Hobbiton is a fictional village which appeared in the novels: “The Lord of the Rings” and “The Hobbit” by by J.R.R. Tolkien. Hobbiton village was built as a set (for the films which were based on the Novels) is located on a farm near a little town called Matamata in northern New Zealand. It was decided to keep the Hobbit holes set  as tourist attractions, (they blend smoothly into the environment), there is even a sign which says: ”Welcome to Hobbiton” on the main road, directing people to this wounderful little Hobbit town.

Sometimes I come across a game that makes me feel really dumb really challenges the ol' noggin of mine, and I know I just have to share it with you all, the Android faithful (because Android users are inherently smart). Apparatus is one such game, and by the time you're done with it, you'll deserve either a pat on the back or a tasty cold one (or both).

If the name didn't completely give it away, Apparatus is about just that: building apparatuses. To do what, you may ask? To make sure a dark blue ball makes it's way safely into a sky blue box. That's it.

Now if you're wondering what makes Apparatus so difficult, it's because the game uses physics and all, so if any of your parts aren't stable and attached to something, they'll fall away into the nothingness pit that makes up the bottom of the screen.

Fortunately there's no penalty for completely botching the job (sometimes it's the only way to learn what's going on), and a simple tap of the pause button will get all of your objects reset on the screen.

For the first couple of levels there are hints that'll show you the ropes on apparatus-building (like how batteries work, how to tell which way your plank of wood will spin, and how to attach pieces of material together), so you're not totally out in the cold, but once you've been taught the basics, it's up to your own ingenuity to get the job done.

Perhaps even more amazing than the levels the game has you work through are the community-designed levels and the sandbox. From within the sandbox, you can build either an apparatus or a building challenge. When you're done designing your masterpiece, you can upload it to the community levels to people can try and beat it or just watch it unfold.

It's absolutely amazing to see someone construct a rudimentary gun using only these simple tools, or an impressive fireworks show with the only trigger being a wheel rolling over them, and more than makes this app worth its price.

Apparatus feel like one of those "must have" games on Android. It's cheap, forces you to be creative, and is filled with levels. Even if you never touch the main game, the sandbox and community sections can easily take hours out of your otherwise productive day, as you build and see what others have built. In a word, it's stellar.

Apparatus is $2.45 in the Android Market.

Perfectly Clear was launched in Google Play this week with a bevy of quick photograph fixes. Simple sliders can change exposure, depth of field, sharpening, vibrancy, tint, darkness, and skin tone individually, or apply all of them at once with the one-tap Fix button. The app shows your picture with a very cool before and after comparison.

The core app is available for $0.99 as an introductory offer, which will soon be bumped up to $1.99. There are a few extra correction filters that are available through a single in-app purchase that includes skin smoothing, eye enhancement and tooth whitening, but the vast majority of fixes are available without having to buy anything extra.

The app’s UI is for the most part great. The sliding bar that you can swipe back and forth over your image provides a really clear distinction on how an image is being improved. Unfortunately, on the smaller screen, it’s hard to make out the finer changes until the export is made and you see it on a computer monitor.

Every adjustment is made with a single slider, with a tiny switch to toggle them on or off, which makes what would normally be complex adjustments very accessible to just about anybody. Both landscape and portrait orientations of the app are available, which makes it flexible enough to work with no matter what kind of picture you’re taking.

Perfectly Clear includes the ability to process multiple files, but the file selector is pretty crappy. Many of the thumbnails pulled up are duplicates, and they aren’t in a particularly great layout (despite having fancy animations when picked). Often it won’t even load up the pictures that I select, or show everything that’s in my camera gallery. Your best bet is to launch into the camera directly from the app.

My only other usability complaint is that the app regularly stalls on checking user licenses.

Function

Perfectly Clear is a great app for simply making your mobile pictures look great. You aren’t going to find a lot of artsy-fartsy filters here, but that’s totally fine - you can make great-looking pictures without those. The simplified adjustments may not be rich enough for hardcore photographers that want to screw around with stuff like white balance and levels, but for the average Joe Shmo that doesn’t have any idea what those things are, this set-up is perfect.

The picture selection menu still needs a lot of work done, but the breadth of corrections and processing makes Perfectly Clear with the $0.99 pricetag.

The Atlantic Road is a 8-kilometre long stretch of road between the towns of Kristiansund and Molde, the two main population centres in the county of Møre og Romsdal in Fjord Norway. The road starts approximately 30 kilometres southwest of Kristiansund and ends 47 kilometres north of Molde.

The road

The Atlantic Road zigzags across low bridges that jut out over the sea, linking the islands between Molde (famous for its annual jazz festival in July) and Kristiansund in the western fjords. The Hustadvika is an infamous stretch of ocean and when in storm it is truly dramatic. In calmer weather you might spot whales and seals, writes the British newspaper The Guardian (25 April 2006).

Chosen as "Norway's construction of the century" in 2005, the road links together small coastal communities. From the town of Kristiansund, the Atlantic Road is only a 30-minute drive through the Atlantic Ocean Tunnel. After passing the tunnel you cross the island of Averøy with Kvernes Stave Church, the very scenic west side of the island, and the incredible coastline out towards Hustadvika.

The Atlantic Road has been awarded the status national tourist route because of the architecture of the road and the bridges, and the incredible coastline it passes through.

Recording what's happening on your Android device's screen has always been a bit of an anomaly. There options were few and far between (one, two tops) and the frame rates you'd get from them weren't top-notch. Then, all of a sudden, like a beacon of hope and progress towards a better future, ScreenCast & Screen Recorder appeared.

ScreenCast & Screen Recorder is as simple to use as they come. Hit the big red record button on the main screen and you're good to go.

There also are a couple of settings in ScreenCast & Screen Recorder, like the ability to choose normal or high quality, pick the frames per second you want to record at, or define the default file name for your videos. It's pretty bare, but it doesn't need to be comprehensive. They are just screen recordings, after all.

There's also a built-in gallery where you can open and watch your videos, but be assured, everything still shows up in Android's gallery, too. Rounding it all out is the benchmark options, which stress tests your system to try and see what the maximum fps you can record at is.

ScreenCast & Screen Recorder doesn't do live streaming nor can it take screesnshots, but the developers says those are both features being worked on.

ScreenCast & Screen Recorder has both a free version and a paid version for $2.99. The free version is merely to let you see how the app works (and that it works at all) and only lets you record 30 seconds of video. Spring for the real thing and pay the three bucks. It's totally worth it.

Late on the night of August 2, 1981, a Hong Kong freighter navigating the choppy waters of the Bay of Bengal ran aground on a submerged coral reef. The ship, called the Primrose, was hopelessly stuck. But there was no danger of it sinking, so after radioing for assistance, the captain and crew settled in for a few days' wait until help arrived.

The following morning, as it became light, the sailors saw an island a few hundred yards beyond the reef. It was uninhabited, as far as anyone could tell: There were no buildings, roads, or other signs of civilization there -just a pristine, sandy beach and behind it, dense jungle. The beach must have seemed like an ideal spot to wait for a rescue, but the captain ordered the crew to remain aboard the Primrose. It was monsoon season, and he may have concerned about lowering the men into the rough sea in tiny lifeboats. Or perhaps he'd figured out just which tiny island lay beyond the reef: It was North Sentinel -the deadliest of the 200 islands in the Andaman Island chain.

On July 16, 1945 the first nuclear weapon was tested near Alamogordo, New Mexico. After the end of World War II, many countries were determined to gain nuclear technology. In 1949, the Soviet Union detonated its first fission weapon. The United Kingdom followed on October 2, 1952, France on February 13, 1960, and China on October 16, 1964. These five powers are permitted to possess nuclear weapons under the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty. There are four recognized sovereign states that are not parties to the treaty, including India, Israel, Pakistan, and North Korea. India, Pakistan and North Korea have openly tested and declared that they possess nuclear weapons, while Israel has a policy of opacity regarding its nuclear weapons program. There have been over 2,000 nuclear tests conducted since 1945. In 1963, many states signed the Limited Test Ban Treaty, pledging to refrain from testing nuclear weapons in the atmosphere, underwater, or in outer space.

After adopting the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty in 1996, world powers pledged to discontinue all nuclear testing. When a nuclear explosion occurs, it creates intense light, heat, and incredible explosive force. Many national defense programs have released satellites into the atmosphere that have sensors designed specifically to detect nuclear explosions. On September 22, 1979, a "double flash" was detected by the American Vela Hotel satellite. World specialists who examined the data speculated that the double flash was characteristic of a nuclear explosion and may have been the result of a nuclear weapons test. The satellite reported the characteristic double flash of an atmospheric nuclear explosion. It was detected in the Indian Ocean between Bouvet Island and the Prince Edward Islands, which belongs to South Africa. The recording was labeled the Vela Incident.

The legendary city of El Dorado is thought to have lain near the present-day city of Bogota, Colombia. The name “El Dorado” literally is translated to “The Golden One” in Spanish. As legend has it, the Zipa, or King, of El Dorado would pay tribute to a deity that lived in Lake Guatavita by covering himself in gold dust and swim the lake. The people of El Dorado would throw jewels and gold into the lake as he had his swim. A city of such treasure has sparked the interest of many explorers, including Gonzalo Pizzaro, who led a team of 300 soldiers along with thousands of Indians to search the land for El Dorado only to be met with famine, disease, and death. The city of El Dorado is still yet to be discovered.

 

 

Maho Beach – Where People Get Literally Blown Away by Airplanes

Located right next to the Princess Juliana International Airport, on the Caribbean island of Saint Martin, Maho Beach is a unique destination where tourist experience what it’s like to have jumbo jets flying just a few meters above their heads and get blown into the sea by their powerful jet engines.

Fine white sand and crystal clear water is not what makes Maho Beach such a popular tourist destination. There are hundreds of other such beautiful beaches in the Caribbean which aren’t located right next to a busy and noisy airport like Princess Juliana. But it’s precisely this little detail that makes this piece of paradise so remarkably unique. In order to land safely on the unusually short Runway 10, aircraft pilots have to make their final approach at minimal altitude, and that means flying just a few meters above the heads of thrill-seeking beach-goers. And we’re not talking light airplanes either, but jumbo jets like Boeing 747 and Airbus A380. Plane spotting has become so popular at Maho Beach that local entrepreneurs have built an entire business around it. Beach bar owners have put up boards of airplane arrivals and departures so people can plan their visit, and some even broadcast radio transmissions between the airport’s control tower and and the aircraft.

Marina Bay Sands features three 55-story hotel towers which were topped out in July 2009. The three towers are connected by a 1 hectare sky terrace on the roof, named Sands SkyPark.
The SkyPark is home to the world's longest elevated swimming pool,[35][36] with a 146-metre (478 ft) vanishing edge, perched 191 meters above the ground. The pools are made up of 422,000 pounds of stainless steel and can hold 376,500 gallons (1424 cubic metres) of water. The SkyPark also boasts rooftop restaurants such as The Sky on 57 (by Justin Quek), nightclubs such as KU DÉ TA, The Club facilities, lush gardens, hundreds of trees and plants, and a public observatory deck on the cantilever with 360-degree views of the Singapore skyline.
subject to settlement in the earth over time, so engineers built and installed custom jack legs to allow for future adjustment at more than 500 points beneath the pool system. This jacking system is important primarily to ensure the infinity edge of the pool continues to function properly.

The world's largest vacuum column manufactured by L&T in India. Vacuum distillation is a key part in the petroleum refining process to produce products out of the heavier oils left over from the atmospheric distillation. This column weighed about 1250 metric tonnes and has middle section diameter of about 15 meters.

Asphalt 8: Airborne was due to be released back on Aug. 8. Obviously that didn't happen, however there's now a new release date on the cards — next Thursday, Aug 22.

But if you can't wait that long, Gameloft is giving away a pre-launch code to one lucky winner, who'll be able to play the game before anyone else. To enter, you'll need to subscribe to the developer's YouTube channel and fill out the form on its website.

Asphalt 8 is one of the new Android titles optimized for OpenGL ES 3.0, the new 3D graphics standard included in Android 4.3. The title promises 180 events, 47 licensed cars and social integration, including  Facebook support.

Touch screen technology in fast few years has grown drastically in various applications, in order to overcome the difficulties faced by the touch screen; a new frontier technology has to take its part to revitalize the use of touch screen. In this counterpart gorilla glass has thrown a flash light focus on touch screen technology. Gorilla Glass has taken an apt plays in touchscreen technology. This scratch repellent glass is used to form touchscreen panel for portable gadgets like ATM machines, android mobile phones, tablets, personal computers and MP3 Players. It’s designed to protect display screens from scratches, sticky oils, fractures, etc.

 
Process 1: Melting the glass

• The Silicon Dioxide is mixed with other chemicals then put into a furnace to be melted.
• Oxygen and Hydrogen injected into the furnace to increase the heat transfer making the material melt faster.
• Resulting glass(Alumino – Silicate) Contains Aluminium , Silicon, Oxygen , Sodium ions.

  Process 2: Mold the Glasses

•  The molten glass is poured into the desired die and the required shape and thickness obtained.

 Manufacturing Process:

Gorilla glass starts as a mix of pure sand (silicon dioxide) and naturally occurring chemicals (resulting glass is termed as alumino-silicate) which splits the impurities and melting the sand. The molten glass fills up the bin and it is overflowed on each facet. During this "fusion draw" method, the resulting molten glass is pull down by a robust process to a long of 0.59 millimetre-thick sheets of Alumino-silicate Glass.

At this point, you have some very huge sheets of clear, clean, pure glass, however it’s not much stronger than regular glass. Gorilla gets its strength through a noteworthy action. Currently the glass sheet is dipped each into a molten salt bath where a chemical exchange happens. Potassium ions are infused into the glass. At the similar time, sodium ions exit from the glass compound. Here the potassium (K) ions are larger than the sodium (Na) ions. So a compressive stress occurs. That stress is really an honest factor and stops the glass from breaking on flaws.

Google recently released a device tracker that allows you ring your device, see your device’s location or completely wiped the device, all from a web interface. It is without doubt an awesome feature that will help with the recovery of your lost phone. But according to the folks at CyanogenMod, it’s simply not secure enough. See, if Google’s servers were compromised (by a hacker, or even the government), everyone would suddenly be traceable. The info is sent to Google’s servers, and it can be used by someone else.

CyanogenMod’s upcoming service is a bit different. Instead of sending the information through the server, your browser instead sends a public key. The phone authenticates the public key and sends an encrypted key back. The server cannot decrypt this key; only the browser can. This establishes a secure connection that cannot be decrypted on the server side, even if someone manages to get hold of that data. Using this connection, you can track or wipe your device.

It isn’t a foolproof service. If the server was compromised and you entered your password, you would become traceable. However, that would make one user traceable, instead of all users at once. It’s not perfect, but it’s far better than Google’s service.

The service is not out yet, but will be eventually. The source code has been fully published, and the CyanogenMod devs encourage people to check the security and safety of the service. Remember, services like this are improved with the help of the users.

Take a time machine back to 1943 to make bombing runs in the Pacific

 

A popular iOS game for years (yes, years) has finally made its way over to Android, and is packing many gameplay features that took two full game releases to hit the other platform. iBomber is a top-down plane bombing game set in the WWII era, with quality graphics and gameplay that won't blow you away but will certainly leave you satisfied. The game mechanics itself are simple to pick up, but are deceptively hard to master.

iBomber is a great game to spend some time on, so stick around after the break and learn a little more about the title before you give it a shot for yourself.

 

There isn't a whole lot to iBomber on the surface, and you quickly see that this isn't meant to be an extremely deep game to get into. You're just three taps away from playing the first level when you enter the game, which quickly has you selecting your plane (of which you can only select one to start with) and hopping into the first mission. The missions are grouped by areas of attack, each with a set of objectives to accomplish in order to complete the level. The objectives range from attacking certain ships in the sea to defending your own ships coming in and hitting specific enemy land resources.

The entire game is based on a top-down view as a bomber pilot, with a simple UI that doesn't give you too many options to look at. The center of the screen has crosshairs that indicate where you're aiming the bombs, and a large red "Bombs Away" button on the left is pretty self explanatory. Tapping on a toggle switch pauses the game and shows your objective list, as well as options to upgrade your bombs and calibrate your settings. We would really prefer if there were some UI element that could show the progress of your objectives on the main screen rather than hidden behind a pause menu, though.

 

 

One of the best features of Android is that different portions of the interface can be changed to the user's liking, especially the keyboard. Even with drastic improvements in the stock Android keyboard in the last few iterations, one size certainly doesn't fit all. If you're considering trying out replacement keyboards on your phone or tablet, Adaptxt Keyboard should be on the list for your consideration.

Read on past the break to learn a little more about Adaptxt Keyboard and how it could be the next keyboard you choose to use.

There are two main parts to Adaptxt that each make it a compelling choice independently. First, the keyboard mechanics and features are top-notch, and offer a lot of poweruser (err, powertyper?) features with few unnecessary frills out of the box. On top of a solid core set of components, a $0.99 in-app purchase unlocks a whole host of customization options that will make even the most enthusiastic customizers among us happy. The settings menu design is decidedly of the Gingerbread era, but the keyboard itself is sleek and looks great even on Jelly Bean.

The keys themselves are in a pretty standard configuration, but every single key has a long-press function. The top is a standard number row, but the second row holds your common punctuation and the third some less common punctuation. Long pressing the period gives a share intent, which interestingly will share whatever text you have entered to anywhere you select. We could see this being useful if you're looking to cross-post a status between Twitter and Google+, and instead of writing then copying you could hit the share key after composing one and share it to both. It's a long shot on whether or not that's useful to even a majority of users, but it's cool to have

There's a common set of features that most keyboards have as well, such as word prediction, auto-correction and personal dictionaries. Similar to a feature from Swiftkey, Adaptxt can "learn" your typing style from both Facebook and Twitter. There's also a function called "Automatic Text Replacement", or ATR, that lets you use small letter combinations to spell out longer words or phrases. They're completely user-configured, and reminds us of the way TextExpander works on the Mac. The example in Adaptxt by default is the string "hru", which expands to "Hi, how are you?". When you type "hru" into a text field, the center suggestion in the top bar of the keyboard shows "+hru" -- tap that, and it expands to give the full text. This is something that goes above and beyond what normal word prediction does, and could save you a lot of unnecessary taps.

The video camera on your Android phone just became a lot more fun to use thanks to FxGuru. If you ever wanted to have a T-Rex crash your brother's Little League game, or drop a piano on your mother-in-law, or just weasel out of cutting the grass because a part of Skylab fell in the yard, now you can! OK, not really but it can look like it happened, and that's more fun than cleaning up after a T-Rex.

The app is easy to use. You pick the effect you want, hit the OK button, and start recording. There's an overlay on your screen of where the magic will happen so you know just how to keep things lined up. When you're done, you can select a filter and boost the audio, and it saved to an mp4 video right on your phone.

There are seven free effects included -- Breaking News, Birthday Bot, Dancing Droid, Piano Drop,Satellite Crash, UFO Shuttle and TNT Barrel -- and you can download plenty of others for 99-cents each or $4.69 for six in a pack. The free effects are limited to 480p recording, but the paid ones will allow HD recording.

I'm having entirely too much fun with this one. Hit the Google Play link below and check it out.

A game doesn't have to be complicated to offer hours of fun

There are in-depth and wonderful games that require hours and days of your time to complete, and then there are the equally necessary games that draw you away from reality for just a few minutes at a time. 2Fuse is in the latter group, and executes on that premise quite well. It's a quick and dead simple puzzle game with just a few rules and some fun animations and sounds to keep it lively, paired with a gameplay model that will keep things fresh no matter how many times you play.

Just because a game is simple doesn't mean it needs to be overlooked -- stick around after the break and learn a little bit more about 2Fuse, a new puzzle game on Android.
There are just a few simple rules to understand in order to play 2Fuse, but that doesn't mean it's an easy game to master. When you enter the game to play for the first time, you'll be given a quick tutorial of the game mechanics, which break down pretty simply. The game consists of a 4 by 4 grid of boxes, each having either "1", "2", "3" or a star in them and being either green, red or blue. Your goal is to match up pairs of boxes that are both the same color and type (same number or star), tapping to combine them. Pairing up two "1" boxes creates a single "2" box, and pairing two of those gives you a single "star" box. When you combine the star boxes, you're given different bonuses to help you score higher depending on the color of the boxes you combined -- red for a point multiplier, blue for a time slowdown and green for an instant refresh of available boxes on the screen.

  

As you pair up the boxes, the open spaces are re-populated with new "1" boxes, which you then continue to combine over and over again. Your goal for 2Fuse is to combine as many boxes as possible before the 60 second timer runs out for the round. You receive points based on the boxes combined, along with whatever bonuses you have associated with them and the combos you put together without making a mistake. As you play, you'll see a bar counting down the amount of time you have left in the round, as well as the status of your bonuses and your score vs. the highest score you've ever had -- but you'll be so frantically tapping pairs of boxes to pay attention to those.

Dedicated mobile gaming devices have been on the decline, and we all know that. The new gaming giant is Apple, with more than double the consumer spending on games than the gaming optimized handhelds as a whole. However, for the first time, Google Play has surpassed the Nintendo 3DS and Sony Playstation Vita in game sales.

You may be thinking, “Well of course Google Play has more consumer spending on games; they have far more devices!” You are absolutely correct. There are 1.25 billion smartphones and 180 million tablets in this world (of which only a fraction are Google Play enabled), and only around 200 million handheld consoles. But consider this: a majority of smartphone games are free to play, and ad revenue doesn’t count. The rest of the games are cheap. Almost all games are under $5. Handheld console games are much more expensive, added more per unit to consumer spending totals. Google Play still won out.

 Google Play still has quite a way to go if it wants to pass the iOS App Store in consumer spending, but it’s getting there. Games on Android are becoming better every day, especially with the rise of Google Play Games and the services it offers to developers. With these services, developers can spend less time on multiplayer and leaderboards and more time on the actual game.

A day after learning that the HTC One Developer Edition would be skipping the Android 4.2 update and go straight to Android 4.3, HTC’s president of global sales has now revealed that the company is working to release the same update for the HTC Droid DNA and all HTC One variants in the US and Canada before the end of September. It seems the only thing standing in the way of your HTC One or Droid DNA from receiving the news software is carrier certification.