Google Chicago sign
Originally uploaded by steveobd.
Our new sign
]]>Very Cool, if you can create a channel in YouTube, you can create a custom player.
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1997 meets 2007
]]>I thought it would be good to use my XBox Live gamer tag at the office and at home. That's not the way it works! It's a token that moves around from machine to machine - so once you recover it at work and go home, you have to recover it again at home. Each time it takes about 15 minutes to recover. jeesh. that ain't right.
I should be able to play as myself quickly and easily at any XBox.
I guess we're going to have to develop our own game system at Google unless you can fix this Microsoft.
Cool - the Nokia N75 can post photos to any Atom capable webservice. It worked!
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blurry psychedelic furs at naperville ribfest
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it's actually interesting because they start the day out of sync, and by about 3pm, they are all singing in sync. There is a definite pattern with crescendos and decrescendos that you can hear alternating from tree to tree.
a huge weekend for cicadas at my house. here's one on it's way out...
]]>emusic is too niche, and Apple is too proprietary. But Amazon presenting this MP3 based store has the power and scale to make this work in a mass market - and make the music industry finally re-think the business models around music distribution.
In ten years, we will all look back and laugh that we tried to protect digital media with DRM.
Yes, we will see more product placements in movies, and we will see more ads in videogames, and music, well, music will become the promotional device for a band to make money on other things. Artists will start to produce more music and release it more frequently.
Will people still buy media? Yes, they will if it's easy and cheap enough to get at the very instant someone wants it.
Will music make it's way around to people who didn't pay for it? Sure. But let's face it - it does that now. Any college kid these days who wants a CD but doesn't want to pay for it can tell you where they can get it in 10 minutes. Is there a way to monetize that scale? There must be.
The music industry knows its current business model's days are numbered - and DRM-free stores will force their hand in figuring out the new model.
So here's to putting DRM in the history books.
]]>Launch the following file in Google Earth:
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This means emergence day is coming soon for Brood XIII.
For those who aren't from the eastern half of the U.S., there is a species of cicada (commonly called "locusts") that lives underground for about 13 or 17 years, digging tunnels and doing who knows what until they choose to come up for air, molt, and breed.
I remember seventeen years ago in 1990 - the amount of cicadas flying around the Chicago suburbs was insane. Totally insane. You couldn't walk anywhere without crunching these. Apparently, they've done the math, and we can expect 1.5 million cicadas per wooded acre.
I can't wait for the invasion on May 23rd.
]]>Not I need more time browsing feeds - I think I do enough of that already - but if I wanted to, I could now use Google Reader's new controls to make this a lot easier to read feeds on the Wii.
The controls are as follows:
Google Reader can take advantage of the buttons on your Wiimote, letting you navigate easily from the comfort of your couch:
- up/down: scroll up/down
- right/left: next/previous item
- 1 button: show subscriptions
- 2 button: show links
When showing subscriptions:
- up/down: previous/next subscription
- right: select current subscription
- left: close
- -/+: collapse/expand folder
Yep, feeds are making it everywhere.
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You can never have too many videogame consoles.
A few weeks ago we happened to be at Target when the big-but-seldom-seen Wii truck showed up - so what the hell, we bought a Wii.
Of course, I never really looked at how this machine worked - I had seen and read the splendor of the wireless remotes that allowed you to play madden by actually thowing the ball, but failed to ever think about the technology of how such a thing would actually work.
In the days of Duck Hunt and CRT TVs, one light gun could read something encoded in the picture itself and figure out if the gun was aimed at the TV. But I guess such things do not work with LCD and Plasmas.
Thus, I was a little surprised to find out the Wii has to be placed somewhere near your TV for the Wii remotes to work, because there is a "Sensor Bar" that has to be placed in the center of your TV so that the remote can aim correctly at the screen. And the Sensor Bar has a wire that has to be connected to the Wii.
However, my setup is such that my equipment is nowhere near my wall mounted screen. And it's certianly not in front of it. All our equipment is off to the side toward the back of the room.
Hmm. Surely I couldn't be the only one with this setup and a Wii.
And of course I wasn't. Enter the Nextronics wireless sensor bar . It turns out the Sensor Bar doesn't actually sense anything. It's just an infrared emitter that is always on so that the Wii remotes can triangulate the screen direction - and Nextronics makes a great device in both A/C and battery powered formats.
The Nextronics seems to work perfectly. I just plugged in behind the screen, placed it under my plasma, and all is fine in Wii-land.
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