attempting a reset of your Network connection:
1. Click on Start and then Run.
2. In the Open box, type in: winipcfg
3. Click "Ok"
4. When the Windows IP Configuration box comes up, Click "Release".
5. Then Click "Renew"
6. Then close the Windows IP Configuration box
• Disable VoIP in BF2142.
  
• Turn the settings for Textures or other video details down a notch.
• Disable any anti-spyware apps while you're playing online.
• Call your broadband internet provider and have them test your connection.

I almost forgot: If you're on the market for a copy of Battlefield (or any game for that matter,) I'd suggest checking out alphaleap.com. They're able sell brand new games in the box for a fraction of the price of retailers because they sell them through a distributor in Bangkok. The shipping takes a while, but if you ask they'll email you the key before they ship. That way you can download the game via newsgroups or torrent, using your valid key to register the game, and be playing that same day.

I hope all of this helps someone out there. See you in the game!