The Zone

Jeng jeng jeng.....Presenting to you the new papercraft kit from tubbypaws, the papercraft master who has done pieces for games in the past. Now, you can own your very own 3D Niko Bellic (who's voice actor was paid USD100000 for his work and now he regrets it because he will never get the slice of the earnings pie) complete with car and apartment block. Too bad there are no other in-game characters that accompanies him, but we bet it will look great on your desk!

Check it out here! 

Another day, another breakthrough in technology! Sharp has announced its thinnest CMOS imaging sensor yet, and the RJ63SC100 seems mighty thin and small for what it can deliver. We're not sure how Sharp actually managed to squeeze 5 Million pixels in a size that small, but there are slight problems in actually using it. Apparently a S/N ratio of 1.6 is used to counter the traditional problem of a small sensor with crammed internals, but expect mobile phones to have this sensor to be on the high side of price - it costs 96 US dollars!

In a publicity stunt made by Panasonic, a tiny rope-climbing robot climbed up 530 meter rope at the Grand Canyon. While the EVOLTA batteries are pretty long-lasting to us, having used a sampler pack in our hotshoe flash once, what makes the stunt remarkable is that the batteries lasted over six hours, ahuling a 500-odd gram robot up a cliff complete with winds and all. we just wish they're rechargable, as RM15 for a 2-pack Oxyride is rather dear!

[via Pink Tentacle]

It seems like we're having many gaming-related posts for the past few days, but you can't simply turn down this one; a GTAIV inspired stunt video for all you Niko fans. It has a perfect introduction, and although the video goes slightly tired nearing the end, its almost poetic, this driving cars off buildings thing! 

Radiohead's semi open-source song, Nude, gets a playthrough with hard drives and a motley crue of a Sinclair ZX computer, a dot matrix printer and a scanner. How geeky can this get? we wouldn't know, as programming would be a real headache. now, if only we could play John Lennon's Imagine on this!

Okay, so Apple did the inevitable and launched the 3G Jesusphone iPhone. While it does have improvements over the previous model, we're still miffed about the supposedly 1.4Mbps 3G cap, video calls, or for the lack of it, and the fact that Malaysia is completely overlooked in their global roadmap launchings. The only silver lining in this cloud is that unlocked previous-gen phones will definitely drop in price! That's how i'll get my grubby paws on one  

Yeap, we had our fair share with the spore Creature Creator Trial, and while the small palette of parts seemed limiting at first, you can never underestimate the power of the human imagination lol. One striking thing that we noticed while playing God was that Spore has seamless sharing intergration when it comes to showing off your stuff. You can download creatures just by saving their JPEG images from the online Sporepedia, you can upload your own creations to YouTube without quitting the game, and you can even snap IM avatars and such using the tools provided. I've even got a Spore gadget that shows my creations on Facebook! Is Spore really a next-gen online social device? We'll have to wait and see.  

Okay, so its that time of the year again - Google has announced that the registrations for the Google Code Jam 2008 is now open, and programmers are allowed to use their noggins to solve interesting problems. Glory in the form of recognizesd |337 h@XX0r skills! To join in the fun head over to code.google.com/codejam

They're adding bikes and a night mode to the mix already, and look at the text above the tumbnails - planes? Are we going to see some kind of spectacular airshow crash in a console near us? Cool!

Winds' Vin trying to look menacing while practicing for the CELGames Semi Finals just this morning!

More pics after the break! 

With Hector Ruiz' announcing his resignation from the CEO's seat of the world's number 2 processor manufacturer, we are now inclined to see a bleak future for AMD, especially after that recent huge layoff which saw a closure of a fabrication facility. Ruiz however will be remaining on AMD's board of directors, and will be appointed executive chairman.

On a lighter note; the HD4870 X2 is crowned the biggest and baddest ATI card that the world has seen so far, giving users a performance boost that rivals the events we saw in the days of the 9800Pro/XT.Woot!

[Sauce]