The last few years have been a boom for indie developers, especially on the PC: Humble Indie Bundle Indie Gala Indie Royale BeMine ...not to mention the Indie packs in the Steam Summer Sale!

And the budget conscious could have a big ol' ED-209 welded to their hood - "Move away from the vehicle!" Keeps it safe while parked too! ;)

Martian Chronicles was an early favorite, but the one that stuck with me as a young kid was The Veldt, which I was lucky enough to have read and seen on film in school.

Lame, I would have thought it was pretty funny. Then again I enjoy things like this: Clip from GMOD Idiot Box #2

Boardgamers are a perfect example for Kickstarter as they're already used to various pre-order systems. For example, I play Advanced Squad Leader. Printing a niche product for a is a big risk for a small company who have day jobs, so they have their where they state a minimum number of said product that needs to be sold to break even - once enough people pledge to buy that product goes into the production queue. Win-win situation for everybody, and I'm looking forward to seeing more successful projects from it.

Seems Kickstarter is more like business used to be... create an idea, shop it around to get capitol to market said idea. This is just a way to show your idea to the entire internet at once, and get small (but numerous) bits of capitol instead of a lot from one (or a few) investors. It'll work great for some, and not for others - the main thing it changes is the chance to get financial backing directly from people interested, instead of having to go through a large publisher like EA.

We've got these wonderful places called Mongolian Grills / BBQs where you assemble your ingredients and they throw it on the grill for ya. All meat? No problem. All veggies? No problem. Little of both? Go all the way! Three bowls!

Our 3-year-old happily sits watching Dora & other shows in the back seat with my old iPod Touch on longer car rides. Same thing will probably happen with our iPad after it gets replaced. Plenty of room for video, durable, and the battery life is better than any portable DVD player. Back to Dora - the first handful of DVDs were worth their weight in gold, but per-episode cost way more than buying sets off of iTunes, and while the discs auto-play, they also auto-play all the ads (whether you want to or not - Disney gave up this practice, I wish Nickelodeon would...) If she's happy watching on our iPad, Mom & Dad can watch whatever we want on the big screen TV. :) If not, they're all dumped in iTunes and streamable by our Rokus.

After spending some time POKE-ing around, the books I had sound like they might have been Micro Adventures

I started playing around with BASIC at random on the PET, and a few years later had a Commodore 64 where I learned much more. I remember having two books which contained a basic storyline, but had coding problems ranging from fixing the code to writing a lock for a door (or a program that would test all combinations, etc) but for years haven't had the slightest idea of where the books went (and neither do my parents.) They were written for young adults, and general enough to work on any BASIC (at the time C64, Apple II and Atari 400/800 were the targets) Does anyone know of these, or something similar? They are exactly the sort of thing the OP needs. (That being said, BASIC may no longer be the best language to start with, but aside from provided code, these books would have worked just as well with Ruby/Python/Perl/etc...

I'm pretty sure I've got CNN International live 24 hours a day on my Roku. Not that I'd watch it - I'd rather skim articles than watch talking heads as it's a lot faster...

Commodore 64 on the iPhone/iPad has had BASIC for some time...

Yep, the two side bundles I bought mostly for the extras. #4 is chock full of goodness, though!