Build-A-Bearville

If you’ve taken your wee ones (or girlfriend) to the Build-a-bear store in the mall recently, you should check out Build-A-Bearville.com, the online equivalent. There are some cute bear games, and an animated Build-A-Bear workshop. But the best part is:

With BuildABear, you enter a unique ID number off the birth certificate, and you get an online version that is identical to your one-of-a-kind, custom bear that you built. Of course the “one of a kind” bear is only one of given number of permutations of options, but still, to a kid, this is MAGIC!

The intersection of teddy bears and computer games, does it get better for a kid?

Via On Pampers, Programming and Pitching Manure.

Too Many Apps? Declutter Your Facebook

I hate Facebook apps. I don’t want to be a pirate or a Yankees fan or see the daily Full House quote or watch your plants grow. Unfortunately for me, I’m in the minority and my Facebook friends have lots of useless crap applications on their pages. According the Facebook blog, I’m not the only one who’s unhappy about it,

As time has gone on, we’ve received increased complaints from users that friends’ profiles are getting too cluttered, and that people are having trouble finding the information they are looking for on their friends’ profiles. On the other side, users are complaining that their own profiles are cluttered, and they have installed so many applications that it has become overwhelming to un-clutter it.

Or you could just stop installing ridiculous apps.

To benefit all users, therefore, we will soon be launching a “profile clean-up” tool. Similar to how your computer’s desktop will remind you to get rid of unused icons, this tool will give users the option to move extra profile boxes to an “extended portion” of their profile. Users can choose to move these boxes; we will recommend that they keep the Friends Box, Mini-Feed, Wall, Basic and Personal Information as well as the top 12 application boxes they have added. At the bottom of the profile will then be a link to “Show Extended Profile”.

It looks like application sheep and bitter nasty folks like me can both be happy.

YouTube Clones In Trouble In China

YouTube has been blocked, and back up, and blocked again in Beijing more times than I remember. Now the Great Firewall turns it’s wrath on smaller video sites, as well.

It’s well known that China goes to tremendous lengths to censor and block certain types of content online through a combination of tens of thousands of “internet police” combined with vague rules that are left up to various ISPs to enforce or face sanctions (meaning they tend to be even more quick to block than they may need to be). It appears that even that wasn’t enough to deal with the rise of user-generated video sites in the country. The Chinese government has a new policy demanding that all video upload sites must get a license from the government, must be state-owned or state-controlled and (of course) must not allow any video that “involves national secrets, hurts the reputation of China, disrupts social stability or promotes pornography.”

From this TechDirt article.

Solar Bags

Mental Floss lists a new gadget for 2008 that I REALLY want… a solar-power bag.

One side of the bag is a weatherproof flexible solar panel, which fully charges in 6-8 hours in the sun, or somewhat more on a cloudy day. Just set your bag in a window while you’re at work. The internal battery will hold a charge for several days. The interior features a voltage selector and a wall-charger adaptor so you can recharge your cellphone, iPod, or other gadgets wherever you are.

The bag is around $400, which seems a little steep until you remember how much you’ll be saving on charigng your phone, iPod, Blackberry, etc. I want this SO MUCH but I think I’ll wait for the perfect solar bag, a laptop-sized solar panel bag that charges my laptop.