Pocket Planes vs Flight Tycoon: Really enjoying the airport simulator genre. Flight Tycoon employs high resolution graphics while Pocket Planes (soon to be released) prefers low-res graphics like Tiny Tower. Both simulators are free on the iOS platform and share the common goal of growing a fleet of planes to ferry passengers. Presently, we're investigating how to maximize sales (flight earnings) using the most efficient planes and optimal destinations in Flight Tycoon. To learn more about Flight Tycoon, take a look at this walk-through. A preview of Pocket Planes can be found here.

Pocket Planes is expected to be available June 14. Watch the trailer available on YouTube.

Isoball 3: A challenging mental exercise where you construct a pathway for a ball using a fixed set of resources like blocks, inclined planes, bridges, elevators, and directional. In some cases there are multiple solutions to a level. This game is free and runs in Google Chrome.

In the attached photo of level 75, the blue ball drops from the chute, runs down the ramp, gets an added boost from the conveyer belt, makes a right and rolls across a power bridge though a tunnel that pops out at the upper right. From there, the ball goes down the 3-level elevator, makes two more right turns and heads into another tunnel popping out at the upper middle. After passing though the four tunnel openings, the target doors open in the lower left and the ball makes its final descent in the four-level elevator.

Shadow Cities: Still a strangely attractive world. Earned the red spider "sigil" this past weekend. Accomplished by assisting in the collaborative vanquishing of the powerful Arachne Weaver. One or more participants "gain" the Shadow Spirit at the end of the battle. Ten gains earns the red sigil.

Architect realm liking link

TripleTown: Solo board game that challenges you to build a small "city" by matching three of a kind objects to open up space to place yet more items. Haven't made it passed Outpost yet. Really silly looking bears.

SimCity 2000 on Windows 7 (x64): Although it runs great in almost every way on the relatively newer operating system, the SimCity 2000 program quits whenever Load or Save is selected. After investigating file permissions and compatibility suggestions found online, the only solution that worked for this studio is to run the program within Windows XP Mode and Windows Virtual PC. These tools are free from Microsoft here. Note: through Remote Desktop, performance is notably sluggish.

The screenshot below demonstrates SimCity running within the virtual environment. Just after program launch, the anticipated dialog box appears successfully upon selecting "Load Saved City". Yay!

James Franklin Hyde Chart: This colorful arrangement of elements has been a studio favorite since acquiring a pair of the posters in 1976. This one is mounted on a foam-core backing and it has held up nicely through the years. Notice the pivotal placement of hydrogen, carbon, and silicon at the center. Rather than calling it a periodic table of elements, one could describe it with adjectives such as curved, circular, spiral, rings, and looping.

J. F. Hyde, “A Newly Arranged Periodic Chart,” Chemistry, September 1976, 49(7), 15-18
See this bulletin for a little more history behind this chart.
See this bio on Mr. Hyde. Another from wayback.
Also check out this database of periodic tables.
See also wikipedia

Shadow Cities: On December 12th, game developer Gray Area released three more levels beyond 15. It is possible to level from 15 to 18 within 4 weeks, sooner with more effort.

Below is a chart of average damage at levels 11 through 18. The nine lower set of points are un-buffed hits. All data was collected while leveling up.

Tiny Tower Update: Management has decided to halt tower construction at the 120th floor. Sales reached a peak of 1950 units per minute at a sustained rate. View the tower: here

New update: Construction resumed!

Shadow Cities: Amazing and free multi-player location-based real-time strategy game. Join either the Architects or the Animators, then carry out missions warping to beacons across the globe with your iPhone/iPod/iPad during a weekly three-round battle campaign. Missions range from energy harvesting and solo entity quests to full-scale battles for territory or teamwork to control the powerful Arachne Weaver. Earn medals; advance levels; persist and discover the brilliancy of this game. And one more word: adrenaline

Check out these resources if you want to get started:
Watch the trailer
Sign up here
Read about levels
Watch out for the level 8 bug
Read this thread
"Like" my realm on Facebook to give me a vitality boost!

With determination, it is possible to achieve level 15 within two weeks.

Tiny Tower Update: Construction is moving right along. We're presently in the final stages of completing our 108th floor; this one zoned for a service organization. Overall commerce within the tower is reporting excellent business demand and brisk sales with a combined total rate of 1597 coins per minute, achieved by stocking only 3-coin inventory items. We're also happy to report that 174 of the 185 residents have found their dream jobs within the tower with more on the way - the Millspring Apartments just opened on the most recently completed 107th floor. Four minor issues have been reported to the tower developer. Meanwhile, the elevator operator reports that the new Infini-Lift Lightspeed is superb.

Tiny Tower Update: After upgrading to v1.3 and learning that a new elevator can be had for 499 towerbux, a shift in strategy was required. Instead of stocking only 3-coin items in stores, play the Dream Job Roulette game of leaving at least one opening per residential floor. This can be hard at first if there are happy bitizens in residence, but evictions are necessary, especially with the new 2 towerbux reward for dream jobs.

The reward is worth it! The new Infini-Lift Lightspeed elevator runs at 13 floors a second, going from the lobby to the 94th floor in 7 seconds.

Observed: Rain released a fabulous new album!
Awesome cover art is by Android Jones

Tiny Tower Tips

To maximize sales, don't bother stocking the 1- or 2-coin items in stores. Sales occur at a rate of about 10 per minute per store multiplied by the sector demand rate. 3-coin sales yield approximately 30 coins per minute at 100% demand. FYI: The stats page displays "coins per minute" even though it states "sales per min." Bitizens with a rating of 9 will help maximize profit and dream jobs maximize inventory.

Tiny Tower: Now at 60 floors with 110 bitizens and 106 dream jobs. Tip for more dream jobs...occasionally stop ordering and go into an eviction frenzy, then use accumulated towerbux to move in bitizens. The higher the tower, the more likely a bitizen matches a store. Often, when a biz has three happy bitizens, then give one of them a temp job in order to hire the new lesser skilled only to cash in on the 3 towerbux reward, then evict. In the end, you end up with more towerbux than spent and lots of happy bitizens. It's almost another game within the game.

Helpful sites:
Tiny Tower Wiki
Tiny Tower Guide
Tips & Strategies Thread on TouchArcade

Update note: uh oh...the new 1.2 release only rewards 1 towerbux for placing a dream job. This effectively eliminates the sub-game of moving people in to dream jobs for big towerbux gain. An alternative sub-game: evict everyone from the building and earn towerbux as new bitizens move into dream jobs.

Tiny Tower: Really liking this app...very addictive time waster. Presently at 50 floors with 78 "bitizens" and 74 dream jobs. Does this app teach cultural tolerance?

Tiny Tower tips:
Save bux.
Upgrade elevator.
Evict all bitizens without dream jobs.
Maintain one store with max 3-coin stock on order for big spender (e.g. Recording Studio or Doctor's Office). When he arrives, use bux if necessary.
Maintain a list of recent searches noting both the store and the home floor.
Group stores to make it easier to shuffle staff while awaiting perfect employees.
Send delivery person to max 3-coin stock (translates to 3 bux savings).

iPod touch tip: Moleskine has a new app for note taking. It took a while to figure out how to activate the drawing tool. Once you're inside a note, open the tool select screen at the lower right. Then, touch the pen tool and on the options page, touch the red check mark to activate the tool. This takes you back to your last open page and you can start drawing. There's an eraser at the top of the screen. When you're finished drawing, touch the input options icon, touch the text icon to open its options screen, touch the check mark and you are back to the text mode again.

Cubase 6 was announced last week. We're looking forward to the upgrade. The Studio version is no longer an option, but the upgrade from Cubase Studio 5 is under $200.

Update: Just ordered on 20110705

Apple's iPad 2.0 will not feature a 2048 by 1536 screen as rumored. See the PCWorld report. Apple will begin mass production of the iPad 2 by the end of February according to Digitimes, a Taiwanese trade publication. Maybe we'll hold off buying one until April or May because a dual-core graphics chip capable of playing 1080p HD video would be a nice feature!

Picked up a 12oz canister of  Trader Joe's Ultra Dark French Roast Coffee. Wow! Very strong, dark, and oily. Tons of aroma and flavor. Excellent when blended with hazelnut

Also looked at a Lifecore R100 rowing machine. They run about $1300.

The next generation of Intel Core processor scores high in the Passmark benchmark. With the reduction in pricing of memory, CPUs, and motherboards, the speed-versus-value of a complete system is improving dramatically.

Presently, we're measuring performance for a new studio system configuration. The orange spot on the diagram below is the speed and value measurement of our latest digital audio workstation powered by an overclocked Xeon W3520. The red spot is the speed and value measurement of a new configuration powered by a next gen, overclocked Core i7-2600K. Comparatively, the prospective system is 51% faster than the system we purchased in August! Value is computed as the Passmark score divided by system price. Again, comparatively, the prospective system scores a 90% improvement. The blue dots are other Intel and AMD systems for comparison. The two blue dots scoring the highest speed (above 12000) are systems powered by an overclocked Core i7 980X. Of course, it's challenging to configure a low-cost, quiet system using this rather expensive CPU.

FYI...The prospective i7-2600K DAW configuration presently prices out at $926.

Mobo ASUS P8P67-M PRO $149.99
ODD ASUS Black 24X $19.99
RAM G.SKILL Ripjaws 8GB $89.99
CPU Intel Core i7-2600K $329.99
HSF COOLER MASTER Hyper 212 $29.99
HDD WD6401AALS 640GB $64.99
GPU ASUS EN8400GS Silent $34.99
Case Antec Mini P180 White $79.99
PSU COOLER MASTER Silent Pro M600 $99.99
Fans 2x Nexus PWM Series D12SL-12PWM $25.98

New Addition: We picked up a Capresso coffee burr grinder (model 559) from Costco for $30. It does a modest job at producing a fine grind. To overcome the grind inconsistency, we discovered a large sifter comes in handy to strain out the larger remnants from the grounds. The few remaining remnants can be dropped back into the upper hopper for regrinding later. With the extra sifting process, this grinder produces outstanding flavor - better than Starbucks! BTW, we load about 16g of beans at a time.