Archive for February, 2007
Balanced
I ordered my new television today, the one I wanted, the Sony KDL-40W2000. I don’t actually have the money to do so, but my recent sell off pays for half of it, so it’s not too bad. I put it on my already high balanced credit card, and got a phone call from them that night to ask me if I knew anything about a significant purchase that had been made on my card that afternoon. Their fraud protection system had immediately rejected it as suspicious, but it was all sorted pretty quick and the order has now gone through successfully.
I really can’t wait. Watching TV every night on this 19″ LCD isn’t much fun when you’ve been living with a 28″ one for so long. Moving up to 40″ should therefore be a lot of fun. And sometime in the future, when I have a house where I can get Sky HD, that should look pretty special too. In the meantime I’m looking forward to playing some of my new game purchases in HD, as well as going back to try out things like Gears of War.
Revenge
I wrote about buying games from eBay a few days ago. Well one of the games I had my eye on was Burnout Revenge. I already have the Xbox version, but it doesn’t play on the 360 and I wanted to play it again, especially with the better graphics afforded by that system.
I lost my first attempt at picking it up, but found another and placed a bid. Luckily, I managed to get it for the fabulous price of just £7, which I thought was an excellent bargain.
It turned up today and I found out why it was so cheap. It wasn’t the Xbox 360 version at all, it was just the Xbox version. Which I already have. Ooops.
I went back and checked and this really was just an error on my part, rather than the seller trying to dupe me in any way. I even went back and looked at the first auction I lost and you know what, that was for the Xbox version too.
I am officially a dolt.
I have since bought another copy, definitely the 360 one this time, for three times the price. That’s more like it.
Available
Looking on Amazon right now, they still have PS3’s available for pre-order. That means that any thoughts I may have had of just selling it on eBay and making a profit are completely out of the window. I honestly thought that despite the price, the Sony fanboy’s would still be out in force, pre-ordering every available unit and making it impossible for anyone to get one, but it seems not. Either Sony are producing an incredible amount of units for the European launch (unlikely), or they’re simply selling none of them.
Amazon completely sold out of Wii’s in 7 minutes, and I believe it’s still quite difficult to just walk into a shop and buy one, and the Xbox 360 was hardly easy to come by when it came out either. But Sony’s latest just seems to be a little out of reach of most consumers. Who would have thought Sony could throw away the market so easily?
Second
I’ve been looking at adding a couple of new games to my collection recently, and rather than goto Amazon like I normally would, I decided to give eBay a try instead. And the lesson is simple, if you’re buying a game which is a few months old, why would you buy it anywhere else? The general rule is that they’re almost half the price of buying them elsewhere. And it’s not like they’re second hand either, these are often brand new, still sealed games.
I may find myself building up my collection considerably if I decide to put a concious effort into devoting more time to the art of gameplay again. And with prices that good, that wouldn’t need to be an expensive choice.
Earth
TUAW pointed me towards OSXplanet, a Mac version of the UNIX xplanet program which renders pictures of the Earth, Mars and other planets, and allows you to put markers on them if you know the appropriate co-ordinates.
OSXplanet renders out a background image for you at a set interval, with a number of configuration options including whether or not you want to include live cloud data, earthquakes and satellite positions. You can even put markers in your favourite cities. And since it’s xplanet, it draws really nice maps complete with the current position of the sun lighting the planet.
If you’re a Mac user, it’s worth a look.
Lyrics
Andrea went to see Music and Lyrics, the latest Hugh Grant vehicle, and was nice enough to put together a review for whatentertainment.
This is the first time since Graham decided he was too good to write for it anymore that someone other than me has produced something. So hooray for that and let’s hope it’s the first of many.
I’m still on the lookout for somebody else who would like to contribute articles in the hope that it can grow some more. At the moment I find it hard to consistently produce content, but I know that if I was doing it with other people I’d be more likely to pull my weight.
Switcher
I delivered my iMac to it’s new owner today, my older brother. He officially became the second switcher in the family.
It was quite sad to see it go, it really is such a wonderfully designed computer, and I’ve spent a happy year with it. It’s been so nice using it over the past couple of months every day, basking in palatial silence instead of the sound of PC fans. I never loved the design as much as the Luxo inspired one, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t special in it’s own way.
With the TV gone as well, my flat is starting to look emptier by the day.
Prestation
I pre-ordered a Playstation 3 from Amazon today, in much the same way as I did with the Wii last year. They announced in advance when they were going to start taking orders and although I initially forgot, I was still there in time to place an order. Since Amazon don’t charge you until it ships anyway, I figure I’ve now got over a month before I really have to decide if I want it or not.
It’s not really the games I’m buying it for, there’s still not a whole lot that makes me want one for that. But it’s the cheapest blu-ray player out there, and if I’m going to have an HDTV, then I’m going to need some HD content to watch on it.
I could get the HD-DVD add-on for the 360, but I believe that blu-ray is the format that’s going to win out. It has more studio support, so it’s now beginning to get retailer traction, and whatever you might think of Sony they’re ultimately going to sell a lot of PS3’s, and the player is going to be in every one of them. That’s a lot of homes that are going to have blu-ray disc whether they realise it or not.
So we’ll see anyway, maybe over the next month I’ll see more reasons for having one, but at the moment it’s just a cheap way to get a next generation disc player.
Merge
Even though it’s just a couple of months since I relaunched Chatbear and Bearkey, I’m going to make another big change. I’m going to merge the two of them into one site.
The idea of Bearkey was always that it was this separate user entity, an account and user profile that was shared among a series of sites. But the truth is that there’s never been any other sites. There’s this blog of course, where you can use your Bearkey account to post comments, and at one point you could do something similar on whatentertainment, but really it’s never turned into anything substantial since Blogbear, Imagebear etc have never launched.
So I’m going to take Bearkey and the functions on there and simply add them to the Chatbear admin. So your Bearkey account becomes your Chatbear account, and your user profile is on chatbear.com along with all the options to control it. It bugs me at the moment how you log into your Chatbear account and I need to have all these messages pointing you over to another site just because you want to check your private messages. I’m sure it does nothing but confuse new users.
I’ve been mulling over some other Chatbear ideas too, hopefully these will also come to fruition over the next couple of months.
Harsh
I was lying in bed last night thinking about how far behind I was with the blog posts (as I write this, I don’t have entries written for the past two months, so it may be a while before this one actually appears) and what I could possibly do to catch up when it seems to take me so long to write each one. While doing so I had a great idea for another post, which is good because I struggle a lot of the time for what to write. In the harsh light of today however, I have completely forgotten what this idea was. I can’t even remember what area the topic of the post might have been in, whether it was a television programme or film that suddenly popped into my head, or if it was based on something else I’d heard or read that day. So instead you’re getting this, a post explaining how I forgot what I was going to write and had to write this instead.
These posts just get better every day don’t they.
Platform
Andrea has been playing a lot of Mario on the DS over the past few weeks, which has gotten me thinking about game programming again. Writing a platform game could be pretty good fun, even more so if I used Microsoft’s XNA to do so, because then I could play it on the 360.
I’ve therefore been analysing Mario a little to see what challenges I might face (beyond the fact that my knowledge of C# is pretty slim at this point and I can’t draw) and from what I can see, the engine is really quite simple. There’s one single player, he can jump, he can run. He can jump on enemies heads to kill them or pick up a power up that allows him to shoot basic fireballs. The enemies themselves are pretty basic, they walk back and forth on a platform but not much else, very linear paths. And finally he can hit blocks from below to break them, pick up coins and go down pipes. None of which seems particularly complex. The gameplay comes purely from the level design rather than the engine itself being powerful.
Which is what gives me hope that I could actually do it, because it really does seem like a good introductory programming challenge. Maybe something to look at seriously later this year.
Camp
What is selling Apple laptops to a lot of people nowadays is the ability to install Windows as well as OS X on there. Not via Parallels either, I mean actually natively installing the operating system and using the drivers for the hardware that Apple provide. But if you do have Parallels, you can then boot into your Windows partition from within OS X, allowing you the best of both worlds. It’s there as a full reboot option when you want to play some games, but it’s there without a restart if you need to just do something quickly.
So I bought a legitimate OEM copy of Windows along with my laptop so I could do just that. I went through the Boot Camp process, got it all installed and activated my copy. It’s a little odd seeing the XP boot screen appearing on a Mac Book, but once it’s started up it’s everything you expect from Windows. Viruses and all.
So then I went into OS X and told Parallels to boot into it, which it did, but then Windows popped up the activation window again. Since it now thinks it’s running on the fake Parallels hardware, it thinks I’m a filthy pirate who has just installed it on a second machine. And in a few days, if I don’t activate it (which I can’t, because it thinks it’s already been) it’ll not let me start it anymore. I can still restart and boot into it properly, but it refuses to work under Parallels because of Microsoft’s retarded activation scheme.
This is the problem with DRM schemes. If I really wanted to, I could get around the activation issue with a hack, there are no shortage of pirated copies of XP out there for download. But as a legitimate customer I’m being stopped from running my own copy of XP on my own hardware (and the same physical machine remember). DRM doesn’t stop the real pirate, it just makes it harder for the customer who is just trying to use what they paid for.
Arrived
My new laptop arrived yesterday, but with the film last night I didn’t really get the chance to play with it until today. It’s all as expected, but I’m a two time Powerbook owner so that’s hardly a surprise. It’s all the little touches that make it such a nice piece of kit, from the magnetic power supply cord that pulls out so that nobody can trip over it and pull your expensive laptop off the table, to the keyboard and screen that change brightness depending on the ambient light.
When you first switch it on you get the option to transfer all your settings from an existing Mac, which is incredibly helpful. I was able to copy my entire user account from my iMac, and it really does copy everything. It meant that when I first got into the OS properly everything was identical to what I’ve been used to, all my settings, all my applications, even my desktop wallpaper and the position of the icons on my desktop was all there. Next job is to wipe the iMac and prepare to sell it, but first I need to work out what I’m doing to do with my 250GB of music.
Fuzz
Thanks to a promotion in the Metro newspaper, me and Andrea got the chance tonight to go and see Hot Fuzz at our usual Glasgow cinema, complete with the stars Simon Pegg and Nick Frost making an appearance with a Q&A. It hasn’t even had it’s premiere yet.
It was a completely surreal experience. The whole cinema felt like it had been taken over for the night, and after passing through lots of security and obviously studio related people, we found ourselves some seats and waited for the film. Simon and Nick came out and introduced it and up came the Universal logo and we were off to the races. Once it was over, they came back out again and did a 45 minute sit-down Q&A with a presenter taking questions from the audience. They were great, but it was very, very weird seeing the stars of the film you’ve just watched appear in front of you. It was the rest of the audience that let me down, asking a series of pretty dull questions or taking advantage and getting something signed.
The film itself? Well as always I’ll get a review up on whatentertainment eventually, but if you can’t wait until then I’ll just say it’s a definite recommendation. It’s a great all rounder, from the comedy to the action and we both thoroughly enjoyed it.
The fact it was free and exclusive just made it even sweeter.
High
During a small shopping trip to Glasgow today we ventured into John Lewis to browse their collection of high definition televisions. I’ve looked in lots of other places, all the usual suspects really, Comet, Dixons, Currys, but none of them have any clue whatsoever when it comes to setting up TV’s. I’ve got a reasonable idea already which one I’m going to buy (a Sony KDL-40W2000) and it’s just a matter of putting together the funding to do so, but I want to see one in action. I found it in Comet, but would you believe they had it setup with a standard coax connection in the back, and a badly tuned one at that. How do they expect to sell anything?
Anyway, in John Lewis they know exactly what they’re doing. And while they didn’t have the specific set I was looking for, it was still a revelation to see them all running good, solid HD feeds.
They also had a wide array of couches. But although they were some of the comfiest we’ve sat on, nothing was in the style we’re looking for, nor the budget.
Couches
Furniture shopping is an exhausting experience.
The flat I live in comes fully furnished, meaning that 90% of the items that fill my living space weren’t picked by me. This isn’t really much of a problem, I was able to replace the curtains, cushions and pictures with my own choices to make it feel like home, and it meant I didn’t have to go out and buy things like a bed, or dishes, or the point of this entry - a couch.
I have two couches right now, a pair of red, two seaters. They’re not identical, they have different coverings, but they have a lot in common. They both have arms the same height as the back, they’re of equal size, and they’re both very uncomfortable.
Which is why me and Andrea spent all of today visiting every local furniture shop that we could think of. DFS, Vogue, MFI, SCS, Harvey’s, Sterling… if they sold couches, we were there. It’s an amazingly tiring process, you wouldn’t think sitting down all day could be such hard work, but you eventually get to the stage where you just need to go home and have a lie down. Standing up and sitting down over and over again is hard. And when you can’t find a single couch that meets all of your requirements, that’s even harder. We saw some absolutely ridiculous monstrosities, sat on things that almost bruised your bum as soon as you put yourself down and laughed at people when we saw what they had chosen.
What we didn’t do is come home with a couch. Or even come home having ordered a couch. No, in fact I think it gave us a new appreciation for the ones we have. They do after all suit the decor of the room and most of all, they’re already here.
Turnaround
My laptop has shipped already, meaning that I should get it on Monday. I ordered it via Dabs because they offer 9 months interest free credit, and I’m definitely impressed by their turnaround. It wasn’t that fast the last time.
I like 9 months interest free credit deals, you pay a little up front and then don’t need to worry about it all until the balance is due. And it’s easily enough time to save up whatever is necessary to pay it off. You get the goods now, and it doesn’t cost you anything extra. Unless of course you don’t pay it off within the 9 months, in which case it’ll cost you a fortune in interest charges.
Television
I haven’t really been in the market for a new television, but I’ve been aware that at some point I’m likely to be buying an HDTV, especially as each of the games consoles becomes even more dependent on having one in order to have the best experience. So when Andrea’s mum found herself in a position where she needed to buy a new one, I decided selling her mine was the perfect solution to both our problems. She needed a new TV and selling mine to somebody on eBay would have been nothing but a hassle, shipping would be out of the question and I’ve already said I don’t want to deal with anybody else in person.
Of course this means I now have no television, and am resigned to watching everything on one of my PC LCD screens plugged into WOPR. In turn we’ve had to pull the couch in closer, because otherwise it’s just a little too far away to see comfortably. Which reminds me, I really need to go to the opticians.
As for getting a new television, well we’ll look at that a little further down the line once I sell off the iMac.
