TENNIS

Occasionally we sprinkle advice around here. It's intended to be both gracious and helpful.

Today's homily is for those who are paid by cell phone manufacturers to use their phones.

The advice is this: Please, please remember to use their phones.

I mention this only because of the latest telephonic faux pas committed by the very fetching Spanish tennis player David Ferrer.

It's the Madrid Open this week, so he thought he'd inform his almost 370,000 Twitter followers that he was so very, very happy with his new Samsung Galaxy S4.

Perhaps his competitive adrenaline … Read more

Screen Tennis is like a time-warp back to Pong days. There are two controllers, which are big colored blocks on either side of the screen, and a round white blob in the middle that is the ball. The ball bounces back and forth and you control one paddle. The app installs easily and launches quickly, sitting over top of your desktop and wallpaper.

You have some very basic customization available with Screen Tennis. You can change the color of the two paddles and the ball, for example, and select whether the AI controls the left paddle (the user always controls … Read more

Before the U.S. Open tennis tournament began this week, I had never heard of 18-year-old Laura Robson (@LauraRobson5), even though she won an Olympic mixed doubles silver medal in London this summer.

To me, the women's game is dominated by the Williams sisters, Serena (@SerenaWilliams) and Venus (@VenusesWilliams), and a revolving cast of mostly unmemorable Russian players, except for Maria Sharapova (I couldn't figure out her official Twitter feed -- can you? Her site has a social section, but it only lists a Facebook account).

But 89th-ranked Robson, who sent former champ Kim Clijsters packing in … Read more

The Netflix video streaming player finally gets an overhaul, but most of the upgrades to the navigation and video thumbnail layouts feel vaguely reminiscent to us, but we can't put a finger on it.

Speaking of streaming video, we'll also made a plea to HBO to broadcast episodes of "Game of Thrones" to non-subscribers. The show has quickly become the most pirated show of 2012 so far, and although we understand HBO's rights to keep the episodes in-house, we can't help but wonder why the network isn't taking advantage of this opportunity to get more money. Related: this week's Low Latency comic.… Read more

The flood of iOS apps and games continues at the iTunes App Store and this week has been particularly big for new releases.

While I usually try to incorporate a theme into these iOS app collections, this week I wanted to let you know what I'm playing right now. These games are all high quality, from three different genres, are all new to iOS, and have captured my attention all week.

This week's collection of apps are games I'm playing right now. The first is a one-of-a-kind tennis game that has a unique control style along with a comic book story line. The second is a remade Mac game with an extraordinary amount of content and a beautiful setting. The last is a sequel to a popular FPS franchise and might be the best yet.… Read more

With the 2011 U.S. Open Tennis Championships getting under way, fans and fanatics alike are sure to be hunting for the latest scores and news updates coming out of the tournament. With a free iPhone app you can have all the updates you desire. You will even get a free radio feed of the matches, as well as a video highlights and a live video on the final weekend.

… Read more

It's right up there with the sound of nails clawing a chalk board. Scratch that. It's far worse.

Each year, it seems, the on-court shrieks and grunting of professional tennis players gets louder and louder with seemingly no solution in sight. But now technology is coming to the rescue in what fed-up tennis fans will surely welcome as a hopeful harbinger.

The BBC has announced a downloadable noise reduction product it calls Wimbledon Net Mix that will let people listening to the Wimbledon tennis tourney control the decibel levels from the match. (It was co-developed with German technology institute Fraunhofer.)

In a statement, the Beeb, which described the technology as an "experiment," said listeners will be able to "adjust the commentary level relative to the sound of the court: the crowd, base-line grunting and ball. For technical reasons the experiment will only be available during live coverage of matches from Center Court. The player may need manual configuration within some corporate firewalls."

The tool is currently only available for BBC Radio 5 Live transmissions, but it may be introduced to other broadcasting platforms if successful. … Read more

"Star Trek" aficionados may recall the episode in which Captain Kirk gets transported down to a planet by super-powerful aliens to do hand-to-hand combat against the Gorn. Without giving away the plot--in case you were deprived as a child and never saw the show--Kirk used his wits to defeat the lizard monster by assembling a primitive cannon from elements he found lying about.

Now comes Dylan Hacker (I'm assuming he goes by his "stage" name), who runs a San Francisco production company called Household Hacker. This morning we stumbled across his highly entertaining video recipe for putting together a "Superman hand cannon"--basically an enhanced tennis launcher, assembled from bits and pieces of junk that probably are lying around your basement--just in time for the summer. Definitely worth a look-see. (It's amazing how far duct tape will take you, especially on the odd chance that you, too, run into a Gorn somewhere down the road.)

This story originally appeared on CBSNews.com.… Read more

So you work for a video game company. Say it's called 2K Sports. You are about to launch a game called "Top Spin 4."

Now, tennis isn't quite the most popular sport in the world. And you need to persuade, oh, young, happily hormonal men to buy your game.

You hold a brainstorm that takes at least some minutes. You decide you need to make your game sexy. "Serena Williams is sexy," someone says. "Yeah, yeah," someone else replies.

Your minds then hotfoot it to an ad concept in which Williams looks … Read more