Launching stuff is cool, and doing so in a flash game online is even cooler.

VivaLaGames brings us a new Time Waster with "HedgeHog Launch".

The premise is simple, you go through a series of days and launch HedgeHogs with a nice launcher gear, much like you would water balloons. Except these aren't balloons, these are dangerous little beasts called HedgeHogs. it's not quite Sonic, but we think it's way more fun.

The name of the game is to only get distance, but to grab money in the air while your HedgeHog flies.

The controls are quite easy, and you can play in fullscreen mode too. Just don't do it at work, because we can't be held responsible for having "HedgeHog Screwoff" on your permanent record. But that would be pretty schweet though.

You can dig in and tweak your thrusts left or right, and as you go through the days, your skills will get better and the stakes will get higher. Collect money, buy better rockets, some stylish goggles, and even a parachute to get better scores.

The music is addictive too.

So launch your hog and share your scores in the comments.

Mario Paint Composer lets you do what you know you've wanted to do all of your life...compose music in the key of Super Mario. You'll remember this from the Super NES days, but everything is way more fun on the computer.

This baby is free and it's available for Windows AND Mac and it comes from unFun games. Yay.

Don't have any music writing chops? No problem, neither do we. It makes fun noises and has cool Mario icons. 'Nuff said.

The default song when you load up Mario Paint Composer is a jazzy version of your favorite video game theme song ever. But it's up to you to write the next masterpiece.

And not just any masterpiece, you get to use pigs and cats and hearts.

Best part is that when the app is loaded, everywhere you click on your computer, the sounds follow. I like hearing a nice Yoshi sound when I click on an email or on iChat.

unFun built an interface for you to lo in and download all the songs you want, for your personal listening and partytime enjoyment, but it took forever to log into the system, so we wouldn't hang our hats on that feature.

[via chris pirillo]

Anyone who has gained super powers through radiation exposure, cosmic rays, or scientific experimentation gone wrong knows how painfully difficult it can be to conceal your identity after the fact. Fortunately, there's a web site that will help you make the process much, much simpler.

Fake Name Generator does so much more than what its moniker implies. Not only will it create a (usually) convincing new name, but it'll also give you a corresponding address, phone number, mother's maiden name, phone number - even a social security and visa number. Though we're not entirely sure it's a good idea to go passing those around.

The clever engine will even piece together an email address and domain name for you AND check to see if they're available. Now that's useful. If you're going for a safe, secondary online identity you may as well have a convincing email to go along with it.

At last we're safe to use our powers for good without fear of being discovered by our nemeses!

Origami is the art of folding paper to create beautiful sculptures of animals or objects. No glue or scissors are used at all, only folds on the paper itself. It goes without saying that it can take years to master the art of origami. But instant-origami has developed some clever ways to shorten the learning curve.

Using the power of video, instant-origami gives you a birds eye view of some very modern techniques to this ancient form of paper folding. Here you'll be able to view and create some of the most breathtaking paper sculptures like an octopus, a frog or even the mythical dragon.

We followed the instructions on the site and were very impressed with our own results as they came very close to the one on the video.

So if you've always wanted to try your hand at origami, check out some modern techniques over at instant-origami.

If you listen to a ton of music and the word "scrobble" is part of your vocabulary, you'll get a kick out of Lastgraph. It's a service that generates interesting visual representations of your Last.fm listening history. You can view a sweet line graph of your listening to a given artist, or you can generate some snazzy posters of your overall listening.

The posters are pretty huge and take quite a while to render, but you can actually print them out as some stylish, informative wall art. If you don't need something that huge, there's also a smaller version available through the quick timeline feature. You can also export your data as an Excel file, a CSV or JSON.

Do you know those cool art spinning booths at festivals and carnivals? Of course you do, they're awesomesauce aren't they?

Well now thanks to CosmicPainter from garageCube you can bring that to your Mac OSX desktop, minus the carnies and smell of funnel cake (booooo).

CosmicPainter lets you make designs from different pre-set shapes and colors, as well as from other images you already have on your computer. You can really dig in with the shading and depth choices on the pallette and make some really rad shapes and designs.

Why would you want to use this? Because it's hella fun and free.

We sat in front of this thing for hours and got completely lost. But Chris Pirillo, the tipster who sent this in to us, warned us that we'd get sucked in...and we're pretty sure you will too.

[via chris pirillo]

Perhaps our fate is sealed at Download Squad. Perhaps if you avert your eyes now you can save yourselves. Abandon all hope ye who read past this point, and know, yea verily, that while the weather stinks here, the company is diverse and you're bound to find someone you have something in common with.

The Ubuntu Satanic Edition is Linux for the damned. You don't have to be damned to use it (well, we're using it, and we've been telling ourselves this). The best thing is that it is so well designed and configuration is so well documented, you won't even need to use naughty words in the installation process. (We do advise, to get the most out of your hellish computing experience, that you follow the configuration guide. Some of it is very obvious, some of it isn't.)

Unlike the (now on temporary hiatus) Ubuntu Christian Edition and (active) Ubuntu Muslim Edition, which both have religion-specific applications, the Satanic Edition is simply a collection of themes, wallpapers (some NSFW), sound effects and splash screens. We suppose that's fine, as we really don't want any Satanic applications on our computers, although we're pretty sure someone will comment on the true nature of OEM installs of certain software that comes pre-installed on many computers. We didn't say it, though, okay?

Ubuntu Satanic Edition is visually quite stunning. We mean this in a good way. The artwork is very professional looking, the themes render well (and there are hints for making them work better with applications that have issues with dark themes), and the screen savers and bootsplash screens work without issue. There are even Beryl Skydomes especially for this edition.

Ubuntu Satanic Edition can be optimized for wide screens, and can be uninstalled, should you have complaints from co-workers, loved ones, or just feel really creeped out. It'll install happily on Hardy, Feisty, Gutsy or Edgy in either the 32- or 64-bit varieties (PPC does have a few components missing). There are guides for installing and configuring both Ubuntu and Kubuntu. There are also several additional themes for Emerald, icon themes, and other assorted goodies that are not "officially" part of the Satantic Edition.

The version number of the Satanic Edition? Duh, 666.4, of course.

[via Aditya Kavoor's blog]

If your blog is looking a bit lonely why not get it a pet to keep it company? There are many sites that specialize in the creation of these Tamogotchi like characters but one site that caught our attention was doll-doll because instead of animals the creators decided to make them like little people.

Once you've selected a doll, customized and name it, you then copy a line of code containing your doll's information to your blog. From there, your little doll will live on your site. And like Tamogotchis of the past, you are responsible for it's well being by making sure you feed it regularly. If you slack off in caring for your doll, it may die.

Visitors to your site can also play with your doll and kill it as well (usually by giving it bad food). But unless you are the owner of the doll, death by visitors isn't permanent.

This is probably a good thing as you can imagine how many drive by killings might occur.

Sometimes you just want to unwind with a simple flash game. Nothing overly complicated and to involved, just a simple one mouse click game. And Ferry Halim of Orisinal fame has created such a game called Sunny Day Sky.

The goal of the game is to simply glide from car to car using your umbrella . And the only control given is a click of your mouse button to open and close the umbrella. Points are given for the number of cars that can be passed and of course the more you pass in a single jump the higher the points.

The graphics and the colors used gives the game a very soft and inviting feel to it. The music reminds us of the Happy Working Song from Disney's Enchanted (not that we listen to the soundtrack here or anything like that).

So if you're just looking for a simple one click game to zone out with, give Sunny Day Sky a shot.

Imagine you had a drawing program in which you couldn't draw what you wanted because each tool had a mind of its own. Also imagine you couldn't select the colors to use as it would decide it for you. If this is your idea for a drawing program then you should definitely check out bomomo.

In all fairness, bomomo never claimed to replace any drawing program you may be already be using. Actually, it never claims to be anything really. Maybe its just a web based application that just draws shapes in pastel like colors.

Using bomomo is pretty self explanatory. Select an available brush/tool and start moving your mouse around while holding your button to draw. Shapes are random so don't expect to be able to draw right angles or parallel lines, just think organic.

Bomomo might be used more for the creation of abstract art instead of drafting up plans for a multi story building so that may explain the hours of frustration we had while trying to use the program. Then again we're not really art experts as we think the velvet picture of dogs playing poker is a classic.

Pop the virtual bubbles at the click of a mouse, or go into Manic Mode, and just have at it, swinging your mouse all over the screen. We do feel we ought to warn you though, when you click the "Fresh Sheet" button, watch out for the recording. You'll want to keep your volume turned down because it doesn't sound like it has anything to do with an innocent sheet of bubble wrap. You'll see what we mean.

We know the novelty of this will probably wear off pretty quickly, so it might not qualify for more than 5 minutes worth of wasting time, but it definitely deserves a mention.

The email subject line. The bane of our existence. Back when Download Squad was just a wee little blog, we used to communicate the old fashioned way, by sending letters in the mail and waiting a week for them to arrive. It may not have been the most efficient way to keep in touch, but at least we didn't have to write subject lines.

Fortunately, Yahoo! has a hidden feature designed for the creativity-challenged. Can't come up with a clever or appropriate subject line for that email you're about to send? Just hit the subject button in the new version of Yahoo! Mail. Yahoo! will throw in a quote, funny phrase, or who knows what?

Here are just a few of the things that we found. Keep in mind, somebody must have taken the time to actually type these in there.

• Do you use them for good, or for awesome?
• I'm out of my mind, but feel free to leave a message.
• Hazards of storing plutonium in Tupperware
• Why does Chinese food always taste better in front of a computer?
• Fwd: Re: FW[2]: RE: re: [FWD] joke

[via Lifehacker and WebWare]

I remember being a little girl, and watching my friends fuss about what their babies would like if they married George Michael, or Michael Jackson (so I am not only carbon-dating myself, but I'm also showing how naive my friends and I were). Oh, c'mon, I never fussed about these things. I was too busy playing with the Commodore PET.

The Commodore PET could only dream of doing the things modern computers (or little girls) do. Today, its dreams have come true with the introduction of (cough) MakeMeBabies.com. Okay, this site is for entertainment purposes only. The resulting child of any of these unions, holy, unholy, or otherwise, may not be true to life. Yet all of us here at Download Squad are wasting way too much time spreading our genes throughout Hollywood.

They'll thank us later, for sure.

The results of our fooling around (hate the game, not the playaz, guys) produced some interesting (if extremely disturbing) results. My (real life) husband and I had a blonde child that was much too good looking to have come from either of us. Never mind that neither of us are blonde. Antonio Banderas and I produced a child that had some serious facial issues. Interestingly enough, fellow Download Squad lady bloggers (why aren't the guy Squadders doing this too?) seemed to have children with similar facial issues. Actually, we all seemed to have the same child with Brad Pitt, Orlando Bloom, and Antonio Banderas.

So what do you all think? One trick algorithm putting similar features on generic children's heads? Or is it a deeper conspiracy? Do all the guys in Hollywood have the same genetic structure? Are they all inbred? Or maybe... Maybe it's all of us here at Download Squad. We'll never tell.

[via Jay Martinez.com]

What could be more fun than browsing your favorite sites? Why, browsing your favorite sites while directing a funky-looking avatar to parade around and do your bidding, of course. Unlike PMOG, where your experience is backgrounded until you stumble upon mines or loot (but requires a Firefox extension to work), RocketOn figures it'll be a lot more fun to disrupt your browsing with some crudely animated avatars overlaid on top of whatever page you're on. They do this in much the same way Gabbly works, by intercepting the page and overlaying the content on top. Essentially, you're seeing a browser in a browser.

We weren't particularly impressed with RocketOn, however. While the tech works well enough, is there really a desire to put an avatar on pages? It completely interrupts the experience and adds practically nothing that you can't get from a service like Gabbly, save the rather lame avatars. The avatars themselves aren't very customizable out of the box, although apparently you're supposed to hang out on the bare pages of RocketOn to "earn" more stuff. Pets, clothes, the usual crap you get thrown at you on Facebook. Ultimately this looks like a nice tech demo that is just a complete waste of time. Or maybe we're missing the point.

[via TechCrunch]

Let's be honest here. How many of us have gotten on stage to do a bit of karaoke. Don't worry no one is gonna laugh at you. Because when you did get up there, it was only for that moment never to be repeated again. Well that would be true unless you decided to sing it up at Red Karaoke.

Red Karaoke gives you the ability to sing your favorite songs and have it hosted on their site to share with others. Depending on how good you are at karaoke, this could be a good thing or a bad thing because members can comment and do vote on your performance.

The quality of the music reminds us of general midi files, but then again the accompaniment isn't the star here you are. If you want to give your performance a little more pizazz connect your web cam for some video karaoke action! The service itself is fun and easy to use. And Red Karaoke does offer a decent selection of songs ranging from the 1950's to the present in a variety of genres.

But try as we did, we couldn't find any NKOTB.