LEGO Hero

I don't care who you are, you need to see this. Be sure to start at the first photo of LEGO Guitar Hero goodness.

Opera + BitTorrent = Sweet Lovin'

In the internet world, time is measured in microcyberpixelseconds, which means time moves very fast. It has to, otherwise your megabits won't get to your computer in time and then your JPEGs would load backwards. What all this means is that whatever I say in this blog is old news, and you can safely ignore it. Like this: Opera now has a built-in BitTorrent client!

Look out, only the cool kids (and a Dungeon Master) use Opera now. Oh, targeted ads, how you amuse me with your silly ways.

Glossy ads aside, the BT integration works surprisingly well right out of the box. I googled for some legal torrents and ended up at - lo and behold! - www.legaltorrents.com, where I found some nice stuff that creative people have released under the Creative Commons license. Click on a torrent link, and a dialogue pops up with a message warning you about sharing the file with other people. Click OK, and the download shows up just like all your other downloads in the Transfers window, with kBs and whatnots whizzing away without a care. If you're behind a firewall, you don't have to open any ports if you don't want to, but it helps.

Speaking of legal torrents, take a look at the short film about trusted computing (ignore the unfortunate grammatical errors in the film, it has a nice message), and prepare to be amazed by Studio Trophis's The White Chamber. It's a scary point-and-click adventure with fairly simple puzzles and nice graphics. I downloaded an old version from LegalTorrents, so I have no idea how the new voice acting sounds. I might get back to you on that one.

In the mean time, have fun with BitTorrent. Looks like P2P is getting some well-deserved attention. They could have picked a less crappy protocol than BT, I guess, but oh well.

Console inflation

I made a diagram that shows how much consoles actually costed; all prices are adjusted for retail inflation. Maybe I'm just weird, but I think it's actually pretty interesting. You can see how Nintendo just keeps dropping in price; according to my calculations, consoles will be free by 2012. Until then, a special deal: Trade in your old Atari 2600 for 3 Wiis!

Edit: It turns out that the graph I based my adjusted version on already has a sister graph showing the exact same data I calculated. D'oh.

Mobile Office

I sat in the very back of the bus today, in the middle seat, or as I like to call it, "the bouncy office". The very bouncy office. Sitting right above the back wheels, you receive nearly all the force of the uneven Swedish roads directly into your spine, delivered via the not so subtle undulations of the shock absorbers. It kind of sucks, and it can make you a bit nauseous if you're reading a computer screen. Also, thanks to the wonders of adolescence, the ventilation on the left hand side has been cracked open and is now spewing ice cold air into my face. So make that "the ice cold, very bouncy office".

But still! Finally somewhere to completely fold out the old lap top, stretch the old legs and use the old grey matter for something not very useful, such as writing this blog post. In Notepad, of course; I still dream of the day when the bus fare will cover the price of wi-fi. Imagine each bus having a wi-fi uplink to, at the very least, a 3G/EDGE internet connection. How hard can it be? As hard as sticking a wi-fi card and a 3G SIM card reader into a lap top? Heck, the bus fare is already kind of expensive, so why not throw in some extras? What am I paying for anyway? :P

"Earthquake! Look out!"

Yes, it's another toy commercial! I can't get enough, and really -- who doesn't love toy commercials?

Each Cube World has a motion sensor and buttons that let you play with the stick person living in the cube. The really cool feature is that you can connect cubes and let the stick people interact with each other. Apparently, they can cross the Cube World boundaries by their own volition. Could have been a nice setup for teaching kids a wholesome message of world peace, if it weren't for the constant fighting (as featured in the commercial). I know I'm not kidding anyone, of course fighting is fun!

I bet that if you connect enough of these together, they'll develop a hive mind and start disobeying you and ultimately take over the world. Well, one can only hope.

Pixel Chix

I'm fascinated by toy commercials; they're happy and funny, and of course the only interesting commercials out there. Now I think I need one of these Pixel Chix toys, and apparently a friend with his/her own Pixel Chix to play with.

Look! A crystal LCD embedded in a toy house! It's genius.

Powerball Techno

I have one of these. It's awesome. :)

This is just the demo message ("new nsd power ball"), which is the easiest one to get and thus the one we used for demonstration purposes. If you rev up the powerball to higher speeds, it shows the RPM you achieved as it winds down. In short... Best. Toy. Ever.

P.S. Managed to get a nice shot of the RPM display. Enjoy!

Crazy tree

I found this at a furniture store:

Kinda scary.

Deep in the Caribbean...

If you can't believe what you're seeing, then you're not alone. I couldn't either. But it's true! It's Monkey Island on a mobile phone. On my mobile phone! I can actually walk around with this classic in my pocket and play it any time I want. It might take some time getting used to, but I think this giddy feeling of euphoria might help me tide it over.

The porting of ScummVM to EPOC/Symbian has been in the works for a while now. I've known about it since the first EPOC patch was applied to the ScummVM CVS, but I never dared hope that they'd actually target the S60 platform. Surely, it had to be impossible?

Apparently, not so. The crazy genius who ported this made it work on my phone, and today the executables were released to the public. Well technically, it was yesterday, but time flies when you're having fun.

Now, this is ScummVM we're talking about, so suddenly I can play all sorts of games on my phone, not just LucasArts classics.

The screen is smaller than 320x200, so everything is scaled down to fit. Surprisingly, that's not at all noticeable for the graphics, but it quickly becomes painfully obvious that legibility is adversely affected. Basically, this means I can't read what anyone's saying in Beneath a Steel Sky. The font is rather narrow, and a lot of the outlines on the letters are missing. The strange love of ALL CAPS that the Revolution team exhibits in this game doesn't help matters; caps aren't exactly known for their readability.

LucasArts had a better font to start with. Their big blocky font has a nice and wide kerning. Apparently they weren't scrimping on screen estate, so their font doesn't suffer that much when it's scaled down. There's still the odd unreadable letter, but you can understand every word from context, especially if you've played the game before. On the other hand, that kind of goes for Beneath a Steel Sky too. I understood the intro dialog in BASS, since playing it again jogged memories of my three or four runs through it on the PC.

Unfortunately, the sound only has one volume setting as of yet: ear-piercingly loud. I'm hoping they'll fix this, because now I have to connect my headphones and use them as loudspeakers, which is not a great solution. On the plus side, it's sound! I can hear Michael Land's brilliant iMUSE music on my phone! I'm running out of exclamation marks!

Minor issues aside, the games work flawlessly. I can't understand how much processing power and memory my phone actually has. That these games even fit on my memory card is fantastic, and that they run without a hitch is amazing. It's ScummVM, for crying out loud! These guys know what they're doing, and it works so well you'd think the games were written for them, not reverse engineered by them.

Well... I guess it's simply a miracle.