pobject width="494" height="400"param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/yeF7yLkEECscolor1=0xb1b1b1color2=0xcfcfcfhl=enfs=1"/paramparam name="allowFullScreen" value="true"/paramembed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/yeF7yLkEECscolor1=0xb1b1b1color2=0xcfcfcfhl=enfs=1" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" allowfullscreen="true" width="494" height="400"/embed/objectDominoes, always a favorite elemental for Rube Goldberg-ian device chain reactions, are unsurprisingly the name of the game at last week's Domino Day in Leeuwarden, the Netherlands. That is where Robin Paul Weijers (Mr. Domino!) and his helpers (including Dutch girls suspended on harnesses above the action like Tom Cruise stealing a NOC list) rigged up 4.5 million dominoes and then set them a-falling, artfully rendering Che Guevara, a Sarlacc pit, a a href="http://gizmodo.com/5079556/happy-birthday-saturn-v-still-the-biggest-rocket-of-all"Saturn V/a liftoff and subsequent Apollo re-entry, and oh so much more in tumbling plastic. The list of records broken is impressive./p blockquotep1. Longest domino spiral (200 m)br / 2. Highest domino climb (12 m)br / 3. Smallest domino stone (7 mm)br / 4. Largest domino stone (4.8 m)br / 5. Longest domino wall (16 m)br / 6. Largest domino structure (25,000 stone)br / 7. Fastest topple of 30 metres of domino stone (4.21 sec, time by Churandy Martina: 3.81 sec)br / 8. Largest number of domino stone resting on a single domino (727 stones)br / 9. Largest rectangular level domino field (1 million stones)/p/blockquote p[a href="http://www.neatorama.com/2008/11/16/domino-day-2008-new-world-record-for-toppled-dominoes/"Neatorama/a]/p br style="clear: both;"/ img alt="" style="border: 0; height:1px; width:1px;" border="0" src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?i=5f73a3b2edaf6955a1130791bb88b1af" height="1" width="1"/ img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=5f73a3b2edaf6955a1130791bb88b1af" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/div class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=Qgshbnn6"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?d=120" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=B7eCEa4Y"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?d=41" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=8J0HYdXv"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?i=8J0HYdXv" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=jx1vTgQU"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?i=jx1vTgQU" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~4/bwTXG8wphOY" height="1" width="1"/

pimg src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/2008/11/custom_1226878407309_Veronica_and_Phoenix1.jpg" width="494" height="658" style="display:block;" /Over the last few weeks a href="http://gizmodo.com/5075490/nasas-phoenix-mars-lander-guest-blogging-on-giz"here on Giz/a, the Mars Phoenix Lander, already a a href="http://twitter.com/MarsPhoenix"prolific Twitterer/a, became the first spacecraft to blog from its cold, unforgiving home tens of millions of miles away on Mars as its mission came to end—culminating in a href="http://gizmodo.com/5082385/this-is-my-farewell-transmission-from-mars"a touching goodbye/a this past Monday. As some of you may have guessed (and, for the rest of you, hate to burst the bubble), Phoenix had some help. Meet JPL's Manger of News Services Veronica McGregor, the voice of Mars Phoenix Lander./p pThe story of Phoenix's tweeting started when it became clear that the landing date—the most critical point of any mission—would be over Memorial Day weekend, when many American hit the road for beaches, barbecues and beer. McGregor realized that Twitter's SMS updates may have been the perfect way to reach people interested in the mission via their phones when they weren't in front of a TV or computer./p pSo a few weeks before Phoenix was scheduled to land on Mars, without thinking about it too much, Veronica started a Twitter page for the mission with a a href="http://twitter.com/MarsPhoenix/status/805995758"single tweet/a: "Less than 20 days till I land on Mars!" On top of reaching people's phones, Twitter also seemed like the perfect way to get info out quickly and easily without having to deal with the typical NASA bureacracy that tended to bog down news blogs for past missions./p pThere was no publicity, no big media push to promote it—just a single announcement on a serious space geek forum, unmannedspaceflight.com. But the next day, over 3,000 people were following MarsPhoenix on Twitter. The day after that: 6,000. And after getting tossed around on the bigger Tweeters feeds, it was off./p p"After that, I kind of had a "there goes my summer" moment." Veronica remembers. "After we saw that emeverybody/em else was mentioning it, we thought 'hey maybe we should put something on our homepage.'"/p pTwo specifics of Twitter's messaging format made Phoenix's tweets take off. To fit into the 140 character max for each post, writing tweets in first-person quickly became the easiest way to squeeze in the most possible information./p pSecond is Twitter's direct response feature, which allowed Veronica to answer submitted questions in the best way possible. Who wouldn't want to receive a first-person tweet directly addressed to emthem?/em/p pNow with over 39,000 followers, with almost no one dropping the feed now that the mission is technically complete, MarsPhoenix is one of the biggest Tweeters in the history of the site. It no surprise, then, that Veronica has also been tweeting for the Spirit and Opportunity rovers (although not in first person, as per the mission director) and plans to carry on in first person for the upcoming Mars Science Lab mission./p pWe here at Giz were honored to be the home for Phoenix's final words, although sometimes it's kind of a morale-killer: how could my posts ever possibly top a robot's coming direct from Mars?/p br style="clear: both;"/ img alt="" style="border: 0; height:1px; width:1px;" border="0" src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?i=9fc1eebf3ce2e56ff3663a79a33af5a6" height="1" width="1"/ img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=9fc1eebf3ce2e56ff3663a79a33af5a6" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/div class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=7D8ldlVP"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?d=120" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=JOv2Bzav"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?d=41" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=Vlnk7q6h"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?i=Vlnk7q6h" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=eXV7Tfmo"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?i=eXV7Tfmo" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~4/M0OCTqM7i-o" height="1" width="1"/

pimg src="http://cache.gawker.com/assets/images/gizmodo/2008/11/Picture_21.png" align="left" hspace="4" vspace="2" width="507" height="481" style="display:block;" /HTC is a href="http://gizmodo.com/5059900/htc-touch-hd-pretty-much-never-coming-to-the-us"not releasing the Touch HD in the United States/a. Which still seems a little crazy to me, because few other phones have received such a favorable and envious reaction online recently. Despite the fact that you probably won't ever want to import one (no US 3G pretty much seals the deal), the Touch HD is still a useful indicator of where HTC, one of the biggest mobile players there is, is going. Now that the phone is available in the UK and Europe, the reviews are starting to hit, and while pretty much everyone continues to be wowed by the hardware, there's that pesky little emWindows Mobile/em thing that keeps coming up./p pHardware wise, there is of course the 480 x 800 screen which is the centerpiece—everyone says what the a href="http://gizmodo.com/5047830/htc-touch-hd-looks-big-and-beautiful"pictures/a and a href="http://gizmodo.com/5051701/htc-touch-hd-gets-fondled-in-french-video-oh-la-la"videos/a have been telling us since the beginning: it's beautiful. Less fantastic, though, is the resistive touch screen (which is cheaper and less-responsive than a capacitative touchscreen like the iPhone 3G's). HTC goes with resistive on almost all of its phones to ensure they'll be accepted by the Asian market, in which recognition of complex characters written with a stylus is key (styli are the only thing that doesn't work quite as well on a capacitive screen)./p pTouchFLO, HTC's custom Win-Mo GUI has a ton of room to be awesome on this screen, and makes Windows Mobile look as good as any other phone out there now. But there's one huge problem: unless you stick with making calls, taking photos and using a few of the built-in widgets like weather and stocks, you'll often find yourself dropping back into Win-Mo 6.1's default interface, which looks MUCH less pretty on the HD's beautiful screen. That means getting your media on the phone and accessing it is still just as painful as on any other Win-Mo piece. Ahem, HTC? Android? Think it's about time./p pSo yeah, given that this phone is useless on all of the US 3G networks, the import market will be next to 'nil. But here's hoping the Touch HD is merely a prelude to a similar device running Android, complete with luscious US 3G bands, sometime soon./p p[a href="http://www.mobiletechaddicts.com/2008/11/09/htc-touch-hd-review-2/"Mobile Tech Addicts/a, a href="http://reviews.cnet.co.uk/mobiles/0,39030106,49299703-2,00.htm"CNET UK/a, a href="http://www.slashgear.com/htc-touch-hd-slashgear-review-part-1-0521514/"Slash Gear/a, a href="http://www.phonearena.com/htmls/HTC-Touch-HD-Review-review-r_2060-p_5.html"Phone Arena/a]/p br style="clear: both;"/ img alt="" style="border: 0; height:1px; width:1px;" border="0" src="http://www.pheedo.com/img.phdo?i=2873b18ec2b8d41f71dab3d43cf67eb4" height="1" width="1"/ img src="http://www.pheedo.com/feeds/tracker.php?i=2873b18ec2b8d41f71dab3d43cf67eb4" style="display: none;" border="0" height="1" width="1" alt=""/div class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=GzvmfXPC"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?d=120" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=ylbZRzGr"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?d=41" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=zs0w1yGX"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?i=zs0w1yGX" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds.gawker.com/~f/gizmodo/full?a=amW0gmiE"img src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~f/gizmodo/full?i=amW0gmiE" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~4/tFxe1DiS1Mo" height="1" width="1"/

A lot of things changed this week. A lot. Personally I could not be happier (not one bit), but even if it's good, change can often be a bumpy process. But you know what never changes? The tidal of wave of new applications that hits the App Store each and every week. Our rock. Let us dive in.

Guitar Rock Tour: While it appears to be guilty of any number of IP infringements, Guitar Rock Tour brings a Guitar Hero/Rock Band-like experience to the iPhone, with playable guitar and drums set to what are surely cut-rate covers of Rock You Like a Hurricane and others of that ilk. At $10 this better be awesome, but if you need to take your simulated rocking with you everywhere, here you go.

Wall Street Skeet: No no, not that skeet. The shooting. Toss up some day-trading fatcats and hit them with water balloons while the tears spill onto the 401(k) statement you just received. $1

Mobile Files: From a few weeks back, but probably of note to Mobile Me/iDisk users—Mobile Files claims to be the only free app that can access your iDisk on the run. Files capable of being read by your iPhone (mp3s, office docs, etc) can be viewed remotely. Free

Pankaku PASY02: Cool looking synth app that generates tones based on how you manipulate an elastic-y spiderweb interface via multitouch. $1

Idle Hands: Hone your multitouch typing skills with Idle Hands (kudos for the name, guys), which not only keeps track of your performance ranks it with other users of the app around the world and allows you to enter into monthly challenges. Free.

This week's app coverage on Giz:

•The iPhone Ocarina: Link Never Would Have Allowed This

•Drug Lords For iPhone Takes Dope Wars To the Next GPS-Assisted Level

•Confirmed: 3G Tethering Coming to iPhone

•iPhone 2.2 Screenshots Show Full Podcast Interface, Polished Store App

•iPhone FakeCalls App Bails You Out of Awkward Situations

•iPhone Bug Crashes the Phone when Malicious Video is Played

•The iPhone OS 2.2 Rumor Round Up

This list is in no way definitive. If you've spotted a great app that hit the store this week, give us a heads up or, better yet, your firsthand impressions in the comments. And for even more apps: see our previous weekly roundups here, and check out our original iPhone App Review Marathon. Have a good weekend everybody.

Those traffic loop sensors embedded at stop lights to detect the presence of a car have always provided fodder for vehicular snake oil vendors: I've seen products promising to eliminate red lights ONCE AND FOR ALL by ingeniously fooling a mysterious (but gullible, apparently) system hidden below the pavement. While false promises abound, this patent for bicycles seems to be more on the legit side, and could result in more carefree whizzing through intersections than previously allowed.

The systems work by detecting the shift in inductance caused by a huge metal object being in the vicinity of a charged loop of wire embedded in the road, thus knowing when someone is waiting for a light chane. Bikes, naturally, have a hard time tripping these sensors, which are calibrated to avoid false positives by smaller objects. This sensor, then, emits a signal which fools the sensors at the press of a button. Carry on, cyclists, carry on. [Plan Bravo via BBG]