Carcassonne ($4.99/iPhone)

Easily one of the best games on the App Store, Carcassonne is a German-style board game where players take turns placing road and city tiles in an attempt to earn the most points. To score, you need to place one of your seven “meeple” tokens on a road, in a city, or on the land surrounding these structures. The catch is that you only get these tokens back during the game when you complete a road (by having it terminate on both ends) or a city (by enclosing the entire structure in walls). There’s a lot of strategy involved with trying to block off your opponent (trapping their meeple tokens) and preventing the same from happening to you!

An iPad upgrade is due out sometime this summer (and with that, a price increase to $9.99). However, anyone who purchases the game now gets a free upgrade when the iPad version is released. The game fully supports the high-res display on the iPhone 4.

SquareUp (Free/Universal App)

SquareUp allows you to take credit/debit card payments using your iPhone or iPad. Designed for small businesses and individuals who can’t afford expensive point-of-sale equipment, Square charges lower transaction fees than the large credit card processors. When paired with their headphone jack dongle, you can swipe cards instead of performing manual-entry transactions.

Square also includes some nifty features like emailed receipts and purchase tracking (so it can automatically award your customers that free cup of coffee after they buy 6 cups).

Runkeeper (Free/Universal App or $9.99/Universal App)

Runkeeper uses the GPS in your iPhone or iPad to plot your walks, runs, and other travel-related exercises on a map, which you can view and (if you prefer) share with others. It can also help you with pacing and show various statistics about your runs. The Pro version adds voice prompts to let you know how you’re doing.

Words with Friends (Free/Universal App or $2.99/Universal App)

Words with Friends is a Scrabble clone, but it’s actually much more polished than the official Scrabble application from EA! It supports just two players asynchronously, but you can have as many games as you like going on at once. The paid version (totally worth it) removes the advertisements that appear in between turns.

Pocket Legends (Free/Universal App)

Pocket Legends is the closest thing you’ll get to a Diablo-esque action RPG on the iPhone/iPad. With three classes, 45 levels of advencement, tons of random loot, PvP arenas, and 6 (and counting) campaigns, the game keeps getting bigger every day. The UI is excellent, and most importantly, the game is a blast to play. The Spacetime Studios team supports PL through microtransactions – you pay small amounts of money for things like new campaigns or extra items.

iPad users get their own special client optimized for the larger screen (thanks TouchArcade)!

Fast forward three years. Bigfoot Networks has recently released their Killer 2100 gaming network card at a much more affordable price point of $129. Has Bigfoot made significant strides in the four years since the M1? Have the drivers improved? Is the card just another piece of networking hooey? Let’s find out!

Hardware and Packaging

I purchased VisionTek’s edition of the Killer 2100 from NewEgg (amazing service as always, thanks guys!). The contents of the box are fairly spartan, containing the card, a driver CD, and a short owner’s manual. The card itself isn’t nearly as flashy as the original Killer M1. I actually prefer the toned-down look; the mesh keeps you from accidentally touching the board when you install the card, and there’s a subtle red LED that lights up the interior when the card is plugged in. The card itself is a single slot PCI Express x1 affair, but it will install in any PCI Express slot size (mine’s in an x4).

Software

The Killer 2100 comes bundled with the Killer Network Manager, a combination benchmarking, tweaking, and monitoring utility that serves as a sort of command center for the card. The app is divided in to five sections: Overview, PC Monitor, Applications, Network, and Advanced.

The Overview section displays basic system information, along with average pings, network processor usage, and whether certain software features like bandwidth control and LAN Exceptions are enabled. The PC Monitor can graph NPU usage and other stats over time. The Applications section lets you prioritize applications and artificially limit their bandwidth (for example, I set my BitTorrent traffic to low priority and restrict it to using 30% of my available bandwidth, leaving plenty of bandwidth available for Katt and my other applications).

The other two sections allow for low-level tweaking. The Network section lets you test (or manually configure) your connection speed, toggle the LAN Exceptions feature (which prevents the card from throttling internal network traffic), and change built-in Windows TCP settings like TCPNoDelay and the TCP ACK frequency. The Advanced section allows for altering the behavior of the Killer 2100′s traffic prioritization rules and some miscellaneous options like turning the built-in LED on or off.

The drivers have been rock-solid. No crashes or bluescreens!

Performance

Snazzy software aside, I’m sure you want the answers to the only questions that really matter: Does it actually work? Does the card reduce latency in games? I’m actually quite pleased to report that the Killer 2100 delivers on its promises. Latency tests are difficult to replicate, since there are myriad variables that can affect that sort of performance. To try and gauge the card’s impact on the two games I play most often, DICE’s Battlefield: Bad Company 2 and Blizzard’s World of Warcraft, I kept a spreadsheet of latencies across five days of playtime. The timeframes were relatively consistent, with most gameplay occurring between 8pm and 11pm, Monday through Friday.

My box has the following specs:

• ASUS P6T Deluxe V2 motherboard
• Intel Core i7 920 (2.6GHz)
• 6GB of Corsair Dominator DDR3 1600 RAM
• Western Digital RE3 1TB hard drive
• ATI Radeon 5870 1GB graphics card

In World of Warcraft, I had an average ping of 180ms running on my Marvell Yukon Gigabit Ethernet controller. In Battlefield: Bad Company 2, I had an average ping of 148ms on the same built-in NIC. Then I installed the Killer 2100, disabled my built-in NICs, and started tracking latencies again. I only have 3 days of sample data (compared to 5 for the Yukon), but the averages have definitely dropped. With the Killer 2100 installed, my average World of Warcraft latency is 98ms. That’s a 46% decrease. In Battlefield: Bad Company 2, my average ping is 101ms, a 32% decrease over the Yukon controller.

My connection in general feels a lot smoother — I used to get small latency spikes and hangups in Bad Company 2 when a helicopter would crash or I was riding shotgun in a vehicle. in World of Warcraft, I’d regularly experience the “teleportation effect” in the major cities where large numbers of players gather. Players would be standing in one spot, running in place, then appear 200 feet away in the blink of an eye. These problems have disappeared on the Killer 2100. The best part is that I didn’t have to manually prioritize my gaming traffic: the card takes care of that for you automatically.

So is the Killer 2100 worth its $129 cost? That depends on two things:

1. Is your connection at least mediocre?
2. Are there other upgrades (like extra RAM or a new video card) that you could put that $129 towards and get better performance?

The Killer 2100 won’t fix a crummy connection, although it can make a mediocre one good and a good one great. It’s definitely geared towards the PC gamer who already has the essentials taken care of (processing power, RAM, and a good video card). If you’re lacking in one of those departments, save your money. However, if you’re searching for a product that will give you an edge that’s next to impossible to gain with other hardware, the Killer 2100 is the upgrade for you. The automatic application prioritization and Windows network stack bypass features really do work, decreasing latency and improving overall network performance. You’ll notice a difference!

You can buy the Killer 2100 from Newegg for $129, but I get a small cut through Amazon Affiliates if you pick it up from Amazon.com.

I started out with something of a naive vision: I had some grand tale I had penned in my head, tales of daring-do and epic adventures. Lots of non-player character interactions, environmental challenges (surviving scorching deserts and the like), and most importantly a coherant plot that kept people coming back each week. However, as Robert Burns once wrote “The best laid schemes o’ mice an’ men / Gang aft agley.” I had made my first rookie mistake: I had attempted to craft a narrative where the players were puppets in an ‘on-rails’ tale, rather than allowing them to craft their own story. I quickly realized that if the mercenaries of the Death Llamas were going to stay interested, they needed to feel like they had control of the plot.

This is a lot more difficult to do than it sounds. Being able to improvise is a learned skill for most of us, improved with practice and hard work. I rapidly arrived at the conclusion that I was terrible at handling pivotal plot decisions on the fly, so I ended up compromising a bit. Rather than adhering to a rigid plot (no fun for the players because every event is a forgone conclusion) or giving my players complete narrative freedom (which requires lots of rapid improvisation from the DM and a 100% story-committed playerbase), I decided to take the middle ground. By preparing two or three ‘options’ at a given plot point in the narrative and some sketchy frameworks/ideas for the eventual impacts of those decisions, I found I could give my players choices without taking away the advantages of four hours of preparation each week.

While this might sound obvious, I found that it’s extremely important to take each of your players’ wants and needs in to account. Sending a combat-loving, ‘dungeon crawl’ type of party in to the duke’s annual Winter Ball is a recipie for disaster. Ask each player (preferably in private) what they want out of the game. As an example, my group leans heavily towards combat, broken up with the occasional skill challenge and NPC interaction. They rarely need an excuse to slay monsters (although they do appreciate some world building — more on that in a moment).

Even if your campaign is light on plot, you still need to make your player characters feel as though they are the focus of the tale. When the locals welcome them home with open arms or a visiting bard sings tales of their exploits, it makes everyone feel more attached to the world you have created. As an example, the Death Llamas were granted a guildhall early on in their adventuring careers by a local lord (who would eventually become their benefactor). Through the course of their adventures, they put their treasure and time in to transforming the hall in to a bustling tavern. When a beloved companion perished trying to save them from the martial arts of an evil monk, they renamed the tavern in his honor. Eventually, the tavern became their base of operations and a source of income. The running joke nowadays is that most adventures begin like this:

1. The Llamas have recently returned from an adventure. Everyone is using the downtime for training, running the tavern, working for their affiliated factions, or just chatting with the locals.
2. A haggard figure/panicked villager/old sage from 5 adventures ago bursts in to the tavern with some dire need or task that needs doing
3. The price of doing said task is agreed upon
4. The Llamas set out on their newest adventure

A few other tips I’ve picked up along the way:

• Keep an adventure log. Not only will it help you remember what you did last week, your players will appreciate it as well!
• Use a campaign management system (like Obsidian Portal). This lets you keep all of your party’s treasures, gold, maps, etc. in one place!
• Encourage your players to add descriptions and depth to their characters.
• Even if you use boxed adventures, take the time to tweak them for your players. I try to work in subplots for at least one player each adventure.
• If things seem slow and/or boring, ask people what they think is wrong. (In my case, combat often reached a ‘forgone conclusion’ state where victory was assured, but it would take another 20 minutes to kill the monsters. Consider having the enemies surrender or offer to take away some health from the players to skip to the end of combat.)

It’s been an exciting year so far. Here’s to the next one!

It’s been about twenty years since my brother Ryan and I got our first video game system: an original Nintendo Entertainment System with the Duck Hunt/Super Mario Bros. cartridge and two controllers. I can remember afternoons spent playing cooperative Mario Bros. with my Dad (switching off every level) and crashing my car repeatedly in Danny Sullivan’s Indy Heat with Ryan. (Maybe I shouldn’t have spent all of my upgrade money on engine power and boosts.)

That little 8-bit system fostered a love of video games in my siblings and I that continues to this day. My brother is graduating with a BS in Interactive Media and Game Design from WPI. My sister and I talked the other day about Dragon Age characters on her Xbox 360. Katt and I even had a gaming theme at our wedding. With that in mind, I thought I’d run through some of my favorite titles from the past two decades — those that really resonated with me because of their stories, gameplay, or events they ushered in to my life.

The Early Years

After the NES and Super Mario Bros., the first thing that comes to mind is a game that was hosted on Prodigy’s internet service (and later standalone on PC) back in the late 80s/early 90s…

Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego?

Carmen Sandiego was the first video game I can remember playing on a computer way back in 1990. I was 4 at the time and terrible with geography, but Carmen’s crazy capers (who steals the Indy 500?) kept me coming back for more.

Eagle Eye Mysteries and its follow-up, Eagle Eye Mysteries in London

Ah, Jennifer and Jake Eagle. My partners in crime-fighting! The characters and attention to detail are what made the Eagle Eye series great. The London-based sequel was particularly good, featuring cases that ramped up in difficulty and eventually all tied together story-wise. Armed with our trusty notebook, the Eagle twins and I solved cases ranging from animal theft to art forgery.

Just about everything in the Super Solvers series

That includes Treasure Mountain, Treasure Mathstorm, Treasure Cove, Spellbound, and (my favorite) Gizmos and Gadgets. They might be a bit old (and firmly in the edutainment category), but they’re a great way to teach math, reading, and physics to a young audience. I certainly played them for hours on end (and was, many years later, somewhat disappointed to discover that you couldn’t technically ‘beat’ any of them — the little prizes you were awarded at the end doubled/tripled/etc. up after awhile). Nothing could beat the feeling I got when I built my go-kart in Gizmos and Gadgets with the fiberglass body and lapped Morty’s (the main antoganist od the series) box-shaped kart in the race.

Tetris

Yep, the line-clearing, block filled puzzle game that’s made an appearance on just about everything with a screen. My first experience was with the one that shipped with the original Game Boy in 1989. I think I got my Game Boy in 1991 (it was awhile ago, my memory’s fuzzy), but I remember how excited I was to find that it came bundled with Tetris! My grandma still carries a Game Boy Pocket and a copy of it wherever she goes. She tells me it helps her pass the time while waiting in movie theaters. Unsurprisingly, her high scores are off the charts!

The Legend of Zelda series, but Link’s Awakening in particular

To this day, Link’s Awakening is my favorite game on the original Game Boy. I first spotted a classmate playing this during recess in 2nd grade and fell in love. I was over at his house for a sleepover and brought my Game Boy with me. I asked him if I could play it “for a bit” and promptly spent the entire night playing! With its  8 dungeons, tons of sidequests and items, and wonderfully varied scenery to boot, it’s a marvel even 17 years later. I mean, look at the size of this world map. This was in 1993 on a cartridge that held half a megabyte! The sheer scope of the game still amazes me — it was the first truly epic adventure I played on a handheld and continues to set the bar for RPG/adventure games to this day.

The Middle Years (and my first MMO)

Sometime in early 1995, we traded in our mostly-broken NES at FuncoLand (now more commonly known as GameStop) for $10. The guy behind the counter frowned as every game he put in to the system seems to be broken. Eventually, he pulled out the trash can, dumped the whole lot in, and said “Okay, you know what, I’ll give you $10 for the lot. It’s a steal.” We walked out with a shiny new Super Nintendo, two controllers, and copies of Super Mario World and The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past. Thus began the SNES era in the Bedell household: a time of role-playing games, my first exposure to cooperative gaming, and lots and lots of Tetris Attack.

Today, my brother Ryan continues to jealously guard our collection of prized RPG cartridges (Chrono Trigger and Secret of Mana among them), original controllers, and an SNES Jr (a late-model redesign we bought after our 1991-era model fried itself). I relive our console golden age with a hacked up Wii, an original controller, and one of RetroUSB’s SNES-to-Wii adapters.

I’ll start with my absolute favorite SNES game…

Secret of Mana

“Ryan, you can play this one with three people AT THE SAME TIME!” I was stunned to discover with Square’s Secret of Mana that RPG/adventure games weren’t just limited to a single player. Mana‘s cooperative gameplay was, for me, revolutionary. My brother, sister, and I often watched one another play through different titles, but for the very first time in our lives, we could play a console game together. For a trio of RPG lovers, Mana was heaven-in-a-cartridge. Weapons and magic that got better as you used them, an open world you could fly around (in MODE 7 pesudo-3D!), and a decent storyline — we were sold. Many hours of fun (and bickering about who got the fancy new helmet) ensued, and the game remains a family favorite to this day.

Super Mario Kart

Two player racing with characters from Mario? Sign me up. Super Mario Kart was the second racing title we ever owned. Even with just two players, the Grand Prix racing and Battle modes were fantastic (I can see the red balloons popping now). It doesn’t look like much in 2010, but it was the only kart racer around at the time. When you think about it, the mechanics of the series haven’t changed much over the years. Those pesky heat-seeking red shells and banana peels are just as hazardous as ever! In fact, I saw a fellow with this bumper sticker just the other day…

Nexus: The Kingdom of the Winds

(wow, it looks a lot better these days than it did 12 years back)

Oh boy. Where to begin with this one. Nexus was the very first massively multiplayer online game that my brother and I ever played — it was also one of the first to be released in the U.S., right around Ultima Online. Ryan and I beta-tested it through 1997, then begged my dad to front the $10/month/account fee so we could keep playing it for the majority of 1998 when it officially launched in the U.S. We even got some of our friends playing!  It is responsible (along with me having no willpower) for:

• Convincing my parents to switch over from 56k dial-up with AOL to a 1 megabit broadband line from MediaOne (“We won’t tie up the phone anymore, mom!”)
• Me nearly flunking 7th grade (academically, it was my worst year of public school hands-down — I went from a solid A student to Cs in the span of 6 months)
• Me realizing that, perhaps, I should play certain games in moderation
• Improving my time-management skills!

Despite all of its negatives (both from a gameplay perspective and the fact that it completely sucked me in), Nexus opened the door to some great social experiences with Ultima Online and its free server community…

Ultima Online

Another doozy that kept Ryan and I busy from 1998 to 2001. After deciding that we didn’t want to pay for another MMO to play, a friend of ours directed us to a player-hosted server called Lair of the Sorceress. It was there we met two individuals who would be a major part of our online lives for years to come: Wolverana from the great state of Texas and Nabisco from Canada. Wolv was a Game Master on the server, a sort of combination administrator/police officer/ who resolved disputes, put on events (more on that in a moment), and generally kept everything running smoothly. Nabisco was a friend-of-a-friend who loved Dungeons and Dragons and writing various modification and extra content for our little server. He started an online D&D group that brought many hours of monster slaying and adventure

A few rounds of drama later, and Wolv had started her own server running off a little 3 megabit cable line in Austin, TX. Ryan and I took advantage of the low population and UO’s awesome open-world “do anything” gameplay to start our first guild: the Obsidian Artificers. Ryan’s incredible powers of wizardry and mining ability combined with my fencing and blacksmithing skills made us a force of benevolence (and sometime mischief) in the world. There are too many tales to tell, but here are some of my favorite stories in one line apiece:

• Founding outposts across the land and stocking them with supplies for players in need (way over the maximum number of buildings two players could put down)
• Holding a complete monopoly on magically-enhanced armor and giving it away for free
• The day we had our first Player vs. Player arena tournament (Ryan cast Flamestrike on every participant and fried them in a single hit, myself included, taking the victory)
• The day we founded Irondale, the first player town on the server (I had a restaurant!)
• The great explosion, when Ryan spent an entire afternoon covering the city in exploding potions and then set one off by accident
• The great pirate invasion (we hired every pirate mercenary in Moonglow, a pirate haven in the middle of the sea, then brought them to town by boat. It crashed the server.)

Needless to say, we had a great time.

Blizzard’s epics: Diablo and StarCraft

Ryan and I had just received our first personal computers in December 1998: Dell XPS T500s with 500MHz Pentium III processors, 6GB hard disks, and a Voodoo 3 graphics card apiece. Through the magic of telephone-wire networking, Dad managed to get an IPX LAN up and running at home (later, we would actually pipe Ethernet around the house and run a real TCP/IP network). The network multiplayer possibilities were endless! Blizzard’s Diablo and StarCraft had recently been released, and they were the first (and only, for quite some time) games we ever played on our new computers.

Because we shared a desk, we had to stick a large piece of poster-board in-between our monitors whenever we played StarCraft games against each other. I peeked all the time and to this day, I have never won a StarCraft match against my brother. Diablo was cooperative (which was much better), and many rainy afternoons were spent crushing the minions of Hell beneath our bootheels. Ryan’s barbarian and my sorcerer did a fair job of squishing any evil that came our way.

The Last Decade: 2000-2010

These last few titles have a special place in my heart because I spent most of my time playing them with the people I love. Many a Thanksgiving in East Burke, VT was spent playing…

Perfect Dark

The ‘spiritual sequel’ to Goldeneye (at least in terms of multiplayer), Perfect Dark was the best multiplayer shooter on the Nintendo 64…even if it required a special RAM Expansion pack and ran at 15 frames per second on a good day. Even with its engine bringing the N64 to its knees, Perfect Dark was an incredible experience. There was nothing quite like having my brother, sister, and friends all playing at once with four computer-controlled bots making things even more hairy. The stat tracking (I am, according to the game, a grenade magnet) and the ability to tweak gametypes (hate the Laptop Gun? Get rid of it! Love Nanite Bombs? Play an entire round with them as the only weapon!) only made a great game better.

Although it feels a bit dated now, there’s a high definition remake available on Xbox Live Arcade.

Gauntlet: Dark Legacy

Another Thanksgiving classic. Joe, my brother, sister, and I once played through the entirety of Gauntlet: Dark Legacy in a 17 hour marathon. 100% completion. We never played it again after that, but it was the first ‘marathon’ gaming session I had ever done. I don’t think anything has come close to the 17 hours-in-one-day mark since.

Super Smash Bros. Melee

A college staple, especially freshman year. Super Smash Bros. Melee was the mortar that cemented my friendship with Tim and Scott (second from the left and last in the row, respectively). Every Friday and Saturday night we would head up to Scott’s room on the 4th floor of my dorm at Bentley, break out the sodas, and play Smash until our thumbs were sore. On occasion, we’d head over to Brandeis with other members of the BSGO and play with the CGX members too.

Team Fortress 2

I met the Disgruntled Cookies (although at the time they were the “Uber-noober Battle Group” or UNBU) playing Team Fortress 2. Although we don’t play much of it anymore, the community often plays titles like Heroes of Newerth together. We even exchange Christmas cards during the holidays.

World of WarCraft

Yep, six years later and my shaman is still alive and kicking. WoW and I have something of a history together. I started playing in the beta in September 2004, introduced it to a number of friends (and my wife), and have been playing it off-and-on ever since. We’ve played with folks from all over the world, and even (at one point) went down to visit some guildmates in nearby Connecticut. There were the 9pm to 2am raids on the weekends in college, hours spent fighting off the opposing faction in Battlegrounds, and talks about family over Ventrillo. Server swaps and character transfers, rerolls and respecs. A thousand and one tales of our adventures in Azeroth. In short, WoW’s story is a long one best saved for another day. It’s a tale I plan on telling eventually though!

And there you have it my friends, 20 years of gaming. I may have played a lot of games in my day (our Nintendo DS library is 48 titles strong), but these selections will always hold a place in my heart!

When I was twelve years old on September 30th, 1998, Nintendo introduced me to a role-playing game the likes of which I had never seen before: Pokemon Blue for the original Game Boy. Those 150 pixelated monsters gave my brother, sister, and I hours of fun battling, trading, and leveling. Every few years, the company would introduce new features and more monsters until it became apparent that they were “missing” (sales/exposure-wise) a generation of gamers who had never played the originals. Then the remakes started. Nintendo looks at them as a way to introduce new gamers to the older entries in the series. For me, it’s more about reliving the “golden years” of playing the games with my siblings.

Enter the latest entries in the 4th Generation of Pokemon games: Pokemon HeartGold and SoulSilver for the Nintendo DS.

Remakes of my favorite entries in the series, Pokemon Gold and Silver, the DS editions add most of the “next generation” technical improvements seen in Diamond, Pearl, and Platinum (wireless trading over the Global Trading System, WiFi battles, etc.) while keeping the setting and story from the original titles. Oh, and there’s the bundled Pokewalker accessory.

This handy little pedometer has become the best ‘gimmick’ I’ve seen from Nintendo in ages. By making use of the device’s built-in IR port, you can offload Pokemon on to the Pokewalker. Each step you take makes the monster inside a bit stronger, and every 10 steps or so generates a Watt. You can spend Watts on the Pokewalker itself to use the Poke Radar (allowing you to catch monsters specific to the route you’re walking on) or the Dowsing Machine (a sort of ‘find the item’ game that lets you obtain various medicines and power-ups). Any monsters or items you get will transfer back in to the game when you return from a stroll. Alternatively, you can transfer the Watts back to the DS cartridge without spending them. When you hit certain totals, you open up new routes to walk your Pokemon on. Each route has different items to find and different Pokemon to catch. To make things even more interesting, Pokewalkers can ‘connect’ to each other to share data — every person you connect with each day earns you an item.

Thanks for putting Skinner’s research to good use again, Nintendo.

In all seriousness though, if you like the Pokemon series, you won’t go wrong with the latest remakes. If you’ve never played, try to forget about all of the marketing and merchandise and give it a shot. You might be surprised!

Flash drives are mostly commodity items at this point; the cost per megabyte on these portable storage devices has plummeted in recent years. I can remember paying $79 for a 16 megabyte USB key around 1999/2000. Now, you can buy a 16 gigabyte key for $39 if you shop around. In a world full of similar products, how do you differentiate yourself? As it turns out, there’s a sizable demand for secure flash drives, especially in the government sector. Armed with 256-bit AES hardware encryption, a built-in antivirus scanner (BitDefender with a year of updates included), and a durable case, the Defender Elite fits the bill. For government security buffs, the drive meets FIPS 140-2 standards.

The first thing you notice about the Defender Elite is its construction. Made out of anodized aluminum, its build quality is tier above the myriad plastic drives out there. In addition, the drive has been filled with epoxy to make it more difficult to access the flash memory chips inside. If yellow isn’t your style, you can also get the drive in green, red, blue, and tan.

The Defender Elite’s key differentiator is its software bundle: a combination authorization/authentication/antivirus app called Kanguru Defender Manager. When you first plug the drive in to a machine, the Kanguru Defender Manager automatically launches. A few quick setup steps later (including setting a password and configuring the update schedule for the built-in antivirus), and you’re ready to go.

Anytime the Defender Elite is plugged in after the initial setup, you’ll be asked to input your password before the drive’s data can be accessed. Before the password is entered, only a separate, unencrypted partition containing the Defender Manager software is available:

After entering your password, the secure partition is decrypted and this tray icon appears in the system tray:

A right click brings up a menu you can use to configure various features of the drive:

By default, the antivirus is configured to scan everything on the drive in real time; each time a file is added, the Defender Elite automatically scans it for viruses and malware. Definition updates are painless and handled automatically. Actual Defender updates are a breeze as well, although the process is a manual one. When an update was available during this review, the Defender Elite downloaded and launched an Update Wizard. I just clicked Next on the two pages of the Wizard, allowed the update to run, then un/replugged the drive. The whole process took less than a minute.

For those who are curious, the included software is 64-bit compatible (I tested on Windows 7 Ultimate) and DPI-aware. This was an unexpected bonus — I run my machine at 125% DPI (the resolution of my screen doesn’t change, but everything is approximately 25% larger). Many applications with fixed windows sizes that aren’t DPI-aware have buttons that are cut off. The Defender Manager, however, worked perfectly with no UI issues in that regard.

Ah, but what about performance? What good is an encrypted flash drive if it takes forever to read and write data? While far from the fastest drive I’ve ever seen (that honor goes to Patriot’s Xporter series, which I’ve seen read and write around 30Mb/sec), the Defender Elite 1Gb turned in decent numbers for an encrypted drive when I benched it with USBDeview. With write speeds around 6Mb/sec and read speeds around 20Mb/sec, the Defender is an average performer. Still, the write speeds are much better than any bargain bin USB drive (I know of a popular brand with a swiveling metal clip that gets 2Mb/sec), and the read speeds are up there with many 5400RPM notebook drives.

The Bottom Line: if you’re looking for a solid performer in the arena of encrypted flash drives, the Kanguru Defender Elite won’t let you down. With an easy-to-use software package, built-in antivirus, and solid construction, it stands up to physical and digital security requirements. The read and write speeds won’t blow you away, but they’re acceptable considering the overhead of the virus scanner and encryption. Available now directly from Kanguru with a starting price of $49 for a 1Gb drive.

• ATI’s Eyefinity multidisplay technology was driving a wall of six displays off of one graphics card
• Alienware’s m11x 11 inch gaming laptop was on display. It’s even smaller than it looks in the Engadget hands-on. 6.5 hours of battery life in integrated graphics mode, 4 in dedicated watching 1080p movies, 2.5 gaming. Also, I want one.
• Watching the SurfaceScapes team play Dungeons and Dragons on the Microsoft Surface was a treat. The table has the ability to detect fingers and ‘tokens’ placed on its surface. The team has tokens on the miniature bases so the software knows where the players are on the map.
• Getting to see the DSi XL. It’s huge.
• Trading info with a mob of Pokemon lovers thanks to my new Pokewalker.
• Seeing Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik present the PA Make-a-Strip panel. Possibly the most hysterical thing I have ever listened to/watched.
• Having my sister Micaela join us on the last day for some Expo Hall fun (Micky on the left, Katt on the right)
• Playing indie games like AAAaaaAAAaaa (A Reckless Disregard for Gravity) at the showcase on the expo hall floor
• Making liberal use of the tabletop borrow-a-game library. Played everything from Munchkin to We Didn’t Playtest This At All!

A finalist at TechCrunch’s TC50 2008, the Fitbit has been a long time coming. A year after its debut, the wireless pedometer is finally shipping to the public! A few days ago, I received mine in the mail courtesy of the U.S. Postal Service. So, what makes the Fitbit different from a $10 pedometer you can buy at the store, you ask?

• Improved step and activity tracking (courtesy of a gyroscopic motion sensor, the same one in the Nintendo Wii’s controller)
• Sleep tracking (measures when you fall asleep, how many times you wake up, etc.)
• Wireless uploading to Fitbit.com through the included base station
• Rechargable battery (the Fitbit clips on to the supplied base station)

The uploaded data is sent to your personal Dashboard at Fitbit.com, which takes your information and turns it in to this (click to enlarge):

In addition, the Fitbit.com site also offers a  meal tracking system with a user-maintained database and the ability to manually record activities that the pedometer isn’t particularly good at figuring out (lifting weights, for example). You can sign up and use all of the manual features for free, even if you don’t buy a Fitbit tracker. For the more competitive folks, there’s even a friends-based Leaderboard for comparing statistics.

Speaking of the tracker, the build quality is excellent. Good plastics and a bit of metal for structural integrity. If you pry open the clip a bit, you’ll see a set of electrical contacts (for charging, initial setup, and firmware updates) lining both ends. One of the nifty things about this is that you can just push the clip over the top of the base station for charging, no need to worry about orientation. As far as buttons go, there’s just one on the back! It serves two purposes: flipping between the various trackable statistics (calories, steps, miles walked, and the fitness flower)…

…and toggling Activity Mode on and off (which allows you to track specific step/calorie/distance counts for a span of time and track sleep). The first three statistics will reset at midnight every day, but the flower shrinks and grows based on your recent activity level. It you’ve been sitting in your office chair for 4 hours, it will resemble a small weed. Climb to the summit of Everest and you’ll see a flower that fills the tracker’s screen.

So is it worth it? There’s a lot of subjectivity in reviewing a gadget like this. The Fitbit is only as useful as you make it. If you wear it all the time, keep it charged (mine’s been running for four days and it still has a 90% full battery), and make use of the information you get on your Dashboard, $99 is a steal for insight in to your exercise habits and sleep quality. If you leave it at home all the time, it’s a waste of money. My honest opinion? The automatic data uploading and “put it on and forget about it” usage model is perfect for me. It’s like I say:

The best technology is the kind you don’t realize you’re using.

If you’re interested in learning more about your sleep and activity levels, and the idea of automated data collection seems cool to you, the Fitbit comes with my highest recommendation.

It’s so sad that nowadays we have to screen our internet lives in fear that respectable, reputable people might be insulted or think less of us because of them. I don’t care if my college, my employer, or even my Grandma can see photos of me on Facebook or read my user info. I don’t care if one of my friends stumbles upon my Deviantart account or that old Inuyasha fan fiction I wrote in 7th grade. My internet history is very telling to who I am as a person and how I have grown, and if I need to screen that.. then there’s something wrong with the way I live my life.

I think she has an excellent point; anyone who posts in a LiveJournal, has a Facebook or MySpace page, or countless other sites is almost writing an autobiography of themselves. An eternal archive of their stories, achievements, pastimes, and projects. Just a few examples:

• The first website I ever made in January of 1999
• Back in the early days of Palm OS, my friend Alex and I used to write little PIM apps and ‘Choose Your Own Adventure’ type games. I guess they’re still floating around
• All of my angsty high school years in one compact LiveJournal
• Our old virtual UO/tabletop D&D group’s site

I’m feeling all nostalgic now…anyone else care to share some of their early internet works?

1. “What do I use every day that I take for granted?” (something that blends in to my life so much that I don’t realize I’m using it)
2. “What do I use every day that would be vastly improved by removing features?” (things that frustrate me to no end every day)

As far as taking things for granted, the first thing that popped into my head was…

The Thermos

I love this thing. As far as I’m concerned, the vacuum flask is one of the greatest inventions of the early 20th century (Germany, 1904 in fact). This particular design manages to do so much with its minimalist construction. The cap is a cup, and the vacuum seal can be partially unscrewed to let you pour (its threaded grooves channel the liquid in to a stream so it doesn’t spill). Oh, and it maintains beverage temperatures. Yay science.

It wasn’t quite as hard to think of something that infuriates me on a daily basis. I’m sure you use one every day for some purpose or another…

The Remote Control

Ugh. I need to use three of them to turn my TV, sound, and cable box on respectively. What’s with all the buttons guys? I think I would be just fine with power, input switch, volume, and channel up/down controls. Maybe (just maybe!) a 5-way d-pad and a Menu button on the cable and TV remotes. I don’t think that anyone in the history of audio/video has pressed the index button on their remote.

What sorts of objects do you take for granted every day? Is there anything that drives you nuts?