For those of you who own Nvidia graphics cards and still somehow haven’t played Portal, Nvidia is now offering, free of charge, an extended Portal demo cleverly titled Portal: First Slice.

Much to my dismay, while First Slice does offer more gameplay than the previous demo, it offers no new content to those who have already played the full version of Portal.

To get your hands on First Slice, head to this webpage.

The site will automatically scan your PC for Nvidia products, and once you’ve been verified you’ll be given the option to download Portal: First Slice to your existing (or newly created) Steam account.

Additionally, Nvidia users can also download Peggle Extreme, Half-Life 2 Deathmatch, and the Half-Life 2 tech demonstration level The Lost Coast free of charge from that same site.

Jada’s Air Guitar Rocker is exactly what it seems to be: an air guitar made real.

“We took the air guitar phenomenon and put it into an amp,” says creator Nitrous Roxide, who demonstrates it well in this video.

The belt buckle detects strums of the air plectrum, while the belt unit plays the sounds.

The songs, stored on little expansion packs, are divided into each note: all the player must be able to do is keep to the track’s tempo, and he or she can rock on.

“It’s Guitar Hero on the go.”

The cheese-grater Power Mac tower is just perfect for holding a dot matrix display, and it looks like Anders Lundberg thought the same thing:

In proper hacker style, Anders took an old alarm clock, threw away the extra parts and from there, designed a circuit board.

The clock needs an external AC power supply, but what’s one more trip to Walmart?

Best of all, he’s selling kits, starting at $70 for a self assembly red LED set and $85 for the ready made.

Source: MAKE

Flashback to 1986 – I’m 14 years old and sitting in my room with my Commodore 64 hooked up to my 13 inch black & white television, typing in a 7 page long basic program from a computing magazine.

I knew IBM “clones” existed, but I knew I had it made with my trusty C64. If you weren’t around then or if you were a Commodore hater, you missed some really cool years of computing.

Early Macintosh snobs were always cracking on C64 users, granted I learned on Apple II computers in 2nd grade elementary school.

Yes, the Macintosh had better graphics, a mouse, a user interface, etc but, the C64 world had something even better: game/program trading galore or as some would call rampant piracy.

Now, I know people have always copied this and that, but I remember C64 trade fairs where you’d leave with a shoe box full of 5.25 floppies packed full of goodies.

It would take weeks to go through all of it. Ah the memories.

If I had seen this commercial back then, it would have probably driven me to IBM clones much sooner.

Fortunately this is (or was) a TV commercial for the Commodore 64 home computer that aired in 1985 on Australian television and well, I’m from the USA.

December 31, 1999: The world braces for chaos as midnight approaches. Will computer systems crash when the calendar switches over to 2000?

Although the answer turned out to be “no,” and the so-called Y2K crisis never materialized, the potential for disaster seemed real enough in the days and weeks leading up to the final day of the 1900s. Fears within the computer industry and the resulting media frenzy it produced certainly helped to fan the flames.

The problem, as some saw it, was that older computers still being used for critical functions might break down when the date switched from 99 to 00, since the numeric progression convention, programmed to store data using only the last two digits of any given year, wouldn’t recognize the logic of a century change.

As far as these computers were concerned, it would be 1900, not 2000. How much data might be lost as the result of this 100-year miscalculation was the great, unanswered question.

Y2K fears were real enough to make governments around the world take remedial action before the event, which had the unintended benefit of actually strengthening the existing computer infrastructure.

Systems were upgraded or, when they couldn’t be replaced, were given additional backup. Billions of dollars were spent fixing the original source code in older computers.

If the threat was real — and there are still plenty of people around who say it was — then the precautions paid off. If Y2K was a form of mass paranoia — and plenty of people believe that, too — then a lot of money was wasted.

As for the midnight switchover itself, 1999 passed into history with barely a whimper. A few glitches were reported here and there, but nothing catastrophic occurred.

The industry would be in crisis soon enough, but as January 1, 2000, dawned, nobody saw that one coming yet.

Source: CNN

Wireless company Motelona, a play on the name Motorola has gone old school and copied the Motorola brick phones of the 1980’s.

The GSM-E158 is only old on the outside, however. Once you’ve slotted in a GSM SIM, you’ll be able to enjoy an MP3 player, a color screen and video.

The handset only seems to show up on eBay pages, however you can buy one new from Analog Hero.

They have all types of retro-tech for sale, and the site itself is so willfully sparse it makes Geocities look Web 2.0.

You can buy the Motelona there for $129.00 USD. I want one