More Secrets Of The Virtual Revolution Revealed

Been watching that BBC Virtual Revolution program again. I know I know I'm a sucker for punishment. But after having seen this youtube clip from another BBC program I believe, although about the news, also applies to this show as well.

It's amazing how close the Virtual Revolution follows this clip.

The Virtual Dud

Last night on BBC tv at the expense of the licence payer Aleks Krotoski was shown looking deep in thought or typing away at her keyboard of her laptop in ever more scenic or glamorous locations round the globe. These shots were all part of it's new four part series The Virtual Revolution.

The hard life these so called experts and journalists have at our expense. Just what are the thoughts that they were having in these shots? "Where can I go next on my bucket list?", "Is the Hilton more expensive than the Marriot in New York? I hope so." It all reminded me of a skit that Spike Milligan did in the 80's. I think it hits the nail on the head, and seems so prophetic. Oh word of warning the following clip is NOT SAFE FOR WORK, but is amazingly funny.

What did I think of the show itself? Piece of crap really, dumbed down tosh just like the Beebs other super dumbed down tech output Click.

I think some one at the BBC needs to start treating the audience as intelligent and producing tech shows that are aimed at some one more intelligent than a five year old. They should go have a word with Leo Laporte at twit.tv.

Apple vs Google Voice App

A lot shorter one for you to listen to today.

Hopefully a player has appeared above. If not you can download the mp4 audio file here.

The iPad

Instead of writing my thoughts on the new Apple iPad I decided to record them using my iPhone this morning as I walked my mutts.

Hopefully a player has appeared above. If not you can download the mp4 audio file here.

Video Gaming Has Always Been Social

The average video gamer has the image of being  a loner that is stuck indoors for hours on end with no social contact with others.

I don’t think that is a fair stereo type of the gamer. These days there is much fuss made of the social aspect of games. Whether it is playing online with your friends or strangers, or having friends round and playing games like Rock Band or Wii Sports.

But even this isn’t new. Since the dawn of the video game consoles playing video games has been a social activity for gamers.

Back in those far and distance times the social gaming was having your friends round to play on your Atari 2600 or Sinclair Spectrum. At the time at best the games were two player. Otherwise it was friends taking it in turns to play a game in single player mode.

The only real progress over the years was two player modes getting more sophisticated, introducing split screens, dual controller ports. Then as hardware got more powerful we started seeing more ports added so up to four friends could play together at one time on the same game.

While that was all going on some home computer gamers were experimenting with playing games online with their dial up modems and bulletin boards. These early online games were mainly text based adventure games.

These bulletin boards and online games were the early versions of the online communities that we have today.

Some of my fondest gaming memories are those I shared with friends. I had both the Sinclair Spectrum and Commodore 64. I also had the modem Commodore sold for the 64, and a membership of Compunet. It was on Compunet that you were able to download demos with the hacked sound effects and music from games. One of my favourite games and also my best friend Andy was Commando. The Spectrum had the better game play than the 64 version. So while one of us was playing the Spectrum version of the game, with sound turned down. The other would be on the 64 doing the sound effects and music using a demo that would allow you to press keys to get the music or sound effects from the 64 version of the game.

All of the above to todays young gamer would look so primitive but it goes to demonstrate that even in those dark ages gaming never was just a solo anti-social activity. It has always been an activity you could do with your friends.  It’s just that now it’s a cool thing to do.

Happy New Year

Just a cut and paste of my post on whitespider1066.com for today:
The pack and I would like to wish the readers of this blog a very very Happy New Year.
We hope that if your 2009 has been as "interesting" as ours, that the coming year will be less "interesting". If you have had a boring year then we hope that it remains just as boring.
I was going to do one of those end of year round ups. Then I thought I could also do one of those end of decade round ups that seem so popular on the tv and radio etc. I soon ruled that out when I thought it will be a cold day in hell (well it has nearly got been that down there) before I write a blog with a title that has "noughties" in it. In fact those look backs kind of leave me cold really.
Besides I kinda like the title "Gordon Brown, his part in my downfall". It has a ring to it, sadly I couldn't use it. I'm pretty sure that the Spike Milligan estate would have something to say about me using a title based (however losely) oops sorry inspired by the title of one of Spike's classic war memoirs.


Have a goodtime this evening, and see you on the otherside in the future.

Recent iPhone Apps Part 1

I know between this blog and my other ones I’ve spent a fair amount of time writing about the iPhone and the rather cool apps you can get for it. For those of you without an iPhone this may of been a bit boring for you. Sadly I’m going to bore you a bit more with this post.

I've been playing with some new apps on the iPhone. The majority are free, one or two I've had to get from the US app store because they are only available there.

I'm going to start off with an app that I have been playing a lot today, and really enjoying. Which surprised me. In fact I enjoyed it so much I splashed out and upgraded from the free ad supported version to the paid version! So what app has been so good that it had me reaching for my virtual wallet?

The app is called Words With Friends. Basically you are playing Scrabble on your iPhone. But for the obvious legal reasons they can't call it that, or use the same board layout. You still get the double and triple word scores, and letter scores but in different locations on the board. This is not a solo game. You play with friends or complete strangers that also have this app on their iPhone. It then basically becomes a game of postal scrabble but using an iPhone to track the game. When your opponent has finished their go, (if switched on) a notification is sent to your iPhone to let you know.

The great thing is that you are not restricted to playing one game at a time. You can have several on the go at the same time. Which is a fantastic feature.

The app also allows you to send out invites to friends (via email), or post a tweet on Twitter or status update on Facebook to invite friends to play with you.

In fact I have enjoyed this so much, even though I'm not much of a chess player I may just download the chess app that they do that works in a similar way.

The next two apps I'm going to cover together. They are from the same company and I had to use my US iTunes account to get them. Why? Because for whatever reason the developer decided that the rest of us can't play with these yet. The two apps are voice apps, the first Dragon Dictation allows you to speak into your iPhone, and turns that into text that you can copy and paste into whatever app you like. The second app is Dragon Search which allows you to speak in to your iPhone with what you want to search for. Sadly the speech recognition is not that great. My initial test of the dictation app was to speak "I'm writing using dragon dictation". Guess which part it didn't understand? Yep it's own name. I thought maybe it was me and the way I talk. So I fired up the Google app on the iPhone and repeated the word dragon and it understood it. So it definitely is down to the voice recognition app that the developers are using, and that just isn't as good as the one Google are using. The search just reminds me of being competition to the Google app. So no reason to switch there. All in all I'm not impressed with these as they currently stand.

A great free app is the Directgov Travel News app. "By choosing a region, you can use the app to search for travel news on trains, roads, tubes, ferries and trams.

You can get detailed information about the type of delay, areas affected, incident description and severity, complete with Google maps.

Check before you leave to avoid speed restrictions, road closures, engineering works, sailing cancellations, replacement bus services, roadworks, accidents, bridge and tunnel closures, contra flows, diversions and more." (taken from the official site here).

As you can imagine this is a very handy app to have for all those that travel a lot. Although it can seem a little slow in downloading the data that has been asked for. Especially if you ask it for all the severity types. So I would do this at home over wifi and not the 3G network. Oh and I approve of the tax payer money being spent on this sort of thing. Bugger I think I have found something Labour has done I like.

I use wordpress as my main blogging platform for my other blogs. Which means I use the excellent free wordpress app for the iPhone. However I didn't have an app that would let me edit the blogs I write or contribute to on Blogger. So I have been trying the free version of BlogPress. I know that the paid version will also allow me to write posts for my wordpress blogs as well. But at the moment I'm sticking with the free wordpress app for that. However I may change that if the next release of the wordpress app doesn't match this one in the control it gives over the placement of images within a post.  Which should tell you that I do like this app.

O2 and Sky are doing an offer of being able to watch some Sky tv on the go free for 3 months, then after that it's £6 a month. The tv is the sports and news, I'd of liked some of the other Sky channels myself. But 3 months of being able to watch Liverpool struggle to get back into the top four for free can't be bad. The big test will be in 3 months time whether I keep the subscription going or not. The picture was not bad, but the broadcast was a couple of minutes behind the live broadcast in the test that I did so far.

I'm a movie buff. The questions I like answering in Trivia Pursuit are the movie questions. So this paid for app is ideal for me. It has little video clip based questions, very interactive, very well executed. I like this app a lot. Plus it has the all important Facebook connect so I can go online and brag about my high scores to my friends on Facebook.

This is a great little app that most people will find useful.

I've used it to check the speed of Kate's broadband connection (which is dreadfully slow). Checked mine as well. But you can also use it to check that 3G data connection. The app also stores the results of those tests so you can do back and compare.

It is a simple app and does one thing. But it does it really well.

 

 

 

 

Keep an eye out for part 2 in the next couple of days.