11.19.08
Posted in toys at 11:43 pm by Rob Fahey
A quick glance at the weather forecast suggests that it’s about to get cold - really cold. Saturday’s maximum temperature in London is pegged at 2 degrees C. Apologies to any Canadians, Scandinavians and the likes, but here in London, where it’s habitually a few degrees warmer than the fairly balmy south of England (thanks, urban micro-climate) that’s really cold.
It’s fine, though. Like most people in the British Isles, I’m almost ridiculously well-prepared for the kind of arctic conditions that we haven’t really seen on these islands in a couple of decades. Seduced by images of white Christmases and parental recollections of frozen winters, we stock up on gloves, scarves, hats and heavy coats - oblivious to the combined effects of global warming and the Atlantic Gulf Stream current, which conspire to make our winters increasingly mild and our summers increasingly wet.
Somewhere, I have a ridiculously heavy coat which I was given to wear while watching a re-enactment of a WW2 tank battle on a snowfield in Finland in late November a few years ago. I’m holding on to it “just in case”. Just in case what? The Day After Tomorrow was entertaining, granted, but it seems poor justification for wardrobe choices.
I digress. My point was - by our somewhat odd British standards, it’s getting cold, as winter habitually does. Normally, a nice pair of fleece-lined leather gloves form part of my arsenal against the chill - but they’ve got a bit of a downside, in that they make using phones, iPods and even wallets into a right pain in the backside.
This has reached a peak due to a couple of factors. Firstly, I have a nice new wallet with a flap that holds my Oyster card (London’s transport touch-card) on one side, and my SOAS touch-card on the other (yes, I’m a student these days, for those who haven’t heard - first year of a four year Japanese BA at the School of Oriental and African Studies). This is a handy arrangement, but requires a bit more fiddling than just pulling my wallet out and slapping it on the card reader. Secondly, I have an iPhone. Pressing buttons through gloves on an old phone was a pain; using a touchscreen is simply impossible.
Hence, Freehands. These clever little things are designed exactly for this - they’re a nice pair of leather gloves which have fold-back tips on the index fingers and thumbs. Not entirely a new idea, but it’s novel to see the feature on a genuinely nice pair of gloves, and the addition of a pair of magnets on each finger to hold back the flap while you work is very clever indeed. Plus, they’re inexpensive even with the present dismal Sterling / Dollar exchange rate.
I thought the legions of touchscreen-device users on my friends lists might be interested - I’ve ordered up a pair anyway, so I’ll drop a quick post later on to let you know how I get on.
Technorati Tags: freehands, London, gadgets, SOAS, weather
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06.10.07
Posted in technology, toys at 9:56 pm by Rob Fahey
The D: All Things Digital conference, which ran in the United States last week, was an interesting look at what happens when you run a highly promoted event where the major players want to turn up and be seen without actually committing to announcing anything useful. Three big companies were meant to take the stage with something to show off; by the end of the week, you’d forgive anyone with any remaining critical faculties for wondering why they bothered at all.
Perhaps the worst off after this whole mess is poor, beleaguered Palm - a company which has watched, apparently powerless, as the PDA market it practically invented is dominated by rivals with better devices, better technology, better marketing and better vision. I’ve always had a soft spot for Palm, if only because I thought the interfaces and technology used in the original PalmOS devices were very elegant and clever. I thought it was a real shame when it became apparent that the company’s strategy had changed over from building small, lightweight, clever operating systems to trying to snap at the heels of feature-rich, overpowered and overweight systems like Microsoft’s various Windows implementations on smartphones.
I think my soft spot for Palm has turned into outright pity in the wake of this week’s reveal of the Foleo “mobile companion”. The company has spent a fortnight hyping up the entirely new class of mobile device it planned to reveal at D; when the Foleo appeared on stage at the conference, that suddenly all seemed like a cruel joke. Except Palm’s execs weren’t laughing. They looked deadly serious, in the way that a completely batshit insane old woman on the street who thrusts a dog turd wrapped in a dirty blanket at you and insists that it’s her baby might look serious.
Out of options and out of creativity, Palm has seemingly chosen the road less travelled; madness. The Foleo is, in essence, a particularly ugly, underpowered and overpriced laptop; its small screen and form factor are offset by chunky plastic styling and large surrounds. Trying to sell this device as a magical new class of mobile technology is incredibly misguided - and what’s worse, it speaks of a company which has presumably run out of ideas for improving its smartphone device, the Treo. The iPhone may turn out to be far from perfect, but at least it’s innovating and pushing other manufacturers to do likewise. Trying to persuade people to carry around a chunky slab of laptop to extend your smartphone’s functionality is a step in the opposite direction. It feels like a white flag.
Second place in this uninspiring list has to go to Microsoft - although, on form as ever, the company seems to have garnered plenty of positive headlines for “Surface”, the company’s ludicrous and pointless rip-off of a million tech demos of yore. Such is the joy of the modern tech news media; the perfect meeting of bloggers who don’t do even the most basic research on their stories in their rush to be the first to regurgitate the latest press release, and PR people who can dangle freebies in front of their credulous, eager faces in return for the disposal of integrity they never had in the first place.
Here’s some real, honest to got analysis for you; Microsoft Surface is shit. It’s not just shit, it’s old and shit.
I’ve seen demos of interactive tabletops for almost a decade now, and the concept itself is much older. Every year or so, regular as clockwork, the research labs at somewhere like MIT, or Cambridge, or Philips or Fujitsu, will churn out an interactive tabletop, controlled by gestures, or by RFID-tagged objects that you move around on the table, or by a pen, or whatever. Every year or so, we look at it, and go “right, that’s nice” - and nobody gets terribly excited, because while we can see the potential uses for such a system, they’re not very exciting uses and the whole thing is much too expensive anyway.
This is exactly the same problem Microsoft Surface faces; the uses aren’t very exciting, and it’s too expensive. Microsoft’s implementation faces a further problem; it’s rubbish. While other researchers have managed to put together systems that are entirely integrated into a table, mostly by using cameras under the glass to read hand positions, Microsoft’s Surface requires that you have IR cameras positioned in the room above the surface (yeah, they glossed over that bit in the demo a bit). While some systems use RFID or bluetooth, Surface requires that your various devices have stickers on the bottom of them with unique ID tags that the camera can identify. For a tech demo, this is fine; for the real world, I’m not exactly convinced by the usability (or by the $10,000 price tag).
To the large, expensive and poorly designed Surface, then, add Bill Gates’ astonishing comments on user interfaces for videogames. He heavily implied that MS is working on gesture based input for Xbox 360, but said that it won’t be like the Wii - going on to dismiss the Wiimote because you can’t, err, “pick up your tennis racket and swing it.” This, apparently, is a “natural thing” to want to do.
Strike one; Gates (not, it should be added, a man with a great track record in terms of predicting consumer technology trends) believes that we want to play videogames by picking up real-life devices and flinging them around our living rooms. Hmm.
Strike two; Gates then goes on to say that this revolutionary, amazing new technology will be based on… Video recognition. Unfortunately, his interviewer didn’t have the cop on to check that Bill has actually heard of Eye Toy, or seen any of the next-gen stuff Sony is doing with that technology.
It’s good that Microsoft is thinking outside the box on interface stuff, at long last, but perhaps they should try getting their thinking out of other people’s boxes while they’re at it.
Final strike for the week - albeit a somewhat weaker one - goes to Apple, who turned up at All Things Digital with really very little to bring to the table. Apple has an excuse, admittedly, since WWDC is just around the corner and Steve Jobs will want to keep his powder dry for an event on the company’s home turf. All the same, his announcement at All Things Digital was disappointing - an Apple TV box with a bigger hard disc, and the ability to play YouTube videos.
Now, the former is fine, but the latter? YouTube videos played full-screen on a HDTV? Even the normally far from incisive Walt Mossberg, interviewing Jobs on stage, couldn’t help but comment that this looked, well, a bit crap. As plenty of other have observed, what AppleTV needs isn’t YouTube support - it’s decent support for a wider range of codecs and containers. Admittedly, you can now hack that onto the box with relative ease; but supporting a full set of codecs out of the box would change it from a curiosity into a killer product. On that front, Jobs had nothing to say.
Oh well. WWDC tomorrow. I don’t know whether to hope for the rumours of a 12″ display, ultra thin and light MacBook to be true or not; if they’re true, I’m going to be significantly poorer in the coming weeks, I fear. The joy of geekery is matched only by the pain in my wallet.
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02.21.07
Posted in toys at 12:33 am by Rob Fahey
Abrahamic religion, I have decided, is carefully structured to encourage hypocrisy through means of tasty things. Despite being staunchly atheist since the age of 13 or so (prior to which I simply thought the whole idea was a bit silly, but probably didn’t know the word “atheist”), I find Christmas and Easter utterly irresistible - not because of the birth or death of Christ, but because of Christmas Cake, Mince Pies, Turkey, Trifle, Brandy Butter and Chocolate Coins in midwinter, and great big whopping eggs made of chocolate (not to mention Simnel Cake and an inevitable lamb roast) in spring. As a Celt, I argue that this harks back to the fine festivals which Christianity usurped in the first place - this is, of course, retroactive reasoning, because I like eating tasty things.
Similarly, while Lent means nothing to me, the day immediately preceding this solemn time of fasting is endlessly enticing with its promise of pancakes. I really enjoy making pancakes, and am rather partial to consuming them as well; they’re a uniquely wonderful foodstuff, one of the few which changes from main course to dessert depending on what topping you choose. At this evening’s mini-feast, dessert began when we ran out of sausages, and replaced it with chocolate sauce and raspberry ice cream. I confess that this happened rather earlier in the proceedings than a nutritional advisor might have considered wise.
Every time I make pancakes for Shrove Tuesday, I promise myself that I’ll do it more often in future - they’re an incredibly simple and fun thing to make, and there’s nothing quite like bacon, sausages, pancakes and freshly ground coffee on a Sunday morning to make the lazy day at the end of the week seem worthwhile. I never keep this promise, though, with the result that when I set out to attempt pancake-making again 12 months later, I’m a rank amateur again, and am forced to hide the first few sad, deformed pancakes from the light of day. Rumours that I hide them in my belly may hold some substance.
For a set of religions largely focused on abstinence, fasting and general guilt and misery, Christianity seems rather good at keeping people adhering to its various festivals with the temptation of delicious treats. Then again, I shouldn’t be surprised - how many Catholic priests would bother saying mass on a Sunday if they didn’t get to prance around with some nubile altar boys in the process? A fine application of the carrot from a religion better known for the stick.
Speaking of sticks, I’d quite like to hit someone at Orange with one - or even several, should the initial sticks fail me during the course of this prolonged beating. Having agreed to upgrade my phone last week, they warned me that the new phone would come with a SIM, so the old SIM will stop working at some point. The old SIM duly gave up the ghost this evening.
Unfortunately, there’s no sign of my bloody phone, which leaves me completely unable to make or receive calls until it arrives. Which is just great.
(In other news - hi, LiveJournal Friends List! After playing around with the RSS-feed-to-Livejournal idea for my blog, I’m now just cross-posting entries using an automagic piece of plugin wizardry suggested by Mart, who writes a blog featuring both towels AND cats. You can remove the annoying RSS thing from your friends list, if you want. Or just leave it, if you want to read all my wisdom twice.)
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02.16.07
Posted in games, toys at 12:04 am by Rob Fahey
The BBC ran a particularly awful piece on Watchdog this week about the fact that Xbox 360s currently have a lower life-expectancy than teenagers in my neighbourhood, and that Microsoft UK are being shits about sorting it out for poor numpties who bought their product expecting it to actually, you know, work and so on.
Now, I do sympathise - although perhaps not with the frightening creatures from the blackest depths that they dragged up blinking into the light to act as the Faces of Gaming for the programme - one of whom was exposed to excess oestrogen in the womb and has the face of a trout, the other of whom appeared to have some kind of mechanical device lodged in his ear and spoke with such a dense rural accent that I expected him to end each sentence with “Mr Frodo”. Their awfulness was offset only by having the lovely Ellie on to actually speak some bloody sense on the matter.
No, I sympathise in a more general sense I suppose - after all, my first Xbox 360 died a horrible death only a month or so after buying it, and when Microsoft failed to get back to me about fixing the fucker (it was a freebie) within, er, five months or so, I went out and bought a core system to replace it. I wasn’t about to miss out on Dead Rising based fun for the sake of a mere 200 quid, dammit. Still, I was rather miffed.
Not, I’ll grant you, as miffed as I was when I turned on my Xbox 360 on the evening that the BBC broadcast their hard-hitting report on how lank-haired trout-faced men are getting wobbly bottom lips due to Microsoft’s intransigence. “I know,” thought I, “I’ll kick some men in the fucking face and knock them off some big fucking buildings in this Crackdown game that Tom has been blathering on about!”
Ah. No, perhaps I won’t then.
Perhaps I’ll just be a bit sad about the fact that for no apparent reason, my 200 pound piece of hardware has decided that six months is a pretty good innings, and it has nothing left to live for.
Yep, that’ll definitely be how I’ll spend my evening. Those three lights, according to the MS knowledge base, mean “you’re right fucked, mate”. Helpfully, they also refuse to actually sort out this problem (i.e. arrange a pick up for my now deceased console and send me a new one) over email, so I’ll have to talk to a helpdesk moron in person - here’s hoping they have something REALLY GREAT for me to listen to while I’m on hold for an hour!
Note how my PS3 and one of my PS2s are both silently mocking their Xbox cousin, as if to say, “look at that stupid dead bastard!”
Oh well. On the plus side, the next day the Sennheiser wireless headphones I’ve been coveting for two years arrived from an eBay seller who miraculously had a brand new sealed pair for about a third of the retail price. They’re ridiculously huge but also incredibly light and comfortable, and I’ve found myself on a number of occasions walking downstairs to take a piss and not realising I’m still wearing them, which makes me look like a complete knob. However, I’m easily pleased, and the novelty of being able to walk to the other side of the room to look for something while still listening to music on my headphones probably won’t wear off until well into 2008.
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