Last Christmas, I got Neverwinter Nights and spent the whole break playing it.  This Christmas, Lisa got me a Nintendo DS Lite.  And, well, I nearly spent the entire break playing it.  I did get a lot of home improvements done too (installed a sink [pedestal sinks are hard to install just because there isn’t any room to work behind them], installed track lighting in the kitchen, as well as lights under the cabinets, installed shelves in the nursery, etc), so it wasn’t as bad as last year.  But, I did play enough to win The Legend of Zelda, the Phantom Hourglass.

Phantom Hourglass was pretty cool.  It really takes advantage of the touch screen.  I never used the buttons at all.  So, it was an interesting game playing experience.  It was a bit repetitive on some of the dungeons, but otherwise, was fun to play.

If anyone out there has a Nintendo DS Lite and has recommendations for games, I’d really like to hear them.  I’ve got Madden 08, Age of Empires, and Lego Star Wars: The Complete Saga on my wishlist, but if there is anything else I should look into, please let me know.

worldmapper.org is a cool way to compare different aspects of the various countries of the world. They do this by scaling the size of a country by the relative amount they have some property of interest. For example, the first thumbnail is the regular land area of each country. The second thumbnail is scaled to represent the number of new books published in each country. You can quickly see that Europe publishes a huge number of books relative to their relative land area while Africa publishes next to none. They have a large number of such maps, over 300, covering things such as net exports, voter turnout, number of elderly, and much more. I read about this site in Physics Today.

instructables.com: Do you want to super-charge your digital camera? Make crystal-clear ice? Build a Tesla turbine? Make a 25mm pneumatic sniper rifle? (OK, if you want to do this last one, maybe you should contact your local DoHS agent and let them know…) instructables.com has HOWTOs for a large number of esoteric as well as practical projects. It seems most of them don’t require too many supplies, at least not supplies that are overly expensive. And some have videos accompanying them, showing why you would want to do the project. The step-by-step instructions seem simple enough. I’ll be sure to try some of them as soon as I can.