Nobody plays interactive adventure games for the adrenaline rush, but the stories are often great and occasionally brilliant. They're also great fun for a stop-and-start time killer, as you can resume where you left off without too much trouble, working your way through a game at whatever pace you choose.

The app is surprisingly full-featured, considering the stripped-down aesthetic of the games. It handily organizes your downloaded titles and even provides an in-app web portal to the Interactive Fiction Database, where you can download more public domain text-based games than any single person could play their way through. The most obvious downside here is that you're stuck with the on-screen keyboard, and during the course of a typical game you can expect to peck out thousands of words, many of which will do nothing.

Any text gamer that hasn't been held up by social stigmas or distracted by flashy new games and their "graphics" won't be stopped by a slightly undersized on-screen keyboard, and its hard to argue with Zork, The Hobbit and The Hitchhiker's Guide in your pocket. [TouchArcade via Kotaku]

Loading up his lawn chair with gadgets such as a GPS system, two-way radio, altimeter, wind gauge, camcorder and a cellphone, he set out early Saturday morning. Learning from a six-hour trip in his balloon-equipped lawn chair last September where he ascended to 15,000 feet, on this voyage he was better equipped. He loaded up four 5-gallon containers with water as ballast, and to make the chair rise, he simply opened a spigot. Instead of releasing balloons to descend as he did on his previous trip, which caused a harrowing descent where he ended up using a parachute to save his life, this time he was able to gradually release helium for a gentler landing.

Nine hours later, he safely set down his homemade craft in a farmer's field 193 miles away, after traveling at an average speed of around 21mph. Said Couch to a local newspaper, "When you're a little kid and you're holding a helium balloon, it has to cross your mind... When you're laying in the grass on a summer day, and you see the clouds, you wish you could jump on them. This is as close as you can come to jumping on them. It's just like that."

You're right, Ken. We've always wanted to try this. [KOMO-TV/AP]

Anyway, the solution is pretty ingenious. They use a discontinued pen camera attached to a Neuros MPEG4 recorder along with an IR remote and a battery pack. They stuffed the entire thing into an Apecase camera case and all was right with the world.

NeurosCAM [RainyDayMagazine]