hole

Flick Golf Extreme is the sequel to Flick Golf, a very well-made arcade golf game. But instead of the usual golfing experience of trying to work your way to the green in the least amount of shots, in the Flick Golf games your goal is to get as close to the hole as possible in one shot--ideally with a hole-in-one. Flick Golf Extreme takes the game a step further by moving off the grassy links in traditional golf games to taking shots in all sorts of strange environments.

The interface and controls in Flick Golf Extreme were made for the … Read more

It's bad enough when your plane is struck by lightning. But I'm not sure how I would react if a hole suddenly appeared in the ceiling of the 737 I was on.

I'm not sure my first instinct would be to take a picture. On the other hand, I'm not Shawna Malvini Redden.

Yesterday, Malvini Redden was on a Southwest flight from Phoenix to Sacramento when there was something of an explosion. Then, lo and behold, there appeared a three-foot hole on high. Yes, the plane had developed a skylight, sans glass.

Malvini Redden describes the … Read more

The team behind ChevronWP7, an application that was released last November as a way for users to install applications without going through Microsoft's Marketplace application or signing up for a paid developer account, says that Microsoft has fixed the "error" that had allowed the hack, and will be rolling out that fix as part of the upcoming Windows Phone 7 software update.

ChevronWP7 was available for user download for just a few days before being taken down by its three-man development team. Brandon Watson, director of developer Eexperience for Windows Phone 7, had gotten in touch with … Read more

Editors' note: This is a guest column. See Larry Downes' bio below.

In "1984," George Orwell's classic dystopian novel, protagonist Winston Smith is a low-level bureaucrat in the Ministry of Truth. His job: to "rectify" old newspaper articles in which Big Brother's predictions or promises turned out to be false. Once the articles are rewritten, the original text--and the truth they represent--is dropped down a pneumatic tube known as a memory hole, "to be devoured by the flames."

The European Commission has recently proposed a real-life version of this fictional device, though … Read more

BRENTWOOD, N.H.--Road Trip 2010 has officially covered enough miles to make it from one coast of America to the other.

Of course, that's not what's really happened. Instead, I've driven 3,000 miles up and down--and up and down, and up and down, following a truly inefficient path--the East Coast in search of great destinations to report on.

And that's what has brought me here, to this town of population 4,200 in the southeastern corner of the Granite State--that quest for great things to write about. It's not that I had … Read more

Geolocation services--mobile applications that allow users to share their physical whereabouts with their networks--are gaining momentum. This week, Foursquare said it hit 100 million check-ins, with nearly 1 million "check-ins" per day. Earlier this year, Twitter added its own geotagging feature and now Facebook is reportedly working on its own.

But as these services gain speed, so too, it appears, do user privacy fears--at least according to a survey conducted by Webroot, a maker of antivirus and antispyware software.

Given the nature of Webroot's business, the company does have a vested interest in the topic. Nonetheless, the … Read more

WOODS HOLE, Mass.--Although crews have managed to shut off--for now, at least--the flood of oil into the Gulf of Mexico, it is virtually certain that ongoing cleanup work will keep the concept of deep-sea science in the public's eye for some time.

That could be good news for the scientists and researchers at the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution (WHOI) here, one of the world's leading repositories of across-the-board ocean expertise, and the developers of a stunning collection of hardware and software tools designed to probe the countless mysteries of the deep.

I've come here as part … Read more

What started out as a class assignment for Maddie Chambers became a nearly yearlong obsession. Now that the 30-year-old British woman's project is mostly finished, her work has drawn admirers from Brazil to the Netherlands to Spain and has even prompted a few to propose marriage.

Chambers has painstakingly created a miniature version of Bag End, Bilbo Baggins' house from "The Hobbit" and "The Lord of the Rings"--from the round front door and porthole windows, right down to the Middle-earth maps and the barrel of pipe-weed inside.

It's clear Chambers is a J.R.R. Tolkien fan. What isn't clear is when she sleeps. Chambers, the mother of young twin boys, started the project in March 2009 when she was taking a college course on child care. The unit was on "the importance of play." The assignment? Create a toy by term's end. Chambers, who lives in Chesterfield, England, set to work on the Hobbit hole in the evenings after her boys went to bed. Other times, she would turn to it while the toddlers napped.

Chambers based the dollhouse, roughly 3-foot-square, partly on Tolkien's stories and Peter Jackson's big-screen adaptation of "The Lord of the Rings." Her imagination filled in the rest.

"The Hobbit" first hooked her when she was about 10. About a year later, she tackled "The Lord of the Rings." Tolkien created a world that she wanted to live in, populating it with elves, dwarves, and dragons, Chambers said in a recent e-mail. (She has read "Lord of the Rings" about 20 times over the years.)

"I longed to go on the adventures with the Hobbits and I literally imagined every single step they took and pictured myself there too," Chambers said. … Read more

On January 23, 1960, two men, diving in a small deep-sea submersible, reached the bottom of the Mariana Trench, a spot about 200 miles southwest of Guam that, at 35,800 feet below the surface of the Pacific Ocean, is the deepest point on Earth.

It was the first time humans had gone that deep, and when Navy Lt. Don Walsh and his co-pilot, Jacques Piccard, took the bathyscaphe Trieste all the way down, they surely must have felt like pioneers, the first of many who would make their way there.

On Thursday, at a gala event at the Press … Read more