25TH ANNIVERSARY RINGS

Sneaky Uses for Everyday Things: How to Turn a Penny into a Radio, Make a Flood Alarm with an Aspirin, Change Milk into Plastic, Extract Water and ... a TV with Your Ring, and Other Amazing Feats

Sneaky Uses for Everyday Things is a valuable resource for transforming ordinary objects into the extraordinary. With over 80 solutions and bonus applications at your disposal, you will be ready for almost any situation.
Do you know how to make something that can tell whether the $20 bill in your wallet is a fake? Or how to generate battery power with simple household items? Or how to create your own home security system? Science-savvy author Cy Tymony does. And now you can learn how to create these things and more than 40 other handy gadgets and gizmos in Sneaky Uses for Everyday Things. More than a simple do-it-yourself guide, this quirky collection is a valuable resource for transforming ordinary objects into the extraordinary. With over 80 solutions and bonus applications at your disposal, you will be ready for almost any situation. Included are survival, security, self-defense, and silly applications that are just plain fun. You'll be seen as a superhero as you amaze your friends by:
* Transforming a simple FM radio into a device that enables you to eavesdrop on tower-to-air conversations.
* Creating your own personalized electronic greeting cards.
* Making a compact fire extinguisher from items typically found in a kitchen pantry.
* Thwarting intruders with a single rubber band.
By using run-of-the-mill household items and the easy-to-follow instructions and diagrams within, you'll be able to complete most projects in just a few minutes. Whether you use Sneaky Uses for Everyday Things as a practical tool to build useful devices, a fun little fantasy escape, or as a trivia guide to impress friends and family, this book is sure to be a reference favorite for years to come.

The long-awaited return of Banjo the bear and his friend Kazooie is upon us, though this time development studio Rare didn't follow its own playbook. The platforming genre has all but disappeared from the gaming world and so Banjo has changed with the times. Elements of Nuts & Bolts will be familiar to Rare fans, but don't expect a trip down memory lane. This time it's all about designing vehicles to tackle a series of challenges. It's a unique idea that isn't for everybody, but Banjo 3 is put together well enough that most anybody willing to put the time in to learn the rules will find a lot of fun. Don't immediately write this game off just because it isn't the Banjo you remember.

Nuts & Bolts may look like the Banjo of old at first glance and a lot of the hallmarks of the franchise are here in force. Gruntilda is back and can't stop rhyming. Jiggies must be collected to open new doors. Musical notes litter the ground everywhere to be collected. There's a quiz at the end of the game. This go around, the reason for the clash between Banjo and Grunty is a series of challenges set up by LOG, the Lord of Games and purported creator of all videogames. He's tired of the incessant fighting and has cobbled together this one as the final contest. The story really only exists as a way to tie this Banjo title to past ones and still have Rare's universe make sense. You see, things have changed a bit for Banjo. Over the years, he and Kazooie have grown fat and lazy. They've lost their powers and stamina and now LOG has appeared and introduced a new way to play the game. It relies heavily on vehicles designed by the player and is a stark departure for such a well-known franchise.

Even with a different gameplay focus, Nuts & Bolts sticks to the classic Banjo game design sense. You begin the game in a hub world, this time called Showdown Town. From there, you'll travel to other worlds for challenges to win jigsaw pieces and start collecting things so that you can unlock more doors and move through the game. This is by far the biggest Banjo game yet in terms of size, scope, and total things to do. More than 100 jiggies are up for grabs, 1900 musical notes need to be collected, massive and wonderful worlds exist to be explored. And it all follows the idea that you can play at your own pace. New doors will open before you have found everything the previous had to offer and Nuts & Bolts encourages you to skip ahead and then come back and replay old challenges for higher scores. It's a loose and freewheeling design that makes it tough to stop playing and tough to get overly frustrated with one specific obstacle.

While I did spend more time in Showdown Town than any of the individual game worlds while playing Nuts & Bolts, that's primarily because I became obsessed with finding, unlocking, and purchasing every vehicle part so I could create the perfect rides. Nuts & Bolts features a powerful vehicle creation tool that works a lot like playing with LEGOs. Start with a seat, add some wheels, an engine, fuel and a few blocks to hold it together and you've got a basic car. Add another engine, or a larger one, and the vehicle will go faster. Put a spring on the bottom and you can make it jump. Nuts & Bolts puts the power of creativity in the hands of the player that, when you consider the hundreds of pieces spread across dozens of types, allows for a near limitless set of possibilities.

A race isn't just a race anymore; it's a test of both how well you can drive and how well you can design the car. Knocking over a set of dominoes is suddenly a test of critical thinking instead of just a hand-eye coordination challenge. Consider this example of how a little extra design work and thought can flip a challenge on its head. One challenge puts you in an arena with another squat and powerful vehicle for a sumo match. Whoever falls off the edge of the ring first loses. To win, I decided against making a vehicle designed for power and ramming. Instead, I made a simple little car with an ejector seat. When the foe came at me to knock me off the edge I was sitting near, I ejected and he barreled through my ride before momentum carried him right off the edge while I bounced down inside the ring for victory. Total time spent in that one round: seven seconds. That should stack up well on the leaderboards. I just wish there was more variety here instead of so many race and fetch quests. Part of what makes Banjo fun might also turn some people off. The world and vehicles are all governed by a wacky set of physics. It all makes sense in the same way that Bugs Bunny makes sense. Two engines make a car go faster. Two springs make it hop higher. As easy as it is to make something move, it isn't always guaranteed to move well. You'll have to consider wheel spacing, weight distribution, total weight, fuel storage, hydrodynamics and more in your designs. Don't be surprised if you spend a good amount of time building a

Heidi Schumann for The New York Times

A detail from the display on Black People Love Us!, a Web site by Jonah and Chelsea Peretti that is featured in "Contagious Media."

May 12, 2005
Digerati Vogues, Caught Midcraze
By SARAH BOXER

Two sickly words, "contagious" and "viral," are supreme compliments on the Internet. Now there's a museum exhibition that honors the contagion, all those videos, e-mail messages and hoaxes that spread like wildfire on the Web.


"Contagious Media," the exhibition, occupies a room in the temporary quarters of the New Museum of Contemporary Art in Chelsea. A quick visit reveals more than a half-dozen media: a telephone, a few computer screens, a bunch of framed photographs, printed e-mail messages, various kinds of paper covered with Magic Marker messages, red paper hearts, a television screen and a yellow sweater on a hook.

Nothing looks contagious, except perhaps the sweater. It all seems sad and shabby. Then again, maybe it is supposed to. (In Web design, this sort of carefully engineered basement look has a name, "dirt style.")

The exhibition offers seven viral artifacts: Black People Love Us! (a Web site), "Nike Sweatshop" (an e-mail exchange), "All your base are belong to us," (a badly translated phrase from a Japanese video game), Hot or Not (a Web site), Fundrace (a Web site), Dancing Baby (a piece of animation) and the Rejection Line (a phone number).

Don't worry if you've never heard of these. It just means that you're not cool. And now that you've learned about them in the mainstream media (known as MSM on the Web), they're not all that cool, either.

Dancing Baby, a bit of brilliant animation created in 1996 by Michael Girard, Robert Lurye and Ron Lussier, is easily the most famous, for a simple reason. The computer folks caught the craze, and then the tube folks did: the dancing baby, spinning round and round, waving and bending, was a recurring hallucination on "Ally McBeal."

Displayed on one of the museum's computers, Dancing Baby is an object lesson in Internet culture. No matter how fast something spreads online, the gold ring is television. New media, no matter how hip, want old-media affirmation.

Another case: The largest display in the exhibition, a whole wall, is given over to Black People Love Us!, a Web site created by the brother-and-sister team of Jonah and Chelsea Peretti. Four of the seven contagious objects in the exhibition are by one of the Perettis or both.

The site itself is designed to look as if it's the work of a clueless white couple, Sally and Johnny. The home page says: "We are well-liked by Black people so we're psyched (since lots of Black people don't like lots of White people)!!" The site includes captioned snapshots of Sally (in a yellow sweater) and Johnny having fun with black people. There are testimonials from "real" black people, little red thumping hearts and comments from visitors to the site. You get the idea.

In the museum, the display looks as if Sally and Johnny have put it together themselves. The snapshots are framed and hung. The readers' e-mail messages are written in low-tech Magic Marker on various kinds of paper and stuck to the walls alongside red paper hearts.

But what about that huge television screen at the center of the wall continually playing a "Good Morning America" segment in which Diane Sawyer interviews the Perettis about their Web site? Suddenly the homemade mask is dropped. The Perettis seem almost as uncool as Sally and Johnny. Oops.

Of course, if your site is good enough, you can get away with bragging about your own virality. The wall devoted to "Nike Sweatshop," another Peretti project, emerges from its self-satisfaction intact.

Four years ago, Mr. Peretti, on learning that Nike customizes shoes, ordered his emblazoned with "Sweatshop." Nike kept giving reasons for canceling the order. He kept swatting them away. In good Michael Moore fashion, he had the last word: "I have decided to order the shoes with a different ID, but I would like to make one small request: Could you please send me a color snapshot of the 10-year-old Vietnamese girl who makes my shoes? Thanks." Nike had no response.

The show highlights not the original exchange but the reaction. Running from floor to ceiling are the e-mail messages Mr. Peretti received after forwarding the original exchange to 10 friends. He got 3,655 responses, the show says, from Jan. 15 to April 5, 2001. It was a fabulous contagion. And the proof of it makes nice wallpaper.

The rest of the show is on a single countertop, where you'll find one telephone and a lineup of computers. And what's this? Someone left a napkin with a lipstick kiss on it.

"Call me!" the napkin demands. There's a number. Dial it. You won't get a date. It is the Rejection Line, yet an

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The website comes complete with a vast catalogue of built-in, self updating mobile phone content such as ringtones, polyphonics, wallpaper, logos, java games, animated screensavers, plus much more!
Your customers will also be able to pay to compose their own ringtones online, using a virtual note composer and create their own custom mobile phone colour wallpaper by uploading their own images from their hard drives, which is a massive money earner!
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