If anything, E3 made me realise how very very small Australia is compared to the rest of the world. I guess this is why we have to pay a bit more than the US .. and suffer some awful pings… but our industry is growing, and the types of people turning into gamers is changing… . more ages and genders of humans are becoming gamers… this can only be a good thing in helping our industry grow here. If there was one thing that more developers at E3 said to us more than anything else, is that NOW is a good time to get into the games industry – it’s strong, it’s growing, it’s changing and finding it’s feet through chaos, commercial pressures and the artistic needs of some great minds who just want to make great games.
The new Wordpress dashboard has alerted me to an intriguing collection of bizarre incoming links that the blog seems to have. Warning! Do NOT click on this link. It is NSFW and definitely NSFK. I warned you.
On my blog, its easy for me to know when someone replies to my comments because I get emailed all comments that aren’t marked as spam.
It occurs to me that when I leave a comment on someone else’s blog, I have to go back to the page periodically to see if anyone has replied to my comment. This is sub-optimal, and it would be nice if I could receive email notification of replies to my comments. I can’t do this for everyone else’s blogs, but I can at least give my readers the option.
Now when you comment, you have the option to get emailed all comments on a particular post. It even has a nifty subscription manager that lets you unsubscribe and change email address etc. Why not try it out? I haven’t tested it extensively yet, so if it starts spamming you, PLEASE don’t hesitate to email me and swift corrective action will be taken.
I should take this opportunity to remind readers that email addresses you enter will not be published anywhere, ever. And if you don’t know already, all comment fields except the comment text are optional. But anonymous comment authors beware, I have a tendency to think of you as “random internet people” and may not be as nice to you as I would to someone who identifies themselves…
But I want them to come down in price first. I’ve been looking on eBay for one because it would make an awesome Linux server. But they’re all around $350-400. I want something for about $250. I also looked at the AOpen MiniPC but the ones I found were the same price and they didn’t even come with memory or hard drive. Ripoff. Actually I already have a 2.5″ hard drive I could use. So what are my other options? Are there any other really small PCs out there? Shuttle PC is too big. It has an OK footprint but too tall. I want something the size of a Mac Mini (duh) and I don’t really care what it is as long as it will run Ubuntu and has fairly decent specs. And is not too noisy. Can’t be noisier than a Mac Mini.
…that for the first nine months of his life, he lived inside the pouch of a Kangaroo… and that until now, he’s been hibernating beneath Ayres Rock. All we know is, he’s called Aussie Stig.
With Top Gear Australia just around the corner (late 2008 they are saying), one question remains to be asked: Who is Aussie Stig? We’ve seen the audition videos of the three human hosts, Charlie Cox, Warren Brown and Steve Pizzati. But what of the infamous yet unidentifiable fourth presenter? The SBS Top Gear website mentions “The Stig’s Aussie cousin”, implying that living among us, there exists yet another of these mysterious creatures. But who is he? I mean, really?
Odds are that our Stig is a Formula 1 driver. But you know what? After reading the Wikipedia article discussing The Stig’s identity, I don’t want to know. Well, to be more accurate, I want to spend my time wanting to know, but I don’t actually want to find out. And while I realise he can’t be referred to as “The Stig” – there is only one original, I just hope they choose something tasteful and don’t call him “The Stig’s Aussie cousin” in every episode.
After months of procrastination, I just upgraded Wordpress to version 2.6. Where to start… Well the admin interface looks way nicer, but when I’m writing or editing a post, stuff like categories and tags are not as immediately accessible. I mean I have to scroll down the page to get to them. This is probably not a big deal, since these are things you would set once and rarely change. But its still a bit annoying. In the old interface I could move these sections up and down on the sidebar, and either you can’t do this anymore, or I just haven’t figured out how yet. It also looks like there is a lot of wasted space at the top of the page, and this is one of my all time pet peeves. Grrrr! See this screenshot for what I’m talking about.
But on the plus side, the Autosave feature kicks total arse now. It’s off to the side so I can see it easily, and it dims slightly when saving, so I catch this in my peripheral vision and know everything’s going to be OK. Post Preview is now a nice big button instead of the pissy little link, so that’s also great.
I also just found this intriguing “Turbo” link up in the corner. Apparently Wordpress now supports Google Gears so “After you install and enable Gears most of WordPress’ images, scripts, and CSS files will be stored locally on your computer. This speeds up page load time.” Maybe I’ll try that out some time.
Overall, it was pretty painless. My theme still works, and thus the site also appears to work. I haven’t checked everything though, so if anything’s broken, drop us a line via comment or email.
So I’m gonna spoil the fun right here and say that this is one of four viral videos created by “Cardo Systems” to advertise a boring headset or something. These were watched by over 16 million viewers on YouTube and probably more; mine was via a forwarded email. At first glance this seems pretty plausible, but there’s a couple of obvious clues that it’s a total fake. Firstly, the corn doesn’t move. Anyone who’s popped a kernel or two in their life will know that it’s a pretty explosive occurence. Yet in the video, once the popping starts, the unpopped kernels, even when placed snugly together, remain undisturbed. I would expect at least some movement. The other dead giveaway is that the camera pans away from the popcorn for several seconds. This happens in every video.
Now that’s not to say that this kind of advertising shouldn’t be applauded. I think it’s brilliant. And way more original than something like the Air Force One gag. There’s a few reasons the cellphone popcorn concept in particular makes for successful viral marketing. Firstly, there were four separate videos seeded to YouTube, each apparently from different countries. This adds to the authenticity, creating the illusion that it’s a worldwide phenomenon. Secondly, the videos appear to contain real people who seem genuinely astonished at the result; the Japanese one especially. You believe it because they believe it. The third reason unfortunately alludes to gross scientific ignorance. The majority of people have little or no understanding of how cellphones work or radio waves for that matter. So they believe it because they can’t easily explain it. One physicist summed it up nicely by pointing out that if cellphones emit enough energy to cook popcorn, they would cook our fingers (not to mention ears and faces) every time we used them. Actually I think it’s a combination of ignorance and the media hype around cellphones and the dreaded “R” word in general. This leads to widespread but relatively mild distrust, which spawns the little voice whispering “Hey… that might actually work”. The final reason I can think of is that while it looks simple enough to do, you’d have to actually make the effort to go get some popcorn, then get eight phones set up to try it out for yourself. Now there are plenty of people who have actually gone to the effort, as a simple YouTube search proves. But most people will just watch it and forward it on to their friends who will just watch it and forward it on, etc.
Alas the Mythbuster in me can’t just let it rest there. We’ve disproven the myth, now we have to reproduce the result. And you’re not allowed to use CGI like Cardo did. That’s CHEATING dammit! One theory involves a hidden heating element, but that’s busted because it would burn right through the table. Or if it was under the table, you wouldn’t get enough conduction through a wooden table, for example. You might be able to use Kari’s microwave gun… Anyway it’s gonna annoy the bugger out of me until I solve it. Or at least until I lose interest.
… maybe the whole thing was staged inside a giant microwave… or maybe the phone’s infrared was just on a really high setting…
I think “Shuffle” is a silly name for an iPod. From the name, you assume it’s permanently set to play songs in random order. I just convinced myself that I could live with an iPod that only plays in random order. When I took it out of the box I found a switch that toggles between “shuffle” and “play in order”. OMG Apple! Why have I been without a Shuffle all this time? Because of the stupid name you gave it, you idiots!
*sigh* That said, it’s a great little MP3 player. I have a playlist in iTunes called “Hot Right Now” that I put on it. It’s smaller than a Nano, and smaller than most pieces of food I put into my mouth. So maybe a better name would be the “iPod Pico”? I think it’s a cute name. But when I started up iTunes, there was only one name I could give it. Warning: link contains J-Pop ^_^
I’ve just read as much of that statement as I could fathom, so a semicolon should have been next. It’s very puzzling… but I’ll try to get myself back together, by ignoring everything up to the next `;’. Please insert a semicolon now in front of anything that you don’t want me to delete. — Haskell compiler
