Parade of Awesomeness

Boing Boing recently reported on a turtle who was hit by a car. After some surgery, the turtle mostly recovered, but it had lost the use of its back legs. So Jim Lee decided to help it out by replacing its back legs with a pair of model airplane wheels.

Apparently, the turtle took to them pretty well, and was able to eat, drink, and explore Lee’s house. 

And, as awesome as that is, here’s something even more awesome from the comments on this story:

This story is very personal for me because I too rescued a turtle, one who had lost the use of all his legs. We replaced his legs with RC Car tires and mounted a motor to the top of his shell, one that responded to the upwards and downwards movement of his head by a series of wires and levers (for steering left and right). It was quite a sight to see him fly past at 30 mph, chasing the neighborhood kids around. We set up a few ramps after he showed a predilection for jumping off things, and he would spend hours hurtling himself like a little turtle superman into various piles of leaves and whatnot.

It’s the Bionic Turtle, the fastest turtle that ever was. What could be more awesome than that?

Caylus is one of my favorite board games. In it, players take on the role of master builders erecting castle for King Philip the Fair of France. Their goal is to earn prestige by building the castle and by developing the city around the castle.

Each turn, players take turns placing workers on the board, paying them one coin each. The board has two major elements: The castle, and a long path that contains different buildings. These include a farm, which gives you a unit of food, or an architect’s office, which allows you to add a new building to the end of the path. Once a player drops out and stops placing workers, then all the workers cost 2 coins for the rest of the turn, and so on until everyone drops out.

Then you resolve the workers: Going in order along the path of buildings, the players get the benefits of the buildings they put workers on. After all the buildings are resolved, the players resolve the workers in the castle. In exchanging for discarding three resource cubes of diffent kinds (one of which must be food) to build a part of the castle, players can earn prestige points and royal favors, which give the players different benefits like money or a cheaper building. Then everyone gets two coins, and the next turn begins.

At the end of the game, whoever has the most prestige points wins.

The game is complex at first, but after a game or two you start to figure out the strategies involved. There are a lot of different ways to earn prestige points—building a building, having another player use one of your buildings, building the castle, using different specialty buildings to sell resources for prestige points, etc. That’s a big part of the game’s appeal: There isn’t just one way to win.

But while the strategies are complex, Caylus is pretty easy to learn, and everyone I’ve ever played with has enjoyed the game. It’s no wonder that this game is ranked among the top ten board games on Board Game Geek.

Evernote is a program designed to help you keep track of information, no matter where you are.

Information is captured into notes. These notes can be clips of web pages using the Evernote bookmarklet, photos emailed from a cell phone, or even a note transcribed from a phone call using Jott. It can even pull text out of images or recognize handwriting on a Tablet PC.

Once you have the notes in Evernote, you can sort them into notebooks, tag them, and search for them using the program’s built-in search engine. In the windows client, at least, the search is very fast, filtering out all the non-matching notes and highlighting the search term on the remaining notes, even in images.

What makes this program particularly appealing is that by default Evernote syncs all this information to a web server, which means that you can access your notes from any computer. In addition to the web version of Evernote, there’s a mobile version of the site for when you’re away from your computer, and both a Mac and a Windows client for faster access to your notes when you’re at home.

If you don’t want some sensitive information to be synced to the server, you can set up a local notebook to store that information on only one computer. And on the other end of the spectrum, you can set up public notebooks that anyone else can see.

Evernote has been around for a long time. It began as a Windows-only piece of software that (regrettably) took its design cues from Windows Media Player 9. This new version of the software vastly simplifies the interface and makes the software an absolute joy to use.

Evernote is currently in private beta and (at the moment) is free. I’ve got a handful of invitations available if you contact me using the link at the top of the page.

I really enjoy the Steampunk design movement, which merges modern technology with Neo-Victorian design aesthetics. For example, the Steampunk Workshop’s Jake von Slatt has produced (among other projects) this All-in-One PC by combining a discarded LCD monitor with wood, brass, and computer components to make a beautiful one-of-a-kind artifact.

I like the craftsmanship that goes into projects like these. It’s obviously not a 30-cent mass-produced injection molded bit of Chinese manufacturing; it’s a hand-crafted piece of art that is both beautiful and functional. It takes a rare combination of talent for electronics, woodworking, and metalworking that I can only envy and admire.

If you like this, you’ll probably like a lot of the Steampunk Workshop’s projects, like the matching keyboard you see in the photo above, the telegraph unit that clacks out RSS feeds in Morse Code, and the ongoing Steampunk Car project. 

Last Night on Earth, The Zombie Game puts players in the role of townspeople trying to survive a B-movie zombie invasion.

One player plays as a horde of zombies, while the others play such stock movie characters as Becky the Nurse, Sheriff Anderson, Jake Cartwright the Drifter, and Sally the Highschool Sweetheart. Each of these characters have different special abilities. For example, the nurse can heal another character in the same space, while the track star can move an extra space each turn.

The heroes have a limited number of turns to accomplish the goal of the scenario. In the game I played last night, we had to get at least two of the heroes in the truck in the center of town—after finding the keys and filling the truck with gas. 

The game is simple to play, and it does a really good job of simulating a B-Movie experience. There were a lot of fun moments in the game last night: Jake the drifter was holed up the hospital morgue with a chain saw, taking out zombies left and right. Eventually he found the keys to the truck in the morgue. He started running towards the truck, but the zombies had cut power to the building and he was forced to pick his way slowly out of the hospital. By the time he got out, it was almost sundown. Billy the track star ran towards Jake, hoping to take the keys and run back to the truck, but Jake couldn’t quite make it to Billy in time.

The zombies feasted well last night.

This game is not a deep strategy game by any means; it’s a lighthearted romp through a cheesy horror flick. If you have any place in your heart for the kinds of movies mocked by Mystery Science Theater 3000, I think you’ll really like this game.