Stupid phone

So that new set of phones I bought a while back… it stopped working.

So the handsets are fine, except that they are running out of power because the base stopped working. Yep, the rather necessary base part which charges the hand set and does all the important stuff like actually being hooked up to my modem, well that part died on the weekend for no apparent reason, which is rather annoying. I’ll go and buy a new one, because I don’t want to wait the time it takes to send the phones back to the manufacturer, wait for them to get to them, then repair or replace them, then send them to me. I kind of need a phone now, and I’d already given my old one away.

So anyway, back to searching telephones online. I suppose this is the only downside with not going through a company like BT who’d supply me with one, but at least I get better rates on everything with my non-phone supplying company. I really do like my UK ISP as the rates are very good compared to many ISPs in other countries. There’s lot of places for business broadband and ADSL lease lines these days, but I like the one I’ve got.

The digital dect cordless phones look alright, but I’ll be reading a lot of user reviews on tech sites before I choose, to find one that’s not going to break down.

I’m always very thankful at this point that at least if I have to shop for new phone, I can check out online reviews and such before I do go and buy one. I don’t mind shopping for tech in person, but it’s much better to go armed with information. I wonder if there’s poor reviews for the phones I bought or if they are merely an exception to the general quality of the phones, because I really thought they were alright…

Looking back through gaming – 00′s

The final chapter in the fourty year history of gaming so far… what treasures await us in the 00′s?

Well right off the bat you’ve got the release of the Playstation 2 in 2000. This was a huge deal, sold really well, and made DVDs more accessible than ever before for your average household, as the price was better than pretty much any good DVD player out at the time. ’01 saw the release of both the GameCubeand the Xbox, with Xbox Live launching a year later. In the next few years there were major buy-outs and take over bids, with Microsoft buying Rare, and EA trying to buy out Ubisoft.

The seventh generation of gaming consoles was birthed with the release of the Xbox 360 in ’05 whilst the Wii and Playstation 3 launched about a year later. The next two years saw dominance by Wii over the gaming market, outselling their rival consoles, but it seems apparent to me that that’s largely due to the reduced price of console and games from Nintendo because of it’s lesser technology.

IGN had the view point that the 00′s made the gaming industry, but it really seems to me that that had already happened in the 90′s, a view which many gamers agree with. The consoles in this seventh generation all seemed to have big issues, whereas the previous generation of the 90′s seemed to have less issues in spite of their lesser capabilities.

So, wrapping up my review of gamer history… It’s amazing to think that we’ve got high definition, motion sensors, and online capabilities, when we came from code being developed on mainframes the size of a room and 8-bit cartridges. I think that gaming is slowly finding it’s footing with entertainment mediums like film and television, and will continue to do so. I’m also hoping that with the visuals of games becoming more and more advanced, so too with story lines and plots development. I think the only thing lacking in gaming is high quality writing on a consistent basis.

Looking back through gaming – 90′s

We made it through the 80′s and now we’re looking at the 90′s.

The 90′s is an era of growing up in my mind, as that was what I was doing throughout that decade, and so was gaming. At the dawn of the 90′s, gamers were still using 8-bit games with 16-bit pixels. Those graphics aren’t completely terrible, heck, I’d play Legend of Zelda right now if I could find an emulator that didn’t make a very annoying sound every time I moved Link. However the 90′s saw an amazing transition from the NES era of gaming through to the Nintendo 64, the Playstation, and SEGA’s Dreamcast. The 90′s ushered gamers from the cartridge era into the compact disc, and all the data that could be stored on it!

In ’90 and ’91 Super Mario Bros. 3 and Legend of Zelda: Link to the Past came out on the SNES respectively, two games which made the console what it was in my mind. Those are still games that I’d happily play today, though I may get bored after a short while and go play something else, but that’s largely because I’ve played both those games so much in the past.

’95 saw the very first E3 in LA, which has helped enormously to establish gaming as a separate entity from ‘electronics’ at large. ’95 was also the year which saw the Playstation hit North America, the very first gaming console to use CDs instead of cartridges. The next year the Nintendo 64 shipped with Super Mario 64, one of the best games of all time and a pure joy for gamers to try out with a brand new console. The Playstation was the first console to employ both the analogue and digital controls, however it’s widely acknowledged that Nintendo implemented it better with a more comfortable controller. I’m always amazed that Sony still uses the same damn controller, considering it’s not particularly comfortable.

In ’98 Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time shipped, much to my happiness. That was a wonderful game, and also in the same year Half Life shipped for the PC, another fantastic game.

Whilst the debate still rages – mostly by idiots if you ask me – as to the validity of games as a worthy entertainment medium, and not something that will ‘make the children violent’ the 90′s was when this debate was most fierce. I think because there wasn’t the evidence that we have now that there’s no correlation, just a whole bunch of overreacting ninnies. However it was also the decade where gaming really did establish itself as more than ‘toys for children’, so it’s a very interesting decade in gaming.

Oh, and Superman 64 was the worst game of the entire decade.

Looking back through gaming – 1980′s

Ahh the 80′s, I remember you fondly. Being a child of the early 80′s it holds a special place in my heart.

The 80′s were a very mixed bag for the gaming industry. From the boom of the 70′s, the very beginning of the 80′s seemed set for gaming to remain a huge phenomenon. Pac-Man and Donkey Kong are remembered very fondly today, and were gaming sensations, and the very first time we saw Mario!

However, in ’83 and ’84 the gaming industry in the US blew itself to pieces, because there were so many poor quality games being put out for too many different consoles that gamers just gave in and stopped buying. This was before there were serious hardcore gamers like there are today, and also before there was the kind of information or access to information that we have today. There wasn’t a dozen sites on the net to tell you what to expect with a game, or three different magazines for each console and the PC waiting near the supermarket check out to give you that same info. No, this was when gamers had to figure it out for themselves, mostly.

So, what happened to turn gaming ’round? NINTENDO!!! The Japanese company Nintendo took a chance in ’85 and shipped the Nintendo Entertainment System – NES – to America with the first Super Mario Bros., and behold, the gaming industry took off again! Two years later saw the very first emergence of Link and Zelda, one of my all time favourite game series.

In ’88 SEGA released the Master System, which whilst being pretty groovy and actually being more powerful than the NES, but even with a few really good games, it couldn’t compete with the runaway success of Nintendo’s console and handheld.

I wasn’t aware of it at the time, but I’ve just read about Atari’s Swordquest contest, and I have to say, it would be pretty awesome to see something like that run today!

Blizzard helps law enforcement

It was a bit of a surprise to me, but an interesting story nonetheless!

So, I’ll give a brief run down of what is in this news story here that I found via a link on the Penny Arcade news section. Basically, there was once a little drug dealer from America, who was arrested on dealing many types of drugs. This little drug dealer decided that, when the arrest warrant went out for him in 2007, he’d rather not go to court and maybe prison, so decided to skip the country.

This little drug dealer had had friends in his home town, somewhere in Howard County, and he had told them that he liked to play WoW. When the sheriff from that good ol’ county started asking those friends about the little drug dealer, they informed him of his predilection for that stupid game, well, they thought why not send a missive from the king – read, a subpoena – to the caretakers of the land of Warcraft. The sheriff waited and waited, for three or four months, before a wad of scrolls was sent back to him. A package of information about that little drug dealer, what his billing address was, his favourite server, and his character’s names. Funnily enough, he played as a Shaman, not terribly dissimilar from is apothecarish tendencies in real life.

Okay now I’ll drop that pathetically fractured story-teller style and deal with the rest of it. So, after they got all this information from Blizzard, sheriffs at the Howard County used the information to figure out that their quarry had gone to Canada and then enlisted the aid of the Canadian Mounted Police, who picked up the dealer and shipped him back to the states.

This is something that’s not been done before, but it’s very interesting. Personally, I think that everything that was done was completely above board, completely reasonable, and if some scum bag drug dealer get to go to prison as a result, then booyah!

Controlling games… with my mind?

A Penny Arcade a few days back got me looking at a new and very interesting piece of technology.

Okay, okay, so the whole thing seems like a bit of a pie-in-the-sky pipe-dream, but it’s interesting as a future possibility. Basically, a company called Emotiv has created something called the EPOC, which is a headset with sensors that pick up facial movements, emotions, and thoughts, and allows you to control certain applications without the use of a keyboard or mouse. Pretty impressive, eh? They’ve got their own software to help you use the EPOC in lieu of a keyboard, by translating movements or thoughts into certain key-commands or combinations.

Basically, this seems like a very expensive, and largely useless, toy. It’s hard to imagine this being used for gaming, or even general computer use. Whilst it would be awesome to have certain abilities in games triggered by thought, eliminating issues like not enough hot-bar space – yes I’m referring to you, Dragon Age – this gadget seems to… how do I put this… be sold as a lot more than it really is.

During one of the demos, they show that emotion can effect colour and music… I’m sorry, but if I’m upset by my game, frustrated at a particularly difficult encounter for instance, the last bloody thing I want is my gamma brought so far down that not only am I fighting for my life, I’m fighting to see. Of course, this would make me angry, which would probably cause a grand crescendo in the music, just the thing a frustrated, gamma blinded, angry gamer needs! See my dripping sarcasm there? That’s inhibited by my choice to keep this blog profanity free; keep that in mind.

Another demo showed someone using blinks and smiles set up to turn a little side-module, a laser. What if you just wanted to blink, or something made you smile? This who apparatus seems fraught with issue after issue, and apart from a few neat tricks, seems completely useless, and most assuredly not worth the US$299 that it’s retailing at, though of course you have to buy online from the Emotiv sight, too.

Damn e-mail accounts

Goodness! So annoying! I get a fair load of steaming piles of spam pretty often, and I can handle that, but what really drives me up the wall is when I can’t get emails I actually asked for!

I got a comment on my blog from someone who said they saw the site on Technorati, so I went over and decided to join up – looks like an awesome site, actually! – and ‘claim’ my blog. All was going well, save having to find a user name took a few tries, until it got to verification time. There was a little message at this point saying if you didn’t get the message, check this FAQ. Over I went, thinking smugly that I was just filling in time, that my email account wasn’t one of those frustrating ones which wouldn’t let this process occur, nooooo, of course not!

I have a Hotmail account that I use for all non-work stuff. The company I work for have a very strict policy about non-work related emails, it’s insane. Anyway, because I’ve had this Hotmail account for about eight, nearly nine, years, I don’t much fancy using anything else. Seems fair enough, right? Anyone notice how the free Hotmail accounts stopped giving you the option to ‘block’ some time ago? Well, I get a heck of a lot of spam and phishing scam emails as a result, and I can deal with that, at least they still go to the Junk box.

But this verification email is just gone, lost, never to be seen in my Inbox, and I’m really annoyed. I wanted to join this site, but now the chances of that seem rather diminished. All I can hope is that some nice person will read this, and post me the email address the verification link comes from, so I can add it in Hotmail as a contact, and then I’ll get the email! So that’s still really annoying, but nice to know people are reading my blog!

Ahhh, technology

Some days I am more aware than others of how much we rely on, and utilise for enjoyment, technology.

For instance, I was just offered a free trial of a new phone system, because I work from home and have a very awesome broadband connection. I hear of so many people still using ADSL or some even using dial up!? But today I’m really aware just how much I use my net connection, for regular news, or tech news, which is cool, because it’s often not covered on normal sites in much detail. Try this site here for broadband and tech news. I hate using the phone, so email is essential for me, and of course I have to have a great connection for gaming, not to mention for actual work, too. Though I’m not working today, oh no, today I’m catching up on blogging!

I’ve been having trouble with my blog all week. It took me four days to figure out that one of my WordPress files were corrupted, and then I had to completely reload the software onto my PC! I kept up my blogging, I just wasn’t posting them, so don’t be surprised to see a week’s worth of blog posts go up today!

It was very nice to be able to get my blog back up and running, especially because I’ve been so busy with work that I really didn’t have time to do much in the way of figuring out what was actually wrong. It’s always like that, though, you’ve never got much time to fix things, which is probably why my methods are precise… I’ve had time to think about exactly the best way to troubleshoot, and fix the issue before I waste a lot of time on it.

Anyway, enough of that. I was looking at the PlayStation Network, and for those who want to use the online multiplayer function, you pretty much have to have some form of headset or the like. The nifty thing with the PS3 is that it can be a Bluetooth one, which is pretty cool… then I thought about actually playing with other people, and having to listen to them, and I shook myself out of my silliness.

Why so difficult?

There are things that just don’t need to be as complicated as they are…

For a start, why is it so annoyingly fiddly to get HDTV at the moment? Is it just my system, my set top box, or are other people finding their signal isn’t consistent? It’s HDTV, it’s supposed to be stable, strong, consistent, dammit! My better judgement is telling me that it is something to do with my set-top box, and I really don’t want it to be, but the local technology forums aren’t reporting anything…

It’s so frustrating when things don’t work the way they are supposed to… It reminds me of when I was a teenager, around 17 I think, I was still living with my parents, and they’d taken me into the city – an hours drive from their home – to pick up a PlayStation game. It was one of those ones that came on multiple discs, it was Final Fantasy VIII. When I got up to disc two, I found that they had sold me a scratched disc. This was frustrating enough, but after a phone call to the store where I had bought it, I was somewhat relieved to know they would swap it for another disc with no trouble, I just had to get my parents to drive me into the city again.

Okay so they did, and we picked up the disc, and came home. This was a two hour journey, mind you. So I put the disc in the PlayStation… same issue… not just the same issue, it was the same disc! They had given me the same disc back by mistake… so then I had to convince my parents to make the two hour drive into the city again, purely for my benefit. Thankfully they complied the next day, with little attitude towards me, which was nice.

Third time turned out to be the charm, and finally I had a working copy of Final Fantasy VIII. Anyway, what’s going on with my set-top box reminds me of that.

Want it all!

In my last post I was linking to some tech sites, and that got me reacquainted with some of my favourites form GizmoBlog, which I thought I would share.

I like USB gadgets, because they are entertaining, don’t require a lot of mess, and are often very quirky and fun. Here are a few stand outs from the above mentioned site. First up is the USB Chameleon, which I don’t like, exactly, but is sort of… well it’s interesting! Next up is something called a USB Moo Moo. This is a very cute little gadget which you hook up and install onto your computer with a small amount of software, and you can pat this little plastic cow to make it moo, which sends a message to the corresponding cow – this is why it is cute – which is supposed to be hooked up on the computer of a SO or spouse. Oh that’s… odd but cute.

Now I move onto the totally miscellaneous. I, like many British, enjoy a hot cup of tea. I don’t enjoy, however, is misjudging how long that tea cup has been sitting on your desk, only to take a big gulp and find that it is either scaldingly hot still, or disgustingly cold. This cup here, the On/Off cup, would completely eradicate such incidents! I like groovy things to put on my desk, like the Newton’s Cradle and such, so this little Levitron AG Anti-Gravity Globe would be just perfect! It’s always handy to have a globe close by, for some reason, so this would be just nifty. Now, as a gamer soon to have a PS3, and for some reason console playing often leads to feeling the need to move off the comfortable sofa and sit on the uncomfortable floor, I would love to have one of these Lazy Geek’s Cushions.

Now this is just a mock up of an idea, but what an interesting idea! A Tattoo that responds to the DNA of the wearer. Hmm. I’m not into tattoos, personally, but this is still interesting. On a completely different note, my SO loves to read in bed, but I don’t, and I need darkness to be able to sleep. So I’d love to get her one of these so she can still read, a LightWedge Mini, just the perfect thing for reading in bed!