fonality sucks (interesting)
similarities between light and sound
how to record an orchestra
grandcentral google
guitar tuner for mobile phone
google grand central
pc magazine
recording an orchestra
guitar tuner mobile phone
light and sound similarities
I finally got around to keying in the beta test activation code for Home, Sony’s new virtual world system for the Playstation 3. The initial download was around 80 GB, and Home requires an additional 3 GB allocation on the PS3′s hard disk.
Right off the bat, the similarities in mechanics to Second Life are greater than the differences. Of course, Sony’s graphics are superior, with the virtual world having less jaggies and pixelation than Second Life. As far as I can tell, you can’t create or craft virtual items in Home the way you can in Second Life, but that could change as this is merely a beta. Item creation inevitably leads to virtual perversion, so time will tell. Remember that Second Life “rape” case?
My girlfriend hooked up a USB keyboard, which worked as expected. The chat interface, without a keyboard, is the same on-screen keyboard seen in many PS3 titles, and is too frustrating to bother with. If chat is your thing, a USB keyboard (we borrowed one from our iMac) is a must.
We created two characters to try out. One that looks like me-skinny, pale and white–and one that looks like her–skinny, pale, white, and cute. It is remarkably easier to get your avatar to look more like your real-life self that it is with, say, a Mii on Nintendo’s Mii Channel. Of course, Miis are supposed to be caricatures, and I don’t suspect Nintendo has a Wii social network up their sleeves.
Walking into Home’s first main area, a town square, the female avatar was immediately inundated with chat requests and “really close” dancing by the other (male) beta testers. There were hundreds of male avatars running around, but I only counted three females including my girlfriend. So, not exactly chick-friendly. I’m guessing that the PS3 and XBox have far fewer female users than the Wii, since the dominant offerings for the Sony and Microsoft systems are shooters, Madden, and racing games.
There are some neat things in Home, despite its freshman appearance. Though the stores in Home’s virtual shopping mall were “unavailable”, there was a giant-screen in the town square running a game trailer for Far Cry 2–a shooter, imagine that. Also, there is a rather cool bowling alley where you can play arcade games that look like old-school standup machines. Pool tables (like the one shown at right) and bowling lanes provide real value-add gaming experiences, so that’s cool. A poker room would be even cooler, but Sony apparently hasn’t licensed a fast-enough hand evaluator to get poker running in the beta.
Some of the participants were chatting about a version of Home for the PSP, but it boggles the mind. Why anybody would walk around a virtual world on a 3-inch screen when they can just walk around the real world is beyond me. In a way, the same argument exists for the full-on PS3 version of Home. I guess it’s the same issue I’ve had with all these virtual world chat / emote / fantasy environments like World of Warcraft and Second Life. Perhaps that’s why Google canned their virtual world project. Somebody at Google must’ve had the bright idea — hey, what’s so bad about wandering around the REAL world, anyway?
It seems that there are a lot of unfinished ideas in Home: entrypoints into other games, participant contests, and so on. The things that do work (which surprised me) are buddy call (where you can call buddies from your list like a telephone), open-area voice chat, and the virtual games. Everything else more or less reminds be of stuff we’ve already seen a thousand times, whether it be Sims Online or the Mii Channel. Here’s hoping Sony can crack this nut. They’ve made it useable. Now it’s time to make it USEFUL.
Eighteen months ago, when the ‘sphere was abuzz with posts about Joost, I downloaded it, blogged, played with for a few days, and then it more or less faded from my radar. I’m not as big on TV watching as many, and Joost lacked a lot of the social features that made YouTube and Hulu so effective for me.
But, while the YouTube experience on the iPhone is pretty cool, Joost offers one thing YouTube doesn’t: commercial content. So I installed Joost from the Appstore this morning. My expectation that it wouldn’t work on 3G was confirmed as soon as I fired it up. A quick trip to the Settings panel and my WiFi was re-enabled.
Within moments, I was watching Will Smith and Tommy Lee Jones in a 4-inch-screen version of Men in Black. It took about 20 seconds for the film to begin streaming. The quality was great and there were no burps during playback.
OK, like Ken Camp, I’ve tried Fring and had my share of stability issues with it, but I’ll tell you what. It’s so frustrating to see so many promising apps (Palringo, et al) appear and stagnate on mobile platforms, especially the iPhone, because their best features are either WiFi-only or otherwise hobbled by Apple or the carriers. Case in point is SIP on non-jailbroken iPhones. Not from Fring, not from nobody. Sucks times ten.
Get over it Apple & AT&T. Consumer choices is how you win (and keep) customers.
One of the things I find silly about Google AdSense is that it often inappropriately matches keywords, resulting in advertisements that either explicitly bad for your web site, embarrassing, or perhaps just silly. I’ll give you a few examples. I remember a few years ago when a buddy wrote a post blasting Microsoft Exchange, religiously decrying Exchange as a bad product–and naturally Microsoft Exchange was the keyword hit for AdSense, and his story ended up getting coupled with ads for Microsoft Exchange integrators.
Another example — I was reading an online novel, a blog novel. On the sidebar was an AdSense block, and my eyes gravitated towards the AdSense before I finished reading the first chapter. The advertisement was for a woodburning fireplace. OK, I thought, there’s got to be a fireplace somewhere in this chapter. Sure enough, I got the end of the chapter, and there was a brief scene with a fireplace.
It dawned on me that the author’s click-through rate on this chapter is probably quite low, since woodburning fireplaces may not appeal to his readers as much as, say, BOOKS. And being that it was a fantasy novel, perhaps his click-throughs would’ve been better with ads for fantasy artwork, figurings, or some such.
Google would do well to improve AdSense by allowing webmasters to indicate which keywords correspond to the products or services they’d like to see advertised on their sites.
After having several extended periods of evaluation time with Digium’s SwitchVox PBX appliance, the AA60 model, I’ve developed a list of what I love about it–and what I’d like to see improved. It’s running the current SMB firmware (sorry I don’t have the revision in front of me at the moment). I don’t normally run into SwitchVox gear in the field, but I visited a soon-to-be client that was running the AA60 with a full-on Polycom phone set. The standard AA60 rig. Of course, they had complaints (but they’re running 4 dial-tone trunks over SIP on a single DSL line, doy.) Naturally, I told him I could help.
Anyway, I’ve summarized what I love about the AA60, and what can be improved:
Pros:
- Recording calls from the web interface. Works great. Recorded calls end up in your voicemail box. Perfect. In-call recording using a dialed code to start and stop, not included.
- Panels can easily be integrated into desktop apps, like the experimental panel I built for my Excel contact sheet using RealBasic’s browser control. Good stuff.
- No problems with call quality. Works great with Junction Networks IAX and SIP trunks (I’ve tried both but prefer IAX since it’s more firewall-friendly).
- Auto-provisioning is stupid simple. And Polycom makes some of the best SIP hardphones money can buy. P.S. Polycom seems to be the preferred phone vendor for SwitchVox PBXs.
- Call-logging and reporting is great. There are a variety of built-in traffic reports, CDRs, and an Excel export that works very well.
Cons:
- No IAX endpoint support. Given how downright simple it is to support IAX in an Asterisk environment like SwitchVox, this is just silly. Add IAX support, guys. Really.
- The web interface could use a few tweaks. Setting up cascading call groups is tricky, for example. But hey the AA60 is a small business product so it’s hard to complain.
- No redundant power supply or storage (the higher-up model offers both).
It appears that Telia is the first firm to garner Apple’s blessing in developing a multimedia messaging (MMS) app for the iPhone. That is, one that doesn’t require a jailbroken iPhone. Interestingly, Telia doesn’t service customers in the United States, and it remains to be seen how Apple plans to address what I believe is the biggest Epic Fail of the iPhone–no media messaging.
