2008 Weblog Awards – [GAS] Nominated as best tech blog!

The 2008 Weblog Awards

To our surprise (and very appreciative amazement!), some kind soul has nominated GAS for the 2008 weblog award. Best of all, [GAS] was selected as one of the top 10 best tech blogs for this year’s edition.

Unfortunately, there can only be one grand winner, and we’re running up against some very stiff competition. If you want to help us win this prestigious award, we humbly ask beg you to take a minute of your time and cast a vote—we will be eternally grateful.

We may not be as big as the Gizmodos and Arstechnicas of this world, but we’re doing everything we can to inform and entertain you the best we can. Thanks for a fantastic year and for all your great comments. Readers, you are truly appreciated!

Link to vote: http://2008.weblogawards.org/polls/best-technology-blog/

Please note that the voting system allows you to vote once every 24 hours, so if you guys feel like going back to cast multiple votes for us, feel free to do so!



Inside ThinkGeek – Exclusive Interview

ThinkGeek

By Jimmy Rogers
Contributing Writer, [GAS]

Today we have a very special presentation for you. ThinkGeek, known far and wide for their wonderful geek gear, has been extremely secretive about their inner workings.  That is… until now.

Geeks Are Sexy was given exclusive access to the ThinkGeek headquarters in Fairfax, Virginia and sat down with John Frazier, one of the men responsible for procuring everything from lightsabers to high-tech peripherals. Enough introduction, though, enjoy the show!

This video is actually the tale end of a very long and interesting story. If you’d like to know more (like how we broke through the binary curtain), I have a few reflections and recollections on my blog. Plus, there’s a bonus lightsaber video—who can resist that?
 

I would like to thank John, Shane, and all the other ThinkGeek staff who put up with us as we traipsed through their office with cameras and cables.  Oh and a special shout-out to the ThinkGeek Twitter lady!  You guys are the coolest company I’ve ever visited!

Lastly, thanks to Natalia, my awesome camera person, and all the future journalists at Connect2Mason, whose equipment we used to make the film.

Gamers Still Love Their Playstation 2

By Casey Lynn
Contributing Writer, [GAS]

Nielson’s 2008 Trend Summary reveals some interesting data in its gaming top ten lists. It seems that despite the fuss over next-gen consoles these past two years, people still spend more time with Playstation 2’s than any other gaming console. Based on usage minutes, the PS2 nearly doubles the time of the runner-up, the XBox 360, followed by the Wii, and then, interestingly enough, the traditional XBox beats out the Playstation 3. Of course, the PS2’s dominance isn’t all that surprising when accounting for the number of gamers who don’t have next gen consoles either due to unavailability or price. Also, these numbers don’t account for handheld consoles like the Nintendo DS.

In other gaming news, World of Warcraft is the most-played PC game, played by nearly 1% of all gamers in the United States, at an average of 671 minutes per week. Call of Duty and Halo are also up there, though I was rather surprised to see that more people play The Sims than The Sims 2. The top mobile game in the US last year was Tetris, followed by Bejeweled.

Some other interesting results from the list: the top market for adults shopping online is Washington D.C.; the top fiction book sale was The Shack, and nonfiction, A New Earth; the top website accessed via mobile phones was Yahoo Mail; the most downloaded song was “Low” by Flo Rida; the top website all around was Google; and the most “timeshifted” television show was Heroes.

Roku Review – Bringing Netflix to your TV

My wife bought me a Roku for Christmas, which is a player that lets us instantly watch Netflix movie and television shows on our 57-inch LCD Samsung HDTV. I heard of Roku almost a year ago, but it had slipped my mind. So when I was opening the gift, my initial thought was that this was going to be some kind of Asian puzzle game or something. That would have been cool enough. However, not nearly as cool as the Roku Netflix player turned out to be.

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Helpless: A New Tilt-Shift Time-Lapse Video by Keith Loutit

Remember Keith Loutit, that talented Australian photographer we featured a few times here on [GAS] for his amazing work with time-lapse videos? To our greatest joy, Keith released yet another masterpiece a few weeks ago, and as usual, we had to share it with you. This one is named “Helpless” and features the daily activity of everything happening at a nameless beach somewhere in Australia.

[Via TechEblog]