Sandeberg Rising

Google to get into social bookmarking?: “For anyone who hasn’t tried social bookmarking, it is most easily described as the bookmark capability built into your browser, cross-bred with social networking sites like MySpace or Friendster. A logical comparison could also be made to the user lists found on sites like Amazon, i.e. ‘my list of favorite Dr. Who DVDs,’ or ‘my list of quality Kitchen Aid blender accessories.’”

Personally, I’ve been playing with del.icio.us recently, the mosty well-known social-bookmarking site and been finding it very useful, especially as I’m now using three or four different devices to access the internet. Also, it allows me better tools for research than Google. Search terms in Google will bring up a lot of dross, ancient forum entries and a lot of SEO sites. Looking for other people’s tagged sites is a lot more reliable.

Basically, it’s Flickr for your links and it’s even owned by Yahoo as well. Yahoo would be wise to start merging some of it’s offerings.

So it makes sense for Google to get involved, but it’s hard to see how it can improve on existing models like it did for email.

One new rival on the social bookmarking scene is Ma.gnolia (are you spotting the naming trend?) It’s a newcomer and hence suffers from not many people using it, but it’s key selling point is that when you tag a site, the server stores a snapshot of the page, so you never have to worry about pages vanishing with your reference materials.

Personally, I’m happy to stick with del.icio.us for now. I’ve only just remembered the ridiculous URL…

BBC NEWS Technology Microsoft unveils Vista editions: “Microsoft is planning six versions of the next incarnation of its Windows operating system.

Microsoft said the six versions were designed to match the demands different users have for its software. No details have been given about the pricing of the separate versions.
The six versions are:
Vista Business
Vista Enterprise
Vista Home Basic
Vista Home Premium
Vista Ultimate
Vista Starter “

Well, it looks like if you want a version of Vista Home that does anything of any use, you’ll want the Home Premium to get the functionality of XP Home. To get the full functionality of XP Professional, you’ll need Vista Ultimate; Their most expensive version of course. XP Professional cost about £200 but no figures have been released for Vista pricing.

technorati tags: windows, vista

So, this summer Penny is going to three different concerts. She’s going to see the Foo Fighters, the Chillis and Radiohead. I’m very happy for her, but I was somewhat grumbley since there was nothing that I was desperate to see or could make time for.

Then I saw it in this morning’s Metro. The O2 Wireless Festival 2006:

Friday: Massive Attack and DJ Shadow
Saturday: Zero 7 (which even makes up for James Blunt being there)
Sunday: Depeche Mode, Goldfrapp and Bauhaus

Genius!

Then I catch the dates, and it’s the 23rd to the 25th of June.
I’m in Germany. Aaargh!

There’s no justice in the world.

Update: There might be a way around this: Go to see Goldfrapp at the end of March and then just go to the Friday afternoon/evening part of the O2 festival to see Massive Attack and DJ Shadow…
It’s a crazy idea, but it might just work! Now just to check whether or not I’m booking one lot of tickets or two…

Update 2: Goldfrapp tickets booked, and just waiting to see if Alex & Alison are joining me for Massive Attack. Nice!

[Updated 23/02/06 14:34 after Alex updated me a little]
[Updated 27/02/06 15:30 after a weekend of playing with new features]
[Updated 15/02/06 13:00 with minor updates]
[Updated 30/03/06 10:33 with updates from the Game Developers Conference]
[Updated 10/04/06 10:30 with info on loading playlists from Itunes]

So, for my 30th birthday I received by Sony PSP. It was much desired before the day and greeted with much joy, but how does it measure up in the real world context of actual use? Has it become a very well designed paperweight, packed with electronics never used? Let’s break it down:

Games

It’s an obvious way to start, since games are what people buy a PSP for; And I certainly do play games on it.
Games for the PSP can be quite expensive at £35 a pop. Sure, that’s cheaper than a PS2 game, but still about the price of a new PC game. So for this reason I have only two games so far. These are:

Star Wars Battlefront 2: A good fun game that got mixed reviews. Due to having only one analogue joystick, it takes a while to get used to control system of this FPS, especially for console players. Personally though, once I got used to the system, it was great fun. Waiting for a train? Jump into SWBF2 and kill some ewoks, gungans or jawas. Very satisfying!

Lumines: Ask anyone, this is the must-have game of the PSP; A ridiculously simple Tetris-like puzzle game, where the better you are, the more backgrounds, skins and music you unlock. Yes, I know this sounds like it’s of limited entertainment value, but you’d be amazed, it really does suck you in. Very addictive indeed.

Prince of Persia: This is a full 100% port from the PS2 version with no differences at all. Sadly, the smallness of the screen and the resolution limitations mean that it’s sometimes hard to distinguish features of the background. Crucial for solving some puzzles.

Lemmings: What can I say… It’s cute, it’s clever, it’s simple, it can be pleasantly easy or brain-curdlingly hard and apart from the slight increase in difficulty in selecting the little green-haired suicide artists, this game confirms my nostalgia to be entirely justified. Lemmings rocks!

Other games I’m considering for the future:

• Ridge Racer: It really looks like racing games have been the easiest first batch converts to the PSP and they look great. This looks like one of the best.
• Battle Chess: I know, I’m sad, but I can’t help it.
• Untold Legends 2 – The Warrior’s Code: A Diablo-style hack-n-slash RPG

In short, yes, games are good on the PSP. There aren’t a gigantic pile of games out there and most are dodgy PS2 converts, but the console has only been out a for a limited amount of time and things are getting better.

Alex’s comment: I’m personally looking forward to Outrun 2006 at the end of March at the moment, along with Every Extend Extra (the new music/shooting game by the Lumines guys).

Movies

I’ll begin by discussing UMD movies. It depends on how old\popular the movie is, but UMD movies will cost around £15 +/-. As you can imagine, this is rather a rip-off, when you consider how cheaply you can get DVDs these days and paying £25 total to get the movie in both formats is bobbins. What about imports I hear you ask? No go I’m afraid. We might all have multi-region DVD players, but there’s no such thing as a multi-region UMD player and all UMD movies are region-encoded. So while there are some okay movies out there to buy for your PSP, it’s an expensive and somewhat frustrating experience. Although, I quite like the music video\concert UMDs, but there are very few of those. (Apart from Depeche Mode, bizarrely, who have about three out. Other than that you’ve got Goldfrapp (which I have), Iron Maiden, Kylie and Coldplay. That’s it).

So, is the PS doomed as a movie playing device? Well, many of us have respectable DVD collections, but DVDs are encrypted and it’s illegal to decrypt them (for example by using the DeCSS decrypter). But if, by some terrible accident, your DVDs randomly decrypted themselves (what? It could happen!) then you could use the 3GP_Converter software to convert the resultant VOB file directly to PSP sized and formatted MP4 video. End result? 7Gb of Fight Club DVD would become 250Mb of PSP viewable movie. Nice! Suddenly flights, hotel stays and train journeys are no great chore. In fact I wish they’d last longer so I could watch more movies!

(Did I ever mention how very happy I am that my PSP came with a 1Gb Memory Stick? No? Well I should. Because I am)

Note: When transferring movies to the PSP they must be put in the directory \MP_ROOT\100MNV01 and must be numbered rather than neatly named. However, 3GP Converter will do the renaming for you. And if the movie file had a sensible name to begin with, the title is retained when viewed in the PSP.

Music

So the PSP plays MP3s. In fact, if you manage to connect to the internet (see below) you can even enable WMA access too (but I can’t tell you how frustrating it was, realising that I had to go online to agree to an EULA just to play WMAs). But while I use my PSP to listen to music (or even audiobooks) a lot, it’s because I always have the device with me, rather than because it’s particularly good at it. No playlists, no way of seeing what the next track will be, no visualisations, no way to control the order of play (other than random). It does work, but it needs some refinement. But, as I said, I use it to listen to music anyway.
I may even consider audioblogs (podcasts) at some point.

Update: Alex points out that you can do podcasts now with the current firmware, but unfortunately it’s streaming only. Not much use when you’re on the Underground or in an aeroplane… However, this is alledgedly going to change with the upgrade to the 3.0 firmware in March.

(Quick unrelated aside: I like visualisations with my music; they’re pretty. But beyond that, I found out a few years ago, at a house warming party, that a device playing mellow music and visualisations was the ultimate stoner trap. They were gathered around, their reverent silence only occasionaly broken with an awe-struck “Wooahhh”. One day the police will use this to arrest stoners in their hordes, mark my words.)

Update: Using Itunes with your PSP
I recently started using Itunes instead of Windows Media Player and I must say I like it a lot. Especially since I learnt how easy it was to transfer music from playlists to the PSP, which can’t be done fro WMP.
If you make your playlist (I use the party shuffle) and select the files you want to copy to your non-ipod player, right click and select “copy”. Open a folder where you would like to copy your mp3s to, and “paste” in that folder. The files will copy over. Easy as pie.
I’ve yet to experiment with AAC format (without DRM) and also I heard on the grapevine that it was possible to con Itunes that your PSP is actually an Ipod Shuffle. Watch this space!

Photos

A functionality I never thought I’d use, but it turns out I quite like having selected, treasured photos with me. (No, not porn) Furthermore, I take a screenshot of important timetables, my diary etc on there too, so I never have to worry about losing softcopy of my schedule.

Update: If you want to have perfectly sized images that fit on the PSP screen without scaling, e.g. for wallpaper, the resolution needs to be 480 x 272.

It’s a shame that the PSP currently won’t read TXT, PDF or RTF files, but in the meantime there is a workaround. The text files can be converted using JpegBook to images of the right size, which can then be read quite comfortably on the PSP. I haven’t tried this product yet, but it seems to be simpler than some of the workarounds I’ve been using. Best combined with files from something like the Gutenberg Project, or your own documents.

Update: I’ve tried Jpegbook now, as well as it’s closest rival, Paperless Printer. Both are somewhat flawed, but JpegBook less so. PP has the advantage that you can “print” from any application, so images are embedded. However, the text area cannot be shrunk to PSP size, so you have to scroll around. Annoying.
JB is only for converting TXT files to JPG which it does admirably and of the correct size. The downside is that sometimes it doesn’t wordwrap properly if you have more than 72 characters per line.

Further update: Can’t find the free ebook you’re looking for on the Gutenberg project? Well, the US copyright laws are quite tight in terms of what can be released into the public domain, so the Project Gutenberg of Australia is a very good bet for works by Shaw, Orwell and other authors of this century who were published after 1926.

Internet

You need to get online with your PSP. Without a net connection, firmware upgrades are awkward, you can’t enable WMA playback (mutter, grumble, grrr) and you lose out on a chunk of functionality of your device. How to get online? There are three options:

• Have a wireless network at home
• Wander the streets, periodically hitting ‘Scan for wireless network’ and hoping for some muppet with an unsecured wireless network (your odds are better in large towns. In Aldershot I think they’re still not sure of electricity, nevermind wireless networks, whether secured or not)
• Pay for either a one-off voucher or a subscription to someone like BT Openzone (which can be expensive unless you use it a lot and the wifi hotspots are pretty few and far between in Surrey, but London is fine)

• Mobile Gmail – Like Gmail, but optimised for the mobile browser. Very useful indeed. Also good to use for blogging, as the input window of Blogger won’t remember what you ‘typed’ if you lose wifi connection, while Gmail has an autosave.
• Mobile Bloglines – Do you read blogs? The news? Webcomics? Subscribe to all their rss feeds and then read the updates all on one page. Invaluable.
• Del.icio.us – A social bookmarking and bookmark-tagging site. Keep all your bookmarks online, share them (across people and, more importantly, machines) and tag them like a Flickr pic. I have a tag link set up just for mobile links which I have verified work on the PSP.
• AimOnPSP – Use the AOL instant messenger from a PSP enhanced webpage. This works, but nobody I know uses AIM. How annoying.
• BBC News – Works well as is on the PSP, but your browser is best set to small fonts and Just Fit screen size.

• Writely – Online wordprocessor with online storage. Especially useful as the PSP cannot save non-graphical files to the memory stick. Failed! Could not even log in with PSP browser.
• Irows – Online spreadsheet with online storage. Especially useful as the PSP cannot save non-graphical files to the memory stick. Failed! Could log in, but not access spreadsheets with PSP browser.
• CalendarHub – Online calendar. Failed! Links to log in or edit calendar entries fail. However, if you use CalendarHub from a different computer and want to view your address entries, you need to use this login page.

Homebrew

No, not a kind of beer! There are a huge number of unofficial apps, games, emulators and whatnot out there. Unfortunately the vast majority require an ancient firmware update that is no longer available and you can’t downgrade. I hear that there is now a hack to make hombrew software work with the newest firmware version, but to be honest there’s nothing out there fantastic enough for me to take the risk of turning my PSP into a brick. (And yes, there is a trojan that will do this. 100% unrecoverable)

Alex’s comment: Homebrew: will work on all PSPs now with the new loader that’s just come out (Brown Ale, amusingly enough) but you need a copy of GTA to be able to use it.
Update: There are mutterings that Sony will unlock the PSP to allow 3rd party code to run on it, but this is a rumour I, for one, intend to take with a big pinch of salt.

Future enhancements

There’s a few official enhancements due out sometime in the future:

• GPS – Sounds somewhat useless, but could have it’s value. It depends how expensive and large it is. Game manufacturers have the opportunity to make very intriguing location based games. Real life monopoly? A London-location based who-dunnit?
• Keyboard – Since they’re going to be releasing this, I think I can assume that they’ll be adding a document editor too. Otherwise it’s of low value. Update: Logic3 have cancelled their keyboard project, citing difficulties in getting API information from Sony. However it looks like Sony will develop their own.
• Access to Sony Connect – Joy, another opportunity to buy music and video that you can’t use on any other device or format at an unrealistic price. You can buy individual episodes of Lost or 24, but at $1.50 each, you could buy the DVD box set at the same total price. £7.99 for a whole album that I can’t play on my PC or stereo? I’d be better off buying it on Amazon. Alex’s comment: Sony Connect is going to be relaunched next month apparently, along with the 3.0 firmware. Rumour has it that you’ll be able to download game demos, a bit like on Xbox Live Arcade on 360, which will be good if it’s true. Update: Sony have confirmed that PS One games will be available for purchase and download from Connect for playing on the PSP. Update from the GDC: Winter.. around October, we’ll introduce a further key innovation: the ability to download and run software directly from the Memory Stick. UMD will continue, but we believe that we can do true e-distribution of content straight to the machine without the need for a disc. Content server – to memory stick – to PSP. This will be augmented by having the PSone content available through an archive server. We’ll have an emulator, and you will have access to the entire PSone library.
• A PSP version of the Eyetoy, in effect a webcam for the PSP. Update from the GDC: Another great innovation will be the addition of a video and stills cam for the PSP coming this October. The obvious application for this is a wifi videophone – we’ll have VOIP built into the OS.
• An addition to the RSS reader. Not for text, but to allow it to consume video blogs as well as audio blogs. Rumour has it that this will be in download format, not just streaming. Update from the GDC: The next update has RSS feeds for audio and text, plus a flash-enabled browser, really enhancing that internet experience there.

Travel

I’ve mentioned above that I use the PSP extensively for travel. Here are some of my findings:

• You can use the PSP on the plane, but you must have it switched off during take-off and landing and you must have the WiFI switched to off for the whole duration.
• In general, keep the WiFi switched off when travelling as it uses up more battery power.
• If you’re listening to music, switch the key lock on and use only the remote control to change tracks. This will allow the screen to stay off, preserving battery power.
• UMDs (movies and games) use more battery power than reading from the MemoryStick, so avoid them if you can.
• Saying that though, an airport (in the UK at least) is the best place to buy UMDs or games as they are sold tax-free (even for trips within the EU), saving you a rather nice 17.5%.

In conclusion

The PSP is great. It fits my lifestyle very well and if it gains document viewers and a PIM then I’d never need anything else ever again. That doesn’t mean it’s perfect for everyone, but for me it’s the right device and I love it.


Tags: sony, psp

• Spent last Thursday & Friday in Germany shouting at people
• Spent Weekend househunting, found place, waiting for feedback from landlord.
• In Holland today, bone tired.
• Back tomorrow night
• Need vacation

Repost from here:

And now an update to the recent news about White Wolf’s forthcoming new World of Darkness product line, Promethean.

An ad in the back of World of Darkness: Chicago and World of Darkness: Armory contains the following quote from Chapter 4 of Frankenstein:

“Who shall conceive the horrors of my secret toil as I dabbled among the unhallowed damps of the grave or tortured the living animal to animate the lifeless clay?”

Rumours, of course, abound about how this fourth main product line will develop. Personally, I would have thought that it would have worked better as a subset of World of Darkness, much like ‘Ghost Stories’ or ‘Antagonists’, which would make these created monsters into antagonists and protagonists. Instead, these Prometheans join Werewolves, Mages and Vampires as a player species. I guess that just leaves space for the resurrection of Wraith really.

So what kind of creatures are Prometheans? I guess the field is wide open, but it’s best to begin with Frankenstein’s Monster, as this is where all the teaser material is coming from. So, creations by mad scientists like sentient robots? Creations by occultists, like golems? Perhaps even spontaneously awakened inanimate objects, like the university in ‘Mysterious Places’ or the car in ‘Christine’? Or what about possessed items, like Ash’s hand in ‘The Evil Dead’ trilogy?

In short, nobody knows anything, and it’s all speculation. But it’s fun to speculate, isn’t it?


technorati tags: promethean, white wolf, roleplaying

Ah, the romance of Valentines Day. A day allegedly in remembrance of a 2nd century martyr who was tortured and beheaded for beliefs that a later church eventually declared partly heretical. And in 1969, the Roman Catholic Church ceased venerating Valentine as it was believed he was not actually a real person after all.

Valentines Day; the festival invented, or at least placed, to distract from Lupercalia, a roman fertility festival, which fell the day after it. A time of love; a time of pink hearts, over-priced flowers, crappy cards and boxes of chocolates (“I love you darling! Now eat these, so we can plump you up nicely…”); A time of crass commercialism and sappiness.

But hey, if it makes a few thousand people happy, who’s to care?

Last year, Penny insisted that we mark Valentines Day. Those who know Penny will suspect by now that this was not going to be a usual request. No, indeed, there were no cards, flowers or chocolate; But there was a tent, pitched indoors in her room and a splendid banquet of a picnic inside.

This year things are somewhat more traditional. While we’re still declaring the cards etc to be pointless wastes of money we’re going to have a restaurant meal this evening. Sadly our quest to find a restaurant that banned all couples apart from us was doomed, but I’m sure we’ll be fine.
And there’s the gift. My gift to Penny today was for tickets to go and see the theatrical adaptation of the Gaiman\McKean children’s book ‘ The Wolves in the Walls‘ in April at the Lyric Hammersmith.

Last week was Penny’s birthday and so we did have a few plans for the weekend. Nothing exciting, it was purposefully low key and she was working Saturday morning, but we made a good day of it. A good lunch, then Penny picked a copy of Kabuki and then we read in a pub for the whole afternoon. Very relaxing and very enjoyable.

Saturday night involved watching one of Penny’s birthday presents, namely the Kiera Knightley version of Pride & Prejudice. Aparrently it was quite true to the book, but not as much as the BBC version. Colin Firth was a better Darcy but Kiera was a better Lizzie (though apparently she’s supposed to be quite plain, according o the book). The whole film came over as quite rushed and compressed as it had to fit as much in as possible, into a two hour slot. And as for the added US ending? It’s utter crap, as expected. Thankfully it’s an Extra, not tagged onto the end of the film like it was in the US.

Sunday was then an all-day trek. It was going to be longer and over a more distinct route, but various memory lapses meant we covered the stretch between Woking and Ash Vale via a few detours along the Basingstoke Canal. Woking, because it was en route for the first leg of the trek before we had to alter our plans, and Ash Vale because we wanted our evening sustenance to be The Swan.

Plans for this week? Thursday and Friday I’m in Germany, and Saturday viewing property.