One More Thing: Twitter goes 8-bit
And Snake is played with a flute. A jazz flute
With the long weekend so close we can almost smell the motorway congestion, today's One More Thing has been hastily prepared early so you can feast on our popcorn chicken sized look at the world of tech before you pack your life away for four days, gorge on chocolate and visit the local garden centre.
And what a feast we have – there's a look at just how big porn has gotten on the filthy web, Blu movies, and a smattering of Twitter related app goodness. But first, let's have a look at what Twitter would like in the '80s.
8-bit on the side – What do Angry Birds, Twitter, Facebook and Google have in common? No, we aren't listing the different types of crack available to procrastinators but websites and games that have been given the 8-bit treatment. Twitter is the latest to get the retro treatment by the ever excellent Squirrel-Monkey.com. [Cnet]
Snake charming – Snake is the greatest phone game ever but it's just been made even better with the introduction of a flute. The flute, which we are hoping is the one used in Anchorman and not American Pie controls the game by means of some technical wizardry. Great stuff. [Engadget]
Porn identity – Although we haven't yet been able to confirm this, apparently there's a shedload of porn on the internet. And all of this porn has to be stored somewhere and unlike old-school rag mags, it can't just slip under your bed or in the nearest piece of shrubbery. Instead massive servers have to be maintained to hold the stuff, with YouPorn's own archive adding up to 100TB of data, 28 petabytes of streaming a day and over 4000 pages of filth viewed every second. If you want to know more, Extreme Tech has all the details. Warning: may cause blindness. [Extreme Tech]
Piggy went to Market – The Windows Phone Marketplace hit a significant number this week, passing 80,000 apps which is around 10,000 more than BlackBerry's store. Microsoft has a lot of ground to make up on Android and Apple though – they have over 450,000 plus apps each. [Into Mobile]
TV go home – Social television app Zeebox is now available on Android, which means all Google lovers can now unlock the power of social while watching their favourite TV shows. You may not like the idea at the moment, but companion apps will soon be very big – just think of them as sidekicks and you as the superhero, which makes the whole thing a lot more fun. [C21 Media]
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Dutch courage – The Pirate Bay is set to get some protection by the Dutch arm of the Pirate Party, after a court ruled that access to the site needed to be blocked in the Netherlands. To make sure this doesn't happen, the Pirate Party is going to fight them in court, presumably with cutlasses. [TechEye]
Beaming with pride – Scientists in charge of the Large Hadron Collider (or, as we like to call it, the machine which will be the death of the entire human race) are celebrating this week as it crossed two high energy proton beams and thus created a world record. We hate to break it to them, but the Ghostbusters beat them to it by twenty or so years. [Daily Mail]
In your face – HTC has managed to patent the use of your face in unlocking your phone, which could well be the ultimate facepalm for Google who has added this tech into its cold but tasty OS Ice Cream Sandwich. [Unwired View]
Blu movie giveaway – Sony has announced a new bundle deal for its BDP-S185 Blu-ray player. Essentially it is giving eight Blu-rays away with the machine. Which is great news until you realise that one of the movies is Twilight. So, seven movies and a cup coaster then. The bundle is available from April from Tesco, Sony Centres, Sainsbury's, Blockbusters, Play.com and others.
Lego gets serious – One of the biggest regrets in adult life is not being able to play with Lego as much as you would like so it is great then that the colourful bricks are being put to some serious use – helping scientists figure out how rogue tidal waves work. [Gizmodo]
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Marc Chacksfield is the Editor In Chief, Shortlist.com at DC Thomson. He started out life as a movie writer for numerous (now defunct) magazines and soon found himself online - editing a gaggle of gadget sites, including TechRadar, Digital Camera World and Tom's Guide UK. At Shortlist you'll find him mostly writing about movies and tech, so no change there then.