iPod Touch

I’ve owned a number of MP3/digital music players, but up until recently only one of them was an iPod. The first two of note were versions of the original Creative Jukebox – the silver and blue ones that came in a form factor not dissimilar to an overweight portable CD player. The battery like was as woeful as the interface, and uploading songs using USB 1.0 was not fun.

In 2003 I succumbed and purchased a 15GB 3G iPod – the one pre-clickwheel with the touch sensitive row of buttons under the monochrome display. The size was sufficient at the time, even though my digital music collection was more than 15GB even at that time. I never found that not being able to carry around every single track I own limiting. In fact it was refreshing to have to consider what to put on the device.

The 3G iPod served me well. So well that I felt no need to ever upgrade it. I didn’t need a colour screen, and whilst video and photo display was enticing, viewing them on a tiny screen wasn’t. I swore that I wouldn’t upgrade until it either broke (which it hasn’t, nor has the battery diminished enough to warrant replacement either) or Apple produced a true video capable iPod, by which I mean one with a screen you could actually contemplate watching on a plane.

The iPod Touch fulfills my criteria, and so I’ve bought one. The 16GB model give me more space than I’ve had before (so no problem there. I’m even happy to sacrifice music space for video space) and has the killer advantage of wifi and web browsing. It is pretty much the perfect device for me. I’ll address the major features in turn.

At last the effort I put in earlier this year to re-rip, encode and provide album art for all my music pays off. Coverflow on the touch is so much better for choosing what I want to play than looking at a monochrome list of albums or artists. For one thing I can now see the artist and album information at the same time. The killer though is being able to see the artwork. It is so much more like flicking through my CD collection. Something I can no longer do as it is all boxed up and in storage.

One entirely understandable but slightly annoying thing (certainly in comparison to the iPhone) is the lack of an external speaker (bar a simple one for the alarm and a couple of other things) A number of times I’ve found myself showing off the device only to say “of course you have to have the earphones in to hear the audio for this video” It is an iPod at the end of the day though and really meant for personal consumption.

If Coverflow is the eye-candy, then it’s made all the more better by the multi-touch interface. Using this is simple and effective. The damping effects when you scroll at different velocities are awesome.

Video playback. Not made much use of this yet, save for the Make Love Not Warcraft episode of South Park which was immediately downloaded from iTMS. Playback is good though. The YouTube stuff I’ve found flaky. Some work fine, some seem to hang the application (from which the touch recovers quite well after a short delay.)

Wifi and web browsing. The killer factor, and the reason I already love my touch. I’ve had mobile wifi in the form of my Nokia N80 for 18 months now, and whilst viewing HTML based web sites is possible, it is not a pleasant experience and I found myself heading to WAP sites in preference. Safari on the iPod Touch however is awesome. It renders pages faithfully and quickly, the landscape view is perfect and the zoom function easy to use and effective. Text input is excellent (most notably when in landscape mode) and little things like adding previous and next buttons to the keyboard popup to save you having to press to select individual fields on a form make it truly usable. One of the annoying things about the N80 was filling in forms. Something you typically have to do any time you join a public wifi network, even if it is just a userid and password. With the touch it is simple and quick. I need go no further to prove that the touch is a capable and usable web browsing device than to say that a friend managed to do the whole of the Facebook movie compatibility test application, in the full Facebook web UI not the cut-down iPhone/Touch optimized version, whilst connected to a public wifi point in the pub last Saturday night.

Yes, the lack of flash is an annoyance, but not a big one.

Lack of mail app? So what, web-based mail is perfectly usable (at least mine is)

As for the lack of 3rd party application support. Well I did Jailbreak my touch, as you can see from the photo above. To be honest however I’ve not found any compelling additional applications for it. Yes I could find and install the mail app if I wanted to, but I don’t. When I show the device to people I end up demonstrating the hacked nature by running a terminal and typing ‘ls’ To be honest, so what if I can now ssh into my touch, or run a VNC client on it (honestly, why would you want to?) I’ll be doing a restore and upgrade if a new firmware comes out rather than keeping it hacked. Things may be different once the official SDK comes out I feel.

Battery life is superb. I charged it up on Thursday night before a day of work, followed by a flight over to the UK for the weekend. Music playback during work, the flights, lots of showing off and a good couple of hours of wifi usage and browsing over the course of the weekend failed to use the full charge up by the time I got back on Sunday evening. That’s good enough for me.

Annoyances? Well it seems to have a problem with the correct display of some album art. I’ve seen various thread on this and it seems to be a problem with the way iTunes stores album art and corruption of the data. Everything is displayed fine in iTunes, but some albums get the wrong art when transferred over to the iPod. I’m still searching for a resolution that doesn’t involve anything too drastic like resyncing the entire device.

Why didn’t I wait for the iPhone. A number of reasons. Firstly there’s no news on when it will appear in Ireland. I am not interested in getting a hacked one, the touch is much thinner and finally because I don’t believe in uber-converged devices. The battery life suffers and it tends to become a jack of all trades and master of none.

So in summary, I couldn’t be happier with my iPod touch!

EA Game Face

As mentioned in my previous entry, I’ve been playing the Electronic Arts Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2008 game on my XBox 360 since the weekend. One feature of the game is “Game Face” which allows you to model your career golf character on your own face. Now face modelling in video games isn’t new, for instance 2K Games’ Oblivion had an extensive modelling editor which took the approach of using sliders to alter every part of a model head to match your own. The FaceGen engine used behind this has a demo downloadable app with which you can plug in a photo (or for best results a couple of photos) and it would create the 3D model for you. It was then just a simple case of copying the slider settings manually into Oblivion to create a pretty realistic likeness to yourself.

Tiger Woods PGA Tour 2008 takes this much further though. The Game Face engine is part of the game code, and allows you to use one or two photos to create the 3D model directly. Naturally, I spent a good amount of time playing around with this before I even swung a club in anger in the game itself!

My first attempt was with my XBox 360 Vision Camera, a 640 x 480 web cam that plugs directly into the console. I took a head-on and side profile shot of myself, taking care to make sure that the lighting on my face was even (the 32″ reflector from my camera gear came in handy here!) The game then processes the photos to create the 3D model. It takes about ten minutes if you use a single photo, or up to about 20 minutes if you use two, the latter giving a more accurate render. EA keep you up to date on progress with an amusing set of status updates. So, here’s the result of the Vision cam render…

Overall, very good, and certainly better than you could hope to achieve using a traditional slider approach. It isn’t perfect though, so I broke out my Canon 400d and took some proper photos of myself:

(It was a bad hair day, and the morbid expression was suggested as being best for the rendering!)

In order to get the game to use these photos, you have to upload them to the EA website. Now this proved to be one of the most frustrating experiences on the web I’ve ever had. Firstly I had to register. Now I was already registered for the EA web site, and it knew about my XBox Live gamertag, but apparantly this wasn’t enough. Getting the correct registration involved constant back and forth between three different EA sites, and lots of patience and experimentation. Finally, though I got to the page where I could upload my photos… except it wouldn’t let me. Apparantly their servers were very busy and I should try later. Checking various forums it appears that they’ve pretty much been like this since the game was released three weeks or so ago. Finally a day later I managed to get them uploaded whilst the US were asleep. Once I got started it was pretty painless. The web app does a good job of helping you optimize the photos ready for the rending by zooming them to fit a profile overlay.

From that point it is back to the XBox to go through the Game Face process again, this time telling it to download the images from the EA server. This was painless, and the render process started. 20 minutes or so later, and I have one of those WTF moments when this appears on my HD TV:

Now that is pretty damn near photorealistic. The Nokia N80 camera phone photo from my TV screen doesn’t do it justice. Let’s put it this way, I got Lana to look at it and she freaked out when a bald, blinking me stared back at her from the TV!

The final stage was to “dress” myself with a hairstyle, beard, clothes, etc. etc. Of course, the proof is in the pudding, which in this case is how the avatar appears in-game. Here’s are some more (poor) camera phone shots:

All in all, Game Face is pretty awesome and it is quite a surreal experience to see yourself on the screen. I can only see more games taking this sort of approach to give added realism. Imagine how this technology could enhance an adventure or FPS game. Of course, the real-time 3D graphics in a golf game are much simpler and less dynamic than a typical FPS, but it is probably only a matter of time and processing power.

MashupCamp 5 in Dublin

I and a few of my team have just registered to attend and participate in MashupCamp 5 which is being held at Trinity College Dublin on 12-13th September.

The two days are being run as an open space/unconference with a preceeding Mashup University on the 10-11th. We will be bringing Lotus Connections along to show and play with, with the aim of discovering integration points between social computing within the enterprise and beyond the firewall. There’s already a proposed discussion item about “Mashup Adoption Issues Across the Enterprise” which sounds promising.

So, if you are going be sure to look out for us. I don’t know yet how we will advertise our presence or anything! IBM are a sponsor of the event so maybe we can get some goodies or something. The list of attendees includes Stephen O’ Grady from Redmonk, who I look forward to meeting.

Update-a-thon

Nearly a month after moving into our new flat, Eircom have finally managed to not only provide us with a phone line, but also with broadband. This has given me the opportunity to do a bit of housekeeping on the various gadgets and gizmos which have been starved of an internet connection over the past couple of months.

First off was the iMac which got OS X 10.4.10 and a few other updates automatically installed. Lana’s iBook also received the Apple update treatment. The iMac, and therefore my iTunes library has been offline since before iTunes Plus songs were released so I also popped onto iTunes Music Store to download 158 non-DRM’d tracks from EMI to update my library. Finally, I updated Adobe Lightroom up to 1.1 and look forward to playing with the new features.

Next to receive the automatic update treatment was the XBox 360. There was an auto update for the dashboard to provide support for the forthcoming wireless guitar controllers for hotly anticipated Rock Band game. Forza 2 also updated when I fired that up and went online with it for the first time.

Next was the Linksys NSLU2 NAS device. This has been a little neglected over the past six months or so, sitting happily on the network serving up music to the XBox via uPnP using TwonkyVision MediaServer. It received a firmware update to the latest version of Unslung, and also a new version of TwonkyMedia, taking it up to the current 4.4 release. The net effect of this is that it can now stream video to the XBox as well, including high def content.

Finally, since I no longer use my Nokia N80 on Orange UK, and got it unlocked before moving over to Dublin I decided to update it’s firmware to turn it into an N80 Internet Edition. Orange don’t allow this firmware upgrade by default, so the Nokia Software Updater does not offer it. The solution is simply to use a bit of software to change the product number on the device (instructions here). This proved to be simple and easy. One immediate benefit is that I can now use the phone to make VOIP calls over my wireless network, including Skype calls using http://www.fring.com/. I’ve yet to make a Skype call, but am intrigued to find out how it performs when I phone my folks up this weekend.

Musings about Sony’s PS3 backwards compatibility news

I’ll start with a disclaimer. I’m not a fanboy of any console/manufacturer/brand. I’m just a gamer. I currently own an XBox 360, PS2 and a Nintendo DS and have owned an XBox, Gamecube and another PS2 from the last generation of consoles. I’m not considering buying a PS3, but there is a possibility one may fall into my lap, as it were. I do fancy a Wii right now, fnar fnar.

I’ve been following the run up to the European launch of the PS3 with a little interest. Not in terms of the technology, the games or indeed with a view to buying one, but simply to try and ascertain whether or not Sony have really lost their marbles. Amongst the hardcore console gaming community Sony have really been on a downward track in Europe ever since the huge delay in getting the PSP to these shores. Pricing policy has been a sticking point with Euro and Sterling prices not in parity with those in the US and Japan. What’s more Sony’s stance of grey imports has been authoritarian to say the least, and their behaviour over the whole Lik-Sang affair was diabolical.

So the run up to the European launch of the PS3 on 23rd March has been interesting to watch. We’ve had discontent over the fact that despite the initial fanfare of a worldwide launch, we were later told that Europe would get it months later than the US and Japan. Then there has been the pricing issue. In Japan the 60GB version of the console is openly priced, allowing retailers to set their own price. In the US it retails for $599 (£305 with the currently generous fx rate) whilst those in the UK will have to pay £425. This is even slightly more than the rest of Europe (unless you happen to live in Greece in which case you will get royally done over)

However, today news comes about the fact that the hardware Europe will get is actually different to the rest of the world. One of the things Sony have always played up is that their consoles will play games from the previous ones. The PS2 played PSOne games, and the PS3 plays PS2 and PSOne games. They’ve always gone down the hardware route of backwards compatibility. That is, they include the old CPU in the new console. As such, the PS3 contains the emotion engine from the PS2. Except in Europe it won’t.

It appears that Sony have redesigned the chassis of the PS3 to remove the older PS2 hardware to reduce costs and allow them to introduce pricing discounts earlier in the product’s lifetime. They will now take an emulation based approach to backwards compatibility as Microsoft did with the XBox 360. As such, the number of PS2 games which will work on the PS3 is quoted by GamesIndustry.biz as being “a limited range”. Now that doesn’t sound like it is going to be too many to me

Now I don’t happen to think that back-compat is a terribly important aspect of a console. If I had PS2 games I still wanted to play I’d keep a PS2 to play them on. I do also think that it makes sense to do it via emulation and that MS have done a pretty good job of it with the 360. Certainly they took a lot of abuse from Sony fanboys and indeed Sony execs who lauded the seemingly impeccable back-compat capability of the PlayStation. However, what does this mean for us in Europe? Suddenly we are getting a more expensive product that is actually more feature limited than our friends in the US and Japan. Judging by the comments being made on the thread about this on Eurogamer, Sony’s image in Europe just took another body blow.

I’m LinkedIn

I’ve finally got around to adding myself to LinkedIn. Some of you might have seen a connection request from me. I’m already suprised by how many people I know are on there, I’ve obviously been missing out on this for a while. If you read this and you know me, please feel free to connect to me. Here’s my profile, or you can click the button in my new Funky Buttons section on the right hand side

Yahoo Labs WorldExplorer mashup

The O’Reilly Radar have discussed the new World Explorer mash-up created by the folks at Yahoo’s Berkely research lab. It takes publicly geotagged photos from flickr and combines them with Yahoo Maps to create a mash-up from which you can view photos associated with a particular surrounding. It has some algorithm to display tags relevant to a particular area. What’s more, there is also a night option which will only show tagged photos taken at night to give you a different perspective.

You can embed the maps into web pages, blogs etc. via a nifty little flash app generator called Badger. Unfortunately, WordPress.com doesn’t seem to be happy with the embedded object HTML so I guess we will have to wait for them to do a similar thing as they’ve done for YouTube and Google videos, hint, hint

The underlying technology from Yahoo is called TagMaps, and it supports APIs to allow you to create your own tag maps from data you provide via a REST interface.  I’ve been playing with Google Maps and its APIs quite a bit over the last few months, but I’m getting more and more impressed with the functionality of the Yahoo stuff and am keen to have a play.

1and1 email problems

I’ve been a customer of 1&1 for a few years now on their Instant Mail package which provides five mailboxes (POP3 or IMAP) as well as parking of my two domains. It also supports up to 150 email aliases, web based email access and good spam and anti-virus facilities.

The main reason for using them was the fact that they allow you not to have a catch-all facility for domain based email. A few years ago a spammer blitzed my domain name with <everything>@thespenders.co.uk leading to hundreds of thousands of emails ending up in my mailbox leading to a very unhappy ISP. They were unable to suggest a suitable solution so I moved to 1&1 and have been happy ever since.

However, as The Register have reported, 1&1 have been experiencing various problems with their email service this week. The problems first surfaced for me after Thunderbird asked me for my (stored) password for my IMAP mailbox. A trip to the web mail interface failed, as did logging onto the control panel for account management. Intermittently things came back, only to disappear again. There still appear to be problems at the moment.

The most disappointing aspect however is the lack of information coming from 1&1 on the matter. Obviously there wouldn’t be much use in sending an email, though actually the email address my account is registered with is one from my ISP, not one they manage, for that exact reason. I’ve searched but have been unable to find any information about the outage/problem on their web site, either linked off the home page or from the control panel. A system status page wouldn’t go amiss. I didn’t try phoning them as it was obvious they had problems and there were informational posts around from plenty of people who had stuck on hold to get through.

The outage did make me think about whether I should move to another provider, but as the first problem in a couple of years I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt. However I’ll definitely be suggesting some improved notification mechanisms for future problems. Hopefully they will be redundant though!

Lego Mindstorms car assembly line

This is so cool. Built by a group of 14-17 year old German students for 3000 euro and taking 2000 hours. Somehow I can’t see this ever being allowed to happen in a UK school

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQ3AcPEPbH0]

I also need to start playing with some Lego Mindstorms NXT!

Google Patent Search

Google have launched a patent search engine, which appears to act in a similar way to existing engines from the likes of Delphion and ip.com but with the advantage of a search interface we all know and love (in most cases.) The display of patent results seems particularly good compared to other databases I’ve used. Here’s an example

Currently it only covers US issued patents, not files or any international files or issues.