eggs

Google has hidden a special holiday "Easter Egg" that turns your screen into a winter wonderland.

Simply search for "let it snow" on Google and prepare yourself for an HTML5 blizzard--actually, it's more like a few flurries. The cool part comes after a few seconds, when your screen "frosts over" and your cursor can be used to trace messages or doodles like a finger against a window on a chilly day.

It might not quite have the wow factor of Google's famous "barrel roll" bonus, but it's bound to … Read more

The Google "do a barrel roll" search caught plenty of attention this week--but it's only one of many Easter eggs the Internet giant has hidden around the Web.

The company has been doing things its own, often nerdy way for years--basing its IPO price on e, the base of natural logarithms, for example, or showing pi in the sky at 3:14 a.m. with the right iGoogle theme. Also popping up are references to classic video games, science fiction books, and Lego.

It's a nice touch that gives a bit of personality to a company … Read more

Some people are, today, actually sitting at the Open Mobile Summit in San Francisco listening to someone drone on about how cell phones are now a sense more important than smell to today's youth.

Anyone sitting in that conference who still has a pulse will surely already have heard of Google's "Do A Barrel Roll." I know this because someone from the conference sent me a text and said: "Do it."

Might I therefore merely pass on this suggestion, as by doing it you might just have the most mindlessly enjoyable four seconds of … Read more

The most important meal of the day--as everybody knows--is breakfast. What everybody doesn't know is what they might have for breakfast.

Options abound in the early hours of the day and sometimes those choices lead to a surprise. Perhaps toast was on the menu the night before, but come morning nothing but eggs would do; it's hard to know what one wants before one wants it. All of this goes to say that while breakfast comes in many forms, one should always be prepared for eggs. And if that means via a folding toaster, then a folding toaster … Read more

New Facebook interaction added to eBay, Siri has some quirky answers, and BlackBerry service is restored, but will there be compensation for down time?

Links from Thursday's episode of Loaded:

The first thing you'll notice about the compact Olasonic TW-S7 PC speakers is that they have a unique, eye-catching egg-shaped design. As far as colors go, you can go with black or white, and both versions have a nice glossy finish and come with circular rubber stands that keep the speakers standing, cupping the speakers like an egg holder does. They stand a shade less than 6 inches tall.

We liked their design and also liked the fact that these are USB-powered speakers, which means you just plug them into a USB port on your Windows or Mac PC and you're good to go, no power adapter required. … Read more

Angry Birds Seasons lets you play the popular birds vs. pigs game, but with themes that match every season. You can play among jack-o'-lanterns and white-sheet ghosts in the fall; snowmen and Santa-capped pigs during the winter; or brightly colored eggs and bunny hats when it gets close to Easter. You can play whichever season you want right away--you won't need to unlock every level in order to unlock new themed worlds. With that said, the gameplay is no different than you've come to expect with Angry Birds, but maybe that's a good thing--most people love … Read more

Angry Birds Rio is the surprisingly good game tie-in to the animated movie "Rio." While many co-branded marketing vehicles show signs of slipshod shoehorning, Angry Birds Rio expands on the core Angry Birds mechanic while adding some twists and improvements we hope will, ahem, migrate their way into the main game.

Fans of the titanically popular Angry Birds series will find the same basic interface and gameplay--but instead of crushing pigs, your avian assault team is freeing other birds imprisoned by smugglers, taking out menacing monkeys, and presumably doing other things as more chapters are added. (The game … Read more

A couple of months after Easter itself came and went, the Easter egg Google shipped with its Chrome OS prototype laptops has finally been discovered.

Brad Wells found the Easter egg. Aided by a little Google searching, he found out how to activate a fake blue screen of death--one of the "legacy" leftovers from the PC era Google hopes to banish with its browser-based operating system. Then, with an ASCII code converter, he found a parody of the legalese that causes me a lot more heartburn these days than BSODs.

Wells dug up the egg after Chrome … Read more