Cool Tech Reviews

I have always enjoyed turn based strategy games in general and space trading games in particular, so I was glad to find Dark Nova on the iPad. Those familiar with the space trading genre will feel right at home: you start as a struggling space captain with a small ship trying to make a buck carrying cargo from one planet to another despite the depredations of pirates, the scrutiny of the police, shifty fellow traders, and the occasional alien pest. It’s mostly all about profitable buying, selling, and passenger traffic with the occasional flyer into smuggling or piracy if you are feeling adventurous. You are free to proceed at your own pace since it is turn based and not multiplayer, and there is enough of a challenge (and multiple levels) to keep you amused for a considerable period. While I did not try it, I see there is also a Dark Nova HD specifically for the iPad which presumably has larger graphics for the larger screen, although I was quite happy with the regular version in 2x on my iPad.

There are a variety of weather apps available for the iPad, but by far and away the best that I have seen is Weatherbug Elite for iPad. It has all the expected weather features, but what really blew us away is the mapping. First, we are using a Wi-Fi iPad and yet Weatherbug Elite is able to pinpoint our street location almost exactly apparently because they use technology from Skyhook Wireless that uses a vast database of Wi-Fi access points to triangulate your position.

Second, the radar and other mapping is what I would term infinitely scalable. You can use the usual iPad multi-touch to zoom the display in to your street and out to your state or larger. The other night we were in the middle of a line of thunderstorms complete with hail and funnel clouds. With Weatherbug Elite on the iPad zoomed in on our location it was like watching the storms pass overhead. Very, very neat.

However, the best news is that Weatherbug Elite for the iPad is free. Give it a try and see if you do not think it is slick as well.

Adam Pash at Lifehacker makes some interesting suggestions on how to Get Vista’s Best Features in XP. The sad part is that there is so little there beyond eye candy of dubious utility or applications for very specialized niches. In the latter category, I liked:

Take Quick and Easy Screenshots: PrtScrn has been around forever, but it’s never been the most user-friendly way to get a screenshot. In Vista, Microsoft threw in a screenshot utility called the Snipping Tool. Fact is, if better screenshots are important to you, there are gobs of excellent free screenshot apps available for XP like Screenshot Captor (original post), Clip2Net (original post), and Jing (original post), among many others.

Choose Clip2Net or Jing if you want to share your captures on the Web or Jing if you want to grab a screencast, but for my usual chore of taking screenshots and saving them on my PC, Screenshot Captor does the job and more. Screenshot Captor is for Windows only and is donationware.