Is your city puting on a massive pyrotechnics display this weekend? Or maybe just your neighbor Carl? Either way, you can learn how to capture the moment in all its noisy, exploding glory with a digital camera.

Ideally, it pays to use a camera that offers some level of manual control over the settings. That way, you can dial in the best exposure, aperture and focus settings to achieve the best results.

But you can still take good photos of a fireworks display no matter what kind of camera you have. Yep, even the iPhone!

Did you expect the negative reaction from some fans following the announcement of Left 4 Dead 2?

"We obviously listen to the community a lot. That's one of our staples. Did we anticipate it? No, we didn't, but I think that one of the key things is: announcing Left 4 Dead 2 doesn't mean we're abandoning Left 4 Dead 1. Another thing is it's important to remember that E3 is where you go to announce new titles, specifically titles that are coming to retail. We do press there, but it's not really a venue for announcing DLC or mod tools. So I think there was a little bit of confusion that we created unintentionally, by announcing a sequel and not having the complete story ready: announcing it and not saying, there's still a lot of stuff being worked on for Left 4 Dead 1, and the mod tools will work with both games."

"It never crossed my mind that there would be a shooting there, in Clarendon," Evans said. "An employee went to the backroom, and then we heard a woman's scream. I didn't wait to find out what happened."

Evans said customers "weren't panicky" but quickly made their way to the front door.

The glass-paneled shop was cordoned off with crime-scene tape by midafternoon. A handful of Apple employees paced back and forth and sat on benches, checking their iPhones for updates about their colleague's condition.

[Yes. Really.] With the movie rights for Pac-Man and Joust already snapped up, the bidding war for the privilege to adapt Atari's old-school rock-buster Asteriods into a film has come to an end.

Universal won the four-studio competition, according to The Hollywood Reporter, with Lorenzo di Bonaventura (G.I. Joe: Rise of the Cobra) attached as a producer and Jeff Kirschenbaum (Wanted, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World) overseeing. The script is to be written by Race to Witch Mountain (2009) scribe Matthew Lopez.

Also in the works at Universal are four feature film adaptations of classic Hasbro board games, which could result in movies inspired by Battleship, Candyland and Monopoly.

Our favorite inside source has given us a heads-up on what to expect from both Sony and Microsoft this year in hardware packages and pricing. The path to the holidays is a rosy one, with more hard drive space inside the systems at a lower price. Here's what we can expect.

Since we can't name the source, we're treating all this information as rumor, but the Mole's reputation in the industry for breaking large stories, a long history of being first out of the gate with big announcements, and an outstanding track record for accuracy speak for themselves.

Sony and the PS3...

Those of us with 60GB PS3 hardware–with fully-working backwards compatibility–live in constant fear of something happening to our precious. There is nothing that beats the ability to play three generations of PlayStation games. According to Siliconera, however, Sony may be working on a surprise to bring that functionality back to newer systems.

The BitTorrent tracker site's little lie down sparked speculation that is owners had pulled the plug on the operation already. But the latest Twitter update from co-founder Peter Sunde, aka BrokeP, claims that a DDoS attack is in fact the culprit.

Swedish software firm Global Gaming Factory X AB released a statement this morning in which it confirmed it was in the process of acquiring The Pirate Bay for $7.8m.

Many users of the site have hit out at the site’s four co-founders, who were handed jail terms and hefty fines in April this year after the men were found guilty in a Swedish court of being accessories to breaching copyright laws.

Unsurprisingly, sell out accusations are currently flooding the interwebulator.

Unfortunately, it seems that Dell may not be able to find a way out of the dilemma unscathed. The Commission ordered that Dell should sell each customer one monitor at the previously listed $15 price, and then offer a descending discount for each monitor ordered. If Dell fails to comply with the order, it would be a violation of Taiwan's fair trade laws, and the government would thus be forced to seek "legal alternatives."

When I asked ORNL Director Thom Mason about that plan earlier this week during a visit to the lab, he didn't much want to talk about it -- apparently because the upgrade would be funded with stimulus money. "The stimulus announcements are all coordinated by DOE," he said. "So until they make an announcement, there's nothing for us to really talk about because we don't have any money."

Mason, however, did talk a bit about an upcoming review of plans for a new 20-petaflops machine that would -- if the current goal holds -- come online sometime in 2011.

Sadly nothing to do with the classic Captain Blood, and everything to do with classic novel Captain Blood. It’s a hack ‘n’ slash adventure game from the developers of Sea Dogs, complete with pirates getting stabbed, cannons getting primed, and bosses getting — wuh-oh — quicktime event’d. I played this a bit in Moscow last year and it was actually pretty fun — especially the arcade boat violence between speedy galleons — but I’m not exactly holding out for a masterpiece.

The year’s most unexpected sequel is barrelling towards us, and Telltale hope to whet a few more preorder whistles by finally releasing a smidgen of interface’n'puzzle footage — specifically, the opening minutes of the reborn point’n'click adventure. Episode 1, Launch of the Screaming Narwhal, is out in just six pirate days (which are like normal days, but with a looser moral code), and if you’re convinced you’re going to love it, you can pay pirate money (which is much like normal money, but with a slight scent of seaweed) for it right now.

One of Bruckheimer Films’ latest projects, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time, should attract both male and female audiences when Disney releases the tentpole movie next summer. Based on the Ubisoft videogame, Bruckheimer hopes to do for games what he did for theme park rides.

“We liked the concept of the game and felt like we could do some interacting character development with the characters,” said Bruckheimer. “We felt we could make it very exciting, which I think we’ve done.”

When it comes to translating a game into a film, Bruckheimer went straight to the source, hiring Prince of Persia creator Jordan Mechner.

“I think to honor what gamers like about the game, you work with the people who actually created the game,” said Bruckheimer. “So the individual who created the games for us worked with us on the screenplay and everything else, so he's part of the process. He's not going to do something that would hurt his fan base.”

StarCraft II will ship without Local Area Network multiplayer support in an effort to combat piracy, says Blizzard, in an official statement sure to annoy if not outright confound series fans the world round. Calling it a "difficult decision," Blizzard's Bob Colayco reportedly told Joystiq that "moving away from LAN play and directing players to our upgraded Battle.net service was the best option to ensure a quality multiplayer experience with StarCraft II and safeguard against piracy."

Uh-oh, did someone just invoke the 'p' word? And is Blizzard serious? No more LAN parties? Every potential customer has internet as fast and dependable as they're apparently dishing out in Irvine, California? Running crossover Ethernet cables between PCs is officially passé?

The deal is this: the video stream from the Moon was of a decent quality, but far too large too be able to be be sent to TVs around the country and the world. Using the Parkes radio telescope in Australia, astronomers recorded the video beamed from the lunar surface in high quality, but what they transmitted to NASA was necessarily compressed. It’s the latter we’ve all seen. The thing is, the high quality tapes were then lost somehow. NASA admitted it a few years ago, and the search was on! According to the article the tapes were finally found recently in a storage facility on Perth.

Australia supplies about 50% of the world's legally-grown opium used to make morphine and other painkillers.

"The one interesting bit that I found recently in one of my briefs on the poppy industry was that we have a problem with wallabies entering poppy fields, getting as high as a kite and going around in circles," Lara Giddings told the hearing.

"Then they crash," she added. "We see crop circles in the poppy industry from wallabies that are high."

One gripe among hardcore Mass Effect players is that its toughest difficulty was an unlockable - after playing through the game twice. A design lead explains why, and "insanity" may not be locked in ME2.

On the Mass Effect forums, Christina Norman, lead system designer, said that Insanity difficulty was made unlockable, because it was so difficult a player needed the experience of already playing through the game in order to complete it.

So, what about the top difficulty level for Mass Effect 2? Norman said the team is considering "additional dimensions" to the difficulty system in Mass Effect 2, details that will make the game harder in the sense that it is more challenging, not simply "tougher."

A little-known Swedish software firm has snapped up file-sharing website The Pirate Bay with the hope of turning the source of legal controversy into a money-spinner that appeals to both users and content providers.

Global Gaming Factory X AB, which operates Internet cafes and provides software, said Tuesday that it had agreed to buy Pirate Bay for 60 million Swedish crowns ($7.7 million).

The website made world headlines in April when the three Swedish founders and a financial backer were each sentenced to one year in jail and ordered to pay a combined $3.6 million in damages for breaching copyright law with the free downloading site, which was one of the biggest sites of its kind on the Internet.

So what's the catch? First of all, AMD only made a few TWKR chips due to the extraordinary traits of of the product. So don't expect to find any at your favorite online retailer cause the TWKR is not currently for sale. At this time, they are distributed directly by AMD. Another disadvantage is the lack of warranty coverage on this product. Once its broken, that's all she wrote. At any rate, HotHardware recently got a chance to test out the TWKR and throw it on the test bench for some sub-zero overclocking.

Sampling is set to start on AMD’s fast new Phenom II X4 965 next week and we’re being told the new offering is 200MHz faster than the 955 at around 3.4GHz - straight out of the box.

For the second time in a month, Amazon.com has sold out its new electronic reader, the Kindle DX. The online retailer's Kindle DX page now gives a 4 to 6 week wait for the device. In mid-June, the DX was briefly out of stock, but Amazon got shipments going again in a few days. This isn't the first time Amazon has experienced Kindle supply issues -- the company memorably sold out the original version of Kindle in late 2008 (just as the holiday shopping season was getting underway) after an endorsement from Oprah Winfrey. Is Amazon overwhelmed by the demand for Kindles, or, as some suspect, is it keeping Kindle supply low to help generate buzz?

At a recent press event, Starcraft II lead designer Dustin Browder told Shacknews about some of the game's single player missions.

"We've got a mission right now where every five minutes, lava rises and kills everything on the ground. Everything dies. You've got to get to the high ground or die."

Reminds me of the mission in Halo Wars where defensive lasers sweep the deck of the ship and kill your units unless you garrison them inside.

"We've got a mission right now where infested Terrans are attacking at night, but they're hiding in the ground by day, so you need to just hold out all night long like you're in I Am Legend. Like, "I've got to live!" and then day, "Get 'em! Kill 'em while they sleep!" And you run out and you burn everything as fast as you can, and then when darkness starts coming you have to get back and hide out."

WORD HAS REACHED out tender ears that Apple has shown Nvidia the door, very unceremoniously. Several people who are familiar with the 'negotiations' are saying the language tended to be a bit harsh.

The word is that Nvidia is out of Apple designs, starting with the Nehalem laptops and iMac type things. We are told the arrogance and bluster of Nvidia proposals were greeted with a response that, paraphrased, said, "Go away and don't come back for 3-4 years if you are still around as a company. Lose our number, and if you do call, we will laugh at you again."

Actually, that wasn't how it happened, the conversations we were told about were not nearly that nice, and involved far less friendly words. The 3-4 years bit was true, the rest was far more forceful.

1. A system for engaging shoes with a hitch mans to permit a person standing on a stage surface to lean forwardly beyond his or her center of gravity, comprising:

at least one shoe having a heel with a first engagement means, said first engagement means comprising a recess formed in a heel of said shoe covered with a heel slot plane located at a bottom region of said heel, said heel slot plate having a slot formed therein with a relatively wide opening at a leading edge of said heel and a narrower terminal end rearward of said leading edge, said recess being larger in size above said terminal end of said slot than is said terminal end of said slot;

HTC yesterday pulled the wraps off of its next smartphone that’ll run Google’s Android mobile operating system — the HTC Hero.

Unlike the previous HTC Android handsets, the Hero isn’t centered around the “Google Experience,” but rather it uses an HTC-customized user interface called Sense.

“HTC Hero introduces a more natural way for reaching out to the people and accessing your important information, not by following the status quo of todays phones, but by following how you communicate and live your life,” said Peter Chou, Chief Executive Officer, HTC Corporation. “HTC Sense is a distinct experience created to make HTC phones more simple for people to use, leaving them saying, it just makes sense.”

Though free-to-play, real-world currency can be used to purchase a variety of in-game items and bonuses, including the ability to "level up faster [and] get Valor Points (VP) faster," new clothes, "ultra exclusive limited-edition items," and special emotes. However,, you must first purchase the virtual "Battlefunds" currency available in $5 (700 Battlefunds), $10 (1400 Battlefunds), $20 (2800 Battlefunds) and $50 (7000 Battlefunds) bundles.

Management of major gaming retailer GameStop expects price cuts to PlayStation 3 and Wii consoles in 2009, while some strong fall and holiday season game releases should help to return the overall industry to positive growth.

Meanwhile, the company downplayed the potential growth in the digital distribution arena, claiming that cost, equipment, and market size issues will keep the segment from significantly threatening retail in the near term.

The projections were reported by analyst Arvind Bhatia of Sterne Agee, in a research note based on a meeting with four key GameStop executives.

The survey revealed that punters were walking away from huge shopping carts because the shipping costs were out of line with reality. Only three per cent of Canadians said they had no intention of purchasing the item online after filling up the cart and proceeding to the checkout. The rest all said that they were set to buy right until they saw the cost of shipping.

Part of the problem is that sites do not say how much it will cost to ship the goods, or other important fees such as cross-border duties and handling fees. The other side is that some merchants, particularly in the book selling market, depend on inflating the cost of shipping to make any profit on the sale. This is why you see books listed for 10 cents with a shipping cost of $3.50. The actual cost of postage is often $1.50.

iSupply has done an analysis of the iPhone 3GS and estimates that the bill of material and the assembly cost about $179 (iPhone 3GS 16GB). That doesn't take into account other things like marketing, shipping and R&D.