It seems that a few Apple warranties have been deemed void due to the fact that the owner was a a smoker, and consequently their Macs were contaminated. The Applecare contract says nothing about this, and the list of toxic materials includes other such dangerous household items as talcum powder and isopropyl alcohol. There’s a long discussion of consumer rights and nanny laws and all that sort of thing just waiting to be pulled out of this story, but let’s not and say we did.

Are you sitting comfortably? Good. Because you’re not going anywhere for a while. Wired has a great article up right now that reminds me of Wired magazine content in their glory days in the early 2000s. The object of the piece is to examine the feasibility of disappearing completely in the digital age. They gave writer Evan Ratcliff a month’s head start to plan his means of vanishing, then set the entire internet on him once he’d executed his plan.

I’m only about halfway through it right now but it’s an easy recommendation if, like me, you’re lolling on the couch, sipping coffee and browsing the net.

Now, it’s not that I don’t want to tell the time when I wake up in the morning. It’s that I don’t want it spelled out in macaroni where I usually put my head.

I’ll tell you what. Fill a city with these things, and I’ll move there. I can’t think of a greater source of childish delight than a playground full of these things, haphazardly zipping around the asphalt, attracting the attention of every bird, dog, and blogger that passes by.

Even though Starcraft II was playable more than a year ago, Blizzard has still been extremely selective about the assets that they release. This latest video shows off the “Story Mode,” also known as the game, in which you can see a few characters driving the story, directing the flow of the game, and so on. The graphics, as we know, are very reminiscent of the original, yet polished and in high resolution; the added depth of 3D makes that Yamato Battle Cruiser look way meaner than it did in Starcraft. And the environment seems way more dynamic with the emphasis on high/low ground. How about that lava?

Check out the video inside.

For the last 20 years I’ve been playing racing games here and there, and when they started becoming realistic (i.e. the cars weren’t square and the engine noises weren’t square waves), the enormity of the sound challenge never really struck me. Engine, road, and tire noise, plus accurate doppler effects, different crunches and thunks for impacts… the list goes on. As if that wasn’t enough, you have to worry about engine noise contaminating your samples.

So it’s no wonder that some game designers from Microsoft jumped at the chance to use a Tesla for recording game audio. No engine noise and careful mic placement means you can get tire squeal, or any other audio component of driving, almost completely isolated. Now, I know you guys aren’t really that hot for the details of audio production, but I know you like fast cars. And it actually is pretty entertaining to see a Tesla with so many big hairy mics on it that it looks like a pussy willow.

Well done, Apple. You’ve finally done it. You’ve got the world bending the knee for a device they’ve never seen, and which you deny exists. Condé Nast has declared that Wired will be Apple tablet-compatible by mid-2010, although they admit that Apple hasn’t actually told them how they might go about doing that. While this isn’t exactly comparable to adjusting office doorway heights in case someone hires a Yeti, the parallels are clear.

There’s no shortage of secure devices out there, but if you happen to be a Kingston-only type of guy, you’re in luck. They’ve just put out a new USB stick that, like other secure drives, requires a password before you can access the data. It’s encrypted with a 256-bit key so I don’t think anybody will be brute-forcing that information any time soon. And if they put the wrong password 10 times… poof, formatted.

The “de-make” is a class of indie game where a popular new game is crushed into a low-fidelity environment; we’ve seen D-Pad Hero, Gang Garrison II (my favorite), and a whole competition based on the idea over at The Independent Gaming Source.

The latest victim of this ridiculous trend is Left 4 Dead — check out the video inside.

I haven’t played through all of Super Mario Galaxy, but what I did play was pretty forgiving. Compare that to the punishing, yet rewarding, difficulty curve of the original games or newer games like Demon’s Souls — it’s like comparing a sprint to a ramble. However, Miyamoto has stated in a recent interview that Mario Galaxy 2 will be “really challenging,” which is encouraging. They need to remember that their company has its roots in games that were hard as coffin nails.

Now, it’s not this blog’s intention to post every little bit of gaming news (or is it?), but this is a more signal event than all the PR out there. Modern Warfare 2 for the PC, which infamously lacks dedicated servers, a console, the ability to kick players, and other things integral to a good PC game. Infinity Ward, maddeningly apathetic to the needs and requests of their users, has said that no changes to the stated areas are forthcoming.

Well, you can’t keep a good PC gamer down. They’ve cracked it wide open.

A while back I went to a fun overclocking event held by AMD, where there was a lot of vapor, some exploding burritos, and some overclocking that got tantalizingly close to 7GHz. It was just an arbitrary number, and they broke a bunch of other records, but they couldn’t quite hit that last target. But a few months and I can only guess how much liquid helium later, they nailed it.

These days, when people aren’t talking about the Apple Tablet, they’re talking about how Apple’s next target is the Big Three gaming companies. The iPhone will topple them! The iPhone is a revolutionary gaming device! Well, certainly a little optimism is warranted; the iPhone has inarguably changed the landscape of mobile phones, personal media players, and to a lesser extent personal computers. Why shouldn’t Apple extend its holy sovereignty to gaming?

It already has, in fact. But Apple has come kicking and screaming the whole way. The iPhone, you understand, was not meant to be a gaming device, and in Cupertino, Apple’s intentions are paramount. Apple could never accidentally create a platform for gaming; if it wasn’t meant for gaming (or enterprise, or medical use, or reading e-books, etc.) from the beginning, Apple doesn’t want it happening at all. Because if Apple didn’t intend it, it’s outside of the bounds they set into the platform (regardless of how well it works, much like tethering) — it breaks the mold and, ironically, that’s the last thing Apple wants. And there are plenty other reasons not to expect Apple to jump into the gaming arena any time soon.