djb31st.co.uk

Not had the internet properly for about 5-6 months!

2 blogs.. 1 night.. not interested in this one? try this 1 “The start of a Buisness”

Still not got it properly until the end of this week i’m guessing, i expected to start looking about the net tonight and loads of things would have changed.. doesn’t really appear to be the case. I guess i only expected this due to when i was at uni i would keep track of all the latest developments no matter how big or small and it turns out that a lot of em where a lot smaller developments than i thought at the time.

Anyway been having a browse about and realised i hadn’t done a random tech blog in a while..

Site of the moment has gotta be http://www.anappaday.com/ some crazy guy is thinking up/being suggested a progrram and coding it within a day.. he’s going to do this for 30 days!

By the time i found the site he was already on day 17, i expected all the application to be rather pointless or really crappy, but they all have a certain coolness about them!

WPM tray is kinda pointless but fun in a way.. basicaly just tells you how many words per minute your currently typing and also gives you a graph of your words per minute over the last 15 minutes… guess it will show me when i’m being lazy with the coding! As i type it says i’m doing between 60 and 80 words per minute..

TimeManagement is nother cool program that will help let me know when i’m getting distracted! It basically keeps a log of whatever window you had in focus and were therefore working in! So if theres more MSN than coding or IE windows, i’ve had a bad day!!

The other 2 cool programs he’s wrote so far are GoogleWallpaper and JEdiConcentrate, with the concentrate one being slightly cooler but maybe not that useful.. dunno could work!

Final bit of techy crap i’m gonna drivel on about tonight is Google Browser Sync now this has been an absolubte godsend for me just recently as i’ve been working on 1 laptop and 2 desktop PC’s at various houses.

What this plugin for firefox allows you to do, is syncronise all your cookies, history, bookmarks, open tab information between multiple machines. This means that you can be working on your laptop, login to a site, save it as a bookmark, close the browser with the page still open and switch your laptop off. Then later on that day when u login to firefox at work or home on a desktop, it will automatically ask if you want to go to the page you had open on your laptop and providing you were logged in to the site on your laptop, you would be logged into the site automatically! Magic and brilliant for storing links from reasearch.

I guess on the downside all your bookmarks/history/cookies are being stored on google servers somewhere so the evil that apparently is google is spying on you even more.

I personally don’t think there spying on me, i think the US government want to get at their data… but thats another story all together. Google are just bringing all your data into one easy to access place.. the internet! That reminds me.. has anyone played with google spreadsheets, looks good, its hardly worth getting office these days!

Lots of announcements have been made at E3 resulting in the Wii still being the console i want, Sony cluthing at straws and charging lots for their console and not having anything “extra”.

Anyway i may post about all that one day but thats not what this post is about..

I submitted my last post about my general ramblings about the Wii to Digg.com I’ve never submitted a story as i haven’t got the time or inclination to find storys before other people do. I didn’t particulaly think it was news that i written or that interesting to a lot of people i imagine and was expecting maybe 5 or so hits and then the story to be reported lame and taken off the Digg system.

Just went back to check my story now which you can view on digg here and i somehow manged to get 5 diggs for my story, took a quick look at my webstats and apparently 57 people came to visit me from Digg and viewed 91 pages meaning a few people had a nose around the site

I imagine most people clicked the link saw it was a lame blog link and then closed the window, but thought i’d test out the idea of how much traffic you can generate from the Digg system using a buzzword thats hot that day/week.

Unfortunatly nobody clicked my google ads so i didn’t get any money from any of it.. but still kinda cool and shows just how many users Digg has that are constantly looking though the system for submitted storys.

Even some people from random contrys like Italy, Japan and Iceland.

Well thats it really.. just thought it was kinda cool and strange to think of 57 totally random people viewing my website.

In other news i got a e-mail from google today

“We received your resume and would like to thank you for your interest in
Google.  After carefully reviewing your experience and qualifications, we
have determined that we do not have a position available which is a strong
match at this time.

Sincerely,
Google Staffing”

It doesn’t say what job it is on about though… maybe it means all of them.. maybe it just means the proper job i applied for and not the graduate jobs?

Either way onwards and upwards get these exams out the way and then apply for some more jobs

Ooo my exam the other day went quite well i think which was nice i even remembered the date!!

In my last exam i managed to have no idea what the date was, so i asked the date and it was the 5th or something of May, but he just said the 5th so i put the 5th of April :-/
Sure it will be ok though!!

 

Right, this was going to be a post initially about lots of silly jokes with the word Wii, with puns such as controlling my Wii from the Wii controller. In fact you can put the word Wii in almost ayn sentance and it sounds funny!

So heres the reasons i want a Wii.. (i’ll stop soon i promise)

For people that don’t know what a Wii is, its the new name for the new console coming out from Nintendo. It was called the Revolution, but in a stroke of genius they changed the name to Wii sometime last week.

Now i hate consolse with a passion and just don’t undestand the whole buy a console buy lots of games and then there useless after a few years.. with a PC you can upgrade and play most games anyway and usually in better quality on a higher resolution screen. However graphics cards for PC’s seam to be getting more and more expensive and more and more games seam to be becoming console only.

So a few storys everynow and then about the Nintendo Wii which didn’t really catch my attention untill the silly name change were popping up on http://www.digg.com/ so i decided to take a look.

At first i thought Nintendo, kids games, mario, mario kart etc.. and thought back to the days of battering my mates NES!

Turns out i was wrong.. ooo was i wrong! Nintendo is now cool!

The battlefield for the nextgen consoles is as follows with a quick list of whats good or bad about them:

• Xbox 360
• In the shops now
• HD resolutions
• Network connectivity
• Wireless controllers
• Media Center capabilites
• Playstation 3
• Still not out
• Blu-ray discs (expensive and unproven)
• Rumoured to be expensive
• HD resolutions
• Probably some other cool stuff, but its not out, its late and they don’t seam to have anything that the 360 doesn’t offer
• Nintendo Wii

I’m going to go into a bit more detail with this one

First the things that in theory would make it not so cool

• Slower spec graphix and processor than Xbox 360 and PS3
• No HD TV support

Slower spec, not a massive issue gaming is about fun not graphics, although nice graphics are good.
No HD TV support, who owns a HD tv?? OK.. and when you watch DVD’s that are 720d do they look crap, no they just look the same as if they were on a non HD TV. The Wii will support 720d therefore will look fine

So that gets the bad points out of the way onto the cool stuff.

Looks

the console

The controller

Looks a bit like a remote control doesn’t it!
Tilt your head to the left and it looks like a old skool NES pad

Now heres the magic… the controller has built in motion sensor and lazer, this means that it knows when your swinging it around and so therfore can use it to play tennis for example..
The lazer knows where you are pointing so you can play duck hunt and do other similar screen related stuff.

Immediatly you should start to see that there clearly thinking on another level to Sony and Microsoft and want people involved in the game rather than passivly playing.

Take a quick look at this video to undestand how cool this could be

Cool isn’t it! you can even get an extra little controly thing that also has motion sensors but only to the level of moving/not moving.

Imagine tennis, mario, football, boxing endless fun and more importantly not sat on your arse bashing buttons.

So thats cool, the games may be a little crazy and Jap but i have a feeling its gonna ensure Sony don’t ever sell any PS3′s and make Microsoft have a little think about where their going. Nintendo are after the market of people who don’t play games, i guess i don’t really play games maybe thats why i’m excited about it.

There are so many rumours going around the internet about the Wii at the moment, small things such as it maybe having memory in the remote wand and a speaker so that i dunno maybe you hear the tennis ball being hit, quite plausable and would be rather immersive!

Another slightly less plausable rumour is that it will include Augmented Reality.. the creator of the Wii has been saying that there will be one final suprise and it will be a big one!
Augmented reality is using a camera to put yourself in the game and show this on a screen, so you could be holding the Wii controller and the box will overlay a Light saber into your hand on the screen! WOW!! a cool little demonstration of this can be seen here

So that will be cool, but less plausable.

Someone from Time magazine has apparently been playing with his Wii today, quite a cool article and he sounds fairly impressed and a bit of a sneak preview into what it does before the big day.

Read what he thought here

The big day however is tommorrow. E3 started today, now i’ve never been that excited about E3. (basically a big techy gaming entertainment event, bit like the motor show for games companies) Apparently Sony waffled on about the PS3 for a little bit today from what i can gather and tommorrow seams to be taken up by Nintendo stuff all day!

So will it live up to the hype?
What will the suprise be?
Will any of the other console makers have a suprise to retaliate with?

Did i mention this thing is expected to cost £100-£150 thats a lot less than the PS3 is ever going to be and less than a 360.

Also for those shouting screenshots, i found these fun over realistic.. but if you can controll a game with your Wii wand won’t that be enough?

I WANT one :-/

Just been revising again today.. so not much to say.

However someone suggested i should use categories on my blog as sometimes i winge about my life, other times i ramble about tech stuff.. This is a ramble about tech stuff so i have lobbed it into a tech category, although i don’t want to fully seperate posts, i’ll just stick them in the category i think they fit in, or both!

So tech stuff i’ve been impressed by today!

Box.net
<-- click me!

I signed up to this a few days ago but hadnt' really used it.. i signed up after using http://goowy.com/ which is a kinda cool online OS with box file storage built in, although i’m still yet to see the usefullness of an online OS for me at the moment.

which is a kinda cool online OS with box file storage built in, although i’m still yet to see the usefullness of an online OS for me at the moment.Anyway back onto box.net basically the deal is

• 1Gb of storage
• Lots of file transfer
• A really cool Ajaxy interface
• Drag and drop support for uploading files

All for free, now thats fairly good in its own right for backing stuff up or just getting files from one place to another.
Ontop of that though you can share files with other people and they can either drop them directly into their “BOX” or download them… heres where it gets cool again though. Rather than downloading the file, if its an MP3 file they can just stream it directly from the web browser, if its a picture file they can just view all the pictures as a slideshow directly in their webbrowser.

Have a go… http://www.box.net/public/g3saqmxzpl

If you decide to signup use the link up there.. as if i get 5 people to sign up i get my account upgraded meaning more space

There also working on a Desktop Synchronisation program, which basically means it will backup a folder all the time for you.. genius really!

Now time to make the google search thing pay me and also add some adsense adverting into this, just to see how it goes