Please note, that Tetrisconcept.com opened up a Tetris-wiki, that is totally devoted to everything related to Tetris. Their mission is quite cool they say: “Our goal is to compile every Tetris detail known to mankind.”

This project is a must for everyone who wants to go into puzzle-arcade games in general or the mystical world of Tetris in special. There are many interesting details, for example the rotation system of the different game systems or different hints for gaming techniques at certain problems of the game. To get an idea, sneak into the page of the I-Spin problem.

The rotation system from the most famous version of Tetris.

They collect also wisdom and curiosities about Tetris, so why not add your project, if it is worth to mention? In that sense, have fun with that video from YMCK:

Some pixels of goto80’s website, 16. July 2008

Goto80 computer geek loves the machines and switched his website to machine-readable. It’s pretty enjoyable to read this website in the RSS-reader, while using the browser, well…. Just to look at the website. Many people tell, that it’s totally irrelevant how a website look like, and this time Goto80 proofs them right. The website still rocks! Oh, I also found an enjoyable, human and machine listenable musicfile. Goto80 – Sysygy.

No audioplayer showing up? Download the mp3: http://ia311313.us.archive.org/2/items/grimeton_calling/sysygy.mp3

There are lots of media and technology-festivals. On my radar just recently three new festivals popped up, hopefully making this a beautiful summer with people, nature and technology.

Robot250

The first one is the Robot 250, sponsored by the Carnegie Mellon University, that will take place around the City of Pittsburgh. The festival is currently running until the 27 July. To get an idea of the festival, check out the website of the Robot 250 or look at the video below. It’s an excellent piece of art, that is out there somewhere. It seems really inspired by Philip K. Dick‘s famous short story “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”. It the work Mower from Osman Khan, currently working at the Carnegie Mellon. (via BotJunkie).

Gossip08

The Gossip08 is a fresh festival for free culture. It’s located on green grassland in the deepest south of Germany we call Allgäu. It will be held in the mid of August, from the 15.-17., so enough time left to order tickets and get everything ready to join the ride. This festival is not limited to a special “genre” of culture, but anything that comes free and relaxed will be welcome. Check out the website: Gossip08. They also got an extended program of music, workshops etc… (via Gulli)

Demoscene-Party at Metalab

The metalab in Vienna is having its first demoscene party. It will be from the 18.- 20. July 2008 at the place of the metalab. They expect about 100 visitors and a panel with the topic “oldschool coding” on vintage machines vs. recent technology hacking should be also a part of the party. (via Futurezone)

Demos by Synesthetics

Demoscene.tv is the “TV-channel” for the web, that show products from the demoscene as web-video. Not long ago they made a somehow decent redesign of their webpage and enabled a great feature, where you can put together your own playlist-channel.

Today they announced their latest feature. Now you can embed the most popular playlists into your blog or website, well just like I did. Unfortunately they did it not for every playlist, like the one I made some weeks ago. This feature also lacks on free scalability of the player window. I scaled it by hand, that’s why the video looks a little strange. Maybe they will add this in the future?

I embedded the playlist from the group Synesthetics. The works of them are always on the edge with pushing acid-music and *yes* colors. Did I mentioned already? I loooove colors.

I don’t know how you feel about getting up in the morning. Still this is one of the biggest problems for many people and countless solutions to that problem has manifested in creative product designs. We see the evolution from the bucket of water to robots, replaying your dreams, that technology is also moving along on that path.

It even looks good!

Alice Wang made a great concept, that combines technology with social factors in a very unique and innovative way. This alarm clock begins to call people from your mobile phone, if you don’t manage to wake up. It puts peer pressure on you – if you don’t like that noise in the morning, be sure that you will get into problems on that day, just because your friends once again got that call from your alarm clock. This concept also works, if you oversleep rarely. Your co-workers are alarmed and they can call you up, until everything is fine. Well, isn’t this a Web 2.0 community then?

via Neuerdings

On a website of Max Pfisterer, a designer from lovely Stuttgart, I discovered this really, really beautiful pixel-icons. Made in 16×16. Since I love 16×16 so much I directly sensed, that this work of pixelart is far away from the world of icons we are facing every day on our computers, or that cute, cute, cute things we see on computing games.

The design of the pixels here called “Störk Tronic” is so rough and somehow special. Evidently it came from a source, that even designers are not concerned with on a daily basis. Almost instantly I wrote Max a mail. He told me, that this work was made for a customer. The icons are used for a “refrigerated display case” (Kühltheke). He said, and I can imagine, that it was not an easy task to design 256 pixels with one color each (ok, some are animated) to show things like “Messerabstreifer” or “Tropfschalenheizung”. Just look on the icons and take the trip into exotica. Thank you so much!

I discovered the site from Max via the Glam Slam netlabel. He did the corporate design and some artworks for this netlabel. Maybe I should also join with my designing skills?

Ok, there is hardware and then there is software. Still lovely hardware has so much charm, that we like to spend hours and hours with that gadgetry. Much more irrational is to spend days, maybe weeks, in tweaking hardware together that normally would never meet in this universe. It then reads software for the other device, that normally would never find its way to the datadisk on that very device. To make things short: Some French people build a floppydrive ready connectable to a GameBoy Color.

With that floppy drive you can read files just right into the gameboy from 3,5″ disks. At the moment it can’t directly read and boot ROM-files, but they posted a possible way to do so. And maybe we will have that update one day. ROM-files normally require hardware-modules gameboy ready or emulator software. This here is the other way round.

There are lots of ways to play gameboy stuff completely emulated and software driven, meanwhile on almost any device with a screen and some keys. But this here made easy things complicated and then easy again in a very charming way. Sometimes I just love the homebrewers.

via boingboing