hockey

If you've ever seen a hockey coach's playbook, you know that he's carrying around a lot of plays and notes on a relatively unsecure format -- paper. For that reason, there have been multiple attempts to take playbooks into the 21st century with a digital format. One of the most recent such attempts is iPlayBook Hockey Free. With numerous menus, pre-designed plays, recording features, and playback and share buttons, iPlayBook is a solid playbook app for the iPad, even if it is a little cluttered.

The app, itself, is straightforward, but the interface does have a lot … Read more

Simple, slightly addictive, and quite competitive, this app reminded us of Pong, the game that revolutionized arcade gaming in the early 1970s. Even though Air Hockey Deluxe resembles Pong in style of gameplay and is in general quite fun, it shows some imperfections that could easily be fixed by the developer.

Interface of Air Hockey Deluxe offers no advanced options or specific game settings. It simply provides you with one-player and two-player options. The one-player option will put you against an AI, while the two-player option lets both players play on the same screen. The controls of the game don'… Read more

If you know hockey well, be ready to go straight through the menus of Big Win Hockey and play your seasonal games away. If you're not that familiar with hockey, well there's always room for a little trial and error.

The simple interface of Big Win Hockey has straightforward buttons and options. For those who are well-versed in the game, it should be a breeze to jump in and get your team assembled, but a few specifications presented in the player's stats, such as the player's shot orientation and rating, might not make immediate sense to … Read more

True story. A few years ago, I got a concussion at a baseball game -- and not because a ball hit me in the head. When my friend and I simultaneously turned and leaned in to talk, her head hit mine with such force I thought I had broken my nose. My doctor, however, said all signs pointed toward a concussion. Did I mention it was a Giants game? Go, Giants!

World Series aside, had I been wearing a new impact-sensing skullcap from Reebok and startup MC10, I might have immediately known whether I needed medical treatment or rest before resuming play, which in my case involved sitting on a bench trying to explain baseball to CNET's Swedish summer interns.

The sensor-laden mesh cap provides colored LED readouts that vary according to the level of impact, thus providing instant information on the gravity of the blow. It should be commercially available to consumers early next year, "essentially serving as an extra set of eyes on the ice -- or any other playing field," MC10 says. … Read more

We'll wait until tomorrow to go over all the Apple announcements from WWDC, so today's show is all about Jeff's return to the East Coast and his E3 wrap-up. Jeff and Scott Stein agree that the show lacked the hardware announcements everyone expected, with Nintendo playing serious catch-up with the Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3. Jeff and I then envision a potential future without E3 or maybe even a move to New York, where my co-host wouldn't be forced to play next-gen hockey games as the LA Kings.

Moving on, we'll talk about Microsoft registering … Read more

Jeff's still gleeful after the results of this weekend's NHL Eastern Conference Finals, but there are other things going on in the world of The 404 too.

On today's show, Jeff gives a 50/50 review of "The Avengers," Justin gets an East Coast geography lesson, airports around New York announce holographic avatars designed to "help" lost passengers, Facebook reveals plans to develop yet another Facebook-exclusive phone, and Sony files a patent that could pause games to show players advertisements.… Read more

Aunt Jill is on the show once again, back by popular demand to tell us more about Apple's massive earnings that blew past our initial profit forecast.

She'll also update us on her LinkedIn privacy fiasco and answer more questions from our listeners -- this week's advice includes what to do with extra savings, tips to reduce interest on school loans, how to use 401(k) rollover at a new job, and more.

We tried to answer everyone's questions today, but be sure to follow Jill Schlesinger on Twitter if you think of another. If not, Jill will be back on the show in two weeks, so get ready!… Read more

Some say our inner teen never leaves us, but merely takes on more sophisticated tastes.

One wonders, therefore, about the inner teen of a parent at a high school girls hockey game in Massachusetts, who allegedly brought along his laser pointer.

Did he wish to use it to feature some aspect of the home team's strategy? Not quite. He is accused of using it to distract the opposing team's goalie.

I know that hockey exists largely so that people can reconstruct each other's faces, but the idea that a parent could try to do this to a … Read more

Here in Canada, you make the best of the long cold winters by getting out there and skiing, skating, testing solar bulbs, and launching Lego men into the stratosphere. Or you build hockey-playing robots.

Jennifer is a DARwin-OP robot from the University of Manitoba's Autonomous Agents Laboratory that can shimmy around on a rink and even stick-handle a bit. She's billed as the first of her kind.

Named after Canadian hockey Olympic medalist Jennifer Botterill, the bot has mini skates, a stick, a Team Canada jersey, and a ball and puck to play with. In the vid below, she shuffles around to the old theme from "Hockey Night in Canada" and you can't beat that.

The piece was put together as a submission to the DARwin-OP Humanoid Application Challenge at IEEE ICRA in May. The robots are open-platform humanoids developed by U.S. universities and sold by Korean firm Robotis.

The challenges facing Chris Iverach-Brereton and colleagues on the University of Manitoba team include getting the robot to hit the puck from a sideways orientation and improving her skating skills. She's not ready to join the Winnipeg Jets just yet.

"We want to improve a great deal and have proper skating and really precise stickhandling," Iverach-Brereton told Postmedia News. "By May, my personal goal is to have the skating down and have (Jennifer) be able to push off one foot and glide." … Read more