It takes a lot of research to make a tech purchase with conviction. Sam Grobart reduced a lot of hard-earned and complex wisdom to seven rules of thumb in the New York Times. I was pretty impressed with this list because I think his advice is sound and he was able to reduce it to short rules of thumb. His seven rules are a trade off, as most tech advice is. When buying hi tech...

-- Pay for RAM, not speed. The speed of the computer chip does not matter; the attention-span or RAM memory does matter.
-- Pay for messaging, not minutes. On your phone, your texting is more expensive than your voice time.
-- Pay for components, not cables. Buy the best components, and the cheapest cables.
-- Pay for speed, not channels. For cable internet, with enough speed you can watch TV channels on the internet for free.
-- Pay for screen size, not refresh rate. On TV screens, bigger size makes a difference while refresh rate does not.

What tips do you have for tech shopping?

I've fund an interesting group if you're into the startup thing, or just building product that you'd really like to sell :

It's called http://startupguild.net/

It was launched by jason & justin from the techzing podcast (which is my favorite podcast ). It's a very nice group of people who try to build startups, you can share tips, ask for feedbacks. The group is really good and knowledgeable.

If some people are here on DC & on startupguild, may be they could signal them here too.

Dig, fight, explore, build! Nothing is impossible in this action-packed adventure game. The world is your canvas and the ground itself is your paint.

-http://terraria.org/

Terraria can possibly be described as a 2D mashup of Metroid^w, Castlevania^w, and Minecraft^w, but has influences from many other games.


If the video is too boring for you, the action really picks up at around 3:32.

Terraria should be available on Steam for $10 USD on Monday, May 16th (which is today for most of the world).

I want to give a little teaser for a new toy app i've been working on for very young kids who are just learning to start to speak.

It's based on my MultiPhotoQuotes engine.

Tentatively called "VoicePics", this program runs full screen (across multiple monitors if present) and listens for a child to speak or press a key.

If the program detects something being spoken, it finds the best match for a word it has photos for, and displays some random photos for that word, as well as the word text.
If a key on the keyboard is pressed, a word beginning with the pressed key is displayed, along with some photos for that word.

Users can add their own photos easily, so you can customize it with pictures of mom, dad, sister, brother, dog, cat, house, etc.  It will scan labeled photos on startup and add those words to its vocabulary.

It uses the microsoft speech recognition engine, which is ok but not ideal.  I wouldn't expect to be able to use this to teach any kid how to pronounce words -- it's more to encourage very young kids to babble and give them the experience of having what they speak affect what it shown in a semi-consistent manner.

If anyone has any kids of an appropriate age, message me and i'll give you a link to a beta version.

I hope people will help by making some additional image packs for the program from royalty free photo sources.

I need suggestions for an official name for this -- the working title is "VoicePics" but i think it needs a better one.

Sad cautionary tale from Matt Ingram over at GigaOM.

The Danger of Playing in Apple’s Walled Garden

Every so often a news item comes along that reinforces the downside of building your business on someone else’s platform, and this week’s poster child is iFlowReader, an e-book app for the iPhone and iPad. The company behind the app announced today that it is shutting its doors for good, and it puts the blame for its demise squarely on Apple and its new 30-percent levy on in-app sales. The benefits of getting into bed with Apple are obvious: access to a huge universe of motivated users and built-in payment handling. But the downsides for those who play inside Apple’s walled garden should be just as obvious — namely, that you lose control over some fundamental aspects of your business.

The bitterness that iFlowReader feels about Apple suddenly changing the rules of the app game spills out of every line in the company’s blog post, in which the company advises users that it will be “going out of business” as of May 31, and that this is a “sad day for innovation.”

Link here for full article.

Be sure to check out some of the links found within the article.  The blog post making iFlowReader's going out of business announcement is an especially painful read.  I took the liberty of providing a copy below (emphasis added) for reference should iFlowReader's website disappear because it's really worth reading. Especially if you're planning on getting into bed with Apple as a developer.

...

Regardless of whether iFlowReader was overly trusting, much too optimistic, or simply naive, Matt Ingram's conclusion pretty much says it all:

Would iFlowReader have failed even without Apple’s new fees? Perhaps. But the fact that the company changed the rules for content-based app makers so dramatically probably pushed it over the edge, and theoretically it could do the same to anyone. That’s just the nature of playing Apple’s game — the house always wins.

Did you love dungeon-crawling with your arcade buddies in Gauntlet?
Did you find the Legend of Zelda series fun and challenging, and never complained about it's "cutesy"-ness?
Do you like the social interaction and character-building aspects common in most modern-day MMORPGs, but aren't basement-bound geek enough to take them seriously?
Are you short on cash?
Do you want all this and have a ton of fun while you're at it?

Come, join up with the Spiral Knights and explore the ever-changing Clockworks world!

You have crashed.
You are stranded.
But you are not alone.
The Spiral Knights have awoken on an alien world. Their equipment stores have been raided and their starship, The Skylark, will not recover from the crash. Now they must work together to survive on a journey that will take them to the very core of this strange world.