21 Oct 09 Annoy-a-tron 2.0 Lets You to Slowly Drive Your Co-Workers Insane Just for Fun [Pranks]

You may remember the original Annoy-a-tron, a tiny device designed to annoy the crap out of friends and enemies alike. Well, now there's the new Annoy-a-tron 2.0, taking the obnoxiousness to new heights.

The Annoy-a-tron is a tiny device that plays annoying sounds at random intervals, perfect for hiding in your targets office. While the original would just play one annoying sound, the 2.0 version has five different sounds, allowing you to specifically choose your form of torment. The sounds are:

-15kHz (Mosquito tone) (full volume)
-Cricket chirping (medium/low volume)
-IM Doorbell (low volume)
-Grating Electronic noise (full volume)
-Typical Electronic Beep (medium volume)

Yes, that mosquito tone is the frequency that young people can hear and older people or people with bad hearing cannot, making it the perfect setting for "annoying" your toddlers when they're trying to sleep.

The tiny device has two magnets on board and a battery that will provide it with four full weeks of juice, provided you hide it well enough to torture someone for a full month. [ThinkGeek]

Tagi: random intervals, friends and enemies, annoying sounds, tiny device, annoying sound, obnoxiousness, medium volume, tr 2, tron 2, cricket chirping, grating, doorbell, mth, pranks, beep, mosquito, co workers, torment, toddlers, magnets

20 Jul 10 Anatomy of an Achievement

Whether they annoy you or fulfill your nerdy collection habit, achievements have spread across the gaming landscape and are here to stay. The Xbox Engineering blog recently posted a glimpse into the creation of the Xbox 360 achievement system, discussing how achievements work at a software level, and even showing a brief snippet of code. They also mention some of the decisions they struggled with while creating them: "We are proud of the consistency you find across all games. You have one friends list, every game supports voice chat, etc. But we also like to give game designers room to come up with new and interesting ways to entertain. That trade-off was at the heart of the original decision we made to not give any indication that a new achievement had been awarded. Some people argued that gamers wouldn't want toast popping up in the heat of battle and that game designers would want to use their own visual style to present achievements. Others argued for consistency and for reducing the work required of game developers. In the end we added the notification popup and its happy beep, which turned out to be the right decision, but for a long time it was anything but obvious."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Tagi: gaming landscape, game designers, game developers, software level, heat of battle, xbox 360, decis, deci, voice chat, snippet, beep, glimpse, anatomy, habit, peoe, creati, xbox, lt, heart, blog