ThinkGeek’s April Fools’ Day fake-product lineup is a must-see for gadget lovers – this year’s offerings included a Keurig-like beard growing machine, a NERF Nuke to end all dart-gun wars, Rosetta Stone for Klingon and more.

The only problem with these fake gizmos is that sometimes they’re cool enough that people actually want to buy them. And in a few instances, ThinkGeek has brought its April Fools’ creations to life: the Star Wars-themed Tauntaun sleeping bag and the iCade iPad arcade cabinet being two prominent examples.

The $30 Laser-Guided Tactical Necktie isn’t an actual product, but – BUT! – it could be. The pitch: it’s made of durable nylon, and sports a D-loop, a militarily-inspired MOLLE system, and two removable pouches – one for carrying small items and the other housing a laser pointer.

As you can see in this photo, the tie looks wonderfully ridiculous:

Search your feelings. You’d either wear this or you know someone who’d wear this. And more than a few people in the comments section of the product page are trying to will it into existence, too.

I’m going to go out on a short limb and guess that this becomes an actual product. If you’ve got a hankering to accelerate the process, you can vote to have it become real (along with the other April Fools’ items) on this page here.

Laser-Guided Tactical Necktie [ThinkGeek]

The Elder Scrolls Online's director Matt Firor answered 10 questions about Bethesda's fantasy roleplaying MMO in tandem with its launch today.

The Elder Scrolls games have arguably the strongest claim on the mantle of the fantasy gaming tradition Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson’s Dungeons & Dragons kickstarted in the 1970s. You might say a game like The Elder Scrolls Online was thus inevitable: a sprawling multiplayer-only opus that brings the series full circle.

You see, The Elder Scrolls: Arena, released in 1994 (and which wasn’t originally supposed to be a roleplaying game at all), was the first and last game to offer access to all of Tamriel, the continent on which all the action’s happened to date. Tamriel has nine provinces, and you could visit all nine in Arena — a game that boasted over two million square miles of explorable turf. Nothing else came close to that boast in 1994, though most of that turf was randomly generated and forgettable.

Subsequent Elder Scrolls games increased each province’s granularity, but at a cost, trading sweeping tracts of random-spawned terrain for smaller swathes of hand-sculpted geography. The other compromise involved throwing up arbitrary barriers, like the water surrounding Morrowind’s island of Vvardenfell, or Cyrodiil’s invisible walls bordering its six adjacent provinces and turning you back.

The Elder Scrolls Online dispenses with those barriers and resurrects Tamriel as a continuous continent, all of its provinces plumbable, from Skyrim to Elsweyr and High Rock to Black Marsh (though some of the world remains locked at launch, for the sake of expansion content). The game lets you play as a Dragon Knight, Templar, Sorcerer or Nightblade, squaring off against a demon prince named Molag Bal — referenced in prior games, but the primary antagonist here and threatening to pull Tamriel into his other-dimensional realm.

I posed the following questions to Matt Firor, ESO‘s director and one of the lead designers on Dark Age of Camelot, the most warmly received MMO in the post-Everquest run up to Blizzard’s World of Warcraft. ESO launches today for PC and Mac, and runs $15 a month (after a free 30-day trial period).

How geographically close do you hew to the cartographic arrangement of the provinces in prior Elder Scrolls games? Will Morrowind, Cyrodiil and Skyrim — the three most concretely defined areas to date — be discernibly similar, topographically?

Yes, we stuck as close as we could to the original heightmaps for areas of Tamriel that have featured prominently in other Elder Scrolls games. As we expand the game’s geography, and begin to fill in blank spots on the map, we’ll continue to do this. We also updated those areas’ ruins, flora and fauna — mushrooms in Morrowind, Ayelid ruins in Cyrodiil, etc. — to be immediately recognizable by gamers familiar with those classic titles.

Tell us a little about the quest system and what you’ve done to mitigate the sense of box-checking genericness that plagues most MMOs.

Good quests begin and end with a good story. If you care about the characters you are helping or the mystery you are solving, then the quest works. This is a game content design mantra, not just confined to MMOGs. With fully voiced NPCs and a really strong writing team, we made sure that when you are questing that you care about what you are doing, which makes the whole quest interesting and fun.

Combat was arguably one of the weakest aspects of Skyrim, and in my view, it’s been a problem point for all of the Elder Scrolls games (to say nothing of its click-slavishness and physical disconnectedness in most MMOs). How different is combat in ESO?

I suppose this is subjective — I really like the combat system of Skyrim and Oblivion and we used the combat control system from those games as the foundation of the ESO combat system. But we have a much different A.I. system in ESO, as it is a multiplayer virtual world. Our world has a constant population of respawning enemies, so the main differences come from being able to deal with enemies behind you and multiple enemies at the same time.

More recent MMOs have been figuring out how to fold event spontaneity into their exploration/loot hunt/leveling games. How dynamic and mutable is ESO (as opposed to scripted) as you move through the world?

We have a couple of different types of spawning content in the world. We have our Dark Anchors, which are large-group-based open world encounters where you and your friends take on allies of the big bag guy, Molag Bal. We also have miniature versions of those (Dark Fissures) that are solo-able as well as other randomly spawning encounters at various points around the world. When you add that to the exploration content we have (treasure chests, skyshards, mini-dungeons, etc.) as well as our really in-depth questing system, there’s a ton to do in the game.

Let’s talk music. We’ve been saturated with composer Jeremy Soule’s scores for three sprawling Elder Scrolls games. How did composers Brad Derrick and Rik Schaffer approach this game? Given the time shift, are we in the same thematic ballpark as Morrowind and Oblivion and Skyrim, or a noticeably different one?

Both Brad and Rik have written and managed the scores of many games between them, so they had the experience to find the right tone for the high-fantasy orchestral score. Jeremy’s work does make a cameo – he composed the track “For Blood, for Glory, for Honor.”

We also had Malukah write and perform bard songs for the game, which are amazing – you can hear them just about any time you walk into a tavern in the game. But yes, overall, even though we’re at a different period of time with ESO than Skyrim or Oblivion, it’s still in the same high fantasy ballpark.

Style-wise, ESO‘s interface most strongly resembles Skyrim’s minimalist approach, which some players loved and others hated. Can you talk a little about the things that inspired ESO‘s interface in that light?

It wasn’t so much copying Skyrim’s interface as it was trying to build on one of the most important parts of Skyrim: Moment to moment gameplay is about looking at the world, not at the UI. The compass is small and unobtrusive, but tells you what you need to know, enemies in the game give you “tells” that you respond to instead of buttons flashing on the button bar, etc.

What’s the mini-game and achievement hunt like? I assume there’s an exploration mini-game?

There are several. Every zone has tons of achievements (every quest, every explorable area, every dungeon, all dungeon bosses, etc.). There are also skyshards which, if you find enough of them, give you extra skill points. There are also chests to find — complete with a lockpicking minigame — that can give you some pretty good loot, especially if those chests are found in dungeons. Every time you find an area on the map that has something interesting, you get experience, so just walking around the world will help develop your character.

How interesting do you feel you’ve made the nooks and crannies and null space? How bored (or not bored) do you think players are going to get exploring dungeon #1 versus dungeon #159?

Our dungeons, designed for groups of four, have really interesting stories that drive the player to (and through) them, so the first time you go through it, it feels like just more awesome questing. Dungeons are filled with chests, books, barrels, crates, and traps to keep players busy while exploring and fighting.

If you want to do multiple dungeon runs, obviously then you focus on the loot, which is better in dungeons than in the overworld, and you are always guaranteed good stuff from the boss and mini-bosses.

One particular thing that should be pointed out is the attention to detail on boss encounters in dungeons. Every boss is a hand-crafted encounter with unique abilities for groups to learn and overcome. With over 18 normal dungeons and 6 Veteran dungeons at launch, that’s a lot of boss encounters. Speaking of Veteran dungeons, these 50+ dungeons provide a second challenge or story to the “normal version” of that dungeon. It is a new quest with new areas and all new enemies.

ESO has a huge advantage over other startup MMOs in that it’s built on a successful franchise, but how are you handling sustainability post-launch? What sort of content rollout schedule should players expect?

We have been working on post-launch content for many months now – our first post-launch package, Craglorn, is our first Adventure Zone. It introduces Trials, a large-group competitive PvE endgame, four-man Veteran Dungeons, a Death Recap screen so you can see who or what killed you, and an entire overworld designed for groups. While the content packages we have will range in feature sets, Craglorn illustrates the kind of commitment we have to providing regular content to our players. Over time, you’ll get new systems, new zones, new quests, stories, and lots more.

Do you worry that at some point the whole swords-and-sorcery theme wears out its welcome? That after all the crazy time players put into Skyrim, they’ll bounce sooner in ESO?

These things wax and wane, but there’s always room for a good fantasy, whether that’s a game, book or movie. It’s been over two years since Skyrim launched, so there has been plenty of time for gamers to get their Tamriel appetite back!

President Barack Obama may be a devoted Blackberry user, but a snap with Boston slugger David Ortiz that's doing wonders for Samsung has prompted a terse response from Obama's inner circle at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue

The White House has hit back at smartphone giant Samsung for using a selfie Red Sox hitter David Ortiz snapped with President Barack Obama for marketing purposes.

Ortiz is a social media ambassador for the South Korean tech giant, but the camp of the U.S. commander-in-chief — famously a Blackberry devotee — evidently objects to this cheeky advertising ploy.

“As a rule, the White House objects to attempts to use the President’s likeness for commercial purposes,” White House press secretary Jay Carney told reporters on Thursday. “And we certainly object in this case.” He said the White House lawyers were being consulted.

What an honor! Thanks for the #selfie, @BarackObama pic.twitter.com/y5Ww74sEID

— David Ortiz (@davidortiz) April 1, 2014

But it's no toy. The technology behind this self-charging bot can be applied to increase the endurance capacity of other machines

A German company has successfully emulated the jumping behavior of the kangaroo in robot form, the company said.

The bionic kangaroo has self-charging legs that allow it to keep jumping indefinitely without tiring, just like real kangaroos capture and re-use energy by using the tendons in their legs like springs.

It’s thought that the robot kangaroo technology could lead to advances in endurance for products such as cars and other robots.

The BionicKangaroo, which is made by the German tech company Festo, weighs 15 lb (7kg) and stands 3ft 3inches (1m) tall, and it can jump 2ft 7 inch (0.8 meters) horizontally.

The company that Google acquired for $3.2 billion says there's a flaw in its smoke detectors. Nest was worried that people would unintentionally activate a hand-waving feature and find the alarm not working during a fire

Nest Labs, the Silicon Valley darling that was recently acquired by Google, said Thursday that it was stopping sales of its smoke and carbon monoxide detectors over safety concerns.

CEO Tony Fadell posted a letter to Nest’s website that said the company is fixing a problem with the feature called Nest Wave, which allows people to wave their hands in front of the detector to temporarily disable the alarm. The company was worried that people would unintentionally activate the feature and find the alarm not working during a fire.

Nest has already remotely deactivated Nest Wave for all those who already have purchased the Nest Protect: Smoke + Carbon Monoxide alarm. Those detectors will continue to function.

The technical difficulty is a rare glitch for Nest. Google paid $3.2 billion to acquire the startup in January after it earned praise for its carefully designed products, which include both the smoke detector and a thermostat. Fadell previously worked at Apple on the iPod and iPhone. The Wave feature is just one of the many ways Nest is attempting to make mundane home devices more intuitive.

Mike Judge's eight-episode HBO comedy series, which will premiere on Sunday, depicts the Valley in all its odd, prosaic glory

It’s clear that Hollywood has a crush on Silicon Valley. Among the recent evidence: last year’s Jobs movie (Ashton Kutcher is Steve Jobs!), The Internship (a buddy comedy set at Google) and Betas (an Amazon Instant Video original series about app developers set in San Francisco’s SOMA neighborhood–not the Valley, but close enough).

Of course, loving something is not the same as understanding it. None of these projects really captured the spirit of the tech industry; in various ways, they felt off in ways their creators probably didn’t realize. At least that’s my take, as a guy who makes his living covering this stuff. (I’m sure that anybody who writes about the plumbing business isn’t impressed with Hollywood’s treatment of plumbing, either.)

But now there’s yet another piece of entertainment about the Valley. This one’s called–wait for it–Silicon Valley. It’s an eight-episode HBO comedy co-created by Mike Judge, whose satirical credentials (Office Space, Idiocracy, King of the Hill, Beavis and Butt-Head) are impeccable. It’s both the most laugh-out-loud funny portrayal I’ve seen of the Valley, and the most real one.

HBO rolled out its red carpet for a Silicon Valley premiere in Silicon Valley last night, screening the first two episodes at the historic Fox Theatre in downtown Redwood City. Judge and his collaborators, including the cast, mingled with real citizens of the valley such as Tesla founder Elon Musk and TechCrunch creator Mike Arrington.

In the series, a bunch of guys–in the first two episodes, at least, they’re all guys–are trying to launch a digital-music startup called Pied Piper, run out of a house in Palo Alto. They’re archetypal characters, but don’t feel like stereotypes; I could imagine running into any of them at a real Palo Alto startup. Especially Thomas Middleditch, who plays the naive, gawky, hyper-smart creator of Pied Piper’s technology, and the late Christopher Evan Welch as a venture capitalist.

(I also like Josh Brener, who plays another member of Pied Piper’s startup team, but every time I saw him in the first two episodes, I thought of both his Samsung commercials and his role as a new Google recruit in The Internship. What is it about this actor that makes people want to cast him as a tech industry nerd, over and over and over?)

There are some nods to actual Valley institutions in the first two episodes: Google’s Eric Schmidt shows up briefly as himself, for instance. But I enjoyed the fictionalized touches more, such as a suspiciously Google-like company called Hooli. Its willfully eccentric campus is no goofier than the Googleplex we actually have. I hope people watching at home realize that virtually no comedic exaggeration is involved.

The real Silicon Valley is weird, as it must be to generate the new ideas that keep it relevant. But it’s also prosaic and repetitive in many ways; a lot of the conversation in real startups boils down to matters of math and money.

Silicon Valley gets both aspects of Silicon Valley right: It’s perceptive when it’s being wacky, and it’s perceptive when the characters are talking about lossless compression and consumer-facing applications, and trying to write a business plan for Pied Piper, a plot point which takes up much of the second episode.

Like Office Space, the show draws inspiration from Mike Judge’s own experiences working at a tech startup in the Valley in the late 1980s. (He quit after less than three months.) Either some things about startup culture haven’t changed in all that time, or Judge and his co-conspirators worked hard to capture the scene as it exists today. Probably a bit of both.

See below for HBO’s trailer for season one–or see the show for yourself starting on April 6. I don’t have HBO myself, but I’ll bet I’m not the only resident of Northern California who’s ready to pony up just to keep tabs on this series.

Glaring omissions are getting harder to call out.

For all the things Windows Phone does well, it’s always felt like a game of catch-up. Whether it’s copy-and-paste, multitasking or proper turn-by-turn directions, the biggest features of each update tend to be ones that iOS and Android users have enjoyed for a while.

With Windows Phone 8.1, Microsoft is still playing catch-up, but something’s different this time. At least in terms of core operating system features, I’m having trouble thinking of any more major areas where Microsoft hasn’t caught up to its rivals.

Here’s a rundown of some of the major new additions in Windows Phone 8.1:

Centralized Notifications

Windows Phone devotees have long argued–wrongly, I think–that Live Tiles are an adequate way to view notifications. The problem with Live Tiles is that they’re too hard to glance at quickly. You have to exit whatever app you’re in just to see them, and the information may be scattered randomly across the screen.

Microsoft recognized this, and so Windows Phone 8.1 will include a proper place for notifications, dubbed “Action Center.” The system is similar to those of iOS and Android, letting you view notifications by swiping down from the top of the screen.

Quick Settings

Having to dig into a settings menu just to toggle the screen rotation lock or Bluetooth is not a pleasant experience, and thankfully that’s getting corrected in Windows Phone 8.1. Microsoft is taking a page from some Android phones and putting a customizable strip of quick settings inside the Action Center.

A Bona-Fide Virtual Assistant

Cortana sounds like a cross between Siri and Google Now. Like Apple’s virtual assistant, Cortana learns your name, has a personality, and taps into Bing to answer general search queries. But like Google Now, it automatically serves information on things like sports scores, upcoming flights, package deliveries and news stories on topics of interest. Cortana also borrows from the iPhone’s “Do Not Disturb” feature by silencing your phone during “Quiet Hours,” while still letting you specify who can reach you at any time. And just like Google Now, Cortana lets you search with text instead of just voice. (One unique thing Cortana does is let you set reminders that trigger when you’re texting or talking to a specific person on your phone.) Whether Cortana is a hit will come down to execution, but it at least sounds like it’s miles ahead of the rudimentary voice search that Windows Phone offered before.

Gesture Typing

By now, I’ve gotten so used to Swype on Android phones that it’s hard to go back to anything else. That’s as true for Windows Phone as it is for the iPhone, whose keyboard has largely stayed the same over the years. Fortunately, Windows Phone 8.1 is adding a Swype-style keyboard, which Microsoft is calling “Word Flow.”

Browser Tab Sync

On my phone, I’m constantly reading stories in Chrome, and using the browser’s tab sync feature to open those pages later in Chrome on my PC. Sadly, there’s no version of Chrome for Windows Phone, but Windows Phone 8.1′s tab sync capabilities should help make up for it. At least I’ll be able to open links in Internet Explorer on my PC instead.

These aren’t the only changes in Windows Phone 8.1, but they’re the most essential. As I look through my iPhone and HTC One, I’m no longer coming up with glaring omissions from Microsoft’s platform.

What’s Missing

That’s not to say Windows Phone 8.1 has absolutely everything I want in a smartphone platform. I’d still like a way to view and answer text messages from my computer, and a way to set defaults for certain types of applications, such as e-mail. And I still think the potential for Xbox gaming on Windows Phone is unrealized, with very few cross-platform games available. But the lack of those features aren’t dealbreakers for me.

Of course, I haven’t addressed the elephant in the room, which is the shortage of apps available on Windows Phone. There’s also the related issue–and, perhaps, the more serious one–of existing apps not getting updates and new features as quickly or as often as their iOS and Android counterparts. (One example: Spotify overhauled its free music service in December, but won’t deliver it to Windows Phone users until the spring.)

There’s no easy answer to those challenges, though it helps that Microsoft is adding universal apps for Windows and Windows Phone, with the option to have purchases carry over across platforms. Developers are likely to continue favoring iOS and Android, but if they do target Microsoft’s platforms, they can reach a wider user base than before without much extra work.

For me, at least, the app shortage has never been the big problem with Windows Phone. My frustrations have come from the operating system, which seemed to stand in the way of me getting things done. With the changes in Windows Phone 8.1, I’m ready to give it another shot–and I’ll be at a loss for ideas if it still doesn’t work out.