Gadgets Blog » Humor

A few years ago, my wife convinced me to join the 21st century and create an account on Facebook with the promise of reclaiming long lost friends and keeping in touch with those I already have. Now, all the people that never talked to me in high school are commenting on pictures of my children and complaining about the drama in their lives.

I probably would have given the whole thing up had it not been for the digital heroin that is Facebook games. It all started with the now famous Mafia Wars, where I made my way up the crime chain level by level until I had hundreds of properties and was a Mafia bad boy.

Mafia Wars seemed so benign. All my friends were doing it, so I didn’t think it was a problem. I was checking it several times a day, but I could have quit at any time if I really wanted to. After a while, Mafia Wars wasn’t giving me what I needed, so I looked around for a different game to play. Mafia Wars was my gateway game.

I had always been interested in the sci-fi and fantasy genres and began playing a game called Castle Age. I needed friends to really make a dent in the game, so I began sending out requests to join Castle Age and I had a few takers. I had become a game pusher.

A little while ago, I shamefully watched two full seasons of one of my favorite NBC shows Parks & Recreation. When the character Tom Haverford finalizes his divorce and moves out of his home, he introduces the show’s viewers to his cleaning companion: DJ Roomba. With a top-mounted iPod, he raps while he cleans. After DJ Roomba dies, he returns to the lives of Tom Haverford & co. covered in a sheet, as a ghost.

After recovering from watching 16 continuous hours of TV, I wondered: surely, Tom Haverford is not the only person with a DJ Roomba. In fact, someone even devoted a website to this very moment in Tom’s life. Apparently, it’s pretty simple to make your own DJ Roomba.

What other identities can you give this otherwise inconspicuous robot?

1. Your pet’s new best friend (or arch nemesis)

2. Thursday night pool champion

3. Creepy photographer

Who will your Roomba become?

The process of writing this article has led to an extraordinary discovery: April Fools day is a holiday recognized on the Internet moreso than perhaps any other. While searching for news articles, I at times became confounded as to whether or not the article was true. Was this some spectacular joke, the result of some cheeky IT crew?

Such is the case with our first story, a magnificent postscript to our article earlier this week on the world’s largest gadget, the Large Hadron Collider. After some record breaking tests generated much excitement in the scientific community, a strangely dressed man named Eloi Cole was captured by CERN security guards after he was rummaging through some waste bins near one of the Collider’s entrences. Cnet.uk reports that he was dressed in a bow-tie and excessive amounts of tweed. Cole declined to identify himself with any nationality, instead offering up the following classic quote: “Countries do not exist where I am from. The discovery of the Higgs boson led to limitless power, the elimination of poverty and Kit-Kats for everyone.” The future certainly sounds bleak.

In other (fake) April Fools News, Google Documents has been expanded in a mind-blowing way. According to an official product release on Google’s website, the first 1000 people to sign up for a special program would be able to store anything, literally, anything in a Google Doc. This includes (according to a very official source) condominiums, pizza, and small, furry animals. It’s a clever joke, although the whole ordeal over Google changing their name to Topeka has stolen the spotlight for the time being.

Our final bit of April Fools humor comes courtesy of one of my favorite sites, Reddit.com. For the uninitiated, Reddit is an online community where users submit links from around the Internet. Links can either be voted up or down, so ideally, the best and most interesting articles rise to the homepage. In recent Reddit memory, there was a significant amount of hoopla over an administrator receiving money for submitting links on behalf of a company. Reddit’s sneaky retort came out today, when all users were allowed to “Turn On Administrator Powers.” The result? Anyone could upvote (or downvote) a link an infinite number of times, censor or ban another user, and edit the headlines of existing posts. Sadly, instead of the guaranteed chaos, it seems as though everything was just a joke. But then again, were we expecting any different?

This week we’ll be taking a look at some of the most interesting tech stories from the last few days (there was no shortage of exciting news from the realm of technology and gadgets). In an article on CNN.com, Internet analysis firm Experian Hitwise announced a new winner for top-traffic. The new king of the web? Social networking site Facebook, with 7.09% of all Internet traffic for the week ending March 13. Does this mark a significant change in the Internet landscape? It’s hard to tell for the time being, but it’s worth noting that over the last year, Facebook’s web traffic has gone up a staggering 135%.

Content-Aware Update to Photoshop

In an interesting YouTube video, Adobe Photoshop manager Bryan Hughes shows off what is an excellent new update to the much-used image editing software. While in the past, removing objects out of the background of pictures has been a tedious process, the new Content-Aware option uses some nifty technology to easily edit just about any picture. Â Check out the video for a great demonstration of this feature, it promises to make image manipulation easier than ever (which is a good thing, right?)

In case you didn’t catch it earlier, a 25 year old unemployed Frenchmen was arrested this week for hacking into several Twitter accounts, targeting several celebrity accounts (such as Brittney Spears) and even finding success with the account belonging to President Barrack Obama. There are some stiff legal repercussions ahead of him, as hacking in this type of context carries up to a two- year prison term in France, and it’s likely he will get the maximum sentence, given the political target of his crime. The kicker?