Channel 7 has announced a partnership with TiVo to introduce the service in Australia. Age story. TiVo press release.
For those who can’t wait, and are willing to do some hacking, there’s always OzTivo, of course. Other countries blessed with TiVo include the UK, US, Canada and Taiwan, with Mexico getting it soon.
The Age reports that the ACMI Games Lab in Melbourne will be hosting the Game On exhibition of video game history, which has already been seen in London, Chicago and San Jose. Should be a nice followup to the Melbourne House/Beam Software exhibit they had recently.
Speaking of games, ArsTechnica continues its series on writing in games (eg plots and backstories, rather than code).
Meanwhile in Australia there’s more campaigning for the OFLC to be allowed to give games an R 18+ rating (rather than having to refuse them classification), to bring games ratings into line with movies.
Though interestingly, a catalogue from discount chain KMart that arrived during the week reckoned Grand Theft Auto Liberty City Stories is rated R — it’s actually MA15+.
From a recent interaction with a Canadian:
Accordingly, we’re trying not to get too far ahead of everyone while still innovating like H-E two sticks.
“Huh?” says I.
No worries, I can shuffle around this odd bit of language. I’ll Google it.
Not a lot of people (16) using the term. Then it twigs:
Oh, for fuck’s sake.
Call me slow, but it took me until the weekend to work out why my torrents were running so slowly. (You know, all those Linux distros I keep downloading. Yeah.) Almost always stuck at about 15-20kbps — if that. Sometimes markedly slower.
Having read about problems with the original firmware, I got to the point of flashing my WRT54G router with the very nifty DD-WRT, which is so amazingly cool that I can’t believe some people took the time to develop it for free. Enthusiasm for innovating is a wonderful thing. But that didn’t fix it.
I switched from ABC (“Another BitTorrent Client”) to uTorrent. Which gave me nifty features like scheduling that will help me avoid burning up my peak hours (7am to midnight) traffic quota. (Came perilously close last month to being “shaped” down to dialup speed. Eek!) But that didn’t fix the torrent speed.
Finally I resorted to fiddling with my speed limits in uTorrent. Changed the upload speed from unlimited down to 20kbps and suddenly the download I was on jumped to 35kbps. Brought the upload down to 15kbps and the download leapt again to 60-70kbps. Eureka!
Dropping the upload to 10 didn’t really affect it further. And by that point I was happy with the speed, so I left it at 15.
See, I’d been going with the principle that it was good to uncap your uploads, to share everything around. What I’ve now learnt is that it’s a good idea to cap them while downloading, and set no limit for once the download has finished. And with the scheduler in uTorrent, you can also tweak things so that most of your downloads happen in off-peak periods at night, but uploads can keep on pumping all the time. (With appropiate caution if you use an ISP that charges for uploads; happy to say mine doesn’t.)
Why don’t they explain this stuff when you start? I guess there’s a bunch of complex stuff to explain to beginners. Mind you, if I’d actually read the documentation, that might have helped.
There’s some other things you can do to optimise Torrents, including patching and fiddling with the Windows XP TCP configuration and lots of other tweaking.
Wait a minute, wait a minute… maybe I’m missing something… all this hype about Twitter, letting people know what you’re doing right now… Scoble posted how people on Twitter reported the Mexico quake first…
It’s just IRC with archives, a web frontend and a mobile phone interface, isn’t it?
Seriously, those of us on IRC during the first Gulf War back in 1990-91 would watch the Israelis posting about Scud Missiles raining down on their cities.
Real-time citizen reporting is not a great leap forwards. It’s been around for decades.
So what’s so different about Twitter? Or is it just another case of a new, shiny, evolving (but not revolutionary) thing getting all the hype?
Video game themes arranged for orchestra
Video from the BBC’s “Click” interviewing co-author of legendary 80s game Elite, David Braben, offering his thoughts on the latest games development, and looking around the London Science Museum’s Game On exhibition. (via Tim)
I can think of two examples where digital media has limitations which affect the fidelity of playback in a major way: with music it’s gapless playback, often noticeable on MP3 players and with CDs on some players. With DVDs it’s layer changes, again, worse on some players than others.
This shouldn’t be the case, of course. Digital media of course is meant to be better than analogue, in every respect. I don’t know if there are standards mandated in the relevant formats, but perhaps there should be… or at least some documented workarounds, such as recommending where DVD authors place layer-changes.
After all, these kinds of things can ruin the enjoyment of a movie or piece of music if handled badly.
Over on my personal blog I’ve posted about visiting the ACMI “Hits of the 80s” video game exhibit. Well worth a look for any nostalgic geeks in, or passing through, Melbourne.
It’s great to see ACMI’s Games Lab giving computer games some recognition for the important cultural impact they’ve had. While we may never again see something like Space Invaders causing a shortage of coins in Japan, or pop songs written about Pacman, games are a huge industry, and a big influence over popular culture.
Over the years, as new web services have come into prominence, there’s been a rush to get hold of the best IDs. Most people would chase something resembling their name, with those with popular names too late to the game being left with the lame IDs: nicknames, real name + licence plate number, or hackerz sp34k versions.
Some of the defunct web sites I got good IDs for include Excite and mail.com. Some I still use include Gmail (and all the other Google properties), Hotmail and Yahoo.
With the news that Microsoft will be supporting OpenId, I reckon the next big rush could be for this, particularly if Google and Yahoo are sensible and decide to jump on the bandwagon.
OpenID identifies you by a URL/URI, so it’s marginally less user-friendly than a conventional logon, but if it takes off (*if*) and gets widespread use around the web, from a user point of view, it could go a long way towards cutting down on the zillions of passwords people currently have to remember… and thus have to write them all down.
So I’ve got my OpenID already. Have you? Now, since Flickr are pissing everybody off with new limitations, maybe I’ll go over to Zooomr and take a look around there.
People are comment-spamming blogs on behalf of DealsDepot.com.au. The comments I’m getting look something like this:
Name: mirror
E-mail: mirrorconsultancy@yahoo.com
IP: 125.22.69.34Talking of [topic], may be if you want to buy [product] at best price, I have a suggestion to make do look up Online Shopping
I’ve had about a dozen of these today, hitting various entries, where the topic closely resembles the topic of the blog post hit, though the link to [product] is often tenuous.
Apparently (see comment 16 here) the company offers discounts from products in return for people posting blog comments about them. Certainly looking around they appear to be successfully hitting a lot of blogs.
Not mine though.
More examples after the fold.
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Did you notice? Google Video now returns results from both itself and YouTube.
Update Monday: Here’s Google’s official line on this. Basically Google will do the searching and indexing, YouTube will host the vids.