Gadgets Blog » Movies

In was but a wee one when the original “Tron” came out in 1982, but I was mesmerized by the amazing graphics and cool special effects. It has action and light cycles, and it involved computers, something not many movies were doing at that time.

Almost 30 years later, a much-anticipated follow-up movie premieres today, and the video game Tron: Evolution is already in stories. It got me thinking about when “Tron” first came out and the arcade game that was developed to follow the movie. I frequented a lot of arcades back then, and that game got me hooked far more than Donkey Kong or Pac Man.

Perhaps the most fun about it was that it was four games in one. It wasn’t just the same game over and over again with maybe a new terrain or faster enemies; there were four completely different games. While that may pale in comparison to the Mario Party and Carnival Games of today, back then, it was unheard of.

Everybody had their favorite game, and the one that they couldn’t stand but played anyway because it was the only way to beat the game. The arcade game featured black lights and fluorescent lights, and it just looked amazing on the arcade floor.

You have to remember that arcades of the ’80s were nothing like the arcades of today. They were loud and dark and filled to the brim with people. For teens and younger, the arcade was the only place to go and play for cheap. All you needed was a few dollars in quarters.

This Friday, The Social Network, a film detailing the rise of Facebook and its online empire, hits theaters everywhere. While some of the early reviews have been touting it as an excellent film, with Rolling Stone even granting the flick four out of four stars, the quality of the acting and directing are secondary to the remarkable nature of the story. Facebook has become a defining part of the 21st century, with millions of users utilizing the service to stay in touch with friends and family. But what if, in addition to your pictures and status updates, your network was also capable of knowing where you were at any given moment? This question, it seems, is no longer hypothetical. Facebook Places provides information to your friend list on your location, something that has some users excited and others understandably nervous.

Facebook isn’t the first company to jump on board this type of social networking. Google Latitude has been on the market for the last year for free. A Latitude-enabled smartphone kept track of your location using a GPS, broadcasting it at any given point to others in your friend group also using Latitude. While the idea had potential, the small number of users turned it into another obscure Google service offered up by the company. Additional ventures into the area have been made by startups such as FourSquare. The service, which currently has about 3,000,000 users, incorporates elements of location-based social networking as well as reviews of local businesses and hot spots. Thus far, however, only 4% of Americans have even tried such a service, according to an article at Safe and Savvy.

In the world of televisions, bigger doesn’t always mean better. As the dimensions on a high-definition screen increase, the price tag can become enormous, making many larger models unaffordable for most consumers. Larger television screens also are bulky and hard to transport, and their size can make arranging a watching area around a screen more difficult. It’s too bad, really, because it becomes all-too-costly to imitate a movie-theater type experience in a living room, without using some ingenuity. That’s where the Epson PowerLite 700 Home Cinema Projector comes in. It’s a powerful unit, capable of transforming any room into a full-fledged theater.

The PowerLite projector may come as a surprise to those who have been skeptical of projector units in the past. The specifications on the unit are impressive, and situating it to work in your house is far easier than you might think. Sporting a 3LCD, three chip optical engine, the colors are bright and clear, provided you have a proper viewing space. This is the toughest part of using a projector like the PowerLite 700, finding a proper surface for viewing use, but this projector unit is highly portable and has easy-to-use focus controls. Whether you’re looking for a permanent watching area or wanting to get some travel use out of the projector, you’ll be able to use the PowerLite 700 with few focus issues.

A major concern for projectors is how they look in a lighted room, but the PowerLite 700 performs better than more expensive projectors in this category. While optimal viewing is still achieved by cutting out some of the light in the room, the colors still remain bright even under less-than-ideal conditions. Capable of projecting in 720p, the unit can spit out high definition images that are impressive for a projector in this price range. In fact, price is one of the greatest assets for this Epson projector. At only $689.88 through Smarter, it’s a great deal, costing less than most mid-sized televisions and far less than high-end projector models.