Geekly Update - 04 January 2012

The AskBobRankin Geekly Update

YouTube has released their annual Year In Review, featuring the most-viewed videos of 2011. The number one video this year was Rebecca Black's "Friday". Others in the top ten include Ultimate Dog Tease, Talking Twin Babies and Nyan the Singing Poptart Cat. All of which does more to lend credence to the Mayan end-of-the-world-in-2012 theory than anything else I can imagine.

It's official... things ARE getting worse. A team from the University of Vermont decided to analyze over 4 billion Twitter messages from a time period of 33 months. Their findings, reported in a December issue of PLoS ONE, show that although moods tend to peak during the holidays, for the most part happiness has been declining.

According to security company Sophos, the latest scam out there was the promise of a Lady Gaga iPad if you clicked the link. Although this one was removed within a day there may be more because other groups, such as Maroon 5, have been exposed to the same treatment.

The Elder Scrolls: Skyrim has been voted the Game of the Year from the 2011 VGA Awards whose participants include game site and magazine editors. Bethesda Softworks says that it has shipped over 10 million copies of the popular RPG.

Sony released their new portable game system this week in Japan after its initial debut in September at the Tokyo Game Show and will hit the states Feb. 22. Vita is motion sensitive, has a touch interface, connection over cellphone networks or WiFi, and features a camera and GPS technology.

For the first time, the NFL has agreed to stream the wildcard playoffs, Super Bowl XLVI and Pro Bowl on its own and NBC sites. Mobile users can get a free app at the iTunes App Store and Android Market.

It's Archo's turn to present its own Android 3.2 Honeycomb tablet, known merely as the 70b IT. With a 7", 1024x600 capacitive touchscreen, a 1.2GHz processor, 512MB RAM and 8GB memory, it has a price starting at $199.00.

In Germany, Volkswagen has promised to stop sending emails to its unionized workers until 30 minutes before they come in and cease 30 minutes after they finish.

NORAD did their yearly tracking of Santa this year and their Facebook page claimed almost a million "Likes." Others followed his route via the official tracking page and on mobile apps.

VuPoint Solutions' Magic Wand PDS can scan a page of text or images in either color or black and white in a mere seconds. Available in several versions and colors, the device can copy data to an SD card (not included) by using one of several universal transfer protocols.

Republic Wireless has announced that it will truly be unlimited service for $19.00 a month. Last week GM Brian Dally stated that the company had eliminated the "fair use threshold" after customers found it to be deceptive marketing.