Author Archives: iksib

Thankfully the good old U.S. of A. has yet to impose those nasty 3-hour caps on gameplay, but from the look of this announcement, it wouldn’t really matter anyway, considering the fact that we’re talking about actual EXERCISE here. That’s right, kiddies…er, ladies and gents: everyone’s favorite floor-stomping videogame is coming to a 24-hour Fitness near you! Move aside, consoles, PCs, cell phones and iPods.

Konami, the company behind DDR, will be partnering with the U.S. fitness chain to encourage gamers to exercise. I’m giving this one the thumbs up: you’ll finally be able to get your game on aside grunting muscle heads and cardio freaks. 24-hour Fitness will apparently be adding the units to some of their kids clubs (not sure if this means some sort of lame fenced-in kiddie area or a type of club with facilities for kids – my fingers are crossed for the latter).

In addition to the installation of DDR systems in the clubs, 30-day passes to 24-hour Fitness will be included in packages of DDR Extreme 2 for the PS2 and Xbox.

You know the guy on the bench press ain’t got nuthin on you, so get out there and impress him with your button-stomping skillz, yo!

In-flight internet has been a reality for a little while (yes, there are perks we still don’t get in the U.S.), but today New Scientist reports on a Boeing flight demonstrating a few other goodies – WiFi plus live television and support for cell phones.

Apparently Boeing leased some bandwidth from satellites with coverage of the northern hemisphere, broadcasting the BBC, CNBC, Euronews and Eurosport News. When it comes to voice service, options include VOIP and low-power onboard base stations that work with standard GSM phones.

Remaining hurdles include clearance from the Federal Aviation Administration in the U.S. and the Civil Aviation Authority in the U.K., largely to demonstrate that the stuff doesn’t interfere with the aircraft’s onboard equipment.

As far as I’m concerned, I’m a kid standing outside of a candy store chock full of sweets that are making my mouth water…and the damn door’s still locked.

I’ve spent the past few weeks enjoying a free trial of Netflix, building a sizeable rental queue, diligently watching my discs shortly after they arrive, shooting them (literally, I wish) into the mail and waiting for what’s next. I admit, Netflix has done a remarkable job of placing distribution centers near major urban areas across the country – they claim 90 percent of Americans live within 1-day mail service of a Netflix facility – but I still sit here at my desk, wanting more.

I just read a very interesting press release (from yesterday), in which GameFly, the Netflix-like online video game rental service, just announced a partnership with the U.S. Postal Service to improve the speed of delivery of rental games.

Dubbed “FastReturn,” the system notifies GameFly as soon as a returned game is scanned by a local post office, so the service can mail out the customer’s next rental right away. According to GameFly, FastReturn promises to improve delivery times by as much as three days.

Soo…Netflix…I smell an upcoming deal with the USPS, right? You’re not going to let GameFly be the innovator, are you? Since I started my Netflix trial, one of my rentals has been lost in transit, while discs mailed together seem to somewhat too frequently are reported as received several days apart. I realize the system is an inexact science at best, but come on! This seems like a great way to increase efficiency for a very small cost, with zero additional effort needed by the customer.

Snap snap! I’ve got movies to watch!

I stumbled on this just a few minutes ago and have kept it running in the background while I work – National Geographic’s WildCam Africa, a live video feed from a place called Pete’s pond, part of Botswana’s Mashatu Game Researve. For the past 30 minutes (starting at 9:45 EST) I’ve been watching an empty pond become a resting place for a herd of elephants, as a trickle of fleet-footed youngsters lead to a stream of adults.

As the site reads, it all came about as a result of some “technical ingenuity, tinkering with satellite coordinates, some switching and routing of video data, and no small share of critterproofing.” Great stuff. The site also has a small “video highlights” section with clips of Wildebeests, Warthogs, Baboons and more. Peak viewing hours are listed as 7 am – noon and 4-6 pm. (Botswana is 6 hours ahead of the east coast of the U.S.).

The camera has the ability to move, which surprised me when it first happened, so if you don’t see anything when it first loads, be patient. If no large animals show up, there’s always the pleasant sound of birds chirping. If you can’t commune with nature, it looks like the web can bring it to you. Finally! 😉

It looks like a slew of folks responded to San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom’s request for proposals on ways to provide city residents with inexpensive (or free) WiFi, the most prominent being everyone’s favorite search engine. As far as I’ve learned, they’ve released a VPN (virtual private network) client, though my attempts to download the damn thing haven’t met with much success…I’m betting they’ve taken the appropriate servers down due to load or somesuch concern, as these things tend to get large pretty fast.

If you’re curious, search for “google vpn client“, or visit http://wifi.google.com. At the time of this post, the second link merely redirects to google.com.

But back to the details of the WiFi: the G-boys hope to blanket SF with a FREE 300Kbps network. I’ve read a lot of complaints about the speed, but keep in mind that this comes from hyper-progressive tech geeks who all complain about the lack of expansion ports in things like Mac Minis and the 100-song capacity of the iTunes phone. For the millions of people out there with little to no ‘net access – the targets of a low cost, municipality-wide internet availability solution – 300Kbps will be sweet.

Man, I wish I was in SF now. Hopefully soon, self…hopefully soon.

I’m no math geek, but that doesn’t mean I utterly abhor the stuff; in fact, I have an amazing amount of respect for people who can enjoy manipulating numbers and do it well. Too bad our society continues to perpetuate stereotypes involving brainy, unwashed and socially inept kids hanging out at the other end of a room from the popular crowd, their minds on starting companies, world domination or dungeons & dragons (wait…MMORPGs).

In such a world, I have no trouble painting Stephen Wolfram as one of the last guys I’d expect to find dabbling in pop culture – he developed the 800-lb gorilla of technical computing applications, Mathematica, and built a company around it. But every now and again the stuff results in a mass-market product whose mathmatical underpinnings can hardly be denied. The guys at Wolfram Research recently released a pretty darn sweet web app for creating completely custom ring tones, dubbed Wolfram Tones.

Visitors to the site can create custom music based on a suite of variables and genres, from classical, dance and hip hop to the bit more arcane, such as ambient, latin and signalling (your guess is as good as mine). Monkey with variables in several composition control categories to get exactly what you’re looking for; those uninterested (or baffled) by the mechanics of the minutiae can simply click on genre buttons repeatedly, each click offering up a unique composition. Compositions can be saved via browser cookies, e-mailed to friends or downloaded to a cell phone (charges apply).

Yes, math can be cool. It can!

So Microsoft and Palm finally confirmed a relationship of sorts – after a slew of rumors/spec leaks/photos, the existence of a Windows Mobile-powered Treo is official.

Scheduled for release early next year, yesterday’s press release tells us that Palm has licensed Windows Mobile for what will presumably be successive generations of its popular Treo. Aside from the PR-ese beating us over the head with hyper-positive jargon touting the plethora of wonderful features offered by the OS, the more interesting question is this: what’s the plan for the Palm OS?

Family history: back in 2003 Palm split into palmSource (software) and palmOne (hardware). PalmOne then officially became Palm again back in May when it bought the rights to the name from Palm Trademark Holding, created when the companies split. Japanese software company Access acquired palmSource earlier this month…and the future of the OS remains in limbo.

So I guess this announcement means that if/when I buy a smart device, it will likely be running Windows Mobile…I’m salivating at the thought of Sprint’s PPC-6700 (EV-DO!), but if Palm decides to get cozy with anyone besides Verizon, I’ll sit up and pay attention.

Ars Technica hits this one right on the head when they label it as potentially simply fodder for the fanboy forums on a Friday (nice alliteration, eh?).

Han Solo, a G4TV.com poster whose claim to fame apparently includes a remarkably accurate leak of Xbox 360 stats prior to the official announcement, posted (located approx. 2/3 of the way down the page, #3 of the forums) what he claims are the specifications for Nintendo’s upcoming Revolution game console. Some details:

• 1 custom, dual-threaded IBM PowerPC 2.5 GHz processor w/ 256k L1 cache and 1 MB L2 cache (potentially L3 cache as well). 512 MB of 700 MHz system RAM

• ATI custom graphics chip w/ 256 MB RAM and a 600 MHz core supporting 2048×1268 resolution. HD support is still undecided.

• The system will support a PPU (physical processing chip) w/ 32 MB of its own RAM, which links to the CPU, GPU and the controller(s).

Aside from straight out comparisons to the Xbox 360 and PS3 (Solo says the PS3 still has a CPU edge, while the Revolution technically matches the superior GPU performance offered by the Xbox), Ars makes note of the fact that Nintendo may be playing it smart by providing potentially developers with a core system for which it’s easy to write games. Given that the majority of titles end up going cross-platform at some point, if the Revolution forgoes any ridiculously esoteric hardware that provides a novel gaming experience but a headache for developers might be the way to go. I make no pretense about being a game expert, but that’s my $.02.

Yeah, I know – no good eye candy or sweet hardware specs to get you drooling. Just some good, old-fashioned numbers that made me stop and think for a few moments:

According to the Pew Internet Life Project, the rate of growth in home broadband adoption dropped dramatically this year, climbing a measly 3 percentage points between December 2004 and May 2005 – approximately 53% of U.S. households now have broadband internet access. This data seems especially surprising, given the 20% growth rate reported between November 2003 and May 2004.

The report cites the changing demographics as the cause for the slower rate of growth, as the majority of today’s dialup users are “older, less educated and with lower income.” This basically translates into a smaller, less net savvy pool of potentials to graduate to broadband (I can’t help but picture some sort of geek-themed ceremony for this involving cat-5 cable, routers…ok, I’ll stop).

The report doesn’t offer other explanations or theories about whether or not we’ve hit some sort of saturation point (temporary or otherwise), but I find it surprising that we’re slowing down after hitting the halfway mark. Then again, I have a hard time remembering life P.I. (pre-internet). Then again, even my 75 year-old grandparents have broadband, having migrated up from dialup, just as the report says.

As someone who spends a lot of time online (I’m in love with the internet – what can I say?), I can definitely appreciate those who can critically analyze the system we’re using today and contextualize it with praise and suggestions for improvement.

BusinessWeek has this nice article up that includes a transcript of a discussion with Jakob Nielsen, a web design consultant apparently snazzy enough to earn praise from BW as “the acknowledged leader in making Web sites more usable.” I haven’t heard of him, but that doesn’t necessarily mean anything – he makes some good points while talking about today’s ‘net and what we can do to make it better. Some stuff of interest:

• There is a glut of bad content out there, especially at company web sites. I wholeheartedly agree on this point. He accurately refers to many of these fluffy bits of eye candy as “brochureware,” which don’t actually provide information to potential consumers in plain language. Cut the flash crap and the blaring audio and give it to me in a clean package. Less IS more!

• Bad searching. While Google and its kin do a good job on the general web, we again return to company sites and their typically horrific proprietary search algorithms. I don’t know how many times I’ve searched through company web sites and found nothing even closely related to what I wanted.

• E-mail overload and the need for better spam filtering, as well as the rise of phishing (getting credit card and other personal information through illegitimate e-mails).

• Companies need to talk to real customers and find out what they want from the web. Teens and seniors are two important groups.

Ultimately, it all boils down to packaging content in ways that are more accesible to users. Blogs need to be written this way, RSS and its kin need to be de-geeked and podcasts…well…only time will tell on that one. Vodcasts/vidcasts, too – I think mobile video’s success will depend largely on how big of a screen people are willing to tote around – something no bigger than a PSP (such a stunning screen) that’s capable of mobile browsing and/or something like UMD might really push this over the edge.

A bit of a ramble today (with a ton of links), but noteworthy in my opinion because it showcases how the desire to do what at first seems like a very simple thing can become a torturous ordeal that never seems to end. Thankfully, I think I might be in the home stretch:

A project I’ve been been doing in small chunks over the past few months is coming to a head, and one of the hurdles I’ve been facing is finding a way to turn a Flash (.swf) file into an MPEG. After a drawn-out process spent searching for an app to create high-quality movies from actions on the screen (I tried out Movie Grab, Ambrosia Software’s Snapz Pro and Screen Movie), I didn’t feel like coughing up the $69 for Ambrosia’s Snapz Pro, despite the fact that it did exactly what I wanted. I appreciate the quality of Ambrosia’s products but couldn’t justify the expense for what was very likely a one-time use. Thankfully, I just found out that QuickTime has the ability to open flash files! While the audio controls are nonexistent, you can export the file as an MPEG, sans audio…leaving me with one more problem: getting that sweet music.

We finally get to the tidbit responsible for the idea of the post in the first place: iPod Linux (also known as Podzilla)! I first heard about it via TUAW and others, in addition to the press generated by DOOM on the iPod. The geniuses behind Tux’s conquest of the pearly-white (and now black) portable media player included a recording function that allows you to sample at rates much higher than the paltry 8 kHz provided by third-party accessories like the iTalk and the phallic TuneTalk. The newest problem? Getting it onto my ‘Pod – I have a fourth-generation player and iPod Linux won’t run on it…yet.

I’ll get the audio from you, dear Flash flies. I SWEAR IT! Thus the race is on to see if iPod Linux for the 4th generation iPod comes out before I find some sort of workaround – I’ve tried recording audio from my speakers using my Skype headset, I’ll try using my roommate’s minidisc player to record sound from my line-out…there are still several options, seeing as how I just need the audio.

I’ll get there…

1UP.com got their hands on the much-anticipated controlled for Nintendo’s next-generation game system, the Revolution, and posted a nice review. A wireless system with a very remote control-like look, it comes with the ubiquitous directional pad and a series of buttons on top, along with a trigger button on the bottom and an expansion port at the end (pic shows analog stick attached).

Here’s the kicker: the controllers are not only wireless, they are also apparently sensitive to orientation. By relaying their position to a sensor placed near the television the controllers can supposedly be used to play games by simply moving the controller in space. 1up suggests in-game sword slashing, race car driving or pointing guns in first-person shooters. Awesome! Turn the “remote” on its side and it looks like a retro NES controller, which seems appropriate given the company’s promise that the Revolution will let owners play classic games on the system. I don’t know about you, but this gets me all hot and bothered.

Their conclusions? They really seem to enjoy the functionality of the controller; playing different games designed to showcase the design choice elicit positive responses (using the controller to “shoot” an area on screen, using it as a fishing pole, controlling a plane, etc.). According to the article, Nintendo wanted to break away from the design of traditional controllers and provide people with controllers that facilitate a “pick up and play” mentality.

I applaud the idea, and I’m excited to see the final product.