While you are recuperating from heat stroke, you can check out these links:

• A few months ago, I sent off my old, unused Motorola Razr phone to Cell Phones for Soldiers. It’s Independence Day soon; do the same if you have an old phone lying around. More info here from AT&T. Shipping is free and you’re doing a good deed.
• NCSoft is still chugging along despite the departure of Richard Garriott. Their next big game, “Aion” is due out Sept. 22 and is already available for pre-order. The company says it’s holding a special closed beta event this weekend and is giving players a chance to win a trip to Seattle for the game’s launch party and the Penny Arcade Expo.
• The City of Austin has an online game for you: crunch the budget!
• The Snuza uses motion-detection technology to monitor your baby’s movement. You can also use it to clip a bag of chips and make sure they don’t tip over in the pantry.
• If you’re still rocking Internet Explorer (WHY!?), you can now translate pages using Google Toolbar.
• Is it just me or does paying $160 to try to save money on gas with a device like the Fuel Efficiency Adviser seem a little… inefficient?
• Journalism students: MaYaMo wants you for a citizen journalism project. Just remember, “Citizen journalism” is often just another way of saying, “You work for free.” Just ask CNN’s iReporters.
• Austin’s Pixel Mine has a new iPhone game called Super Collider. 99 cents!
• QuakeCon 2009 is moving to a new location: The Gaylord Texan, north of Dallas.
• The Wattpad e-book service has arrived on the Android platform.
• I’ve not been in the market for a Vizio TV, but I must admit, the partners announced for their Internet apps are HOT. Pandora? Netflix? Twitter? Facebook? Flickr? Yes, please!
• Austin-connected Slacker has a Michael Jackson radio station in case you’re not already burned out (again) on the King of Pop’s music.
• Sessions for September’s Game Developers Conference in Austin are starting to fill the schedule.
• Sharon Henry is a journalism artist and friend; that’s sure not going to prevent me from sharing her amazing work with you — check out her iPhone-generated visual reports on Austin. They’re beautiful!
• Pretty cool video about HP’s new Web-connected printer, the TouchSmart.
• Austin’s Game Over Videogames is launching a summer-long Classic Game Fest, starting Friday night with “Pong.” It’s retro game summer!

Have a great holiday weekend!

Recent #moonfruit Tweets

From a marketing perspective, it was pure genius. A Manhattan-based Web service and hosting company called Squarespace offered to give away 30 iPhone 3G S devices for 30 days to a person randomly selected among those who included the hashtag “#squarespace” in Twitter posts.

I’d never heard of Squarespace before this contest, which was timed perfectly with Apple’s announcement of its latest iPhone version. Now, I hope I never hear about them again.

I only follow a few hundred people on Twitter, but I was flooded with posts tagged “#squarespace.” Because I like to follow people who are very smart and funny, many of the posts were amusing, plaintive calls for an iPhone 3G S with a hint of irony. Many other posts simply added the “#squarespace” without any context, basically the Twitter equivalent of tattered lottery scratch-off cards you find littering the space around a municipal trash can.

The company isn’t actually giving away iPhone 3G S devices. According to their contest page, they’re actually giving away $199 Apple Store gift cards, which winners can choose to purchase the 16-Gigabyte iPhone 3G S (as for activation fees and monthly service, winners are on their own).

Using those numbers, you can calculate that the company spent $5,970 for what I would guess returned hundreds of thousands of dollars in free publicity.

Genius. The contest ends July 7, but I have no doubt they’ll bring it back around for another go-round. Why not? It’s an amazing bargain for them.

It worked so well, in fact, that another company is doing the same thing: London-based Moonfruit, an online Web site builder, is using the same method to give away 10 Macbook Pros.

Not surprisingly, #moonfruit, which no one had heard of before, is now a trending topic on Twitter and will likely stay there for the duration of the contest.

And here’s where I get grouchy: I have no problem with people wanting to win an iPhone. Or a Macbook Pro. Especially a Macbook Pro. But let’s be honest: these are both online raffles with very little chance of winning. You’re buying a lottery ticket, basically, by using your Twitter account to try to win.

The argument would be that a lottery ticket costs money, while posting one, several or many Tweets with “#squarespace” or “#moonfruit” costs nothing.

I would disagree. If you believe that, then you must believe that your Twitter posts are worth nothing, mere scraps in the wind with no value. Come on, Twitter people: have some self-respect.

This is what posting lotto-Tweets costs you, as I see it:

• Every Tweet you post with a #squarespace or @moonfruit increases the likelihood that cynical jerks like me will unfollow you. The more you do it, the unfollow likelihood increases exponentially.
• The more contest Tweets you post, the less likely you are to post good, useful information or give us insight into your own life. Unless the insight you want to share is, “I’ll do anything for a $199 gift card.”
• As always happens when you post useless things on Twitter, you’re polluting the stream of everyone who follows you. And there’s no simple way to filter that out without filtering you out.
• You’re helping a company that you probably have little to no interest in beyond winning a contest. Do you really want to turn yourself into a talking online billboard? You know those guys who walk down the street with the sandwich board for new housing subdivisions or furniture stores? You are to Twitter what they are to busy street corners.

Perhaps I’m being too cynical and too judgmental. I mean, really, post whatever you want. But it made me a little sad the last few weeks to see people embrace wholeheartedly what’s little more than a very clever marketing gimmick.

Your Tweets, however trivial, have some worth. That’s why people follow you on Twitter.

You have worth. You’re better than this, frankly.

Time to start acting like it.

Using an ultra-high-def Red One movie camera, Alexx Henry and his crew put together movie posters (that could be embedded onto Web sites as well) that appear to suddenly go into motion from a still image. The trick is capturing on a digital video camera something that looks as sharp and life-like as a photo we’d see on a movie poster.

The video below shows how it’s done for the Cybill Shepherd TV movie “Mrs. Washington Goes to Smith” (ha!) and the video below shows one example of the final product as it was presented on the movie’s Web site. Pretty amazing.

More examples from this project over on Alexx Henry’s blog.

But even if it had been a normal weekend with the usual mix of errand-running and advanced loafing, I think this still might have happened: I found myself hardly using my laptop at all.

It used to be that the mobile computer was such a fixture on my lap that you would have thought it had merged with my legs somehow, like the shut-ins who have to be pried surgically from their couches. But over the last six months I’ve noticed myself reaching for my iPhone more and more when I have to look up something on the Web, send an e-mail or, sometimes, even view an online video (as long as it’s not Flash-based, of course).

I’ve been without my laptop before, of course — when I’ve had to send it in for repairs, I’d find myself scrambling to power up my desktop computer, which sits upstairs, out of reach in most situations.

Last week, I got an iPhone 3G S, upgrading from my first-generation iPhone. It turns out it was quite an upgrade. The 3G network is much better now than it was when I first tested out an iPhone 3G last year — it’s more reliable, seems speedier and has a wider area of coverage based on what I can tell so far.

When we were out shopping, it was never a big deal to whip out my phone and do a quick Twitter check or check e-mail with 3G.

In my house, I use the phone in Wi-Fi mode; that’s where I noticed that the speed boost on the 3G S makes Web pages load quite a bit faster and reduces a lot of the lag time on opening apps, switching from Twitter apps to e-mail or photo pages and other things that I never even noticed were slow before.

It always used to be that it was just quicker and more efficient to do things on the laptop that the phone couldn’t keep up with. Those kinds of tasks (watching a DVD of “The Wire” or doing intensive editing of audio, for instance) are becoming fewer and fewer as the phone I use seems to get faster and smarter.

Back in the late ’90s tech analysts used to tell me that at some point in the future phones were going to overtake computers as our most-used, handiest digital device. I thought that was pretty crazy.

That day is almost here.

But we don’t expect online news to get it so bluntly, finally right.

At about 4:22 p.m. Central time, TMZ.com sent out an e-mail alert headlined, “Michael Jackson Dies.” In the body of the message, next to a blurry photo of sunglasses-wearing Jackson, the message began, “We’ve just learned Michael Jackson has died. He was 50.”

Within moments, TMZ’s Web site was crushed with traffic and the news spread like wildfire on Twitter, Facebook and other social networking sites. Meanwhile, CNN, the Los Angeles Times and other news sources appeared flat-footed as they continued to report only that Michael Jackson had been rushed to the hospital. For almost another hour, they repeated reports that Jackson was in a coma (which later proved untrue), but not dead. The speed of messages on Twitter, already alight with “RIP” messages to Farrah Fawcett sped up as debate raged about whether TMZ’s report could be trusted.

Turned out they were right. As usual.

Whatever people think about TMZ’s reporting methods (they are as known for their sleazy, late-night mini-cam celebrity stalking than for their news reporting), the Time Warner-owned celebrity site owns Hollywood news. Yesterday’s scoop, which follows a series of accurate breaking news reports from the news organization (Anna Nicole Smith’s and Heath Ledger’s deaths among them), was only acknowledged by CNN and other more-respected news organizations after the Los Angeles Times echoed the news of Jackson’s death. (Which occurred about 20 minutes before TMZ reported it, according to a Friday story from the Times.)

In an embarrassing sort-of admission of dropping the ball, CNN later interviewed a TMZ editor on camera nearly two hours after TMZ.com had broken the news. It was only that CNN began to acknowledge that the King of Pop was dead. TMZ, it seemed, was suddenly news royalty (at least for entertainment news) after years of playing court jester in the eyes of mainstream media. CNN, whose cable news coverage still seemed to vital and relevant during the 2008 election season, was painful to watch Thursday afternoon. It didn’t help that the news network had recently been criticized for ignoring Iran election news while posters on Twitter lit up the site with updates, photos and video when protests began. A popular tag on Twitter in mid-June was, “#CNNfail.”

It was a make-or-break moment for TMZ: reporting the death inaccurately in such a high-profile would have ruined the news organization’s credibility. Instead, it cemented TMZ’s position as the preeminent quicksilver Hollywood fount of news. Only the death of Walter Cronkite, who has been in poor health this week, might have been a clearer signal that the torch for breaking-news coverage had been passed from cable news to scrappy online news sites. The 24-hour news cycle may now be closer to 24 minutes.

How does TMZ do it? They are well-sourced, tenacious and, in some cases, pay for content. In an interview with Playboy magazine (possibly not-safe-for-work), Harvey Levin, the lawyer who is managing editor of TMZ.com, said, “… roadblocks don’t stop us… In certain cases we pay. Newspeople get on their high horse and say they don’t pay sources. That’s (expletive).”

TMZ.com broke a record in unique visitors to the site, a 33 percent increase over its previous record, the organization said on Friday in an e-mail. When asked by the American-Statesman, TMZ would not release the number of actual visitors on Thursday nor what the previous record-making event had been.

TMZ’s news gathering efforts were passed along in part by a flood of messages on social networking sites that strained network traffic, as CNN.com would later say in a story headlined, “Jackson dies, almost takes Internet with him.”

That surge of activity was fueled by the usual suspects engaged in their usual behavior: the gullible spread of rumors about Jeff Goldblum’s death (not true), which originated on a prank site. Gossip lightning rod Perez Hilton outraged the world, again, by reporting early on that Jackson might be faking his own illness.

And on Twitter, the Tweenut gallery chimed in with everything from snarky jokes about Jackson’s troubled history to heartfelt tributes for the singer to links for songs and videos performed by Michael Jackson on YouTube, blip.fm and iTunes. On Apple’s music site, six of the top 10 downloads were by Jackson by Friday afternoon. Amazon, Inc. and Barnes & Noble, Inc. both reported selling out of some Michael Jackson items after seeing unprecedented demand, the Associated Press reported. Bill Carr, Amazon’s vice president of music and video, called it, “Stunning.”

In an ugly bit of social media zaniness, Jackson first appeared on the list of Twitter’s trending topics as the misspelled, “Micheal Jackson.” Apparently, enough people reposted a Tweet from the very popular “BreakingNews” Twitter account that the misspelling stuck. (BreakingNews quickly deleted the misspelled message, but the damage was done.)

The sudden online wake spurred real-life action: it set in motion a late-night Austin tribute to Jackson at the Alamo Drafthouse. Drafthouse founder Tim League said he and creative director
Henri Mazza decided to do a sing-along tribute to Jackson Thursday “almost simultaneously” — and the show at the Alamo Ritz downtown sold out almost instantly.

“I called Henri and said, ‘We gotta do this’ and he said, ‘I’m way ahead of you,’ ” League said Friday. “But we’d been doing the Michael Jackson sing-along for years and did a bunch last year as we were prepping for the ‘Thriller’ dance, so it’s a show we have at the ready with props and inventory.”

League and Mazza decided to do the show about 5 p.m., not long after Jackson’s death was announced. By 6:15 p.m. the midnight show was sold out, sales fed almost entirely by Twitter feeds and re-Tweets.

The Drafthouse has some 2,300 Twitter followers; League has 560 on his personal account.

“The whole day was a strange Twitter experience for me and a lot of people,” League said. “The news shot through. I got so many messages immediately when the news started flying. All of my coverage basically came through Twitter.”

League described the mood inside the 200-seat theater as “a roller coaster the whole night. Everybody there was some level of super hardcore fan, me included. Henri, who’s been the creator of this show, is a big fan and all the time he reiterated, ‘This is not about making fun of this at all. I am a huge fan and if you’re going to mock this experience, then there’s the door. This is a celebration.’ Everyone could get up on stage and dance but when there was a slow
song people would get sad. The mood swung wildly. But mostly it was a celebration.”

The Ritz will repeat the experience at midnight tonight and at 10:30 p.m. Saturday.

It was a big-screen representation of a new wrinkle in celebrity mourning: the media we remember most of our favorite artists is now readily available, in online videos (he Moonwalks on Motown’s 25th Anniversary special), downloadable music (“Thriller,” yes, “HIStory,” not so much) and of course, Jackson’s Wikipedia page (which went through some heavy editing on Thursday).

In 24 hours, the 911 call about Michael Jackson was online, the quotes from celebrities about the tragic loss had been gathered into online video compilations, and the grisly post-mortem was well underway. It’s too early to tell if the speed of mourning our icons has increased as much as the way we alerted to their passing.

But we know that when an Elvis, a John Lennon, a Michael Jackson passes, we may stop asking where someone was when they heard the news. Instead, we may ask what online service let us know first: a friend’s text message? Were we Tweeting? Did someone Facebook-post it?

(With reporting from American-Statesman features writer Patrick Beach.)

All things Michael Jackson on Austin360 at this link.

Photo by Laura Skelding, AMERICAN-STATESMAN

The press release in my inbox was so ridiculous that I posted a line from it on Twitter, believing it would earn chuckles from my online friends.

It said, ” ‘Virtual farming’ is becoming one of the fastest growing categories to play on Facebook. Its free, its fun, and brings technology back to the heart of America.”

What!? Ridiculous!

And absolutely true. It turns out that virtual farming, like “Mafia Wars” and “Scrabulous” before, has become a big hit on Facebook, fueled by virtual agrarians who apparently… want to raise crops and stuff.

Friends told me they’ve received dozens of requests to play games like “Farm Town” and “Farmville.” 24 of my friends are playing the former. Some people told me their entire families are addicted to some form of Facebook farm gaming.

What is going on? Are we wanting to return to a simpler time of pig slop and harvest dances (ironically, through the use of newfangled technology)? Is it just one more genre of games for people who are tired of Facebook quizzes and past hot games about fashion or dealing dope?

If you can explain this Facebook farming thing to me, please do. I am incredibly curious.

But enough about that pain — here are some links you should check out:

• You’re not a fan of poverty, are you? Of course not! Locals involved in Linux Against Poverty have set an Aug. 1 date for an event setting out to fight blight with tech might. Mark your digital calendar.
• A Nintendo DS game based on the upcoming Robert Rodriguez film “Shorts” is due out in late July from Majesco. In the screenshot posted at right, you can see the evocatively named “Booger Monster” from the game.
• For those who had trouble activating new iPhones over the weekend, AT&T offers a $30 iTunes credit.
• Speaking of iPhones, we’ve seen our first case of thievery foiled by the new “Find My Phone” feature. It’s dangerous out there. Be careful if you try this. (Via Slashdot.)
• Local bargains-via-Twitter site CheapTweet has announced partnership with online stores.
• If it works as envisioned, Opera Unite sounds pretty hot.
• This was in the news quite a bit last week: Dell has made about $3 million via Twitter. Nice work.
• Sony Online Entertainment family-friendly MMO “Free Realms” has already hit 3 million users since it launched in late April.

Come share our opinions, questions and reservations about phones with me and other readers.

If you are like me (and I pity you if this is the case), you want Internet wherever you go, whatever you’re doing. You want it at the supermarket when you want to find out if you’re being ripped off on cantaloupes and you want it in the bathroom while you’re checking out your hair in the mirror (after you’ve washed your hands thoroughly, of course).

Depending on your phone situation, you may or may not be on a higher-speed 3G network (as of this posting, I’m still using a first-generation iPhone, which has Wi-Fi, but no 3G); you may find yourself in situations all the time where, despite what seem like generous Wi-Fi hotspots around town, you’re just not in an area with Internet. Your phone may fall back on a slower network, but your laptop is probably out of luck.

Verizon’s MiFi 2200, dubbed an “Intelligent Mobile Hotspot,” is a slick solution for these woes; it’s basically a WiFi hotspot in a sleek, glossy black box the size of a credit card (and about as thick as an iPod Touch). It charges via a USB adapter and provides a good-sized WiFi network for your phone, laptop or any other device that can connect to it with a provided password.

It can also connect directly, via USB, to a computer and provide a direct Internet conduit that way. As long as you’re safely in a Verizon service area, you’ll have good upload and download speeds. And since Verizon’s national network is pretty robust, it makes the MiFi an idea choice for frequent travelers or those who have to be constantly connected at high speeds.

What’s the down-size? For one thing, it’s not made of magic. It’s not going to work in remote locations where you wouldn’t get regular Verizon phone service and, in several weeks of usage, I found instances where either the device didn’t pick up the network (once, curiously, right off of IH-35 in New Braunfels), or would require a quick restart to begin providing Internet access again.

Luckily, the MiFI itself is very easy to deal with when these issues come up: it has a single button that you press to turn it off and on and usually a simple reboot was all that was necessary to get things in order again.

How were the download/upload speeds? In my experience, it functioned very similarly to a home Wi-Fi network, with very little lag and reasonable speeds even when viewing online video or downloading big files (I used it on Wednesday to update to the iPhone’s 3.0 software without incident).

Because it’s so tiny, you can only expect so much battery life from the MiFi. On a charge, it lasts most of a day with sporadic use, but starts warning you with a blinking red light when it’s low on power. There are options to have the device shut down automatically when there’s been no activity for a predetermined amount of time (anywhere from five minutes to an hour). That’s a nice way to save the battery if you forget to turn the MiFi off.

I was concerned when I heard about pricing for the MiFi: you can pay $40 a month for 250 megabytes of data and 10 cents per megabyte of overage charge. For $60, you get 5 gigabytes a month and 5 cents per megabyte of overage charges. If you’re a heavy Internet user and you’re using this as your primary way to connect, you might be asking for trouble, but in about two weeks of using the MiFi pretty frequently for Web video, e-mail and browsing, I only used about 354 megabytes of data:

You can find out at any time by connecting it to your computer how much data you’ve used as you go.

The MiFi is a good example of a next-gen Internet device that performs as promised as long as you’re willing to pay $40-$60 for a broadband connection. Given that you can share the Internet connection among several Wi-Fi devices at the same time, it seems perfect for social networking meet-ups or business meetings (provided you don’t mind sharing your password).

It costs $99 after a $50 mail-in rebate with a two-year contract. For those who don’t want a contract, you can buy it for $270 and pay as you go, $15 for 24 hours of access.

It’s too rich for my blood to sign on for one of my own, but those who can afford it will fall in love with the simple, pretty and useful MiFi 2200.

I just got off the phone with AT&T representative Mike Barger, who is quoted below in this blog entry. One very key bit of information that invalidates some of the content of the blog post is this: the announcement applies to those who are on $99 iPhone plans, not those who are on cheaper monthly plans.

Barger explained to me that a number of factors are taken into account for upgrade eligibility including the number of phone lines a person has and how far they are into their plans. But paramount is how much a person is paying a month. Therefore, someone who is paying $99 is much closer to paying off the original price of the phone than those who opt for cheaper plans.

Which brings us to the original blog post; those in good standing on the $99 plan who bought iPhone 3Gs last July-September are eligible for $199/$299 iPhone 3G S upgrades. Those who are on cheaper plans? Not so much.

Which leaves me with a big iPhone-shaped egg on my face for reporting otherwise. I was in two meetings, away from my desk, as this was going down and had just posted the entry. When I returned to my desk, my heart sank.

My sincere apologies.

If you’re upset with AT&T or with me today because you thought you were eligible for a cheaper upgrade only to find you aren’t, you can be comforted by this at least: I bet I’m much more upset about it.

Original post follows:

In another wrinkle to the pricing on the new iPhone 3G S, due out Friday, AT&T announced today that early buyers of the iPhone 3G, released last July, will be eligible for the $199-$299 pricing on the 3G S if they purchased their phone from July through September 2008.

According to AT&T’s site, “We’re now pleased to offer our iPhone 3G customers who are upgrade eligible in July, August or September 2009 our best upgrade pricing, beginning Thursday, June 18. If you’re one of the many customers who will benefit from this change, please note that our upgrade eligibility tools will reflect this change on Thursday, June 18.”

This will sound different to those 3G customers who felt burned believing that because they purchased a 3G at launch 11 months ago that they’d be subject to higher prices (as high as $599-$699) for the 3G S to subsidize the phone with a two-year contract.

A phone call I had with AT&T representative, Mike Barger, confirmed the news.

Pricing for the 3G S under this upgrade is $199 for a 16-gigabyte model and $299 for the 32-gigabyte model, the same as what a new AT&T wireless customer would pay.

Another AT&T representative said in a follow-up e-mail to me, “iPhone 3G went on sale July 11, 2008. iPhone 3G S is going on sale about 11 months later. A number of our iPhone 3G customers are literally weeks shy of being upgrade eligible. This change helps them. We recognize that these customers likely camped at our stores, stood in long lines or waited for iPhone 3G inventory to arrive. We value their business - and want to keep them doing business with AT&T. Hundreds of thousands of customers who are upgrade eligible in July, August and September 2009 can take advantage of this change.”

To check eligibility, AT&T has made the process easier than their Web site (which for days gave me the option to upgrade to a 3G phone from my first-gen iPhone, but no option to buy a 3G S): you can call *639# (star N-E-W-Pound) and you’ll receive a text message informing you of your upgrade eligibility. Given that the wording of the press release suggests this all goes into effect tomorrow, you may want to wait a day to try again if you don’t like the answer you get today.

For those who aren’t upgrading but still own an iPhone (or are buying a $99 3G model), there’s still good news today: the new 3.0 version of the iPhone OS is now live, although some have reported that Apple’s activation server is being hit hard with new requests.

I was able to download the software and 3.0 so far is pretty great. It features copy-paste, a universal search function (accessible by swiping left to right on your first screen of apps) and e-mail search. It’s a free upgrade for all iPhone users, accessible on the “UPDATE” button in iTunes when you plug in your phone.

iPod Touch users will need to pay $10 for the OS 3.0 update.

It may seem like a bit of “E.T.” for gamers, but if it’s anything like “Ico” (and it seems like a continuation of themes), it will be dream-like, beautiful and full of emotion.

See for yourself:

The press release was from the research firm IBISWorld and, in a recent report, they say that dads are giving up gifts like electronics and home improvement items (hello, laser level!) in favor of “Pampering” gifts like spa days and grooming kits.

How bad is the drop? According to IBISWorld, sales of these pampering gifts are expected to be up 35.7 this Father’s Day while home improvement and electronics sales are down 27.9 and 16.3 percent, respectively.

How can that be? There’s a new iPhone! And the Palm Pre is out! “Ghostbusters,” the video game, is in stores tomorrow! Did I mention laser levelers!?

The press release for the research report twisted the knife further, saying (mockingly, I might add): “It seems dad is going from handyman to dandyman this year.”

As Hank Hill might say, “Gaaaahhaaauuughh!”

Step it up, dads. If you forego electronics, table saws and, yes, even the traditional ugly tie for Father’s Day for a mani-pedi or a gift basket of body lotions from Bed, Bath and (heaven help us) Beyond, you risk getting thrown out of the Geeky Dad Club. (I’m not just a member; I also just made it up.)

Or you could do what I did if you like to live dangerously. When asked what you want for Father’s day several weeks in advance while you’re playing video games, you could answer, distractedly, “I dunno… a stripper?”

This is a risky move and almost ensures you’ll get no gifts.

As a charter member of the Geeky Dad Club, I’m all right with that.

Make your wish list known: you want drill bits, a dorky Bluetooth headset (with a belt holster to hold it when it’s not on your ear) and a GPS fish finder.

Save the spa retreat for Valentine’s Day.

I have a story appearing online soon and in the Statesman tomorrow about how the local stations fared (pretty good, few complaints). I’ll link to it on this blog as soon as it’s linkable.

Update: here is the story.

KXAN and KTBC shut off their analog signals mid-day and KVUE plans to shut off at 10:10 p.m. tonight, replacing its regular feed with a “Night light” of information about digital TV for the next two weeks.

KAKW, Austin’s Univision station, is expected to cut off analog around midnight.

KLRU and KEYE already switched to digital.

In the meantime, enjoy this iPhone photo of the analog shut-off near the KXAN-TV master control center. The historic transition got a bit crowded:

I mean, come on. A Venus Flytrap holding its own against the fetid undead? How could that not be fun?

Popcap Games, the increasingly influential purveyors of casual games like “Bejeweled” and “Peggle” go above-and-beyond, however, with “Plants vs. Zombies,” which is several degrees deeper than you might expect and a more complex, mature game than the company has produced before.

It’s also priced $20, an absolute steal in the era of middling $60 console games that are all too often barely worth a rental.

While at first glance, the game resembles a popular genre of defend-the-base games like “Desktop Tower Defense,” “P vs. Z” is a clever mix of action, strategy and puzzle game. The basic premise is defending a home from zombies via a yard full of weaponized greens. Peapod shooters, cabbage-throwing catapults and zombie-capturing kelp (for the backyard pool, of course) are just a few of about 50 tools available as the game progresses.

Rather than battling on a 3-D environment or letting zombies go every-which-way, the game smartly limits movement horizontally, not unlike the old arcade beer-slinging classic, “Tapper.” That makes the action manageable, never overwhelming, even when zombies engaging in pole vaults or driving Zambonis threaten to overrun your home and, naturally, eat your brains.

The cartoony animations are charming; the game is never excessively violent or gory despite the subject matter, and the plants are adorable. What’s most surprising is how much game is stuffed into the package: in addition to dozens of levels (most introducing a new weapon or tool to play with), there’s a shop for additional wares, a Zen garden to play with, mini-games, a whole different set of puzzles apart from the main adventure game and a survival mode. It’s a lot of depth for a game that seems so slight at first.

While the game lacks a way to play against others online, you get the feeling a future version of the game may add that option.

I’ve spent several weeks with the game and still don’t feel I’m anywhere close to finishing it. Most welcome is that in that time, the game hasn’t grown boring; it’s got a lot of personality, the gameplay is pitched at just the right difficulty (challenging, but not frustrating) and the zombies themselves are hilarious.

Sure, this whole zombie trend may run its course, but I have a feeling “Plants vs. Zombies” will still stand (or, perhaps, shamble); it’s got undying appeal.

“Plants vs. Zombies”
$20, for Windows PCs and Mac
Rated E-10+ for Everyone 10 and older

Here are some good links to check out while The Linkdown ponders:

• Latinitas is holding a Tweetup at Mercury Mambo Thursday night.
• Game Crazy has a new iPhone app. Most interesting thing about it: you can look up used game prices and trade-in values for video games.
• For those of you using Yahoo! Mail, they’ev added Paypal, photo editing from Picnik and other new applications as features. Check out a video about it here.
• The HeliOS Project, which puts computers in the hands of kids, is holding a raffle for a lovely Alienware m5500i-R3 laptop. Go check it out.
• Security company Schlage is doing a demonstration of its home networking/security products including one for latchkey kids. It’ll be at Lowe’s on Shops Parkway at Bee Cave. Demos are at every half hour starting at 10:30 a.m. until 12:30 p.m.
• June 24 is the date of the Austin RockStar Tech & Jobs Expo.
• The Business Software Alliance recently awarded Texas Senator John Cornyn its Cyber Champion Award.
• Montreal-based Steambot Studios has opened up an Austin studio.
• HP has introduced Power to Change, a campaign to power down computers that aren’t being used. Power that thing DOWN!
• The Austin Web site Radio Use Only sent us an update recently. They’ve posted more than 683 LPs from 44 states and several countries.
• Opera’s beta version of its new version, 10, is out for download.
• As Austinist reports, the city has a new special events street closures portal.
• Austin-based URL shortener budurl.com has partnered with AMD at the enterprise level. That’s a high level, I’m led to understand.
• Nielsen says 2.8 million Americans are not ready for Friday’s digital TV cut-off date. Yikes!