Show me someone who says he’s never had the urge to radio Bones on a communicator, and I’ll show you a . . . Okay, well maybe not everyone wanted a communicator, but I could buy an armload of these things and still not have enough to go around. So here they are, the communicator and the phaser.

That last post on Khet got me to thinking about three dimensional Star Trek chess, which of course led back to the communicator. And like Galaxy Quest, you operate this just like you saw Bill and Leonard do it: flip the grill and you’ll hear the sounds and voice clips from the series. “Bridge here, Captain,” “Transporter room ready to beam up.” It also has a hailing function!

Available at Think Geek (of course): Communicator here
and the Phaser here

That’s right, a game of strategy with frickin’ lasers. Mine eyes have seen the glory.

I bought this game years ago, maybe in 2003 or so, and I believe it was called “Reflection” or something like that. I bought it as it was being produced, I think, and it was available from this tiny little site. One of those where you’re not really sure if you going to see anything after you make the purchase.

The concept is still the same, but it’s been given a story line, and is now available at Think Geek, one of my favorite retailers. The story goes that Khet was a popular ancient Egyptian game, so the object of the game is now to eliminate the competing pharaoh. You do this by aligning the mirrored playing pieces so that the frickin’ laser you shoot from your home base bounces from mirrored piece to mirrored piece, and ending up on the opponent’s pharaoh. In the way of your frickin’ laser are non-mirrored pieces, but one hit from your frickin’ laser, and those pieces are removed.

Simple and fun. Think Geek also offers an expansion pack: Eye of Horus Beam Splitters. So now you have to track multiple beams. Sort of like Tridimensional Star Trek Chess.

ThinkGeek Khet Laser Game

Have you ever thought about making backup copies of the DVD’s you own?

You’ll have a few obstacles to overcome:

• The backup file is often quite a bit larger than a DVD-R can store
• Commercial DVD’s are often encrypted
• It’s not considered legal (not even considered fair use)

I’m not going to get into the legal implications of this here, except to say that I think it’s ludicrous that I can’t make backups of DVD’s I own. For example, if I were the copying sort, making backups of my son’s DVD’s would be a great application of this sort of thing. They could theoretically get all scratched up because his grubby little two-year old paws would eventually end up all over them. In a situation like that, I’d much rather use a throwaway DVD-R. That could hypothetically save me considerable expense, and after all, I do own these discs (in this purely hypothetical example).

My father-in-law, who is not a U.S. resident, uses Slysoft AnyDVD for his backups. He says that the program is fast, but the backups tend to be of poor quality, presumably because of the file size issue. If I were to compare one of my hypothetical backups with his backup, I bet it would be of much higher quality, because the software that I would choose if I were the backing up sort would handle compression.

So if I were to choose ripping software, I would choose something like the freeware DVD Shrink, current version 3.2.0.15. DVD Shrink is able to remove encryption, and then compress the file to disc so that it can subsequently be burned onto a single DVD-R. It also has pretty good reauthoring features, so I could choose to leave off the foreign language track or bonus features if I were so inclined.

DVD Shrink’s official web site is here, but software can’t be downloaded from it. Rather, there is a forum that links to the various download locations. If I were to download DVD Shrink, I would make sure that I downloaded it from one of the locations referenced in that forum, and nowhere else. If I were to do it, of course.

A good quick start tutorial can be found, and more in-depth task-based tutorials are available.

Once this hypothetical file were on my PC, I would then go about burning it to a DVD. A very capable program that could be used to burn these types of files is the free ImgBurn software, luckily available fro download directly from their site. The current version is 2.4.0.

If I were to go about making backup copies, these are the programs I would use. They are very capable and make high-quality backups. But due to the decryption, compression, and drive speeds, they would take some time to copy a full DVD, perhaps along the lines of 30 minutes to rip and 30 minutes to burn and verify. Or so I would reasonably expect.

In all seriousness, while I do think it’s ridiculous that I can’t backup movies I own for my own personal use, I am strongly opposed to intellectual property theft of any kind. I would never consider it, and I discourage everyone I know from doing it. Fair use on the other hand is. . . well, fair.

By day, he was Penrod Pooch, a mild-mannered janitor at the local police station. A quick jump into a filing cabinet, and he shot out of a trash chute into the dumpster, where the Phooeymobile was parked. Hong Kong Phooey and Spot, his police cat sidekick, emerged to fight crime in the city.

Hong Kong Phooey only lasted one season on Saturday cartoons — yes, back when cartoons were only aired on Saturdays — and he had a few disappointuing cameos in the Laugh-a-Lympics. It was years until I would hear about HKP again, when a good friend of mine announced that he was going to get a Hong Kong Phooey tattoo. He never went through with it, by the way.

Available via 80’s tees.com.

I love these guys. The same company also makes a paparazzi figurine set, but I haven’t seen them in quite some time.

I bought this set for my sister as a cubicle-warming gift when she went to work for her new company. I don’t think she was nearly as impressed with them as I was.

Available via Amazon.