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In his third guest installment, the illustrious tech writer Steven Levy explains what it’s like to play arcade Space Invaders while totally shitfaced.

When game historians recall the late ’70s wave of video arcade games, they will correctly identify the major time-wasters, which include Asteroids, Breakout, Missile Defense Command and Space Invaders. (Pong was sort of a brain-damaged predecessor.) But the way it really was, at least in a certain central New Jersey bar, the correct way to describe the arcade ..read more

Before there were computer hackers, there were phreakers. And before there were macs, Jobs and Woz kept themselves busy building their own blue boxes (Above) which would emulate precise control tones to seize control of the phone system.

They were inspired by this Esquire article from 1971 called Secrets of the Little Blue Box, by legendary writer and typewriter fetishist Ron Rosenbaum.

Woz’s boxes were simply, by standards of circuitry, but the original creator of the Blue Box, built his with failsafes ..read more

This concept keyboard plays on our love of, or at least interest in, marketing by replacing all the letters with logos of corporations whose name begins with said letter. I seriously just spend five minutes picking them all out.

The idea is that brands are so recognizable that we can exchange them with letters, probably the most recognizable symbols we know. It works, too, if you give it a second, although some of them are tricky (The Rolling Stones is only ..read more

Softening the blow that Apple struck yesterday, Palm has released its Mojo SDK for anybody to download. They’ll start taking app submissions for the App Catalog from all developers in the fall.

That’s later than we’d like—the sooner the Pre starts building a robust developer community, the more likely the platform is to thrive—but to be fair, we had to wait a whole year for iPhone apps. In the meantime, they’ve got a trickle of apps that’ll be hitting the App ..read more

Filed under: WWDC, iPhone, iPod touch, Mac OS X Server

Seems a little redundant, doesn’t it? What else would an app named Server Admin Remote do? Well anyway, if you’re in the market for something to remotely administer your servers (to a point), particularly Mac OS X servers, this is one handy and powerful tool. View logs, enable services, even reboot the server all from your iPhone (or iPod touch). Plus, there’s support for multiple server instances, which you switch between ..read more

How’s this for lucky timing! In the midst of our Gizmodo ‘79 theme week, legendary power-pop act Cheap Trick is releasing their latest album (coincidentally entitled The Latest) on a very late-’70s medium: 8-track cassette.

The retro format is pricier at $30 compared to the digital or CD formats, and not too many people still own 8-track decks (well, except for me), but it’s definitely a collector’s item. You can pre-order it here. [CNET]

Huge investments as they were, 1970s TVs were subject to the same kind of bleary-eyed lusting as today’s hottest gadgets. Unlike now, though, cutting-edge features weren’t easily quantifiable. So what was there to drool over, if not specs? Plenty.

First, we had design. No, not an obsession with thinness and flatness, but actual, romantic, aspirational design, which at least appealed to big ideas, even if the results didn’t always match the ambitions. From Sony:

Nicknamed the “CITATION” after a type of jet, ..read more

NASA has been working with Lowry Digital in Burbank to restore all of the original tapes from the July 20, 1969 moonwalk, and they just released the first clips of it.

They’re planning to complete the whole thing this fall, but they’re showing off some of the more iconic moments now, such as the first steps on the moon.

The restoration doesn’t bring the quality up to HD or anything, but it’s a definite improvement over the video we’ve been ..read more

Apple’s patent policy—filing for basically any idea that any employee is willing to sketch, ever—gives us an endless supply of speculation grist, some interesting, some not. Take this patent, which calls for flash microstorage in headsets and earbuds.

The patent describes the sharing of device settings, preferences and even media between iPods and iPhones by means of a sort of smart headset, which stores personalizations in a small cache of flash memory. As described, it sounds a bit strange, and its ..read more

Filed under: Gaming, Software, Freeware, iPhone, SDK, iPod touch

The social gaming market on the iPhone has taken two sharp turns recently. First up, right after announcing that their system hit a full million users, OpenFeint announced that their social gaming platform has gone completely free for developers. Originally, the SDK was free to download, and then there was a small cost-per-user fee for developers, but with this new change, that cost is gone, and OpenFeint will now make all of ..read more