artistic

Before giant Lego trees and flowers popped up in the Australian Outback, a honking huge Lego bridge made an appearance in Germany.

Late last year, street artist Megx pulled out the primary colors to transform the underside of a bridge into an optical illusion. Clever use of color and shading makes the bridge in Wuppertal look like it's built from an interlocking set of massive Lego bricks.… Read more

It appears that Internet radio and other digital music services are starting to pay off for musicians.

SoundExchange, a nonprofit organization that collects and distributes performance royalties on behalf of artists and labels, announced today that it had distributed $1 billion in digital royalty payments to recording artists and record labels since its inception in 2000. The organization, which collects royalties from satellite radio, Internet radio, cable radio, and similar services, said it distributed more than $108 million in royalties in the first quarter of 2011 -- the first time its distributions exceeded $100 million in a quarter.

The accomplishment … Read more

I've known about Adam Audio for a long time, but for one reason or another I never reviewed one of its speakers. Adam (Advanced Dynamic Audio Monitors) may have started as a pro sound company, but it now also makes audiophile speakers. To get a handle on their sound I started with Adam's least expensive model, the ARTist 3, a compact desktop monitor. The company was founded by physicist Klaus Heinz and electrical engineer Roland Stenz, in Berlin in 1999.

It was in the early 1980s when Heinz met Oskar Heil, a decade after the good doctor caused … Read more

Paper Monsters is a polished traditional platformer with some added extras and winningly cute art and sound design.

Paper Monsters will instantly evoke other classic platformers, but in a good way: the play and interface are intuitive (a roaming virtual joystick on the left, a jump button on the right, which you tap twice to double-jump), and levels with collectible coins ("buttons"), warp pipes, enemies to jump upon, checkpoints, and lots of hidden pick-ups and paths to encourage repeat play. As the game progresses through its four chapters, with four levels each, the enemies and environments get more … Read more

Stupid Andy helps us out today with a busy rundown that includes Netflix earning first rights to new movies before cable TV; an interactive ad in the U.K. that claims it can recognize gender at a 90 percent success rate; a new Low Latency comic on Crave, and YouTube getting caught with its pants down!… Read more

Muzine is a music news app for iPad that lets you read the latest music topics in an easy-to-read format, or lets you customize your feeds to get news only from your favorite bands and sources. After launching the app, you're given a slideshow of featured stories--strangely, you can't go to a story by tapping on it, but instead need to hit the Features button to get access to full stories. Even with this oversite, the columned layout of the stories in the Featured section makes browsing for music news incredibly easy and enjoyable. A swipe upwards lets … Read more

Antuan Goodwin joins us today to discuss the ISP's agreement to become the Copyright Cops of the internet. Should we fear them? We also talk about driving while talking on the phone and whether or not it is safe. And we continue to follow all of the hacking stories and possible vulnerabilities in our devices. Also the Space Shuttle Atlantis launches for it's final voyage into outer space!

Sure, you know enough to steer clear of Nigerian princes (hopefully), but what about when the hotel desk calls your room because of a problem processing your credit card? Would you know better than to give the "receptionist" your number?

That's just one of the 350-plus scams exposed and explained in Scam Detector for iOS, an informative fraud database that can help you avoid getting ripped off.

The app doesn't "detect" scams so much as educate you about them. The data is divided into five categories: Auto, Face to Face, Internet, Telephone, and Travel. Within Internet you'll find five sub-categories: Social Networking, Financials, Employment Online, Houses & Properties, and Online Auctions & Tech.

In other words, it covers all the bases--and reveals a lot of scams I guarantee you've never heard of. For example, you know the guy standing in line behind you at the register, the one who looks like he's texting on his phone? He might actually be snapping photos, trying to get a readable shot of your credit card as it passes back and forth between you and the cashier.… Read more

Beyond Ynth is an innovative and idiosyncratic puzzle-platformer game, a fun follow-up to Ynth, and now also available in striking HD on the iPad.

You play as a fragile little bug named Kribl, who traverses a series of worlds of various types (forest, desert, volcano, and snow), scurrying through mazelike boxes. You push and rotate these boxes to create a safe, interconnected pathway from one end of the level to the other, and along the way (depending on the type of world you're in), you have to watch out for deadly sunbeams, freezing air, falling acorns, and the like. … Read more