Jul
25
I was given a Zune as part of a Microsoft campaign. Companies do it all the time- get the product into people’s hands, and if it’s good they’ll let other people know. My Zune arrived 5 days ago and I sang it’s praises for the first 4 days.
Today I give if a mark of FAIL. The “why” is after the fold.
Jul
24
The NFB has always held a strange place in my heart. On the one hand they provide the means for a lot of film makers to create and distribute their works. Without the NFB, many awesome little (and bigger) indie films wouldn’t see the light of day.
On the other hand they want $15 for a 10 minute VHS I wanted a few years ago. That right there meant I wasn’t going to see the film.
I can understand that people need to make some money, but I’m also glad that the NFB has realized that there are other ways to do so that don’t involve charging far too much money for an out dated technology. So it’s pretty damn awesome that they’ve started opening up their catalog for free, on the net, and totally embeddable to boot.
Jul
23
Less a hack and more of an exploit, this article details how to do it, but the quickest way to explain it is that anything that has the “Podcast” tag in the genre section of the ID3 tags will be free to share without any DRM. This will cause music to end up in the Podcast section of the player, but you can always change that tag after you have it on the player to something more suitable.
Jul
22
E3 has come and gone and I now know exactly why I will be dirt poor by the end of the year. The amount of software that I must have for the PS3 (and to a lesser degree my PC). With videos linked to the titles and in no Particular order…
- Fallout 3 - PS3 Blu-Ray: I never played the first 2 isometric games that came out oh so long ago but the moment someone offers me a post-apocalyptic action-rpg using the Oblivion engine you have my money. The time stop mechanic where you can select what bodypart you want to shoot your rocket launcher at is a stroke of brilliance.
- Mirror’s Edge - PS3 Blu-Ray: A first-person parkour (free running) game where gun play is kept to a minimum (and you unlock a trophy/achievement if you never fire a bullet during the game), this genre creating spectacle is a sight to behold. Unless you’re not the person playing it; a lot of people have said that while the game doesn’t sinspire nausea while playing it, they have felt motion sick when they weren’t playing it. I don’t like to share anyways.
- Dead Space - PS3 Blu-Ray: This and Mirror’s Edge are both EA published games, and the fact that I want not one but two games from the behemoth means that things have to be changing inside the company. This is an over-the-shoulder horror-action game where the developers have been saying that you have to dismember the creatures if you want them to stop attacking. Headshots are so 1998.
- LittleBigPlanet - PS3 Blu-Ray: This game is the game of 2008. You might not be too aware of it unless you’re a PS3 owner but rest assured, you will have no choice but to come over and play this game on my couch with me. No more words, but more and more and more video (last one is where they created the Sony Powerpoint in the game, which is way more entertaining than your standard bar graph). Watch them all, or I’ll sick a Killzone-esque Sackboy on ya!
- WipeoutHD - PS3 Downloadable: This game was playable at 1080p and 60 frames per second last year, but Sony let it slip that there’s a game-breaking technical problem with the game that they haven’t been able to solve. I owned the first game on my Saturn way back when so I’m praying that this download-only Playstation Network game arrives before the end of the year.
- Pixeljunk Eden - PS3 Downloadable: I’m not entirely sure what the game is about, but it seems the goal is to swing around with two other friends (on my couch, natch) polinating plants. It almost looks like it has a bit of a racing mechanic, as player swing around spiderman style trying to grab the pollination bits to make the flowers. Something about it has me hooked… it also has the ability to record video play of the game and upload it to Youtube, very cool.
- Fat Princess - PS3 Downloadable: Say what? The goal of the game is to capture the other team’s princess (or catch your own, I’m not sure) and bring her home. Thing is, the team in the castle holding the princess is consistently supposed to fdeed her pounds of food and cake to fatten her up, making it harder to carry her home. There are multiple classes of players, and it’s a 16 vs 16 online Playstation Network game, think Team Fortress 2 meets Castle Crashers meets Zombies Ate My Neighbors.
- Left 4 Dead - PC Steam: 4 player zombie killing co-op multiplayer from Valve and the people who programmed Counterstrike’s bots. The game has a heavy emphasis on actual co-operation as you do not want to be left alone for long. The zombie spawn points are procedurally generated so you’ll never get stuck in the same choke point twice, so each play through will require new tactics and on the fly decisions. I’ll be g etting this one on PC and will be playing with my fellow Ectomites.
- Rock Band 2 - PS3 Blu Ray: What, you need me to say more than just the name of the game? It will not only come with 84 master track recordings, and extra 20 free downloadable songs near the launch, and not only will it be compatible with all the songs I paid to download for the first game but for under $5 I’ll be able to put all but a couple of songs from the first game onto my hard drive so I can play them from within Rock Band 2. Fuck yeah.
Jul
17
Hacking my Zune before I get it
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Thanks to my double crossing friend I’ll be getting a Zune 8gb (no idea what colour) as part of a marketing program from a local company called Matchstick. The gist is that they give me a free Zune so long as I talk about it. Truth be told, I’m quite amped already. As a long-standing Zen 30gb user (in lovely green) I’ve never had much urge to swing over to the iPod side of the fence.
When it arrives it’ll already be a very feature rich player. The Zune 2 models (4gb/8gb/80gb) all share the exact same OS and screen resolution (320×240, though, the flash model screens are smaller, regardless of the matching resolution).
A couple of things were niggling at my shins, though.
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Jul
10
Disrupted Search
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Yahoo just announced BOSS, short for Build your Own Search Service. I can’t say I saw this one coming, but then again it takes a lot for me to actually care about something that involves the acronym API.
The service allows those with the know-how to take the Yahoo search engine and customize it to the point where you can change the algorithms and alter the page ranks of sought after sites. Instead of having to use the jack of all trades Google, you could use the master-of-one [Insert-your-name-here]-Search engine. However, like open source software the only people who’ll be able to really mash this up and do some good with it will be those who already have the coding know-how. Still, a great idea to steal some shine from Google.
Jul
7
Karmic Punishment
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Of course immediately following my Mac Poo-Pooing post I decide I want to switch back to Windows Vista. I figure now that SP1 is out that the kinks may be ironed into relative oblivion, or at least the ones that niggled me when I first ran it. Full disclosure, I’m going to format and do a clean install of XP when I get home today.
First thing I noticed that was positively nifty upon vista’s first-boot, and well worth noting if you want to give Vista a try, is that it saved all of my oldXP-installed software in a folder called Windows.old. All the installed software worked without any reinstallation necessary. That was really nice as I didn’t look forward to downloading hours upon hours worth of World of Warcraft patches. Very slick, and should definitely be mentioned to the user on Vista’s first boot, though it isn’t.
The niceties wore off quickly, though, as my hard drive wouldn’t stop reading and writing. I’m talking 30 minutes straight of “rrrzp click click rrrrzp rrrrzp”. It drove me nanners. I disabled system restore, set a hard virtual memory allocation (never let the computer determine the size. Give a hard min and max that are the same amount), disabled what I read to be problem services and still had no luck. The worst part of it all, though, was an an otherwise-awesome feature in vista that lets you see exactly what the computer is reading and writing at any given time. I could tell exactly what file was causing all the commotion, but I could not tell it to damn well stop. Why is this a bad thing? Because HD thrashing can cause considerable wear in a short period of time on the hard drive, rendering it inoperable much earlier than it would otherwise be expected.
Plus it’s loud and annoying.
Tonight, lady and gentleman, I backup a few more things to an external drive, perhaps the WoW folders themselves, and format my C drive. I will then reinstall Windows XP Home with slipstreamed SATA hard disk drivers, and go through the process of getting all my updates in a row and my ducks downloaded. The best part? I can’t really surf the net or do jack all on my laptop while I’m resetting my desktop, because I discovered yesterday that my laptop is totally dead. No power from the AC or battery is getting through, and it didn’t die while in use. Good times indeed.
Jul
4
The above was recently posted on Dear Toronto, this morning in fact. It’s just some footage of some Kids on TV having fun with some Men. good times at Pride Toronto, and more videos showing the fun over the next week.
On another note I’ve witnessed a large number of my relatively small twitter friends publicly decrying their Apple hardware recently. A large number of Macbook Pro systems, in particular, seem to be EPIC FAILING on them. These people chose to go with Macs not only because they look pretty, but because of their reported reliability. These people are power users, not your grandmother.
I haven’t been a regular Mac user since OSX first came out, a period that many would call the Mac’s rebirth. I’ve been a steadfast PC user largely because I like being in control. Not being a Mac power-user I can only go on what I’ve read and heard others say about the platform, but I’ve never been a fan of anything that just works and doesn’t need your input on how it works.
I need to know how something works because when it breaks, I like to tinker around to try and fix it. I like to customize registry settings. I like to use a non-glossy interface that lets me do my work (and surprisingly enough, the operating system itself isn’t what I use to produce, it’s what merely enables the production software to be used).
I hope my friends get speedy fixes for the Mac gear, whether it be non-recoverable hard drives that won’t spin, iPods that won’t sync, or blue tooth devices that won’t latch. In the meantime, if going the PC route I heartily recommend Gateway, specifically for their customer support. Over the phone they allowed me to open up the computer, flip jumper switchess and do hard resets to the computer’s bios by removing the motherboard battery without voiding any warranties. The computer ended up being a lemon, and they exchanged it for a new one within two weeks, but still, it was the first time a level-1 tech didn’t tell me to turn the computer off and back on just in case.
Jul
3
Spooky Countries
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So I just started reading Gibson’s latest book, Spook Country, and while it took a couple of chapters for me to get into it (right around when Blue Ant was mentioned. Oops, was that a spoiler? Suckah!), it’s starting to get interesting. There’s talk of virtual reality never having left, instead it’s evolved into what you’re viewing right now. And then there’s the talk about “the grid”, and how the net has always been more than just what’s on screen, but where you’re sitting right now.
It’s fascinating stuff. I thought Gibson had lost it for the first few chapters. He’s been quick to prove me wrong. More on this when I’m done.