Damnit. Somehow the comment spammers have sniffed me out. You’re probably noticing the bs comments appearing with my posts now, you have to love marketers who are so desperate for eyeballs that they’ll stoop at nothing to get your attention. Should any of you decide to subscribe the offending websites to, say, child porn email lists from asia (webmaster@domainname.com and admin@domainame.com are two great addresses to use) I’m sure I won’t tell. Meanwhile this is going to force me into bringing a new server online and switching weblog software, and possibly also forcing folks who want to comment to undergo a registration process. I don’t know which combination of steps I’ll take, I’ll mention it here as it happens. In the meantime please pardon the inappropriate comments, I’ll turn off comments alltogether if it gets bad.
Creative announces their intention to go after the ipod
You can read more about this over on engadget if you’re interested – basically Creative has announced their intent to dethrone Apple’s ipod as the most popular portable mp3 playing device. My advice to Creative is – focus on the quality and interface on your own products, instead of your marketing. I have a Creative player. It was exceedingly cheap and I got precisely what I paid for – an inferior product in all aspects to an ipod. I don’t mind, I knew this when I bought it, and I bought it more to experiment with than to use (I use an iriver h120 for long trips and a rio cali for jogging). My advice to anyone reading this? Don’t be swayed by Creative’s $100 million advertising blitz – their products are generally inferior and their support is absolutely awful – ever try and track down drivers for one of their soundcard products, or waited interminably for updates to fix known issues? I have, take it from me, they’re not a good company
More gmail storage options
Here’s another option for using your gmail account as a networked file system – Filebunker. It’s Java based so in theory you can get this running on any OS that supports Java, though the FAQ states that it’s untested on Mac OSX. It adds a few features other utilities of this nature have lacked, including autocompression and autoencryption of your files. This is another excellent option for securely backing up your data.
Rachet and Clank – Up Your Arsenal – the apotheosis of this console generation
Right. So I’m completely in love with the latest rachet and clank game. I got it a few days after its release a couple of weeks ago and have been playing almost every night. It’s basically perfect – balanced gameplay, a graphics engine tuned to PS2 perfection, and the right mix of platforming and satisfying shootemup action. If you have a PS2 and enjoy action platformers, you owe it to yourself to get this game.
It also got me musing about this console generation – this christmas is basically it on this generation, it’s at the height of its market power, and christmas is the height of the gaming season. They’ll still be selling games for the current console generation next christmas, but they’ll also be developing and marketing games for the next generation systems – xbox2 will supposedly be released by then, as will (possibly) the nintendo successor to the Gamecube, and Sony is making noise about making sure Microsoft doesn’t beat them to market (though most of the gaming journalists don’t believe them).
Anyway, even if NONE of the consoles make it out by next Christmas, what won’t be here next christmas is sequels to all the big games – those are all targeted at next generation consoles. This by no means indicates that no more good games are coming for the current generation – history tells us that some of the more interesting and innovative games come out at the end of console’s lifespans as the developers have basically perfected their tools – but it does mean no more (or very few) blockbuster titles are coming. This is it, they’ve spent their development load, so to speak, and are moving on to other platforms. There’s a side benefit to this – if you think this January/February is great for a huge library of discount priced games (sub-$20), just wait till next year. Meanwhile, enjoy it this year. Me? As soon as I finish Rachet and Clank I’m grabbing the latest Jak and Daxter game, which judging by the reviews is almost as good as Rachet and Clank.
Never look at an advertisement in your web browser again
What if similar to virus definitions, someone kept an exhaustively maintained list of advertising servers on the net, and you could use this list to exclude the ads from appearing in your browser? Sounds great – which it is. To get this going, first make sure you’re using the latest version of the Firefox web browser (which I won’t link to today – the recent release of version 1.0 has left their webservers completely overwhelmed – no sense pouring gas on the fire). Once you have Firefox running, Use the tools menu to install new extensions. Install the Adblock extension. Out of the box it will block and extensive % of the ads you see. Then head on over to this geocities site, read the instructions.txt file, and install the appropriate definitions file. While that sounds complex it’s actually really easy and will work absolute wonders on your browsing experience.
I’ll make the standard comment about how most of the websites you’re visiting rely on those ads to pay their bills, so follow your own conscience. Me, I installed it, and the flashblocking extension as well. This would be absolutely perfect if they could autoupdate the definitions files in the same way
Play around with Palm OS 6.1
Palm acquired the remnants of the BeOS when that company failed. BeOS was actually a pretty cool operating system, or at least it showed great promise, but going against MS was hopeless and when Steve Jobs took over Apple and locked them out of installing on Macs their fate was pretty much sealed. Anyway a portion of the BeOS developer team has been working on Palm OS 6 for years now, and fans of the old BeOS have been anticipating the release to see that these clever folks came up with. For whatever business reasons, Palm has been slow to release a Palm OS 6 device. Impatient geeks can stop anticipating and start noodling around with it – Palm has long offered emulators that developers can use to test their code, and there’s now an OS 6 emulator available directly from Palm. I’m pretty sure these are win32 only, though in the past these emulators have also been available for macs. If you’re interested in tinkering with the new os, give it a try. And keep your fingers crossed for me that they make this backwards compatible with my much loved Palm Tungsten C.
[updated this 9-2013 to pull some links which no longer work. Amazed that they worked this long since PalmOS has been dead for years now]
I’m a dancing fool
When I moved to NY I had to give up most of my exercise equipment – there simply isn’t enough space in my cottage for the array of equipment I had in my basement in Maine. I kept my weight bench and stored it here in NY, but everything else went. Tearing a muscle in my abdomen kept me from exercising for all of September and October, and it’s only now that I’ve felt good enough to workout again. But what to do for a workout? It’s gotten too chilly (and dark) to run, and too cold out in the barn to lift weights.
I’ve mentioned in the past my minor interest in exercise equipment hooked up to videogame machines. Along those lines, I went out and bought a Dance Dance Revolution dance pad, and I’ve been dancing away in the evenings. It’s a surprisingly effective cardiovascular workout. I have to constantly remind myself of this fact when I’m working out since I feel like a complete ass doing it. But what can you do – it’s actually superior to using an exercise bike, though a bit harder on the knees and ankles. And the equipment stows neatly away behind the shelving in my office. My only complaint aside from the embarrassment factor is that mostly the music that comes with the games is just plain bad, there are no tracks on the cd’s I have that I would actually listen to if I weren’t playing this game. I’ve also discovered that true to the stereotype, I have no rhythm. It does feel great to be working out again though. It’s depressing how quickly my hard earned physique has faded – I used to rattle off 75-100 crunches a night and could do 3 sets of 30 pushups easily. 2.5 months off and I can barely do 2 sets of 15 crunches and 2 sets of 20 pushups. That’s the bad news, the good news is I know what it will take to get me back to where I was, and I know I’ll have no problem doing it, it will just take some time.
Hack a day website
This is a fun blog to watch – check out the hackaday.com weblog, where most days they post interesting hardware and software hacks you can tinker with. My favorite of the past week is the personal hovercraft on the cheap plans. I wish we had these when I was a kid.
Open source console gaming
Now this is interesting – These folks are offering an open platform to develop console games on. The bare hardware is around $200, which gets you just the board for the machine – you need to supply controllers, a power supply, an enclosure and so on. There’s an active community developing content for the system, which is a bit of a surprise given that based on the screenshots the thing seems to be about as capable as the old 8-bit systems – you’d think if someone was interested in writing software of that style they’d work on something for one of the 8-bit emulators. Still, if you’re a developer this could be fun to dink around with.
Alternative to running your own server
Check out this inexpensive ‘server appliance’ from Revo – the Kuro Box. For around $160 you get a linux-based web, file and other services server with internal storage and a USB port so you can add additional external storage. Plug it into your network and you’re good to go. I’m tempted to get one of these to use as a dedicated music server on my network, for the price it’s an amazing value.
They’ve got another model coming sometime next year with better networking and additional storage options, you can read about it in their forums if you’re interested.
Dave's Place/Metamusing 