Minecraft is turning into real life. Here is a cool Minecraft Block. Awesome!

Now that I’m working on projection mapping it was only a matter of time before this happened. Thanks to my brother for the inspiration, he mentioned that one of the other projection mapping examples looked a bit like a minecraft block. Once the idea popped into my head I had to give it a try.There’s a piezo element taped to the box and hooked up to an arduino. The arduino senses the physical impact with the piezo element and sends serial data to my PC. Processing picks up the serial signal and takes care of the projection and interaction (particles, etc).

The best thing about this smartphone design is that the long you carry it, the more attractive it will look.

Here is a great from Cool Material. The Pick Punch looks like a hole punch, but instead of punching little tiny holes in loose-leaf that somehow wind up all over your clothes, it punches new guitar picks.

Best of all it only costs $25.

Seeing as the first person genre seems to be both competitive and repetitive I was sure that we wouldn’t really see a new style of multi-player mass murder game until the world saw another war to base it on. The market is enjoying such good sales at the moment that it simply hasn’t had the need to waste money on coming up with anything new, if if ain’t broke don’t fix it. Right?

The video below is the best looking this i’ve seen for sometime. Barely do i ever see a trailer that makes we actually wanna wait for the game to come out. Set in what looks like some sort of slum in the future the first/third person shoot em’ up seems to be trying to bring something of a mech-warrior culture back. And they’re doing very nicely indeed. Named Hawken and rumoured to be released for all platforms, no real solid news has been released yet about its creators. It is however planned as a downloadable game, and has been built using Epic’s Unreal Engine.

Check out the cool mother-ship looking thing at 1:51……….

More Total War: Shogun 2 screen shot have emerged and they look as plush as the last few. With a sneaky hint at what looks like to be naval warfare says I. Some campaign map shots are knocking about and some sort of super-magic gold dude. It is war, but still, you have to look good don’t you.

Click the pictures for a better look.

It is said on the grape-vine, that Ubisoft didn’t originally intend to release the Wii version of Michael Jackson: The Experience before the other consoles, but since it worked out that way, the publisher is taking advantage of the delay to tweak the experience based on feedback from last year’s best-selling Wii release.

Reviews were largely favorable when it came to the dancing mechanic and gameplay, but the dearth of bonus content and criticisms with the game’s Dance School mode were key points it wanted to correct. A small self life by the sounds of it, that kind of thing can result in thousands of gamers handing in their copies part exchange and the retailers are laden with a plethora of Michael Jackson game for sale second hand and any integrity the game has ever had disappears for ever.

On the latter point, Guillaume Cada (Ubisoft international product manager) said, “We decided to improve these so now that in the Dance School you see yourself dancing, just like in a mirror, so you can modify your moves.” With regard to new content, “We also had unlockables, now you have Trophies from the PS3. Every time you unlock a Trophy you unlock a visual or video in the Extras and in the Gallery part of the game.”

A 19-year-old University of Nevada student in has been charged with hacking into his school district’s computer system and improving his classmates’ grades for a fee.

Local police say Tyler Coyner led a group of 13 students (most of whom were minors) who have all been charged with conspiracy, theft and computer intrusion. “Last year, Coyner somehow obtained a password to the Pahrump Valley High School’s grade system and, over the course of two semesters, offered to change grades in return for cash. Run like a business, consultancy fees and all, Coyner would take money and up their grades for a fee and pay his “workforce” after the workload became too much!

Coyner is reported to have bumped his own grades so high (a 4.54 GPA) that he “was the salutatorian at his graduation, an honor given to the student with the second highest GPA in the school.”

Cops raiding his dorm room also found a stolen LCD television set, and gear for printing fake driver’s licenses. Not so smart after all.

Brazilians are among the world’s biggest fans of Twitter.

Now the microblogging site has become the setting for a battle of wits between police and residents of Rio de Janeiro over a drink-driving campaign known as Operation Lei Seca, or “dry law”.

Anyone who has had too many beers but wants to drive home can turn to a page on Twitter, where those who have seen the distinctive branded police vans warn others which routes to avoid. In turn, the traffic police are logging on to foil the efforts of the techno-literate, often setting up in unexpected locations elsewhere. Penalties include having your licence suspended, being fined and having your car towed away. There has also been an advertising campaign to raise awareness.

Now, i’m not a fan of drinking and driving, and i’m not really a fan of Twitter either. I used Facebook for a bit but got bored, but I do find a sort of Unnecessary genius in their plan. Maybe Apple should get on the case. If your on your way home, your driving, your drunk and need to avoid the police. There’s an app. for that.

Sony has been given permission to obtain details of people who downloaded files needed to hack the PlayStation 3.

A judge in San Francisco granted the electronics giant a subpoena that would allow it to see a list of IP addresses. The software, used to crack the PS3′s operating system, was posted on the website of George Hotz, who is also known as Geohot.

Court documents, obtained by Wired magazine, show that the company successfully petitioned to obtain IP addresses from the web-hosting company Bluehost.com

The details could be used to trace the real-world geographical locations of users who accessed George Hotz’s website, Geohot.com.

Mr Hotz denies that he set out to help software pirates, claiming instead that he was championing the ‘home brew’ community – users who write their own software for the PS3.

Sony has said it is now able to remotely identify users who are running hacked PlayStation 3 consoles and that it will ban persistent offenders from using its online services.

Saints Row has always seemed to play second fiddle to Grand Theft Auto in the world of crime games.

But with Saints Row’s over-the-top naughtiness, a bit more like Getaway, which included pumping pedestrians with pooh in the last game, you can’t really call it a clone. Expect the series to continue pursuing its own brand of potty humour and action in Saints Row: The Third, which was just announced for all platforms.

The slick art you see here comes from Game Informer, which will feature Saints Row: The Third on the cover of the magazine’s April issue.

Penny Arcade and Minecraft are teaming up to make a new game that seeks to reinvent the classic collectable card game genre.

Scrolls will be developed by indie game studio Mojang and feature writing by Penny Arcade’s Jerry Holkins.

Holkins brings his flair for writing and deft use of adjectives to the game’s back story. Holkins says he and the rest of the folks at Penny Arcade are big fans of Minecraft.

Still in beta, computer game Minecraft already has more than 4.5 million registered users and has sold more than 1.4 million copies. The game was developed by Markus Persson. Persson has since formed Mojang, a studio of nine based in Stockholm, Sweden.

Scrolls, Mojang’s first game as a team, will combine elements from classic collectible card games with tabletop and board games, according to a Mojang press release.

Vodafone’s mobile network has been disrupted following a break-in at its exchange centre in Basingstoke near Reading.

The company said some customers had lost voice, text and internet access. It is not known the exact number of users that have been affected, however customers from the south of England appeared to make up the majority of those, reporting loss of service on Twitter.

Vodafone responded quickly with a nice vague: “We are working quickly to restore these and will be back to normal as soon as we can.”

It doesn’t take a genius to work out that Vodafone seem to be loosing ground on much its competator, withdrawing much of its sponsership as it has. Customer have seemed for the most part to be content though. At-least they were until this occurred.

Vodafone have been the victim of this sort of thing in the past in other parts of the world, forcing them to cut charges, as well as the “HiJacking” it sustained earlier this month.

Charlie Brookers nice eccentric ragging on Colonel Gaddafi. Im just pleased for him and the fact that he managed to get Tony Blair, Jedi’s and Ice-Cream into the same sentance. I’m not sure how much we trust Gaddafi’s interpreter however, but it is was in fact raining.

From last week’s Ten O’Clock Live, this is some of the most nose-milk-spurting material ever aired. Ten o’clock live’s clips should all be on YouTube.

Someone has managed to bug some more humour into Google search into making the Wikipedia entry for “abortion” into the second result in searches for “murder.” However you feel about abortion, this Wikipedia page is pretty clearly not the second-most relevant document regarding murder on the entire English-speaking World Wide Web. Lets just stick with the Chuck Norris gags eh fellas……..

The Ocean Dome is an amazing man made indoor beach complex in Japan. Every hour, the volcano erupts and the hi-tech wave machines start up, starting a few minutes of sanitized surfing.

Entrance cost is US $50 per person, which seems especially expensive given that there is a free, natural beach only 300 meters away.

Spammers are being thwarted by finding that their junk messages unexpectedly contain warnings urging recipients to delete the e-mail.

The alerts are issued by ImageShack, in an effort to stop spammers using its services. It is replacing pictures, known to have appeared in spam, with warnings such as “Do not buy”. Spammers often use image hosting sites so they can include fake logos, intended to make the mail look genuine. The aim is raise users’ awareness of the problem and to make life difficult for those sending the spam, Alexander Levin, president of ImageShack told BBC News.

The plan is that the spammers lose customers and see a decrease in revenue.

ImageShack’s system is capable of swapping thousands of the spammers’ images for warnings within an hour of them being reported. The company works with anti-spam groups to identify any files that have been uploaded to its servers. It then scours its web logs to uncover other images that have been uploaded from the same web address.

Zuhaib came across the secret design for Apple’s new MacBook.

EA has slashed the price of most of its top games on iDevices down to just 99c in the App Store, sparking another buying frenzy.

Last time it did a sale of this nature was over the Christmas period, causing EA titles to dominate the Top Paid Apps lists much to the frustration (and anger) of the indy dev community who struggle on a normal day get their games noticed.

Anyhow, you get wicked games for nearly nothing, and that’s all good in our books.

Here’s the list of titles:

* Battlefield: Bad Company 2, down 80%
* Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit, down 80%
* Cause of Death, down 50%
* Tetris, down 67%
* Pictureke, down 50%
* The Sims 3, down 86%
* Scrabble, down 67%
* FIFA 11, down 80%
* The Sims 3 Ambitions, down 80%
* Heroes Lore III, down 50%
* Mirror’s Edge, down 80%
* NBA Elite 11, down 80%
* Madden NFL 11, down 80%
* Monopoly, down 67%
* Risk, down 80%
* NCAA Football, down 80%
* Sim City Deluxe, down 67%
* The Sims 3 World Adventures, down 80%
* The Simpsons Arcade, down 67%
* Need for Speed Shift, down 80%
* Need for Speed Undercover, down 80%
* The Game of LIFE, down 67%
* MONOPOLY World, down 67%
* FIFA 10, down 80%
* Mass Effect Galaxy, down 50%

Autum’s Heretic coffin sofa is “Custom Built From an 18 Gauge, Steel Coffin” and is part of a limited run of three. I’ve seen other coffin conversions before, but this is certainly the most plush-looking piece.

Bethesda has revealed that it looked to its own Fallout 3 for influence when it came to fixing The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim’s difficulty curve. That’s what we like to see.

Speaking to Official Xbox Magazine in the UK, game director Todd Howard acknowleged that the fact monsters levelled with you in Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion was an issue for fans.

“It’s similar now to what we did in Fallout 3,” he revealed, “where we changed it a lot. We now have the ability to set a dungeon and say that ‘this dungeon is this hard’, so when you come in it will look at you and adjust its difficulty level. But it might be much harder, just because of what it is.

“It also saves the state of the monsters. So if you come in and at the side it says, ‘okay, this is going to be hard for your character’ – and it might be much easier because of how we set it – but it won’t change its difficulty if you leave.”

OXM’s massive 16-page preview of the game also reveals that Skyrim’s Greybeards will act as its ‘Jedi Masters’ – passing on wisdom to your character.

Skyrim is set two centuries years after predecessor Oblivion. The land of Skyrim has erupted into civil war after the assassination of its King, whilst god Alduin arises to destroy the world.

The title is due for release on 11/11/11 across the globe, on PS3, 360 and PC.

OXM issue 70 is with subs now and in stores this week. Order it and have it delivered to your door.

Sony’s Playstation Phone aka: The Xperia Play, will be officially unveiled next week on Facebook.

Sony Ericcson’s Facebook even has a count down timer and a very familiar, very disturbing video.

Announce is dated for Feb. 13, 18:00 GMT. What do you think? Too little, too late, or exactly what you’ve been waiting for?

Discuss.

Anything with Lego stuck at the start is ok by me and at least worth a look, though im not too sure who is actually playing all these Lego games. Or for that matter, who’s playing Lego Online Universe or whatever its called. It just doesn’t seem to have the extra approach to make sure the Gears Or War generation are playing them. The novelty seems to wear off after you’ve have a quick look. Lego Iggy Pop on their attempt at Rock Band was cool though!

Her’s something a bid more manly and main stream. The pictures here boast some stunning homemade efforts by a Andy Pescovitz, that are either Lego models manipulated as well as some sculpted by the looks of it. The collection include some Halo:Reach chaps on a warthog along with a well worked Max Payne Loadout on page four.