Our friends at Brauchbarkeit have just released a new game on the AppStore called “Doppelgänger”.

It’s a well made and challenging memory game, perfect for your casual gaming needs. Check it out at One more Games or on the AppStore

Vote now for your favourite website of the year, at the Favourite Website Awards. We hope it’ll be our Red Bull Soapbox Racer!

Update: The results are in. The FWA Website of the Year is “We choose the Moon”, and “Labuat” won the People’s Choice Award. Congratulations!

This week’s edition is about overcoming this admin’s lonesome summer. The bad news first: Unfortunately, the announced Scooby Doo interview has to be postponed due to an urgent surgery. Scoob is just getting a respiratory tract transplantation. Could this be a result of a long media carrier? I will ask him about that, when Mr. Doo is back on top. At least, he seems not to share a doctor with Michael Jackson.

What has happened so far? It’s summer time at the Less Rain office, everybody enjoys the summer outside. Execept me. While the upper floors are dark and empty, there’s still that gloomy well-known shining on the walls. While the telephones are softly covered with dust, my desk is covered with empty pizza boxes, RedBull tins and take away coffee cups, forming a strange yet interesting castle around the screens and keyboards.

So this is my state-of-mind while I am writing this post; the creepy conclusion in the back of mind, the shining screens in front. The only thing left to me is the chance to answer the fantastic question: “Where would I go if I could as I please?”

Red Bull Soapbox - kids of all ages in self-made cars, racing down a steep hill. An extremely popular event, held throughout the year across the globe. The cars are powered by gravity only, no engines allowed but all dreams and colors.

And now it’s online! All of it, the cars, the race, the place to meet and challenge your friends. We call it Red Bull Soapbox Racer and racing you will.

Race first, think later

One single click on “Race now” and you find yourself on top of a steep road, pointing downhill. While the countdown is running, please be reminded that the game is based on a realistic physics simulation and you should not not not smash into one of those nice obstacles. Do collect cans for an extra speed boost and don’t forget the spanners. With ultra speed comes maybe damage.

If you didn’t win instantly the first time, maybe it was the wrong track. We have tracks for everybody, Wildwest, Night Ride, Turkish Riviera, Waterland, Alpenglück - many more will be added. Or was there a problem with the car?

Another car, another race

Red Bull Soapbox Racer lets you build your own car in 3D. Just draw the outline with your mouse. It’s really that simple and everything you draw will have an effect later in the game. The rounder the wheels the better, reconsider materials, use more stickers, paint, use colors, use more colors than your opponents, use every tool you have at least once. And winning races will get you even more of those. (THERE IS A NAILGUN!)

Give it some love, cars will be rated by who-knows-what so make sure there is no doubt. You may also browse through all existing cars for some inspiration.

The Challenge

After tinkering and test driving for a while there comes a point in time where you are quite sure to have the best car ever built on this planet. Challenge your friends! Invite them by E-Mail or simply click on the name of your long-time-rival in the so-called friends list.

A challenge works like this: Start the challenge and you have three attempts to race your best time. After that your opponent will be notified and offered three rounds to beat your time.

And after that, there is the highscore list for everyone to see.

Steeper, faster, harder

It’s even better to challenge somebody on your own surprise track. Give it a try, it’s simpler than building cars. Draw with your mouse where the street should go, done. Then, if you like, adjust the downward slope with some gusto and remember the guideline: The steeper the faster. Place obstacles and power-ups as you see fit, some recommend at least one can of Red Bull.

Red Bull Soapbox Racer is the latest addition to our creative online communities. Make your race times heard, we sure will try to beat you. See you on the circuit!

Related Posts:

Red Bull Flugtag Flightlab
Developing Red Bull Flugtag Flightlab

Being the company’s only system administrator is not easy. Surely, you have the power to control each and every electron which is quite cool. This ultimate digital power on the one hand dooms you to be irreplaceable on the other hand. That’s when lyrics like “Wouldn’t it be nice if I were redundant / then I could roam all the world” come into my mind. However, the trend leads to keeping of admins in a species-appropriate environment: pairwise. Until species’ protection gets in here, it seems as if I can stuff backpacker world tours. The reason is quite obvious: Servers tend to sudden death and don’t have the wishful ability to reawaken by themselves. If they had, they were cats. The interested reader might chip in with the nearly complete GSM-coverage. Right: Nearly. Ever tried to tweet your thoughts while crossing the Sahara desert or did a complete server update on your way to the top on mount Kilimanjaro? You probably won’t enjoy that much. Hence, I need to add “take yet another extra WalMart bag to carry notebook and mobile satellite receiver as well as an emergency engine with a diesel tank with you” on my personal list. Who ever carried 50 gallons of fuel on his back knows what I will have to expect and how much fun this won’t be.

I would go so far as to say that even trans-atlantic flights, a welcomed entertaining offline break for the average Facebook consumer, turn out to be my personal perfect horror trip. Arriving at the airport, some uniformed men suddenly appear and ask me why I do carry a running mobile satellite receiver with me. Surprisingly, they are not satisfied with the most obvious answer: I am an administrator who takes his job seriously. Moreover, they tell me an outrageous story of world-wide terrorism and try to explain the world in a simple yet strange way.

Furthermore, they even force me to shut up and down – the former meaning my objections, the latter my equipment – and have nerve to call me paranoid. Anyway. I am an admin, not a rebel. So I conform and quickly rush through the security check. Some never ending 15 minutes later, I take a seat in the plane. But the worse part of the trip is just about to begin. Innocently I sit in that plane, trying to connect to my servers which means bring both laptop and mobile satellite receiver online to bring this frustrating offline period to an end. The stewardesses, usually known for their never-ending smile, suddenly freak out and for a second I feel like George Clooney realizing that he is in a vampire temple in disguise.

From one second to another their smiles turn into grotesque faces and from one second to another there’s a bunch of hyperventilating stewardesses yelling at me to turn off my phone and notebook because this ought to be forbidden. Please. For me, it’s yet another fake world conspiracy trying to cut the magic band between an admin and his servers. Okay. Got me. Terrorists win. However, I’m still an admin, not a rebel. So I conform again. I decide to wait until the maximum altitude has been reached and brought me as close as possible to my favorite satellite. This takes me another 45 endless minutes. Watching the latest Disney movie doesn’t help either.

But having reached the summit I quickly resume my sessions and connect me to my servers. Everything is working smoothly. Unfortunately, the vampires return – with some reinforcements in tow. It’s the gentlemen from the cockpit telling me the reason that our plane is going to hit the ground very soon would be my internet connection. Again, I am doomed to the agony of being offline because of the selfish behavior of a few. To tell the truth, it’s just their lack of not being able to fly a plane without all that blinking and computing electronic helpers that actually do all the work while the so-called pilots just try to be good-looking and touch down all the time. Anyway. If you don’t keep your admin in a species-appropriate environment, his personal holiday destination look-up procedure has a quite limited framework.

Google released the source code of the Apollo 11 mission - together with an emulator.

On the first sight this may seem as yet another nerdish project, but it’s much more than that.

If you belong to the rare specie of Assembler programmers, you will have the unique chance to follow the thoughts of the people who coded a program that controlled a computer which flew a space-ship from Earth to the moon and back. Moreover, you have the possibility to see how the Lunar Module was programmed.

But for the rest of us, although we do not understand anything of that code, it’s an important artifact of history of mankind. Frankly, how many of those artifacts are we able to read? Hieroglyphs? Are they an important artifact of human history? Definitely.

Finally, there is an emulator to run the programmes on any computer. Somebody even made it possible to run that software on a handheld! 40 years ago, people racked their brains how to have an efficient computer that does not consume too much space and energy and today we could do the same with a mobile. I love IT.

Here’s the video…

Edgar Martins (portuguese photographer, grown up in Macau, China) creates interesting views on uninteresting scenes. We saw his exhibition in Lisbon, Portugal. Soon his work can be seen in Berlin (November 2009, at Caprice Horn Gallery).

A must-see!

©photography by E.Martins

Related links:
Edgar Martins
Caprice Horn Gallery

Don’t miss the next Talk about the Weather, where Frieder Weiss will show dance performances enhanced by motion-tracking real-time projections, Andreas Sommerwerk will tell the story behind his hand stitched watches, and Tobias Neisecke demonstrates the use of virtual worlds for healthcare & medical issues.

Talk about the Weather vol 12, Tuesday 5th May, 20 - 23h, at The Less Rain Basement Berlin.

You might know the situation: It’s been a grey, draggy day since its very first second. All you would really like to have is a calm evening. You open a bottle of your favourite drink, take a seat in your lovely bathtub and start to do your favourite evening activity [play computer, watch TV, listen an opera, read a book].

Suddenly, the phone rings. As you are a post-modern urbanized cosmopolitan you know the importance of communication. Therefore you instantly switch from relaxing to emergency mode - you jump right out of the tub, perform some body-drying twists and grab your towel. Unfortunately, your feet were unwilling to dry and so you slip right into your bathroom’s door.

Almost blind, you try to find the phone and the next Aspirin. You pick up the phone and a moderate attractive voices is twittering in your ear: «Good evening, my name is Maggie Smith and I’d love to ask you some questions about the new Oxygen-White-Mega-Pearl-Ultra-FlexiMax toilette cleaner»

If you’re freaking out right now, it’s probably okay. But there are more sophisticated ways to handle this solution. Martin Engelbregt created a «Counterscript» for moments like these.

flOw was - and still is - a simple, intuitive and ruminant Flash game by Jenova Chen 陈星汉 with an aestetic design and a deep soundscape.

PSP Games - flOw from multimediafreak on Vimeo.

It seemed to inspire the people at Blurst, which recently launched their beautiful oceanic undersea game Blush, that comes up with a lot more colors and personality.

Blush Trailer from Flashbang Studios on Vimeo.

Extremely simple yet addictive. Guide airplanes and helicopters to a safe landing. On sale for $.99. App Store link, and a short review plus video on touchArcade.

Nice article on ars about the history of the music game genre.

Interesting read - shame they forgot to mention my all time favorite Vib Ribbon on the PlayStation!

Image taken from vib-ribbon.com.

I wish Sony would make us develop the Flash or iPhone version of it!!