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Stephen King Turns Short Story Into Animated Webcomic Series
Posted by Nick Broughall at 1:47 PM on August 15, 2008
Here's a fantastic way to waste enjoy half an hour of your Friday: To coincide with Stephen King's upcoming short story collection, Just After Sunset, his publishers have teamed with the folks at Marvel to create a online webcomic series of one of stories in the book called 'N'.
The series, which consists of 25 separate episodes between 90 seconds and 2 minutes long, will have a new episode released every US weekday until August 29. So far, they're up to Episode 14, and it's a catchy little story.
The voice acting is pretty good, although the implementation is a bit annoying - the episodes automatically play in reverse order, and there are video ads that interrupt the clip on occasion. Still - It's fantastic in typical King fashion, I'll be watching keenly to see how the story ends.
Brian Ashcraft's book, Arcade Mania: The Turbo-Charged World of Japan's Game Centers, is available for preorder on Amazon. Brian explains that with the arrival of Street Fighter IV, now's the right time to explain the history, culture and colour of Japanese arcades. (For the first time in English, too.) [
See that battered old Hermes Standard 8 typewriter there, in a fetching shade of institutional brown? I'd practically saw my own leg off to own it. Why? Because I'm a huge Douglas Adams fan, and that battered old thing is the very typewriter DNA used to bring The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy to the world. A surprisingly analogue gadget, for such a self-avowed technology fan as he. And get this: it's actually on sale by a British bookseller, as part of a package with a "fine" condition first-edition copy of Hitchhiker's. The package, complete with autograph on the typewriter lid, will set you back over US$25,000. A vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big sum. But, boy... wouldn't it be worth it? [
Here's one really smart idea that will convert a few Kindle-haters: textbooks. Princeton University Press join Oxford, Yale and the UC in putting some of their titles into e-book form, allowing students to bypass the used book store and directly download their textbooks onto their Kindles. You'll save a few bucks for the digital version, plus shipping costs and shipping time. And if you figure out a way to hack it, that's like, free textbooks dude. Whoa. We see this extended to concerned parents of elementary school kids who've been complaining about how many textbooks they have to lug from home to school and back. Then again, maybe that's why your kids are so fat. [
What does someone who's been covering Microsoft for 25 years think about Bill Gates' retirement? Ask Mary Jo Foley, or consider her book, Microsoft 2.0: How Microsoft Plans to Stay Relevant in the Post Gates Era. I read and I found it to be somewhat encyclopedic in its breadth and knowledge of the inner workings of Microsoft, every page chock-full of historical context and deep knowledge and liberal use of external sources. It's all especially impressive since Microsoft PR decided against officially supporting Gates-transition stories. And she plays neither fault-blind sympathiser nor superficially informed critic; her work is pitch perfect, calling out the obscene and yet recommending doubters not count out Microsoft as Bill leaves.
This great "HD for Kids!" coloring book by Non-Toxic Reviews teaches tykes all about the joys—and pitfalls—of High-Def TV through activities like tracing burn-in on a plasma screen and the borderline-autistic "draw 1,080 dots inside this HDTV". The book is too funny not to be a little tongue-in-cheek, but the lessons are real and helpful for people of all ages. I can definitely relate to the part that gets the younggins disappointed early in life when they realise they have four HDMI devices, but only one input to plug them into. Check out our favourite pages in the gallery, and get the full book for free by hitting the link. [
This Hardbox enclosure from Korean company Sarotech looks even more book-like than the Western Digital MyBook drives that have been around for a few years. There are two status indicator lights on the front, behind which sits 3.5-inch SATA drives that connect to your PC via USB. It's great for hiding the fact that you don't have any books but have loads of external hard drives. That is, until someone looks closer and realises you've read a book called Hardbox. Maybe Hardbox means something different in Korean. [
Scanning a book manually is a colossal pain in the arse. Scanning a book with the DL 3000 Book Scanner, on the other hand, is easy and hypnotising. Just look at that sucker go! It can scan a whopping 3,000 pages per hour, tearing through a whole stack of books every day. Want one? Too bad: this guy will run you US$250,000. [
Finding a way to make portable speakers truly portable has proven difficult for manufacturers over the years. This new Speaker Book represents 
