Wii Greatness

Hello. Sorry about the break - back again now. Hope you missed me.

I've bought a new toy since my last post - a Nintendo Wii. From the day that Nintendo announced what was initially the 'Revolution', I knew they were onto a winner. Yes, the XBox 360 is pretty good, and I'm sure that the PS3 will be - I have a 360 and I'll probably get a PS3 too, but the Wii is the most exciting from a gameplay level.

Initial impressions are very favourable indeed. I was 'lucky' enough (as anyone who is paying over the odds on eBay would be now, if they had any planning skills and reserved one) to get a Wii on the day of release. Currently I have 'Wii Sports' (bundled with the console), 'Wii Play' (bundled with the extra controller), and 'Zelda: Twilight Princess'. Wii Sports and Play are basically short, multi-player orientated games that show-off the Wii Remote. It all works exceptionally well - the controller is excellent and the games are based on 'real' sports which you replicate with the Wii Remote. This means that pretty much anyone can pick-up the remote and play. For example, you hold the remote just like a tennis racket for the tennis game, and golf club for the golf, and so on. The remote is very sensitive and you can chip, spin and hit the ball with an amazing degree of control. You really have to try it for yourself.

I think the next couple of years will be a good time for Nintendo. The DS seems to be doing very well, and they have judged the market very well. I've been wrong before of course (I still think that the GameCube was the best of the last generation of consoles, but sadly sales show that most people didn't agree), but they seem to be doing very well so far. 2007 will be an interesting year for gaming.

National Blog

It has been all over the news this morning but in case you haven't seen it, you're encouraged to blog today for a national archive. You don't have to be doing anything special as they simply want a snapshot of what life in Britain is like. It seems like an interesting and socially useful thing to take part in, so why not give it a go?

Google great - again!

I'm a programmer, for my sins. Those of you who have a similar bent will probably be all too familiar with those times where you know that the code you're trying to write must exist! It happens all the time.... in fact most programming is an implementation of the 'cut and paste wizard'. So with that in mind, check this out. Can Google do no wrong?!

Nabaztag

My Nabaztag wifi cyber bunny continues to impress. It is perhaps the most useful gadget I've bought in some time. The default functionality is very useful, and having had a quick look at the API there it seems easy to write your own services too. Several ideas have already popped into my head. It's a good excuse for my more serious foray into Objective-C on the Mac I think. Programming is much more enjoyable when you actually have a goal that's useful to you (which is where day jobs fall down, in my experience!). Anyway, that all sounds rather techie, but Nabaztag isn't by default. Buy one - I promise that you'll find it useful. Well, as long as you have a wireless network at home. Without that he's just a doorstop (although one with some designer chic). You can send messages to me via bunny from the widget on my web page. Give it a go!

More Googliness

Google continues to take over the world, but in a good, non-evil way. With the coming of Google Spreadsheets you can now do pretty much everything an Office package lets you do, but for free via the Web. There's Writely for your word processing, Google Spreadsheets for your.. er.. spreadsheets, Google Calendar for your diary and project planning, and GMail for your email. There are also lots of other Google services of course, including free voice calls over GTalk and Notebook, and fantastically useful bookmarking thing. Lots more at Google Labs.

I'm no fan of corporations but this can only be a good thing for us all. Thanks to Google there will be no need to ever 'upgrade' Windows again, or even use Windows. You can use anything with a web browser to do all of this stuff, be it a PC, Mac, TV or whatever. There will be no more having to buy Microsoft Office or having to get annoyed, as I do, when someone sends you a Word document assuming 'everyone must have Word'. It's the beginning of the end of a period of monopolies in computing. Once people get their heads around working with Web applications no single company can monopolise your 'office' requirements again. Don't like Google's offerings? There will be dozens other other Web-based apps to choose from since they can't lock you in. It's good news indeed.

The weather was fantastic over the weekend. This was a shame because I was inside for most of it finishing-off an assignment for my OU course. What a pain! Still, at least I got it in on time. What is it that they say about 'all work and no play' though? I don't think it's about getting rich, unfortunately.

Still, I have a new toy - a 20" iMac. It's one of the new Intel ones and it's pretty groovy. It's almost silent, so that's good news for using Logic with it - the PowerMac G5 was a bit of a beast and you could sometimes hear the fan through the microphone when recording. No more problems there though. Anyway, it's sexy and you really should buy one.

I forgot to mention my 'GamerTag' when I talked about my XBox 360. If you're on XBox live then my tag is 'DominicUK' - have a look and challenge me at something. At the moment it would have to be one of the downloadable demos - something like Ghost Recon or Battlefield 2 (I'm too tight to pay 50 quid for a game), or maybe the one game I do own, Oblivion, has multiplayer? I don't know, and I haven't really had time to care too much. I do wonder why almost everyone on XBox Live seems to be either French or Americans swearing at them and telling them to speak English. Very bizarre. Still, it adds some amusement to hear them shouting at each other over the headset thing.

Planning

Yay! Google Calendar is now live! No more Outlook, no more 30Boxes, no more scraps of paper, just an online calendar I can access from anywhere. It works with iCal which is cool, and integrates with GMail. They could do some really impressive stuff with all of this so let's see where it goes. In the meantime, it's pretty much just a very nice calendaring app, but that's good enough for now...

More cool Web 2.0

I love Flickr, it's a great site for storing all of my photos and I love the ability to have them all online at full resolution, sharing the ones I want to share and so on. Brilliant. However, today I noticed Riya, which looks very interesting too. It holds your photos (although at 800x600), but the idea isn't really to store them on the site, rather to index them. The best feature is the face recognition that is built in. Riya will check photos you upload for faces it recognises and tag the photo automatically. How cool is that!? And slightly scary of course. Great stuff.

More Skype Coolness

Skype is cool. Not only is it the best IM client (God knows why people still use Messenger), but it opens-up the world of free voice calls to other users, and generally cheap calls to people who are technophobes without Skype clients. Still, up until recently it has involved sitting in front of a computer, making it still less than 100% convenient. Not any more though - check out the Netgear Skype phone, a wifi device that sits on a wireless network and runs Skype for you. It's just like a mobile phone really, except much, much cheaper. The downside is that you need to be on a wireless network, but like a lot of people I'm not often away from one these days. When this phone is launched it's goodbye to my mobile (I'll get a cheap PAYG phone for when I'm away from wifi) and hello to cheap Skype calls. Progress!

Another interesting (and currently available) product is the Olympia 9211. This is just like a cordless DECT phone in that it plugs into your normal phone line. However, it also plugs into your PC and from the handset you can choose to make a Skype call or a normal phone call (a display on the handset shows if your contacts are online). It's a great device, but fundamentally flawed in that there are no Mac or Linux drivers, so it's no good to me. Foolish manufacturers! If they opened-up their specs someone would have drivers coded for it in no time - I can't understand why so many companies are so stupid. Ho hum, Netgear phone it is!