Monthly Archive for May, 2006

Xbox Live Vision Camera coming on Sep 19

Published on Wednesday, May 31, 2006 in Gaming, Internet, Microsoft and Technology. 3 Comments

xbox live vision cam

According to Microsoft’s Major Nelson, the Xbox Live Vision Camera demoed at E3 ’06 that had its pictures leaked onto the internet, will be simultaneously released in the US and Europe on September 19. This isn’t like the 360 release where they were weeks apart, for the first time it is being released on the same date! However, he did not mention any price for the camera, which you will be able to use for video conferencing and video emails, in some games (ie UNO) as well as for customising your profile picture.

UPDATE: “Major Nelson has corrected an earlier report made during a recent Blogcast concerning the release date for the Xbox Live Vision camera: it will be out in Europe and Asia (outside of Japan) on October 2nd rather than the earlier September 19th date, which still applies for 360 owners in the U.S.” [link]
UPDATE 2: “Our friendly anonymous source at Microsoft has provided us with a few more details concerning the 360 accessories announced back at E3. Perhaps the most important involves the bundling of the Xbox Live Vision camera with a wired headset, the popular Live Arcade title UNO, and a month of Live Gold service for $39.99 when it releases in the States on September 19, 2006.” [link]

DS Lite Street Date Broken in some US Stores!

Published on Wednesday, May 31, 2006 in Gaming, Noteworthy, Technology and Wireless. Closed

There were a few very surprised CheapAssGamer‘s, who walked into their local Target or Wal-Mart to dsicover that they were selling DS Lites! Yes, they were actually letting people buy them. Now we don’t know whether they got the release date wrong, or Nintendo has pulled a fast one on us; but it sure got a lot of people exciting. Now many people all over the US have reported that they have been able to buy one straight from the shelf. One lucky Joystiq reader wrote:

That was some excitment when I woke up to find this post. I called every Walmart in the Minneapolis, MN area, and they either had them and wouldn’t sell them, or they just had no clue what I was talking about. Then I called all of the Targets, and the Crystal, MN Target was a winner. It was a older women who must have thought nothing of street dates and just put them alongside the Phat DS’s. Lucky me, I took the morning rush hour drive and picked one up. There were about 15 more in the display case. Anyway, if you live in Minnesota and want one, go to Crystal.

Those lucky Americans! We in the UK have to wait until June 29 for the DS Lite as well as pay extra for it. But if you have an old DS, GAME are running an offer so that if you trade in your old DS they’ll give you a shiny new Lite for £59.99. A good offer for those tired of the old DS, and wanting a break from the size of it. A Joystiq reader decided to set up a Frappr map for those who want to log which stores have DS Lite’s and which don’t so you can quickly grab yours.

Mac OS Drivers on Dell’s Support Site!

Published on Tuesday, May 30, 2006 in Apple, Internet, Noteworthy, PC and Technology. Closed

Click on the image for a bigger picture!

I was so amazed when I saw this. I honestly thought it was photoshopped, so I headed over to Dell’s support site, and sure enough, I selected a random Dell laptop (Latitude D610), it was there! This has been reported to work with other Dell models, but it is probably nothing more than a small glitch. All the downloads listed under ‘Apple Mac OS’ are non Mac versions, they are in a ‘.exe’ – Windows Executable format.
I don’t think Michael Dell understands. He has previously stated that he would like to offer OS X on their machines, but Jobs declined. Here they go again, trying to ‘win’ Apple over – It’s not working Dell! Apple will not be offering OS X on non-Apple boxes. It is just against their ethics. Besides, running OS X on a non-Apple box just takes all the fun of using OS X out of it, believe me I tried it on my Sony VAIO. It was nice, but not as nice as using a real Mac. It will be one of those things, where anyone using OS X on a PC, just can’t afford to buy a Mac so they install it on a grey box – Pretenders .

Microsoft Announces Xbox 360 Update

Published on Monday, May 29, 2006 in Gaming, Internet, Microsoft, Noteworthy and Technology. Closed

This is really good news! This will be the first major update the 360 since its launch in November. The update will be rolled out “in about a week” and will include many goodies such as background downloading (finally), Xbox Live Marketplace enhancements and more. There is a short overview below, but follow the link for the full article at Joystiq with many photos.

New Media and Entertainment Menu on the 360 Marketplace focuses content into groups, as well as having a link for iPod AAC support. It does have groups like Televison and Short Films, but no content has been added. Is Microsoft going to partner up with a TV network?
There is also a Games menu and Demo’s and Game Videos. The Games screen now has a ‘Newly Released’ section so that new additions to the Xbox Live Arcade can be quickly located and downloaded.
The new download manager offers background downloading so that you can play a game while waiting a file to download (hooray!) It contains a download queue of files to be downloaded in order after the previous has completed. There are siz download slots available, but downloading will pause of you play a game online.
Fast Forward/Rewind button in videos downloaded from the XBLM ranging from 2x to 16x speeds.
Music Player & DVD Playback Improvements – Music playing stays the same when you move from one function of the 360 to the next. With DVD playback you can add bookmarks to films so that you can play a game if you get an invite from a friend and resume playback when you put the disc back in.
“Full” USB keyboard support – It’s a bit ambiguous, as I plugged in my Mac’s USB keyboard a couple of times before to enter some stuff.
Startup feature, instead of automatically booting into whatever game is loaded in the drive, you’ll be able to set your console to boot into the Dashboard by default. I have been waiting so long for this feature!

The update should be available within the next two weeks, so login to Xbox Live regularly (if you don’t already) to see whether it has been put up. The full list of features will be on Xbox.com during the week.

Wii won’t be more than $250 with close UK price!

Published on Monday, May 29, 2006 in Gaming, Noteworthy and Technology. Closed

revolution at GDC

The BBC reported, that “At a news conference in Osaka, Nintendo senior managing director Yoshihiro Mori said the Wii would sell for 25,000 yen ($220) or lower in Japan and $250 (£133) or lower in the US.” That seems like a good price point to me and it will mean that you could buy two Wii’s for the price of one PS3, but it is only $50 less than the core 360; however Nintendo did say they are targeting ‘non-gamers’.

A UK Nintendo rep, also confirmed that the price for the UK Wii will be closely “in line with Japan and the US“. So if you add the 17.5% VAT we pay on everything to the $200; £124 + £22 = £146. So the price won’t be too bad for us in the UK, as we could buy just under 3 Wii’s for the price of one PS3. I think the Wii will be popular in the UK because of that, and it’s cool! At least Nintendo is getting something right that other companies, like Sony and Microsoft didn’t. I personally can’t wait to try out the Wii, I think it is a big revolution in gaming.

Nightmare Packaging Story

Published on Monday, May 29, 2006 in Microsoft, Noteworthy, Technology and Wireless. Closed

This is one story that will make your feet rumble, seriously it isn’t for the faint hearted!

The stubborn plastic casing around the Microsoft Xbox 360 faceplate seemed to laugh first at the kitchen scissors and then the steak knife that tried to penetrate it. When 14-year-old Daniel Mroue’s attempt to open the thing with a long, serrated bagel knife failed, his parents became concerned.

Mroue’s father, George, took over with a pair of box-cutters, which did the trick. But George Mroue also ended up with a wad of bandages shoring up the damage after slicing his palm open on a sharpened piece of plastic.

“It was ridiculous,” groused George Mroue of the February incident. “There was nothing anywhere telling us how to open the (darn) thing. I don’t understand why they make it so goddamn hard to open these things.”

That’s an increasingly common question these days. From Psyclone electronics cables encased in impenetrable layers of thick plastic to DigiPower camera batteries coated with packaging several times the size of the item itself, the hardest part of buying electronics these days is opening the products when you get them home. In many cases, it makes solving Halo 2 seem like a kindergarten project.

This article from Wired explains a whole lot with fiddly packaging. I too have had such problems. For example, on Christmas day when I opened up my 360, Santa kindly left me a wireless USB adapter for the 360. It was so hard to open that I cut my hand with my pen knife (I was too lazy and excited to get a proper scissor) and sliced the manual of the adapter. You can see the manual in the image at the top. Some of today’s packaging so so fiddly and hard to open that they do pose a risk to people. Especially on Christmas when people are hyped up and excited. I may actually refuse to buy such things in the future unless it is really necessary because I know that I will spend half my time trying to open the damn thing!

SPAM, SPAM and more SPAM!!!

Published on Friday, May 26, 2006 in General. 4 Comments

I have been receiving way too much spam on this blog and I am getting floods and floods of emails from the blog telling me there is a comment in moderation (because I set it to moderate a comment if it has more than 3 links). I am going to disable this, but Akismet has not blocked it all, and so I am taking action. Any spam comments received will get their IP permanently blocked from the blog. However, if your ISP uses dynamic IP’s and you happen to receive one of the blocked IP’s then you can shoot me an email (a link is provided on the page you get when it shows your IP is blocked).
Sorry for having to do this but it is such a pain, I have had nearly 5000 spam attempts to the blog (most of which have been blocked by Akismet, others I have had to do manually).

MacBook Disassembly Guide

Published on Tuesday, May 23, 2006 in Apple, Shorts, Technology and Wireless. Closed

Over at iFixit (previously called PBFixit) have now expanded their guides, which offer detailed images and notes to take apart various Macs, to include the MacBook. Lots of info on how to take it apart, and on how to replace individual components such as the logic board, the RAM, Optical drive and more.

PS3 Specs from Sony in 2005 – Lies!

Published on Tuesday, May 23, 2006 in Gaming, Noteworthy and Technology. 1 Comment

This is a cool YouTube (what else?) video that shows all the things that Sony promised for the PS3 in E3 in 2003 and 2005, and then the real specs that were revealed at E3 this year. The video explains it all, but for those who can’t view it I will summarise below:

“PS3 will have two HDMI outputs” – Lies, only one HDMI output is included, and only on the $500 model.
“Gigabit Ethernet – 2x internal, 1x external” Lies, only one Gigabit Ethernet port is included.
“WiFi is also a standard feature” – Lies, WiFi is only on $500 model.
“PS3 will support built-in bluetooth with upto 7 controllers” – Lies, only four can be connected.
“Coming spring 2006” – What a lie, it should be here for November of this year, but that may be delayed!

All these comments were made by Ken Kutaragi at last year’s E3. Now they are no more than words.

video

Europe gets DS Lite on June 23rd and in black!

Published on Monday, May 22, 2006 in Gaming, Noteworthy, Technology and Wireless. 2 Comments

eu ds lite

Haha! Nintendo has announced that Europe will get the DS Lite on June 23rd, 12 days after the US. Not only will it be available in white, but also in a cool black (as can be seen above). The price will be €149.99 / £99.99. The US pay £64.55 ($129.99), Europeans (except the UK) pay £94.46. So again, we in the UK, pay much more for the same product, even the rest of the EU they pay £5 less! The UK price in the US would be $181, which would be regarded as an insane price. I think we are fortunate that the DS Lite is just under £100, as the original DS cost somewhere around £120! This is like the MacBook debate (sort of), we get the black DS Lite but for a lot more than the US get the white DS Lite (they don’t get the black DS Lite).
I really like the DS Lite, and may get it (I got the PSP, but I don’t use that too much, except when I’m travelling) because it is quite cheap compared to the PSP, but I don’t know if I can justify the price though. I wonder how much it will cost to import it, apparently Lik-Sang won’t be too bad for price – but the shipping to the UK may add up to be more than the actual price of it in the UK!