weblog September 2nd, 2008
With rising petrol prices, many people are looking towards smaller cars, hybrid cars or electric cars to cut costs and ease the burden on the environment. I say it’s too late. These are the vehicles you’ll need for the future:
When the ice caps have melted, your neighbourhood might be permanently flooded, so you’re going to need an amphibious car. This car can do 160km/h on land and 50km/h on water. It’s currently available for about $200,000. Also check out this amphibious quad bike for your semi-submerged country estate.
Should we be looking at a Waterworld scenario then unless you can grow gills, you’ll need one of these. The only downside is that it will be quite difficult to repopulate the planet in the back seat of this vehicle.
I wanted to recommend a flying car in this list but unfortunately none currently exist in any commercial form. The closest is Moller’s M400. It’s a sad indictment on the state of modern society that we don’t yet have flying cars.
On the other hand, if you’re living in the mountains, you’ll need something nimble to evade the hordes of refugees. While only a concept at the moment, I like the look of the Yamaha Tesseract. Just be careful though, because it might be a Decepticon in disguise.
And finally, if the apocalypse does come, you’ll need one of these. This multipurpose truck can safely carry survivors/fuel/food/cure past the zombies/bikers/mutants/apemen. A must for every home.
Posted by Andy Cocker to cars, five things | No Comments »
weblog August 28th, 2008
Oh alright. One more iPhone post, but only so as to try to collect all the tips I’ve seen around the web in one handy place. Let’s get right to it. A lot of them are typing tips, but there’s some others.
There’s some basic things about the keyboard that everyone should know, but I’ll say them just in case. Inside “Settings” > “General” > “Keyboard”, you’ll probably want to enable the “.” shortcut, so that you can get a full stop and a space just by pressing double-space at the end of a sentence. You’ll also want to enable caps lock, which I avoided for a while until I realised that it just enables double-tapping the shift key to move into caps lock. Generally speaking, if you’re using punctuation at the end of a sentence, pressing space will automatically return you to the letter keyboard, so don’t waste time switching back.
Speaking of punctuation: don’t bother typing your own apostrophes unless you really have to. By which I mean, the most common apostrophed words get auto-corrected. Type “dont” for “don’t”, “theyre” for “they’re”, etc, and the words will be automatically corrected for you. If you come up against a stinky word like “we’re”, whose apostrophe-less form also happens to be a perfectly sensible word in its own right, just repeat the last letter and type “weree” to get the phone to correct it appropriately.
If you hold down a letter for a bit, a pop-up will arrive with options for special versions of that letter, i.e. with accents and the like. This hasn’t come in handy yet, but its time will come…
It doesn’t come up much, but if you’re browsing a page which has a separate scrollable area within it, use two-fingered scrolling to scroll that area.
If you’re using your iPhone to play music, you can double-tap the home button while the screen’s locked to bring up mini iPhone controls. And if you’re NOT listening to music, but you were, then you can do the same and press play to start from wherever you left off. Presumably if you haven’t at all, it just shuffles your songs or something.
At time of writing, searching Google by actually going to google.com will give you nicely mobile-screen filling text, rather than the big spread out normal results. For some reason, using Google’s own actual searching app for the iPhone does not do this, and nor does searching through the Safari search bar. Makes me grumpy.
If I think of or find some more, I’ll add them here.
Posted by Tom Charman to iphone | 2 Comments »
weblog August 10th, 2008
One of my irritations with the iPhone, which I forgot to mention before, was with audio podcasts. On a normal iPod, if you play the first of a bunch of audio podcasts, at the end, it will continue on to the next, and so forth
On an iPhone however, it’ll just stop. This is a pain if you’ve got a whole boodle of Onion Radio News or triple j new music to get through.
The solution is easy: make a smart playlist in iTunes for tracks which both:
- Are part of your troublesome audio podcast — matching the artist is probably easiest. And,
- Have a play count of 0.
Sync this playlist to your iPhone and when you play it, there’ll be no irritating stoppages. It’s possible this only irritated me, but I thought I’d mention it on the off-chance.
Next time; I promise not to talk about iPhones. No, really.
Posted by Tom Charman to iphone, itunes | 1 Comment »
weblog August 9th, 2008
Well, we’re about a month into having an iPhone now. It’s time to do a spot of reviewing. After all this build-up, is the iPhone actually a good phone? Does it suck in places? Which places? First — the good stuff.
- It’s the first phone I’ve had which allows me to make my own ringtones, out of any audio file I have to hand. After years of never touching Garage Band, suddenly we’re best mates.
- It has 16 icons visible on the home screen. That’s 7 more than any phone I’ve used in the past. Result!
- The App Store. No wandering around the internet, finding dodgy looking programs and nervously sending them by bluetooth to my phone. Oh, the joy. In a related vein:
- 2 Across. The Age crosswords… on the train! 2 Across, by Eliza Block is $7.99 AU and worth every cent. There’s also the slightly more expensive Crosswords, which cunningly insists on showing you the keyboard at all times. This is probably good for geniuses, but as I spend most of my time with crosswords pondering, I prefer the 2 Across style. Crossword’s keyboard is also a squished-up tiny one, which makes noises when you type, even if you’ve told your phone not to do that. And also it’s ugly. I suspect most of my issues with Crosswords stem from it being a port from the Palm OS.
- It will auto-correct your words including accents. For example, the other day it corrected curacao to curaçao. Awesome. Well, awesome on some levels.
But there are downsides to the iPhone, too. I occasionally miss being able to hit a green button whenever I’m looking at something even vaguely about a contact in order to call them. I can’t copy and paste text of course. I’d settle for being able to insert the contents of my “Notes” into proper textareas while browsing. And what the hell is up with those notes anyway? Why don’t they sync with Mail’s notes? It’s not like they look and function EXACTLY THE SAME or anything. I know many have expressed these frustrations, but it doesn’t make them any less annoying. The only redeeming feature of the Notes app is that you can email them.
In other annoyances, the Contacts app — surely a simple sort of thing — quite often hangs after you launch it. Or rather, it did before iPhone OS 2.0.1 was released. Well played, Apple.
Having to wait for Apple to approve updates to software is occasionally frustrating, too, though from a user point of view, it’s easily solved by the developers not telling us about their awesome updates before that approval comes. When you actually update an app, it gets wrenched back to your first home screen, regardless of where you happened to have it filed away.
These are niggles though. My biggest beef with the iPhone, perhaps predictably, came not from Apple but from Optus. While the service had been excellent, my initial bill was unexpectedly $123 and not $66, as I had expected. It turned out that I had impressively managed to download 200mb of data in my first five days, and that those five were in Optus’s eyes, part of a pro-rated month, where my download limit was around 80mb. When I pointed out to the sales assistant that my first month was supposed to have unlimited data, he pointed out that in the terms of service, the “first month” didn’t start until two weeks into the contract. I pointed out that the person selling it to me had specifically told me otherwise, and he kindly refunded me — take note, hapless Optus customers.
Posted by Tom Charman to apple, iphone | 6 Comments »
weblog July 31st, 2008
Like condoms during the Olympics, Nintendo’s console is in great demand. This seems to be because the console is the cheapest of the current generation, rather than anything spectacular about the console. I was going to use this blog to complain about the Wii, specifically its name, the amount of shovelware on the console and waggle being the new button mashing, but I’ve decided to be more positive, so here are five things the Wii should be able to do:
Guns. The Wii has a controller that points at the screen. Light guns point at the screen. So why are there no decent games or light guns for the Wii? Part of the trouble is with the Wii remote’s odd design — the buttons are in the wrong place so a new peripheral is needed, but surely if Duck Hunt could be made for the NES, then a decent game can be made for the Wii. Seems like an easy way to sell a lot of games.
Swords. The Wii knows where the controller is pointing and how it moves so it could be used as a sword. I don’t mean like in Red Steel where there are three possible moves — I want my character in the game to do exactly as I do with the remote. I want the game to teach me actual sword fighting moves. And I want to use a lightsaber.
Autostart. If I want to play a game on my 360, I turn it on. It starts up, starts the game and logs in, all by itself. To play a game on the Wii, I have to press A for the safety warning, point the remote at the screen, press A to select what I want and then press A again to confirm that I didn’t retardedly select the wrong thing. Then I get told not whack anything with the remote and to use the safety grip and the wrist strap. It takes about half an hour just to weigh myself on the Wii Fit. Speaking of interface problems, it’d be nice to be able to use a classic controller on the menu screen, or have the weather and news already loaded with Connect24.
Accurate pointing. The Wii lacks a way to callibrate the remote, so there’s no way that the onscreen pointer will be pointing at the place you are pointing at. It’s a laugh to see people new to the Wii expect the Wii to be able to know what they’re actually pointing at.
Connectivity. I know after that after Nintendo’s constant fascination with connecting the gamecube and the gameboy, everyone’s sick of the idea, but given that my house is already full of DSs and Wiis and that no extra cables would be needed, it be pretty cool to be able to play games that use both, or send games to the DS that have been downloaded from the Wii, like Nintendo said they would do two years ago.
Posted by Andy Cocker to five things, wii | 1 Comment »
weblog July 15th, 2008
Move along.
Posted by Tom Charman to angel, iphone | 1 Comment »
weblog July 15th, 2008
Is there anything more shaming than standing in queue for a phone? Well, yes. But as I’ve never been caught in a Nazi-themed sex orgy, this might have been near the top of the scale for me.
Apparently, the Optus store in Southland was opening at 8.00 am. Australians are lazy, I thought, and so I turned up at 7.30. Disappointingly, there was a queue of about 20 people. Even more disappointingly, the staff soon came out to the queue to inform us that there were no black 16 gb iPhones available. Well, I thought, I’ll just order a black one. I can wait.
After an hour of this ‘waiting’ thing — which might not have taken so long if Optus’ ordering system hadn’t broken down twice — my resistance to white had considerably evaporated. Some bloke had shown off his white one, and of looked quote nice. I used to like white things… It doesn’t look too shabby… I’ll never see the back anyhow… It was just as I was starting to convince myself that I’d happily take the white one that one of the Optus staff came out to inform us that there were only four of them left. There were five people in front of me. Sadly I bemoaned that even with a deposit I wouldn’t manage to get a phone.
“I don’t have a deposit.”
As it turned out, almost NO ONE had a deposit, making my opening gambit of not immediately asking “Who’s got a deposit” when I lined up particularly galling. Luckily, I had a few other queue members with deposits on my side, and we formed an alliance of sorts to beat the people in front of us to the 16gb phones. It was at this point that I started to feel like I was on a particularly nerdy version of Survivor. “They’ve been asking about deposits all day,” lies one hapless competitor. I make a mental note to kill her with whichever app on the iPhone decapitates people and makes it look like an accident.
Our new, smaller queue is formed, and I try not to make eye contact with those we’ve left behind. Mercifully we’re soon allowed in, and I’m given my phone. I open up my old phone to get the SIM card out, and blow dust all over the helpful customer service girl. It’s how we say “thank you” on my planet.
It’s a good little iPhone, too. People whinge about the keyboard, but as someone who never got the hang of T9, I’m light years faster than I used to be. The browsing is nifty, except when websites make their crappy “mobile” versions of sites which don’t offer all the capabilities of the real site. The second I need to actually go somewhere interesting, the Maps will be awesome. And the Facebook app is nifty, as one expects from something made by Joe ‘Firebug’ Hewitt.
I finally have the One True Video iPod. All is right with the world.
Posted by Tom Charman to iphone | No Comments »
weblog June 15th, 2008
There’s a reason there’s not many updates around here at the moment, and it goes by the name of Grand Theft Auto IV. I’m finished, yet still not done.
I’m currently considering napalming the whole of Liberty City. The cost in human lives will surely be outweighed by the time I’ll save not running about killing all the pigeons.
Posted by Tom Charman to games, xbox 360 | 3 Comments »
weblog May 24th, 2008
I have many words of a Burnout: Paradise review sitting about on my hard drive, and yet I still don’t feel like I’ve actually said enough to truly call it a “review”. And so, from now on, I will blog about games, because I’m lazy and most certainly not dedicated enough to finish a game before anyone else is bored of it.
Residing in my DS at the moment is The World Ends With You, a crazy new game from the reliable folks at Square Enix. My favourite games for the DS which haven’t involved Mario or Phoenix Wright seem recently to be made by Square; they’ve got a real dedication to making DS games which truly take advantage of the platform.
World is a fun old time, and much of this is from the crazy combat (there’s a picture above). The touch screen of the DS has been used for several neat things in the past, but this could be my favourite. On the bottom screen it’s essentially combat-by-gesture; slash across your character to shoot in that direction, slash upwards to create a giant icicle, tap various enemies to create chain lightning, drag along the ground to set it on fire…
But people with eyes may have noticed that there’s also a top screen, and one has to fight on both of them. Splitting your attention between two screens makes for a frenetic experience, and I enjoy the combat, but at this stage I almost wish I were playing a game with just the bottom screen. Often my right hand ends up scribbling like a mad thing, and I can’t quite concentrate on either part of the battle completely. World is what it is, and what it is is awesome, but I hope to play a game one day with the gesture combat brought completely to the fore in a more relaxed fashion.
Ideally, this game will also made by Square Enix.
Posted by Tom Charman to games, Nintendo DS | No Comments »
weblog May 8th, 2008
Oh, bad Wii puns. It’s been too long.
I arrived home today to find that Andy had purchased a WiiFit. You may know these from their mind-bogglingly dull billboards, which appear to be taking the reliable marketing tactic of “oh, you so want a rectangular piece of white plastic.”
It turns out that they’re a lot more exciting than their unassuming exterior would have you believe. The platform is of course pressure sensitive and allows you to balance, perform yoga, do aerobics, and various other things even more exhausting than Wii Tennis.
By the end of my first session I was buggered, but I’ll be coming back because of the COMPETITION. Much like Brain Training on the DS, WiiFit keeps track of your progress and measures you against your friends. And I’m kicking serious arse; after only one day, I’ve already managed to be less fat than Andy due to the sneaky height dependency of the Body Mass Index.
I don’t know if families were starting to get sick of Wii Sports, but surely this can only solidify the console’s place amongst perfectly normal people who want to have fun without leaving the comfort of their homes or shooting imaginary people.
Posted by Tom Charman to games, wii | No Comments »
