Category Archives: General

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.

Grab those jars of coins sitting in the kitchen/bedroom/kid’s room and head to the Coinstar machine at the supermarket! It looks like Amazon is the most recent company to strike a deal with the coin gulping bandit, and this time the arrangement is doubly in the favor of you, dear consumer: according to CIO Insight, people submitting their coinage will be able to get an Amazon gift card for the full amount of money they fork over. Amazon sells the gift certificates to Coinstar at a discount, letting the company greedily fill its pockets cover its operating costs without taking their typical cut of 8.9 percent. After counting the change, the machines then use a modem to call a central server, report the amount and obtain a gift certificate number from Amazon, which gets printed on the receipt.

Yeah yeah, so in the end it’s all motivated by greed: Amazon wants to get a piece of the lucrative “spare change market,” which apparently amounts to some $10.5 billion in the US alone. Yowza. I guess I’m just not smart enough. I’d never pay someone to count my change for me, but apparently a lot of people do.

There are two kinds of people in this world. There are the pioneers who have a vision of the future and with hard work, make their dream a reality. Then there are the followers. Those who sit back and make fun of the pioneers for being nerds, or geeks, or losers.

Just because you’re always busy working on a PC that will go into your 1985 Nissan Sentra, and haven’t had a girlfriend in 4 solid years, doesn’t justify a constant teasing from the latter kinds of people in this world. Those people are pushing the automotive entertainment and productivity markets of tomorrow. Car PC’s, carputers, car computers, and mobile minis (mac minis in cars) are taking the car owning geek population by storm.

Mp3 playback, GPS, Bluetooth/WiFi internet connectivity, redefining wardriving, DVD playback, and everything else that you wish to come true at night is available on a car PC. Extremetech.com did a quick scan over about the basics of this new emerging geek fad. I’m personally in the works on a car PC myself, and have been using Mp3Car.com religiously, there are plenty of other forums out there as well. I’m warning you to keep watching these pioneers, we’re on to something.

Looks like our Google buddies just released another “beta” service: Google Blog Search. It looks like it’s designed to compete with Technorati, but my immediate reaction is “whoopee!” Yes, that’s right – I’m completely self-effacing when I say this. It has everything nothing to do with the fact that a search for “iksib” at blogsearch.google.com reveals all of my LIVEdigitally posts, while Technoriti shows me no love. Am I conceited? Please say no. PLEASE.

So get out there and search, ye, of blogly persuasion! Find stuff! Read! Learn! Or just laugh at all the completely arcane and ridiculous things you find…and then share them with your friends.

While I was in San Francisco last week I (obviously) did all of my computing on my laptop; it really got me thinking about the options that are out there when it comes to sychronizing stuff on different machines.

I found out about Portable Firefox this morning and spent a few minutes downloading and performing the steps required to get it working. Download the software, throw it on your flash drive and you have, as the name implies, a portable version of the browser with all of your bookmarks and extensions! Built on John Haller’s Portable Firefox 1.0.6 (for Windows), the latest version is cross-platform and requires a quick modification before being ready for the Mac. I’m still tinkering with mine, but it seems like a fantastic idea – I always have my flash drive handy and it’s so much easier than booting up both machines, connecting them and manually copying the appropriate files. Cross-platform compatibility makes it a no-brainer. If anyone out there has gotten it working and has any remarks, post ’em!

I hate losing my remote control. I’ll end up looking everywhere. Under the couch, in the bathroom, sometimes I’ll even check the fridge. But if my TV remote was my hand, I’d never be without it. Researchers at Australasian CRC for Interaction Design are working on doing just that.
They are creating a glove that when placed on your hand will control the TV using specific gestures. The TV will wirelessly recognize hand motions for on, off, channel up etc, you get the idea.

Hopefully they could integrate it with other household items like the lights, microwave, robotic maid and we will never have to leave the couch again.

I know it’s not the most stunning bit of news to post since my return from San Francisco, but it looks like there may be one immediate casualty of Sprint and Nextel’s corporate union becoming official: the Sprint guy.

Sprint’s headquarters are in Overland Park, Kansas, and according to The Kansas City Star [free registration bypass can be found here], Brian Baker, a.k.a. Sprint Guy/The Man in Black actually found out about his potential state of limbo in the paper. The guy’s been in some 150 commercials since the late 1990s and, according to the article, “became one of the best-known pitchmen in the history of American advertising.” I’m not so sure about the accuracy of that statement, but he’s far superior to the fuzzy-haired, bespectacled Verizon dude incessantly blurting out his master’s mind-numbing catch phrase.

The article is full of random tidbits: Baker made People magazine’s 2001 list of the sexiest men alive, and a year later he married hottie Terry Farrell (Jadzia Dax on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine).

Anywho, Sprint Nextel peeps quoted in the article claim that Baker was never called about the news because he’s still under contract and will apparently stay that way until sometime next year. Until then, Baker’s online fan club, sprint.justmango.com, will apparently have to sate themselves on reruns. All I know is that if Sprint Guy returns, I better not hear the walkie talkie beep for the duration of the commercial. If so, I’ll wish he never came back.

It’s all coming into view for me. Before PayPal, eBay transactions took weeks, for a check to be delivered via snail mail, and wait then for the item to be snail mailed back. PayPal cut one of those postal pains by allowing an instantaneous money transfer. eBay should have done something like that themselves. Instead of kicking their own backsides, they decided to investigate the next best thing, Skype. Instead of emailing questions to sellers and waiting for their response, is just calling them up and chatting VoIP style.

eBay probably saw a bit more potential in Skype than a better auction site, but I’d like to call and make sure that Britteny Spears really did take a bite of that $12,598.78 piece of toast I just bid on.

Finally a show for us and by us. PBS is launching NerdTV hosted by Robert X. Cringely. While Cringely probably couldn’t get a job working for MTV he does have the chops to interview the likes of Bill Joy the father of UNIX and Sun Microsystems. The show will feature top knotch geeks in shows that can be downloaded on your PC.

Think of it as a talk show that we too can finally enjoy.