Archive for February, 2007
PS3 Europe - the game
Following last week’s news that European PS3s won’t have the same backwards compatibility as their US and Asian siblings, Sony has announced a new addition to the launch line-up: PS3 Europe, The Game. Unlike most console games the package doesn’t actually include a disc; instead, it includes two photographs and two labels. The photos are of an arse and an elbow respectively, and to win the game you need to put the right label on the right photo. Unfortunately both labels say “arse”.
PS3 Europe, The Game costs £2,000.
Glasgow goes speed crazy
According to the Evening Times newspaper, Glasgow City Council’s roads boss wants to implement a 20mph speed limit across much of the city by 2010. The zone will stretch from the High Street in the East to the M8 in the West, and from Dobbie’s Loan in the North to the River Clyde (if you don’t know Glasgow believe me, that’s a huuuuuuuge area). I’ve no idea why the south side’s getting away with it, the sods.
It’s a fascinating plan, and I can only assume that it involves getting rid of most of the traffic lights, roadworks, one way streets, buses and other obstructions - because unless you’re a taxi driver or a bus with your special no-plebs lanes, reaching 20mph in the city centre is as likely as exceeding the speed of light, solving the tensions in the Middle East and finding Jimmy Carr funny. Simultaneously.
Me, I reckon the answer to congestion - other than regulating the sodding buses, which are a major part of the problem - is to issue traffic wardens with time-bombs and orders to plant them on the ignorant sods who block box junctions. That, and give me a licence to use a rocket launcher on people who try to jump traffic queues.
Picture (nearly) perfect
I’ve been looking for a digital photo frame for a while, but I’ve been put off by the way they look: in most cases, they appear as if someone’s stuck a PlayStation 2 to the back of a cheap and nasty picture frame, and the SD card slots are usually placed in such a way that the card sticks out noticeably.
This, though, is brilliant. It’s the Neovo FotoVivo V10, a 7-inch photo frame that doesn’t attempt to mimic traditional frames. It’s big enough to see but not so big that it takes over your house.
I love the design. Those glowing white buttons are usually invisible, and only appear when you touch them. The TFT is roughly the size of a traditional 4 x 6 print and the 800 x 480 display is pin sharp. It can handle memory cards I’d forgotten even existed, and the card slots are in a sensible place (on top) and hidden away under a concealed flap. Some nifty ideas include programmed on/off times and the ability to keep the image static or change it every few seconds, minutes, hours or every day. You can also transfer photos to the 128MB of internal RAM via the supplied USB cable.
The photo is misleading: the bezel looks a lot smaller in the plastic than it does in the pic.
Of course, nothing’s perfect and there are a few niggles with this too. At £128 (via Udiggit.com, which was £10 cheaper than the usual suspects) it ain’t cheap, and you’ll need to put it near a power socket - the cable’s very short and there’s an annoying cylinder right at the connector end, which will be visible if you put it on a mantelpiece.
If you’re going to use memory cards you’ll also need to delete not just unwanted files, but hidden ones too: if your card contains an invisible folder such as an OS X .trashes folder, the V10 will try and display that too. And while 800 x 480 is much better resolution than most picture frames I’ve looked at, it’s still a weird aspect ratio and you’ll need to crop your pics for best results.
That said, it’s still brilliant.
Is Napster heading for the knacker’s yard?
It’s certainly difficult to put a positive spin on this Marketing Week story:
Napster UK vice-president and general manager Leanne Sharman is leaving the digital music download company following a restructure. It is centralising its European management and will scale back its UK office as part of the changes.
[Via No Rock'n'Roll Fun]
Rubbish keyboard? A good one’s only a tenner
As regular readers know, my RSI means I can’t abide horrible keyboards for long and I tend to get shot of the manufacturer-supplied one for something a little more finger friendly. Previously I’ve recommended Mac ones, but I’ve found a nifty PC one too: the logitech ultra-flat keyboard. It’s basically a keyboard liberated from a laptop, and that means low profile keys, a small footprint and really nice action (man). Best of all it’s around £10 - £12 if you shop around.
Good keyboards are essential, I reckon. Not only do they help reduce the risk of RSI - clacky keyboards are bloody painful to use for even reasonably short periods - but a fast keyboard will make your typing faster too. And the logitech one is really, really fast.
Violence in videogames
The other day, Penny Arcade took a swipe at a “video games did it!” story about a group of US teenagers who murdered a homeless man and blamed it on video game violence. It turns out that the stepmother of one of the boys is a PA reader, and she emailed PA. [scroll down to "a rare opportunity"]
As Gabe says:
The sad truth is that the reality we’re talking about here would probably never actually see the light of day. The media will tell the story they want to tell regardless and that story will be about violent games. The parents of these kids will be lucky to get two lines in an article about the crime. If they tell a reporter that their son hardly played games or that he was fucked up long before they bought a Playstation do you really think that will make it into the final article? You’d never see that side of the story, not in a million years.
But you’re about to.
[Via Pootergeek, who writes: "If it’s for real then it tells a tale almost as disturbing as that of the murder."]
ID cards: a price worth paying
Sorry, I’m back on ID cards again. But it’s Squander Two’s fault, because his excellent post on the subject got me thinking about one of Blair’s emailed arguments:
If national ID cards do help us counter crime and terrorism, it is, of course, the law-abiding majority who will benefit and whose own liberties will be protected. This helps explain why, according to the recent authoritative Social Attitudes survey, the majority of people favour compulsory ID cards.
I’ve mentioned that survey before, but it’s worth coming back to. The key point:
Seven out of ten people believe that compulsory ID cards are “a price worth paying” to combat terrorism.
Now maybe I’m wrong - I can’t check, because the actual survey is a paid-only publication and I can’t see how the questions were worded - but assuming the above line is an accurate reflection of what people were asked, then it’s a leading question - it’s based on the very shaky assumption that ID cards do indeed combat terrorism. Based on the evidence so far, the survey could easily have asked this instead:
Compulsory ID cards won’t do anything to stop terrorism but could enable every little petty jobsworth to get on your tits, could make it considerably easier for criminals to steal your identity and could make it impossible for you to get benefits, to get healthcare, to travel or even to bank if some incompetent arse mucks up your entry on the database. Is that a price worth paying to prevent the government from looking stupid?
Sadly, they weren’t asked that, so the figure of 70% in favour of compulsory ID cards… hang on a minute, wasn’t this scheme supposed to be voluntary?… has to stand. So what else is A Price Worth Paying?
22% believe torturing terror suspects is a price worth paying.
35% believe that banning “some” peaceful protests and demos is a price worth paying.
45% believe that denying terror suspects trial by jury is a price worth paying.
79% believe that detention for weeks at a time without charge is a price worth paying.
Again, the questions were based on combatting terrorism, and as many others have pointed out the answers are based on the belief that these things would only affect other people, such as brown men with beards who look a bit shifty. I’d love to see how the people surveyed would have responded to this, which is essentially the same questions put in a slightly different way:
If you were peacefully protesting against a government policy and you were told such demonstrations were illegal, arrested, detained without charge, kept incommunicado for weeks, forced to endure physical and mental torture and finally released without apology or compensation, knowing that the state will watch you as a suspected terrorist for the rest of your days, and you were told that, hey, it’s a price worth paying… would you agree?
Far fetched? Not when we can falsely accuse people of training 9/11 hijackers, stick them in Belmarsh for five months and let them out again without any compensation, even though they’ve lost their job and suffered god knows what inside:
The Home Office argues that since Mr Raissi has neither been charged with an offence nor “completely exonerated” he does not qualify [for compensation].
That “completely exonerated” dig is telling - remember that Mr Raissi hasn’t been charged, so he’s innocent until proven guilty. As Steven Poole writes in his book, Unspeak:
You might still think it desirable that anyone accused of a crime in Britain should be assumed to be innocent until proven guilty. The widespread usage of the phrase “terrorist suspects”, on the contrary, presumes guilt. It derives from, and feeds back into, an alarming assumption that the lamentably old-fashioned ideal of presumed innocence is no longer appropriate to modern times. It is at one with the fine contemporary tradition of contempt for the courts evinced by Labour home secretaries. After the four co-defendants of Kamal Bourgass in the “ricin plot” trial were unanimously acquitted, and a further prosecution collapsed, Charles Clarke said: “We will obviously keep a very close eye on the eight men being freed today, and consider exactly what to do in the light of this decision.” Once you are a “terrorist suspect”, it seems, not even a not-guilty verdict will help you. You may no longer be a suspect, but you are still, by definition, a terrorist . . .
A useful techy tip for PCs with integrated graphics
I was poking around my laptop’s BIOS the other day (as you do) and discovered a useful thing: the BIOS enables me to change the amount of memory given over to the integrated graphics, so I upped it from 64MB to (I think) 256MB. And the laptop’s faster now. Woo!
At last the RIAA does something useful
Good news for anyone in the US who can’t decide what educational establishment to go to: the RIAA has published a chart detailing the 25 universities who are best for Bittorrent. Isn’t that nice of them?
Petition crazy! This time it’s about DRM
Another day, another government response to an online petition. This time it’s a request to ban DRM, and the government says:
DRM does not only act as a policeman through technical protection measures, it also enables content companies to offer the consumer unprecedented choice in terms of how they consume content, and the corresponding price they wish to pay.
As No Rock’n'Roll Fun notes, that’s absolutely true if by “unprecedented choice” you mean “locking consumers into one supplier and one format [so] you have no control whatsoever over what you want to pay”.