So, it's the fourth. Yay! Blah, blah, tea in the harbor, blah, blah we can make pretty explosions, yadda, yadda! What's really important here? Out of nowhere my PSP and my PS3 have both been getting regular play time all of a sudden. WTF?

On the PS3 I've been playing Super Stardust. This is a solid little arcade shooter. I might go so far as to say I like it better than Geometry Wars. At the very least, it has more varied gameplay than Geometry Wars. The PS3 has racked up a reasonable stack of games that aren't epic, you aren't going to buy a PS3 to play Super Stardust, but if you HAVE bought a PS3 it is easily worth $8.

On the PSP I've rented a game called Crush. Crush is somewhere between a platformer and a puzzle game. The main gimmick is that the world is in 3d and you can rotate the camera orthographically, so you can see any of the four side views of the world, or up for the top-down view. At any time you can hit the left shoulder button and "crush" the world into 2D. When that happens lines that were decorative in 3d become platforms you can run on, but a solid block that you could jump on before becomes an impassable wall. So you rotate the camera around and flip things about in order to progress through. Things like you might flip into top-down, crush into a flat plane, and walk two steps and uncrush. Those two steps can traverse what was an impassable cliff in 3d, and when you uncrush you're now at the top of the cliff. It's pretty ingenious - it's basically a brand-new puzzle mechanic. I find that I play a level and then turn it off again, but it's certainly worth checking out.

technorati tags:PSP, PS3, Crush, SuperStardust, Gaming

Blogged with Flock

(sigh) I like Wikipedia. It's useful. At the same time I'm pretty sure it's passed an event horizon it will never recover from - the stories about stupidity in editing are legion. Ironically enough Wikipedia itself preserves them all, so you can at least see how their policies have made it an insular little playground more concerns with rules than with truth. And the thing that was originally charming about Wikipedia was that it had pages of stuff on webcomics and Klingons and whatnot. I never wanted Wikipedia to become stuffy Brittanica - we can use Brittanica for that.

This rant is triggered by the flamewar here. In short John Scalzi tried to edit the page on Fred Saberhagen to note his death, and some officious twit explained that the sheer fact of his death could not be noted until an acceptable reference was generated. Harlan Ellison was specifically defined as "not a reliable source by any definition" and the SFWA website was questioned as being reliable. The fracas went on until Locus put up an announcement - very likely informed by Harlan Ellison, but apparently it doesn't matter "how the sausage got made".

Sheesh.

Somebody needs to take the spirit of Wikipedia - a huge open source repository of information to be taken with a grain of salt - and clone it. Because Wikipedia is someday going to consist of locked set of pages about politics and the infamously huge collection of entries on Pokemon.

technorati tags:Wikipedia, stupidity, JohnScalzi, FredSaberhagen

Blogged with Flock

I have a cool little OS X app I use that I've never talked about. It's called Nocturne, and it is freeware from BlackTree, makers of QuickSilver A.K.A. the best OS X application EVER. Nocturne is nowhere near that useful, but it is quite nifty. I think I originally saw it at 43folders, but in a nutshell what it does is make your screen monochrome and white text on black backgrounds. That doesn't sound that exciting, but I use it when I take my laptop outside. Today was a day where it didn't quite get hot enough to turn on the air conditioning but it was close. Come say 5, 6 PM it was hot enough in my office to be uncomfortable, but it's ridiculous to turn on the air then. So I grabbed the Powerbook and headed for the back yard. In the evening we get a consistent breeze/wind that falls somewhere between "pleasant" and "uncomfortably strong" depending on your mood and temperature. But it's still too bright for my screen to hold its own at 5 PM in the summer. (As I write this at 8:23 PM I've shut off Nocturne but I used it for a couple of hours before turning it off.) Nocturne cranks up the contrast just enough to make the Powerbook usable in direct sunlight.

If you've ever tried to use a Mac laptop in bright sunlight and found it difficult to see, definitely give Nocturne a try. There is a magic keystroke you can hit to do something similar (see the 43folders link for it), but it's not something I'd ever memorize. Nocturne is an app I can run, and then just quit when I want the effect to go away.

technorati tags:Nocturne, OSX, BlackTree, screen, contrast

Blogged with Flock

It's a close call, but here we are post-iPhone-launch and I still don't want one. Well, I don't want one enough to blow $500 on it. Of course, if my Treo 600 had held out until now we'd be having a different discussion, but it didn't and I had to replace it a few months ago. Which involved two years of handcuffs to Sprint. According to Apple's site right now I could wake up tomorrow and go to any Apple store in California and buy one, but that isn't going to happen. I've watched the web videos, I've read the web frenzies and my final reaction is meh. See here's the thing - I don't really use a phone that much. And it may be the most fantastic phone browser on the planet, but it's not better than my Powerbook, except in obscure mobile circumstances that just don't happen to me very often. I want to play with the UI sure, but $500 worth? No. Video playback? I've never watched a single movie on my PSP, and I'm not going to start buying 480p from iTunes anytime soon. iPod replacement? Well . . . I have two iPods. My trusty 40gb "3rd generation" iPod which holds all my music and a smaller iPod Nano that I use pretty much just for podcasts. (This is a stupid point and it's because Apple never updated the 3G software to bookmark podcasts properly. I find that fairly annoying, since it's obviously a simple thing. But I've already crossed that hurdle, so leave that behind.)

The iPhone could replace my Nano, but my Nano doesn't need replacing. It can't replace my big iPod because the 40 Gig drive is mostly full and I've been debating upgrading my "base encoding" beyond 128 Kbps AAC. If I was going to replace my "big" iPod I'd have to replace it with a bigger iPod.

So I'm the user that is holding out for for that UI and the touchscreen stuck on a hard drive. Make something the size as a full iPod but with the multi-touch screen? Oh yes please. I don't really care whether it has a cell or Wi-Fi radio, that's not what I want in that size device. But as it is? I can wait for version 2.0. At least until they provide a real programming interface ("web apps!" <snort>) and there's a version of OmniFocus for the iPhone. That might bother me as well.

And I haven't even mentioned how much I disliked Cingular when I had them. From what I understand rebranding the network AT&T hasn't improved the quality in the Bay Area. Sprint isn't as good as Verizon was back in the day, but it's better than Cingular was circa 2004. Here's hoping that by iPhone 2.0 Apple supports more carriers.

technorati tags:iPhone, Kool-Aid, phones, hype

Blogged with Flock