Between battles, the art of baking
Mobile gaming
For the wireless Nintendo DS portable gaming system, ''Cooking Mama" should keep you slicing and dicing, rolling, mashing, and peeling for hours with its all-in-one cooking tool: a stylus.
The game, released in Japan a few weeks ago, offers dozens of challenges to players, from tossing pizzas to seasoning and frying fish. Every task is performed under the watchful (and judgmental) gaze of Mama, who grades your skills at rolling dough and slicing vegetables.
''When Mama gets unhappy, she gets fire in her eyes," said Liz Buckley, senior product manager at Majesco Entertainment (www.majescoentertainment.com), which will release ''Cooking Momma" in the United States this fall.
Mama is not a dowdy matron who wields a rolling pin. She's more of a cute anime character. Majesco expects ''Cooking Mama" will appeal to every generation, from X to the Greatest, because it challenges the intellect in addition to the reflexes.
''We see this as the type of game that belongs in the same category as BrainAge," said Buckley, referring to Nintendo's brainteaser package for the DS.
''Cooking Mama" starts you off with 15 recipes. Additional recipes are unlocked as you progress. The game, which is expected to sell for less than $20, takes advantage of the DS's coolest features. You can share recipes wirelessly with other DS players, for example. And, when Mama tells you to lower the temperature of your tofu as it cooks on the stove, you have to blow into the DS's microphone to cool it.
Telephony
Hands-free Skype conferencing
Each new phone designed for Skype tempts me to ditch my cellular service and my landline for the dirt-cheap voice-over-IP service. Only two things hold me back: WiFi is not as widely available as cellular service, and you can't call 911 from Skype.
The Polycom (www.polycom.com) Communicator, a compact Skype speakerphone, doesn't overcome those reservations. But it will look good on any conference table -- or, in my case, dining room table.
It is much smaller and more attractive than those contraptions that take up half the table and look like they were designed by H.R. Giger.
The Communicator, due out by early summer, is the size of a PDA and props up on a kickstand for use with your PC. It has buttons to control volume, to pick up and release calls, and to launch the Skype application.
The Communicator has a headset port if you need to do the ''cone of silence" thing and discuss private information with someone at the other end of the line.
A USB device, the Communicator also doubles as a 22kHz hi-fi speaker for making presentations and playing video games on your PC.
Stargazing
SkyScout helps amateurs hit the bull's-eye on targeting celestial bodies
There's no joy like pointing at a constellation in the sky and saying, ''Look son, there's Orion." There's nothing as embarrassing as having someone come up behind you and say, ''No, Orion is over there."
But a new viewing device called the SkyScout should help amateur astronomers improve their accuracy.
The SkyScout ''personal planetarium" (www.celestron.com/skyscout) is like a GPS navigator to the stars. Resembling a camcorder, the point-and-click device has a viewfinder through which arrows point you toward the exact spot in the sky you are looking for. It will also instantly identify -- with a single press of a button -- any object you are pointing at, as long as it is one of the 6,000 in the device's library.
SkyScout has a side display screen and audio outputs, through which you learn a bit about a particular planet or comet.
The device, which will retail for about $400, is a bit of an engineering marvel. Two accelerometers acting as tilt sensors work in conjunction with a GPS receiver and a magnetic sensor to determine exactly which object you are looking at.
