sea

Earn coins by catching fish

Fishing Joy is the iOS port of a popular Asian arcade game, ostensibly about catching fish with nets but really about quickly calculating probabilities, taking risks, and earning coins.

Fishing Joy is a pretty game, with a top-down view of colorful fish swimming around a tropical undersea environment. You want to catch the fish by firing a net at them, and you only have two controls: you can tap on where you want the net to go, and you can tap on your net cannon to determine your net's size rating, from 1 to 7. You're very likely … Read more

Nokia to unveil first Windows phone this quarter

Nokia is promising to launch its first Windows Phone during the current quarter.

CEO Stephen Elop made the announcement yesterday at a technology event in the company's home base of Helsinki, Finland, according to Reuters and other news sources. Nokia has been eyeing a 2011 launch for its first Windows Phone devices since this summer, so it has little choice but to hit the market this quarter to reach that goal.

The first handset could come as early as the end of this month to coincide with the Nokia World trade show taking place in London on October 26 … Read more

Dead Sea Scrolls come to life on the Web

Discovered in 1947, the Dead Sea Scrolls have been available for viewing only in a museum in Israel...until now.

Thanks to some expert digital photography and a project set up by Google, high-resolution photos of five of the seven original Dead Sea Scrolls can now be seen online. The Digital Dead Sea Scrolls Web site offers a peek into the distant past, allowing people to view and examine the scrolls in fine detail.

Photographed by digital photographer Ardon Bar-Hama, the images contain as many as 1,200 megapixels, according to Google, so that people can zoom in to get … Read more

Best iPad game you've never tried: Crimson: Steam Pirates

I don't know if a game about pirates and warships can "fly" under the radar, but that's what happened when Crimson: Steam Pirates made its debut a few weeks back. And that's a shame, because it's one of the best iPad games I've played--and definitely worthy of a spot on Scott Stein's best free iPad games list. That's right: Steam Pirates is a freebie.

Well, partially free, and partially freemium. The game starts you off with Chapter 1 of the "Tales of Captain Blood" saga; Chapter 2 will run … Read more

Mysterious UFO-like object spotted on sea floor

Paging Fox Mulder and Dana Scully, we need you at the Baltic Sea as soon as possible. In what sounds like an opening for the next X-Files movie, an ocean salvage exploration company found an object on the floor of the Baltic Sea that looks an awful lot like a UFO.

The sonar images are vague at best, but the object still bears an uncanny resemblance to the outline of the Millennium Falcon. Has George Lucas been spotted anywhere in the vicinity?

The images come courtesy of the Ocean Explorer team, an experienced group of Swedish salvagers that already raised an impressive collection of rare and very expensive champagne from the watery depths.

Expedition leader Peter Lindberg notes that the mystery object is 60 meters across. Lines in the ocean floor next to it almost look like a skidded landing area.

Chances are that the discovery has a much less titillating explanation than coming from another planet. It could be a sunken vessel or a flooded archeological site. There will be no answers until the team goes in for a closer look.… Read more

First Nokia Windows Phone handset leaked?

Now that we've gotten a preview of Windows Phone 7 Mango, naturally, the next thing we want to see is new hardware. Though Microsoft announced several new OEM partners at the preview event in late May, including Acer, Fujitsu, and ZTE, we think it's pretty safe to say that most people are curious to see what will come out of the partnership with Nokia, and it appears we might have our first look now. … Read more

SeaMonkey do

SeaMonkey is an open-source Internet suite that combines a Web browser, email client, IRC client, newsreader, and HTML editor in one free application. It's essentially a continuation of the Mozilla Application Suite, which was to be the next-generation Netscape. SeaMonkey Portable is a fully portable version of the SeaMonkey suite from PortableApps. It's got a lot of potential on the desktop, but it's especially useful as an all-in-one solution for mobile users.

SeaMonkey's default theme resembles Netscape's, especially in its color scheme, its bookmarks, and its expandable, open-and-close-able toolbars, but it also incorporates the latest … Read more

To infinity and beyond, on a party cruise

BERMUDA TRIANGLE--Last Saturday morning, about three dozen people, most in their twenties and thirties, packed into a small meeting room on board the Celebrity Century, a cruise ship floating somewhere between Miami and the western islands of the Bahamas.

They were eagerly listening to a talk by Scott Parazynski, the former NASA astronaut who is, at present, the only person on the planet who can claim to have both reached the top of Mount Everest and flown in space.

Parazynski flipped through a breathtaking slideshow of photos from, literally, the edges of the world with a combination of war-story nostalgia, … Read more

With Virgin Oceanic, Branson plans to get deep

Picking up where the late uber-adventurer Steve Fossett left off, Virgin impresario Richard Branson said today he wants to go to the deepest spot on Earth.

In a press conference today in Newport Beach, Calif., Branson announced his Virgin Oceanic and Five Dives initiatives, which could send a Virgin-branded deep-sea submersible with a single pilot to the deepest spots in each of the planet's five oceans.

Virgin Oceanic will use the DeepFlight Challenger, a submersible built by Hawkes Ocean Technologies of Point Richmond, Calif., for the dives.

The five dives are intended to be to the Pacific Ocean's … Read more

The best-sounding music of 2010

I complain about bad recordings all the time, but there's lots of great-sounding music coming out. Here's a short list of the highlights from the past 12 months.

"Treme: Music From the HBO Original Series, Season 1"

Most soundtrack music is either old tunes or recorded in studios, but "Treme," HBO's series about New Orleans just a few months after Katrina, uses lots of live music recorded on the streets and in the city's clubs. The brass bands swing like crazy, and the funk grooves aren't too shabby. The sound feels … Read more