Terrafugia Flying Car Gets FAA Approval.
No... words.....
Jim sent over this story about how the HTC Vision may be dual-core, Android 3.0.
The design could be one of HTC's fastest as it could use a dual-core 800MHz processor. It would run Android 3.0 and have a 4.3-inch screen that would use a new form of screen technology.
I'm as iPhone fanboy as the next iPhone fanboy, but that does sound pretty sweet (not sure about the huge 4.3" screen though).
Awesome that Shacknews has found Portal 2 E3 Demo Videos Parts 2 and 3.
Here's part 1 as well.
I'm not sure if it's even fair to make jokes about how Microsoft has killed the kin less than 2 months after the product debuted.
The social media-oriented phone will not make its planned European debut and Microsoft is shifting the entire Kin team to work on Windows Phone 7, the Microsoft smartphone operating system due out later this year. Andy Lees, who heads up the company's cell phone efforts announced the move to Microsoft workers earlier on Wednesday, according to a source close to the company.
Pretty amazing iPhone 4 knockoff. Wish the video had more of the "OS" that it is using. Probably a skinned WINCE 6.x like the others.
Not all of it, but she reveals a lot of her self in a Get Mortified interview involving some embarrassing bits from her past.
Cisco introduces their Cisco Cius Android Tablet.
Holy crap! The guy with this Halo Elite Costume is going to win a ton of Halloween contests!
Lifehacker asks How Does the Newly Released uTorrent for Mac Compare to Transmission?
Nice comparision, and some tips for features you may not have seen in one client or the other yet.
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows has the first full trailer online.
Very NSFW language, but these iPhone vs. HTC EVO & HTC EVO vs iPhone4 video fairly well illustrates both sides of the "apple fanboy" and "not apple fanboy" extreme nicely.
Portal 2 video: Meet Wheatley.
I'm good with this as long as they aren't trying too hard with the "funny murderous AI robot" thing....
Wired has a nice list of 10 Stellar iPad Apps That Will Blow You Away, shared out by my buddy @introdus who insists on taunting me with great looking apps for a device I don't have :)
This article is one of those "one ad-filled page per app" things, which begs for the new Safari "reader" feature which strips ads and combines these stupid multi-page articles into one clean page.
iPhone CSS3 is a very cool example of a) how a talented person can use CSS to "draw" b) how specific CSS can be (ie: this only works on a webkit based browser, so Safari, Chrome, etc, even iPhone's browser looks great, but IE (duh) and strangely, firefox show a fairly crappy rendition. Make sure you hit the blog entry to read more about it.
If you're the adventourous type, you can check out the great LifeHacker guide to the Windows Live Essential Beta's New Social Features.
Finally! Red-band Predators trailer brings wholesale violence, spine-ripping.
Sweeeet.
Very cool Hybrid Disk, thanks Laughing Squid.
Great, though long, talk on YA Day in the Life of Facebook Operations by Tom Cook.
Great to know that medical science is helping our four legged friends as well. We can hope that the tech created for cat paws will move to people hands soon too.
Fantastic Java vs. .Net video trailer from JavaZone.no.
After some issues, my buddy Bryan has written up on How to recover your Gmail account.
Yea, they're fanboys too, and I'm sure you're tired of iPhone posts, but I thought that the opening to the Cult of Mac review: iPhone 4 Lives Up To The Hype was pretty telling.
You're probably sick of reading about the iPhone 4, so here it is in a nutshell: It's slick as sh*t and I recommend without hesitation that you buy it.
Also they immediately start in with the crap you need to ignore about spots, reception, etc.
Awh, crap. Steam is having a huge sale. Maybe I should just fedex my wallet to them now....
Now it's on the iPhone and iPod Touch, I'm going to become a Farmville widower as well :(
And speaking as a Canadian fanboy: Damn you all. I have a feeling that things like this are happening commonly around those countries today... :)
Know how in the most-awesome Dropbox the only downside is to share out files from it you have to first copy them to Public and only then can you right-click and get the dropbox link? And then it's only to files, not folders? Seems like with the New Sharing Model (omg) any file or folder is now linkable. Awesome job guys!
"yeah thats not what I was looking for at all."
Just read it, it's funny as hell. You'll want to read through the rest of the site as well.
I've only recently become aware of the happenings on the interwebs with Zach Anner and the Oprah Contest. From the article:
There's a lot of anger and snark on the internet (I should know, I write some of it), so it was great news that this weekend gave us an internet story that just makes you smile. That story is the tale of Zach Anner, a young man with cerebral palsy, who became the internet's latest celebrity when he entered Oprah Winfrey's contest to give a regular person their own TV show. Anner's audition video was hilarious and his overall good nature won over the internet and soon a few well-placed links had landed him more than two and a half million votes!
Farewell to the notification area.... what Ubuntu is doing to make this happen and why.
The Flickr Blog writes about their New Photo Experience. Looks good!
It's slow going, but as Valve Releases 'Counter-Strike: Source' for Mac OS X the offerings on Steam for Mac are starting to fill out.
Remember Batman's Tumbler BatMobile from the latest Batman movies? Well, now there's a Tumbler Golf Cart.
Len pointed me to this Video Comparison of iOS 4 Performance on iPhone 3G. Something to check out if you have the 3G, where sadly performance seems to have gone a bunch. Much as I love folders, I'm almost considering downgrading back to 3.1.3 until the new iPhone is available in Canada (hopefully next month sometime).
In their Google Voice for everyone post you'll be happy to find that GV doesn't require an invite anymore. Sadly, it's still restricted to the US only.
Still due in 2011, but you can see The Green Hornet Movie Trailer as well as the first minute of footage while you wait.
Great E3 stuff from Shacknews.... I'm pretty sure that when it's released, I'll be a Civilization 5 widower :)
Title pretty much says it all. If you're into jailbreaking your phone, you can now do it with iOS 4.
The VideoLAN project has released VLC 1.1.0, with GPU decoding on some OSs, web updates, audio updates, MKV HD files supporting 7.1 surround sound, and much more.
Want to relive the glory days of Lost in your own home? You can now own your own Dharma Initiative Alarm Clock thanks to Thinkgeek. Check out the video. Via Daring Fireball.
As far as I know, it's not available on the servers yet, but if you're excited like me to upgrade to iPhone OS 4 iOS 4, you probably want to know What you must know for iPhone upgrade day.
Biggest things that are pissing me off already are that 3G users are left out in the cold for multi-tasking, which I can understand if the processor and memory are more limited, and the wallpapers, which I can't fathom. I'm as much of an apple fanboy as the next guy, but stuff like that is just stupid.... I have no idea how putting a wallpaper on the 3G wouldn't be possible, other than Apple wanting to deny users something that is cool and more importantly, visible, to give them another reason to upgrade to a new phone. They did this with 3.0 with another very minor feature, not allowing 3G users to show their battery remaining as a percentage instead of a bar, which is another thing where there's no technical reason for it not to be available on older hardware.
Update: OK, so here's an explanation of why the wallpaper is disabled on older iPhones.
Thanks to Curtis for pointing me to this article on Everything you wanted to know about creating a network of multiple sites in 3.0. This is something I've been looking for to possibly combine all my various personal sites into one management system, should I decide to leave Movable Type that is.
A great look at the future of Nautilus, the GNOME file browser. Nice to see some cleanup coming down the pipe in future versions.
Just an FYI that I've done a much more mucking around with the mail server on ufies.org. If you're one of the folks who does have an account there, please keep an eye out for any mail being rejected improperly, or anything out of the ordinary. Seems one of the configurations that had a whole bunch of awesome anti-spam stuff in it was being superseded by a duplicate line farther down the file, but that one didn't have the awesome anti-spam stuff. Fingers crossed this will make things better....
If you do see oddness, please email me at alan at ufies dot org or if that's broken, arcterex at gmail dot com (or if you're all web 2.0, hit me up at @ufies on twitter).
Another amazing cinematic game trailer from E3, this time for Star Wars: The Force Unleashed II. Wow.
With the next version of the iPhone software due on Monday, there's a very nice iOS 4 walkthrough showing you what's new and shiny.
For some people, this Kittens Bookmarklet will simply be the best thing ever. Via http://teabass.com/.
Transmission 2.0 just updated on my system. Not a lot of huge visual UI changes, but does feel a bit speedier. Kudos to the transmission team!
Flock Appears After Year in Hiding, Now Based on Chromium from Linux Magazine. Looking forward to re-re-trying out Flock.
If you're out there and are subscribed to Apple's Mobile Me, you'll be happy to see that The New MobileMe Mail is Now Available to All Members, and there are some new features, including a nice new look. Oh, and you can now (finally) get the 'find my iphone' functionality in an iPhone or iPad app.
Personally there are two reasons I subscribe to it, outside forgetting to cancel after my 90 day trial period expired.
Those friends of yours who mock the iPhone and tell you how Android has all the stuff and more and it's not locked up by ridiculous Apple policies? Maybe send them Daring Fireball's take, and then David Pogue Reviews Sprint's HTC Evo. Sounds like there might be something to be said for the App store policies and the Apple "we're late, but we did it right" philosophy. Just sayin'.
Note: my experience with Android is near-zero. Still waiting for Google to send me that review unit :)
Great news for folks, WordPress 3.0 has been released. Let your designer friends know!
Highlights of the release include:
Slashfilm has some great BP-Inspired Finding Nemo 2 Posters.
More international iPhone 4 pricing plans released, details for Orange in the UK anyway, and a re-iteration of the unlocked iPhone4 for Canada news from the other day:
In related news, Canadian customers have a reason to celebrate. They can by a 4G iPhone directly from Apple and it will arrive at their maple-scented homes completely unlocked. Here it is from the horse's mouth: "By purchasing your iPhone without a contract, you can use any SIM or micro-SIM card from a compatible carrier, including your current one."You lucky dogs. Take pity on your AT&T-bound southern neighbors.
Lucky that we get an unlocked phone for the full $600 I suppose, but we still have to wait an extra month (or possibly now even longer) than you hosers.
Eh.
Finally important questions are answered: Parrot AR.Drone quadricopter hits the US in September for $299, via TUAW.
Two good posts for the photographers out there (or if you're being photographed).
An older post that I just saw... The Six Stages of Debugging. So so true.
Though it's framed in the context of Apple vs. Google, it's cool to hear that YouTube has a movie editor. It's fairly simplistic, but cool to see that it's there and seems fairly able. Can't wait to see more "real" apps coming online, and to see the different UI changes (hopefully for the better) associated with bringing an app from the desktop to the web.
Two quick videos from E3 this morning on Portal 2. The first is the trailer (fairly short) and the second is a backstage one with gameplay. Can't wait for this.
Update: HD version of the trailer - thanks Aryk!
So there's good news and bad news with the post that the iPhone 4 will be offered unlocked in Canada.
The good news is that fellow canucks will be able to order the iPhone 4 right off the Apple site and get an unlocked phone that then can then put a micro-sim from your choice of carrier (Rogers, Bell, Fideo, Telus are the main ones AFAIK).
The bad news is you're paying full price for the phone, probably $549/649 for the 16/32G versions, and not the $199/299 price that you get if you buy from a carrier and get a phone that is carrier locked and with a contract. Still, if you're wanting an unlocked phone, it's nice to know that they are available without having to go to some shady back-alley electronics store.
I read Clients From Hell daily to keep up to date on what not to do and to see how my own contract clients compare to the worst of the worls. Reading A Cautionary Tale I was reminded just how lucky I am and how I have nothing to complain about compared to some people. Long, but well worth the read.
Via @dkubb on IRC: Chatroulette Plans Penis-Recognition Algorithm to Block Pervy Users. I really don't know what else to say. They had me at "penis recognition" :)
Adobe updates Flash against security flaw - but watch out for the extras. Seriously? A company as big as Adobe has to do this crap?
Sneaky, that - trying to get you to install McAfee Security Scan Plus when all you actually want is an update of Flash.
I can understand if you're a small company trying to get a bit of extra revenue from installing crapware like the Ask toolbar, etc, but Adobe seems a bit big to do this sort of thing. The only justification I can see is that they are truly concerned about user's security and feel they aren't going to listen to a "hey, you know you should have an AV program installed" type message, and figure it's better to just shove AV software down their throats. I pity the IT workers that are going to have to deal with uninstalling this or dealing with conflicts or other really bad things resulting from users randomly installing things on their computers.
Star Wars the Old Republic "Hope" Cinematic Trailer from E3. All I can say is "wow". Watch it in HD for sure.
Update: Ooops, wrong name. D'oh!
At Microsoft's Complete Diskinect it's pretty clear that not everyone thinks that the Natal Kinect system is the next coming.
After Sunday's pre-E3 engagement party, Microsoft proved itself to be teetering out of touch rather than ensconced firmly on the edge of innovation. Unfortunately, instead of redeeming itself the following day by expanding on the Kinect's capabilities, the company only dug itself in a deeper hole with a presentation that continuously fell short.
List of 5 Ridiculous Gun Myths Everyone Believes (Thanks to Movies) at Cracked.com. Everything from silencers to bullets exploding everything they hit, with real life video examples :)
You know, it's only Tuesday, so it's nice to start the day with a smile. Check out this super-happy duck and think about how great it would be if your day could be given so much joy. Course, your brain would be the size of a pea, but still, that's a happy duck!
Yea, I know it's old, but I'm only now finally getting around to watching the RailsConf 2010: David Heinemeier Hansson keynote, so if you're interested in hearing about Rails 3.0, check it out.
Apps like Google Earth were why the iPad was made. Looks awesome. Now to get a GPS in that puppy and mounted in your car dash....
The Google Earth Blog Announced Google Earth 5.2. It'll let you track your hike/bike/run, and integrates a web browser (so you can view ads I'm sure). Still, worth a download :)
Missed the Microsoft E3 announcements? Check out the Live Blog for the (now passed) blow by blow of the announcements.
Illiad has announced a UF By UFies Contest, where you, yes you could be featured on the Daily static. Hit the link for full details.
From Aryk: Lifehacker has some tips on how Picrap Offers No Hassle TV Show Streaming In and Outside of the US. I'm told it works well, haven't tried it yet myself.
Found a video of Flash ported to iPhone over on 9-5 Mac. It's jailbroken of course, and the video quality (of the iphone) is crappy, and not many details, but it's cool to see that it's out there and existing. Not that I want flash on the iPhone of course, as what flash on the web is used for from what I see are a) ads (don't want 'em) b) stupid clicky games (don't want 'em) and c) videos (most of the major video places (ie: youtube) provide an HTML5 interface).
That all said, if the answer to the iPhone naysayers who complain that flash isn't on their phone is "run this jailbreak software and now you have it", then that's all good for them.
Oddee.com has their list of the 10 Craziest Green Ideas, from brothels offering discounts for bike users to electricity generating dancefloors.
Sick of me linking to stories about Safari or Extensions for Safari? If so, go off and build your own and I'll write a story about that instead :)
You all excited about the new "reader" feature in Safari, but not so excited about the rest of it? If so, you can get Safari's new 'reader' feature in Chrome & Firefox. I've been using the bookmarklet for a while, but thanks to OMG! Ubuntu! for the links to the extensions.
Team Fortress 2 available on the Mac now (yay) through Steam.
As part of the celebration, TF2 will be FREE to play all weekend, and 50% off to purchase. We've also got a little treat for anybody logging into the game from a Mac.
Great essay called My Problem With White Space over at the Echo Enduring Blog.
Now, I know that white space is an important element in layout and design. Yet, somehow, it seems that when that empty space is sitting there, staring back at me, I find myself struggling with the need to fill that space.
Holy crap. I'm not a fan of people owning high powered sniper rifles, but making your own lee enfield sniper rifle out of lego? Hell yes!
Watching the Android 2.2 (Froyo) Web Browser Speed Test (Flash On) I'm wondering again why I want flash? Yes, you get flash video and games in the browser, but you give up speed, smoothness, and (from other videos I've seen) stability. Thanks, fanboy or not I'd rather have a fast mobile browsing experience....
Thanks to Aryk for showing me this R/C Millennium Falcon Now Available For Pre-Order and draining both my wallet and my dignity as I scream out "OMG I MUST HAVE THIS" in the middle of the office.
Sort of like the Animator vs Animation videos a bit ago.... kinda. Check out CS vs Tetris, pretty damn good (and has a great ending, so don't miss it).
kotaku.com has a trailer for a new Mortal Combat re-imagining, featuring Jeri Ryan. They also have an update with some more details about what this is all about.
Safari Extensions is a Tumblog for extensions for the newly released Safari 5 (which now supports extensions).
As a bonus, I found from this reddit story that the shortcut key to 'undo close tab' is cmd-z. Technically this makes sense (ctrl-z being undo) but the other two major browsers (chrome and firefox) use ctrl-shift-t to do this, so it would have been nice. Also it doesn't seem to undo multiple tab closes, which would be nice as well.
Coworker of mine pointed me to two pages, first is the Rogers iPhone 4 "get me info" page (probably signs you up to all sorts of stuff, but I'm cynical), as well as The Star article saying that the New iPhone to be sold in Canada in 'coming weeks'.
My understanding of the iPhone release was that the US, UK, Germany, France and Japan will get it on release day, June 24, and then 88 other countries, Canada included I'd presume, would get it in "Sept 2010". The article seems to say that us Canadians will get the iPhone 4 at the end of July (possibly coinciding with the end-of-July release of the last version). Fingers crossed we Canucks don't get boned by another month+ of waiting.
Nice writeup on The Good The Bad, and the Meh at WWDC from Macenstein.
Apple pretty much announces the Mac platform is dead. Well, Apple didn't so much come out and announce this as they didn't come out and announce ANYTHING that didn't have to do with their handheld devices. Oh well. At this point Mac developers are used to being treated as second class citizens.
Pretty much my thoughts, though I have to say I'm impressed with the "reader" feature in Safari 5 (think a sexy built in version of the Readability bookmarklet). Too bad the browser doesn't hold up to Chrome and Firefox (IMHO).
I think for me this might be even more exciting than the new iPhone release, seeing on my ride in this morning that Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 3 has been finally released. Very exciting, and the blogs and podcasts are all abuzz....
First there was a press release, then it was pulled, then there was speculation, but now if you run software update you'll get Apple's Safari 5. BTW Apple, you forgot to change the "title" attribute on the Safari 5 page, it still says "introducing safari 4". Wonder if they put it up faster than intended due to the leak / early release of the press release. Actually looking at it it looks like most/all the text, other than the 'Safari 5' header is for the old Safari 4 version. The web is too real time for them to handle!
MacRumors has their iPhone 4 Hands-On Reviews and First Impressions. Nice to hear that some of the claims by Apple aren't just hyperbole.
- As we said, it's shockingly thin.
- The screen is truly outrageous -- you basically cannot see pixels on it. We're not being hyperbolic when we say it's easily the best looking mobile phone screen we've ever laid eyes on.
- The build quality is really solid. The home button feels much snappier, and on the whole it just feel like a tightly-packed device, but it's not heavy.
- The side buttons are really nice and clicky.
- iOS 4 is very familiar -- there's not a lot added to fit and finish.
The Powercolor hd5970 has 12 display outputs. Uhm... compensating for something?
Sure, the free eBooks are all about MS product guides and MS product-centric solutions, but if you're in that world, looks like good stuff.
Trey Ratcliff, of HDR Tutorial and Stuck in Customs fame, has released another fantastic Stuck In Motion Video. Check out the notes for how he does this. Great work as usual.
After all the Apple news today (you may have heard they released some iPhone thing), you'll be happy to know I'm getting back to "real" news and present to you a story from OSNews on a Native ZFS Port for Linux.
For those of you keeping track, here's The official WWDC 2010 Bingo card.
Found over twitter from my coworker @thaeus comes TwitVim a Twitter client for Vim. Not exactly the most user friendly setup, but hey, it's a twitter client for Vim :) Hit on @twitvim if you need to.
Seems that some people were there 12 Hours Before the Event. Wow. On the other hand, those of us not lucky enough to be there will have to rely on the live blogs. I'll update this post as I find them, but for now you probably want to get
As everyone knows, Monday, in just under 12 hours from this very second Steve Jobs will announce the new iPhone version 4 (HD? 4G?). So once you've spasmatically ordered it, you have to figure out what to do with your old iPhone.
Cool look at the different video game visuals from 1990-2008. Ah, the memories....
Slashfilm writes about a war film entirely done inside a tank. Very cool idea.
The whole movie takes place inside a tank, from the perspective of the soliders inside the cramped quarters, as they attempt to rescue and free a paratrooper squad that is besieged by Syrian troops. Maoz wrote the film based on his own experience in the 1982 war with Lebanon.
Trailer is embedded in the slashfilm link.
Woopra (the new hotness in web analytics) has introduced Woopra Web Analytics. You get (and this is a shock) the analytics on a webpage, instead of their desktop app. Congrats to Woopra!
Very cool video of LA Without Cars showcased on slashfilm. The home site of the video has more info and a description and examples of how it was done.
Not exactly "ready for consumers", but the New Handheld Computer is 100% open source software (yay) and a low price (double-yay).
Absolutely brilliant video of a talk on Aliens vs Human Intelligence related to DNA.
Great stuff.
Details over at TorrentFreak. Woo! Though I have to say I've been perfectly happy with Transmission lately....
Good post on the 37 Signals blog on Steve Ballmer at D8. I'm not an MS fan by any means, but based on the clips out of Ballmer when asked about the future of computing, tablets, etc, he did seem to be kinda talking out his ass and not making sense at all, especially compared to Jobs. Not that MS is in any danger of going out of business any time soon of course :)
Google has added the ability to add a Background Picture to the main google.com homepage. Mine is now set to a beautiful black and white image of Yosemite valley (Ansel Adams?) from their selection. Very Bing-like, but one of the things that people have always said they like about Bing is the background images that show up on the main page.
The Google Chrome's Developer Tools sound like they got a good presentation at the Google I/O. They are available on the Chrome dev channel.
The Apple Blog has their WWDC 2010 Predictions. Pretty much all as expected, but you never know, something could shake it all up. I'm just wanting to see the new iPhone so I can upgrade my 3G, which is feeling a bit clunkier every day....
Sad thing is that I think the chimp solved this faster and with a better solution than I would have come up with.
35 Lego Mega Constructions You (Probably) Haven't Seen Before over at hongkiat.com.
The accuracy of this demotivational poster is scarily accurate. Might be time to look at programming as a second option and being a painter first.
Kevin Rose has the Digg v4 Preview up on his site. I think the video's been floating around a bit already, so it's nice to see it. I'm not sure I like it though, even ignoring the Digg is Deadd article a couple of days ago. The focus on friends makes it feel like YAPTHASGAF (Yet Another Place To Have A Social Graph And Friends) along with twitter, facebook 4square, gowalla, etc etc etc. Still, looking forward to new and shiny things.
Someone with way too much time on their hands got an ultralight into orbit (in Flight Sim X).
Based on the title of Fuck Flash In The Fucking Neck With Barbed Wire Coated In Arsenic, I'm guessing that Zed Shaw has some strong feelings about flash. Just sayin. Great read.
Lesbians Who Look Like Justin Bieber.tumblr.com. Presented without comment.
Brilliant.... the Star Wars iPad Briefing.
Want to not only get a cool iPhone app but also get to see the source code that makes it tick? Impossible you say? Well @johnkoetsier has found 25 Amazing Open Source iPhone Apps for you.
First of all, I welcome my US neighbors to the south to 2008 as they are finally going to get tethering from AT&T. Other stuff in the story includes other AT&T service changes, both good and bad.
The description from Daring Fireball about this Review of Sex and the City 2 by Someone Who Doesn't Know Anything About It really makes me understand (a tiny bit) WTH people watch this sex in the city thing. Still not gonna watch it though.
Thanks to PeeJay for the link to the Video Clips of Last Night's D8 Interview With Steve Jobs. If you're wanting more in depth discussion as well, check out this week's MacBreak Weekly podcast.
Update: Collected all on one page.
HOW TO DESTROY ANGELS is now up and available for download. Yay for free and legal high quality music!
Valve certainly does have a flair for the odd, mysterious, and awesome.
So a cool Ubuntu Lucid Lynx Video Review over at OMG! UBUNTU! By a girl. Who likes Linux. You may pick your jaws up from the floor now nerdy guys. It's a nice overview of the OS and the newest features, hitting both the high and low points of some of the more prominent UI issues.
If you read the FAQ for BankSimple, you'll probably be sold with the 'how do I deposit a check' question. No idea if anyone is going to buy into a "new" bank, but if they come to Canada I'd probably give them a chance, based purely on their attitude towards customers (well, at least on the webpage).
Great CGI video called Avatar Days, which superimposes people's WOW characters into the real world. Great done graphics, and a neat idea.
That said, WOW players are crazy.... just sayin' :)
How have I not heard of this before... Check out some of the cool stuff in Mario Kart RC that my buddy H sent me this morning:
Racers get periodic power-ups, which appear on an LED display on the controller. Each car comes equipped with infrared sensors capable of detecting when they've been hit with a weapon, which causes them to rumble and slow down.
