I’m normally not that easily fascinated by art, especially be the form of art found on the Internet. This art project however caught me by surprise. I found reference to the picture on Digg where it was advertised as “The Most Awesome Pic EVER”. My first thought was of course that someone was again using the term awesome to draw attention to his article. This might have worked for the first post on Digg with the term awesome in it but Digg is flooded with it nowadays.

I enjoyed the original Lemmings game on my Commodore Amiga 500 but lost interest when the series evolved. Let me explain the rules in case you never heard about Lemmings before. Your task is to complete all the levels of the game by directing enough Lemmings from the entrance of the level into the level exit.

The sites Torrentfreak and Beautiful Crime announced an Anti-DRM T-Shirt competition a while ago and all entries to the competition have been posted on the Torrentfreak website. All 46 T-Shirt designs can be seen and everyone may vote for their favorite T-Shirt design. Who would have thought that this competition would get such a large amount of entrants ?

You can find some really clever designs among the 46 and I would like to display the five designs that I liked the most here at Ghacks. Just head over to the Torrentfreak website to take a look at all of the designs. The winning design will receive a price of $250, the second one of $100 and the third a price of $50.

Desktop Nexus is a site with a wide variety of high resolution and widescreen wallpapers. The wallpapers are divided into popular categories such as Entertainment, Video Games and Cars. Each category displays the most popular, the newest and a selection of random wallpapers from that category next to a tag cloud and sub categories that define the selection even further.

One main feature of Desktop Nexus is that wallpapers are available in a lot of different formats that suit full screen and widescreen monitors. Resolutions start at 800×600 for full screen monitors and end at 1600×1200 there. The widescreen wallpapers start at 1280×800 and 2560×1600.

Trackmania Nations is a free racing game for Windows that distinguishes itself from normal racing games by introducing a number of additional elements to the tracks. Do you remember Stunt Car Racer for instance ? The game where you were driving through loopings and made big jumps across the screen.

This game introduces all those elements again to a racing game but provides normal tracks as well. You may start with the 90 solo missions that remind me a little bit of the Gran Turismo missions. They are divided into Beginner, Advanced and Expert Training missions and award medals if you beat the tracks in a certain amount of time. This alone is very challenging.

If you are looking for a new site that offers a lot of high resolution wallpapers you should take a look at the web album that is offered on the No Pixel website. Resolutions go up to 1900×1200 with a lot of widescreen wallpapers in the resolution 1680×1050. The majority is showing natural images like landscapes, plants, animals and buildings.

One nice feature is the slideshow. If you move your mouse over the current image three buttons are shown on the top of it. The play button starts the slideshow which is loading one image after the other while the other two buttons are for manually navigating the pictures.

A collection of the best photos published on Flickr in 2006 with an option to vote for all of them in a voting process that reminds me of those hot or not type of sites.

Your first option is to take a look at how the photos have been rated by other users. Please be aware that all of the photos on the site are the best of 2006 and that the rating on this external site is only a rating of good photos. It can happen that a photo gets only 1 point which means that is is bad considered to a photo with a higher rating but still great if you consider all photos on Flickr for this year.

If you are looking for a great roleplaying game for the weekend you should definitely take a look at the excellent Last Scenario game. It reminds me a lot of those old SNES and Sega Genesis roleplaying games that were so much fun to play back then.

Last Scenario puts you in charge of a self proclaimed town protector named Hilbert who is nothing more than a boy at the beginning of the game who is soon to become the savior of the world. If this sounds a little bit to cliched for your taste you should wait and see how the story unfolds.

The Wii is a huge success story for Nintendo. It is selling better than the Microsoft Xbox 360 and the Sony Playstation 3 which is mostly caused by it’s low price and the new way of controlling the action on screen using motion sensing techniques.

The only thing that is really a bit lacking is the supply of new good games. I’m personally a bit concerned about the amount of crappy conversions from other systems that make their appearance on the Wii. If I would have to name the games that are really fun at this point I would probably be able to name 4-5 the most.

I’m not watching a lot of TV. Just about two hours in a week which is reduced to about zero when the football season ends. I do have to watch sometimes though when my girlfriend wants to watch a show or something and I happened to see an advertisement recently that I liked.

Most advertisements are just annoying and crappy but this one was different. It was for a chocolate snack called Kinder Bueno and the ad used a technique that blended a real actor – Collien Fernandes – into a cartoon. What really caught my attention was not the actress but the song of the ad.

I was always a little bit obsessed with Ninjas since the first Shinobi game by Sega. This continued with Tenchu on the Playstation and numerous Ninja games and movies. It was always my childhood dream to become a stealthy deadly assassin, hehe. Well, I found a nice – but short – flash game that lets you play, I think you guessed it already, a Ninja.

You have to make it through ten levels to rescue a woman (princess, geisha ?). To do this you have to cross the levels and beat all the enemy guards who are defending the captured woman. You only have a limited assortment of techniques at your disposable. Amongst them are the infamous wallrun, the backflip and the quick short slash.

The following fix should help users who do have problems with some virtual console games for the Nintendo Wii that display only a black screen after starting them while the sound remains normal. This does not work in all occasions but should work if you get the Wii menu when you press Home and works only for games that received an update for the interlaced mode.

Try out the following to see if this fixes the issue. Start the game normally until you see the black screen. Connect the Nunchuck to the Wiimote and press Home to see the menu options. Now press A + 2 + Z together which should result in a short “ping-like” sound.

This should have activated the interlaced mode. Leave the menu and you should see the normal game screen and not the black screen anymore. To change the mode again press A + 1 + Z using the same method as above.

Speedruns are an extreme form of playing a game. The speedrunner tries to beat the game in the least amount of time possible by avoiding as much of the gameplay as possible without using cheats or bugs. You find good and bad speedruns all over the net and I decided to post my personal top 5 speedruns.

I always thought it was a rumor that someone would be able to beat Resident Evil 1 for instance with just a knife but one of the players does that. You are about to witness some great skills in the following games: Resident Evil 1, Super Mario World, Halflife 2, Goldeneye and Fallout 2.

If you are looking for a rather unique screensaver for Windows 2000, XP or Windows Vista you should take a look at Flitter which is a mashup from Flickr and Twitter at the moment. What it does is that it is retrieving realtime data from both Flickr and Twitter to display those when the screensaver is active.

You obviously need a computer that is connected to the Internet to use this screensaver but it is very well worth it. The default setting for the screensaver pulls data from the public timelines of both Flickr and Twitter but you have the possibility to custom this further.

I’m always looking for new free softwares out there and although I already found an automatic wallpaper changer called Wallpaper Juggler I decided to give the wallpaper changer ScrollWall a try. It is always good to be able to choose from more than one program that has a similar functionality.

ScrollWall offers a very clean interface with only a few options to choose from. You can choose if you want to stretch, center or tile wallpapers that do not fit your resolution and select the frequency of the change.

Here is something that I found on Youtube and thought that it looked incredibly entertaining. We all know the drill that we are forced to watch dozens of advertisements in cinemas before the movies start which becomes increasingly boring if you go to the cinemas regularly. The title of the video is Human Joysticks (NewsBreaker Live interactive cinema game) which describes exactly what this is all about. Take some motion sensing cameras, a breakout video game, a big screen and an enthusiastic crowd and you are about to witness the funniest breakout game of all times.

Yes ! It is official. Blizzard announced that their next game is indeed Starcraft 2, the successor of the best real time strategy game that I ever played. The game looks surprisingly similar to Starcraft 1 which is a good sign in my opinion. Starcraft was so perfectly balanced and had such a great gameplay that it would be a stupid move to change elements only because it looks more like a new game and not an update to the orginial computer game.

The first news about Microsoft possibly banning modified Xbox 360 consoles from the Xbox Live service started to emerge yesterday in some known Xbox 360 forums. It is possible to modify the firmware of the Xbox 360 drive to be able to play backups which of course includes pirated games. There has been no official confirmation from Microsoft about this issue but the frequency of the posts can only lead to the conclusion that Microsoft is actually banning Xbox 360 systems with modded firmwares.

I grew up playing boardgames like Risk, Monopoly and Trivial Pursuit and witnessed that board games evolved almost as much as computer games did. I would like to introduce one of my favorite online boardgames websites where you can play about 50 excellent boardgames online. Boardgames include Settlers of Catan, Carcassone and Thurn and Taxis. All boardgames of the year and of course playable in multiplayer.

I think it is really fascinating that Coca Cola is doing another major promotion in Europe teaming up once again with iTunes and giving away 2 billion songs on iTunes along with other goodies such as tickets to concerts and iPods for codes that can be found in Coca Cola bottles. You had to use four codes to be able to download one song from iTunes in the last promotion and the new one will surely use the system as well. It should be noted that only selected songs could be downloaded in the last promotion.

I really enjoy the shows from this guy. He is reviewing all those bad video games that came out for classic gaming systems such as the Nintendo Entertainment System and the Sega Genesis. It is pure fun to see how he bashes the video games into oblivion showing lots of in game footage. The technique behind his videos is getting better as well which makes it a pleasure to watch his rants. Be advised that this is not really suitable for minors.

When I first saw the Vpod.tv homepage I thought I was seeing a Joost light version on the web. A fullscreen video of the infamous nunchuck guy was shown followed by several others. A menu would appear when I moved the mouse cursor over the lower region of the website showing the next videos on line and giving me some options to switch channels, skip videos and to open a secondary menu with more options.

I always wanted to have one of those lightsabers since the first time that I was watching Star Wars back then when the first movie came out. We used all sorts of replacements like flashlights, sticks and swords to play Star Wars as kids, the rest was done by our imagination. Using those replacements did not make a big difference for us kids but it surely would feel awkward to do this as an adult.

I read about the offer to give away Bejeweled Deluxe for free on Sunday afternoon and thought it would be limited to their Mother’s day promotion and thus decided not to post about it. Apparently though this offer is still valid and will be valid until May 23rd. If you ever wanted to grab a free copy of Bejeweled Deluxe you could do so now.

The Stardoll is definitely a great playground for children between the age of 7 and 16 but also suitable for everyone else who likes to dress and play around with paper dolls. The site offers two main areas. The first can be accessed without registering to Stardollls. You can pick a celebrity, e.g. Johnny Depp, Kylie Minogue or Heidi Klum and use a wardrobe to to outfit them. If you take Johnny you could dress him with the same clothes that he was wearing in The Pirates of the Caribbean or with a multitude of other clothes.

I thought it would be really nice if I would learn a little bit more about you, my regular and casual readers. Instead of simply asking for introductions I had the idea to ask a weekly question which I would answer as well. I certainly know the demographics by taking a look at my site stats but that is not what I’m interested in.

The feature to add your own visual styles to Windows XP is locked by default and you need to replace the original uxtheme.dll with a patched unlocked one to be able to add visual styles to the operating system. Download the patched uxtheme.dll from Softpedia and do the following. Rename the original file which can be found in the system32 folder of your Windows XP installation to uxtheme.dll.old and move the downloaded version into system32. You will have to restart your computer afterwards before the changes are recognized.

Finding great flash games is not as easy as it sounds. I found the game The Last Stand at the donation coder blog and was blown away by the gameplay. It looks like your typical shoot all incoming enemies type of games also known as base defender gamers. At second look it introduces several strategic elements that make every approach different. You have to defend your barricades against Zombies at night and search for better weapons and other survivors at daylight. The goal is to hold out as long as possible and hope that someday a rescue team will come and get you out of this situation.

If you thought that you would be starring at those boring LCD or Plasma displays for the next ten years you will now be proven wrong. Some displays look incredible cool. I personally would love to lay my hands on the Samsung 12mm thick LCD display, the Toshiba Interactive 3D Display and the Touchless Touchscreen. I decided to only include my favorites from the ten future display technologies and suggest that you head out to the original website who posted the list to see the others.

The world’s best Usenet provider Giganews has managed it once again to set another milestone by creating a software called Giganews Accelerator which uses header download compression to download the headers of the newsgroup up to 10 times faster. Header downloads are the most annoying part when it comes to using the Usenet. It sometimes takes longer to download the headers of a popular newsgroup than to download a 700 Megabytes file with my 16 Mbit connection.

Did you ever come upon a video which seemed to tell an unbelievable story but still made you almost believe that it was true ? I experienced this when I was watching the video entitled Fear of Girls showing two roleplaying fanatics talking about their life presenting some footage of their gaming sessions and showing them during an interview. What an I say, geeks like this do exist and this video is really well done.

Internet users from outside the United States are officially excluded from using Pandora to create their own radio stations with songs similar to the ones they have entered at the creation of the music station. Aggrega will surely profit from Pandora’s move although it does not offer the same service. By signing up with Aggrega you can create so called custom channels which are created automatically after assigning a name and a group, artist or genre to them. All videos seem to be taken from Youtube as of now which should not be a problem because I think they are added manually to the database.

I’m usually not using iTunes at all because I think the software slow and overloaded like the Windows Media Player. If I want to play music I use Winamp and to transfer songs to and from my iPod I use Floola. I still have iTunes installed but as I said it is only used very seldom. To be honest, I did not even knew that there were visualizations for iTunes available. You can think of them like the ones on Winamp for instance. I found this amazing visualization for iTunes and decided to write an article about it. I think it would be best to walk you through the installation and activation although it is nothing complicated. Download and install Magnetosphere and start iTunes afterwards.

I’m presenting a new game as usual on Fridays and this time it is Bontago. Bontago is a real time strategy game that can be played against computers or human opponents. Players start evenly on the area and can place blocks to expand their reach from their current position. The task of the game is to encompass all flags that are placed in the level. The initial area of control for a player can be expanded by adding new blocks to the territory under control. The height of the blocks that you can place on top of each others determines how far the influence is expanded.

If you thought that Androids are a product of the not so near future you thought wrong. What you witnessed in movies like I-Robot, Star Wars and Star Trek is becoming more and more reality in todays live. Yes that is right: today. Scientists still have to take care of many elements like movement and artificial intelligence to create the next C3PO but they are definitely on the right track if you can’t distinguish between Androids and humans anymore in pictures, movies and even reality.

You might have heard that the AACS is sending Cease and Desist letters to websites who link to a forum thread at the Doom9 forum which has information about the processing key for HD-DVD movies. Instead of focusing on the free speech issues that arise in this matter I would like to point out to something interesting. This number made many users creative and I decided to publish all the interesting creative works that point to that number.

Did you know that you could get into really big trouble if you post the code 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 on your website ? It is very likely that a takedown notice will be send to the owner of the website as soon as the RIAA, the AACS or some of their lawyers find your website. You might be wondering why they are making such a big deal about this code which only some users might identify as the code to rule them all.. aka the processing key that unlocks the content of every HD-DVD available up to this point.

Every now and then a shiny Microsoft Xbox 360 gaming system will stop working and has to be send in for repair and eventual replacement. Replacing the old Xbox 360 with a new one sounds great on first glance but you have to consider something before you make up your mind on this. If you did download arcade games and other stuff from the Xbox 360 Marketplace you are in for a nasty surprise.

World of Padman is a multiplayer ego shooter that is using the Quake 3 engine which is a very capable engine. Just imagine the game Quake 3 without the adult science fiction theme but a theme that resembles a game for children. Not saying that World of Padman is actually a children’s game. Action is as fast paced as in Quake 3 and the game mode is still deathmatch. Frag the others before they frag you. Levels look really detailed and the style of the game is pretty unique as well. Before you begin you can select a character that you want to play and customize it a little bit.

Audiobooks become increasingly popular and there are many pay sites that offer downloads of Audiobooks after you paid for them. It is however possible to download free Audiobooks from various sites from the Internet. The main problem with finding those free sites is that many pay sites offer free samples of the Audiobooks as well but you have to pay when you want to listen to the complete book.

Sometimes pictures say more than a thousand words. This is actually the first picdump ever here at ghacks, consider it a little experiment that tests the water to see if you like it or not. I know it is not really related to anything here other than that I would say that geeks like us do love funny pictures. It is part of our culture, don’t you think ? And it is tech related, the first image shows a analogy of the Windows XP Firewall, the second is about Google. Enjoy..

I have seen lots of weird gadgets in the past but this one tops them all. A house that can be rotated by 360° around a central core that contains all the plumbing and connections to the house ? Sounds a little bit futuristic don’t you think ? You could apparently rotate the house in correlation with the moving sun for instance. It is also nice to get a fresh view out of the window by simply rotating the house a little bit. Take a look at the pictures..

Kids, let that be a lesson to all of you who are thinking about doing the same thing. A 20 year old unemployed man named Ryan Fitzgerald who is still living with his father had some time at his disposal and decided to help people who needed to talk to someone by publishing his phone number on the popular video portal Youtube. He received more than 5000 calls and text messages after uploading his video on Friday saying that he would be there for everyone who wanted to contact him.

If you thought that the last Multi-touch technology videos that I have been showing here at Ghacks have been cool then you should see this one. This one is a presentation by Jeff Han who is a research scientist for NYU’s Media Research Lab during TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design) 2006. Jeff Han describes his technique the following way: “Our technique is force-sensitive, and provides unprecedented resolution and scalability, allowing us to create sophisticated multi-point widgets for applications large enough to accommodate both hands and multiple users.”

Rooms is an excellent puzzle game. The objective is to move the character from the start of the level to the door that exits it. This can be done by either moving the character himself if there is space to move or by moving the different rooms that make up the level. Take a look at the screenshot below to get a better impression of how a typical level looks like. Several rooms make up each level and you can only move the room that you are standing in at the moment.

I bought the Nintendo Wii gaming system the first day it came out. Besides the system itself I bought a second pair of controllers, a classic controller, 2000 download points and the game Wii Play. After a while I added new games to the list including Red Steel, Rayman Raving Rabbits, Super Monkey Ball Banana Blitz and Korinpa. I purchased games from previous systems including Mario Kart 64 and Mario 64 and played an extensive list of Gamecube games including Resident Evil 4 and Mario Party 7.

I think that I have a good overview of what is currently going on in the Nintendo Wii “world” and would like to describe how I feel about the Nintendo Wii and what I expect of it in the future. I know that some of my friends already sold the Wii again because of the lack of good games following the launch – I personally think that this decision is understandable, the lack of games is obvious at this point.

I still believe that Starcraft is the best real-time strategy game that was ever produced and hope that Blizzard will one day create a second part of at least a MMORPG out of it. Starcraft is part of my past, I used to meet with friends back then and play it in local lan games all night long. It was perfectly balanced and much better than Command and Conquer in my opinion. Someone – I suppose another fan – has created an unbelievable amount of Starcraft Origami and uploaded pictures of them to Flickr.

If you are living in the United Kingdom, have a broadband Internet connection and are at least 16 years of age you can apply to become a beta tester for the BBC Archive. The BBC is looking for 20000 testers that use the system for a period of six months exploring the vast archive that will be available for download (probably mean streaming). Testers will have to take surveys from time to time to improve the service during the test.

While there is no shortage of sites that offer mp3 downloads, both legal and illegal, the concept of a site for legitimate free mp3 downloads that is completely supported by ads remains elusive. The latest site to take a stab at making this model work is We7, a new site with a prominent backer in the form of no other than Peter Gabriel.

Currently the site is still in the early stages and the range of (DRM-free) mp3s available for download is still quite small (I counted 8 artists and 19 tracks, but I guess you have to start somewhere).

I was very young when the first three Star Wars movies made their appearance in the cinemas of this world but was fascinated by the movies since then. This changed a little bit with the release of the last three movies which were a total disappointment in my opinion. Nevertheless I like Star Wars and everything that surrounds it. I’m not a die hard fan but someone who can watch the movies over and over again without getting bored.