iPod Touch 3.0 Software Review...

I updated my iPod to version 3.0 around the day that the update came out, now it is time to share my experience with in the form of a software review.

Considering the fact that I have no form of screen capturing device with which to display screens from the iPod, I shall be conveying what I have seen with artistic depictions of each screen I deem necessary for you to see.

In this review, I shall be covering the new features mentioned here that I am able to with my available resources.

First on the chopping block is the newly introduced ability to download Movies, TV shows and Audiobooks right to your iPod via WiFi. The main screen for the new addition is pretty much the same as the music screen, the real difference is when you pick a film.

All in all, I think that this is a good addition, but I have to ask why? Is this so that I can buy whole Movies on the go? I see no real application for this other than to run your battery down. If I'm sitting in a McDonalds and I suddenly have the urge to watch Top Gun, I'll probably be done with my meal, be out of there and home before the movie's done downloading. If you're already at home, just use iTunes, there's no reason to use this feature unless you're in the same boat as I am and your computer's in the shop.

The next feature would have to be Spotlight Search, an addition to the Home screen. This feature will search your iPod's contact lists, emails, calendars, notes, music and videos for anything you type into the search box.

I tried it, it works. I don't really have anything to say about it, it just works.

Finally ( also know as "I don't want to draw screens anymore"), we have copy and paste. With this feature, you are able to copy pieces of text and then proceed to paste them elsewhere. Looks like the jokes will have to stop here folks, the iPod and iPhone now have copy & paste. No, I'm not making a screen.

I also noticed after the update that the YouTube application had been updated with new features. You are now able to log into your YouTube account and merge your favorites and subscriptions with your device.

Something else I noticed is that when I turn on my iPod, after showing the Apple logo, there is a black screen for around five seconds. I was freaking out the first time this happened, but after those five seconds, the lock screen showed up instead of simply taking me to the home screen like it did previously. I've also noticed that it takes considerably longer to shut down that before, sometimes a good fifteen to twenty seconds.

All in all, I consider this update to be worth it, though I do think that ten dollars for a software update is a little steep.

Doom has come to Blurgh Nation...

What's this? Two posts in a day, surely I am going mad! Nay, if I am going mad, it is only with anticipation to announce the arrival of my new co-contributor: Doom.

Seriously, that's his last name. How can I not allow this man to blog along-side me?

Tony shall be covering anything and everything he chooses since I am heavily indimidated by him. However, like I do my Father, I both fear and respect him.

Tony Doom, everyone.

Yep, I'm an idiot...

I accidentally deleted two of my blog posts last night; "The Speakers! They do Nothing!" and "To Go Where No Man Has Gone Before (Or Wants To Go)..."

Oh, my iPod and I are a crazy pair. If not for Google caching my site, I wouldn't have been able to salvage it.

Also, a minor update on the status of my Laptop, it is now in the hands of professionals. May their hands be guided with laser precision.

UPDATE: The nice man taking care of my beloved Lil' Jim says that he'll have to back up my data and restore the OS, I should have my laptop back by Tuesday.

UPDATE 2: I got my Laptop back today! Now, since he reloaded the OS, I've lost all my programs, configuration settings aaaaand my Wireless still doesn't work. Makes me wonder what would happen if I installed Windows 7 RC1...

My Uncle can beat up Your Uncle...

First off, Happy Father's Day to all who qualify. I know my father has had a nice father's day so far, and while I'd like to write a post about him, this piece seems to have come at an opportune time and I cannot ignore it.

Popular Internet TV Show CommandN has chosen my own Uncle, Philip Shaw as the recipient for their... wheelbarrow prize? Just watch the video and see for yourself, it's near the end:

You can't help but wonder what this wheelbarrow must be like for it to be a prize for anything. This thing must be so awesome that the manliest of men would shed a tear at the mere sight of it.

Well, that's all for now. I'll see you in a few days with a review of the new iPod Touch 3.0 software update.

A Shovel to the face would’ve been preferred…

Once again, I have been subjected to a rather violent bout of computer trouble, this time it was my WLAN driver.

I can almost guarantee that this will turn into some kind of rant about Windows Update, or HP being dumb and awesome at the same time considering that the source of my problem started with Windows update.

Last night around Eleven O’clock I had just updated my iPod touch to version 3.0, but that’s another post. After installing the update, I decided for the heck of it to check out my Windows Update to see if there was anything of interest, sure enough, there were two optional updates available.

One of the updates was for my Nvidia Chipset, I already knew that there was something wrong with this update considering I tried to install it before and it was corrupt, so I stayed away from that. The second one was for my internal Modem, I decided to install it, just on a whim. Why not, right? The shovel I mentioned above would've come in handy right about this point in the story.

Needless to say, no Rutila Ex Machina stopped me from having a terrible night and morning trying to get my WLAN to function again.

When I restarted my computer after installing the update, I realized that my HP Wireless Assistant only recognized my Bluetooth and my little network icon in the system tray had a friendly red X superimposed onto it. Dang it, you got me again Windows Update, you and your zany Devil updates.

I go into the device manager and I notice that not only is the WLAN driver not functioning, the hardware isn’t even listed, it’s gone.

So I used the trusty Eee pc sitting beside me to go to my computer’s software and drivers page on HP’s site and downloaded the previous version of the Modem driver that had been updated, installed it and it did nothing.

Ok, that’s cool, that’s fine, this ain’t my first time to the rodeo. I then decided to download the driver for my WLAN, I had all confidence that this would fix the problem considering that it’s for the component that was missing. Ok yeah, that didn’t do anything. This just got real.

I then decided to go for my old fallback, System Restore. You remember how I used that back in my previous post right? Yeah, man, that should do the trick. I do that, pick the date and start it up. My laptop boots back up aaand nothing, the problem still exists.

What? You’re kidding. I did it again, to a later date, nothing. I uninstalled the modem and refreshed the device manager, the modem reinstalled itself but the WLAN was as elusive as it ever was.

I’m not entirely sure what went on last night after that considering that I was blind with rage, all I know is that I woke up today in my bed and I smelled like something I shouldn’t smell like (I’ll let your minds do the walking).

When I went to work today I took a different approach. Just kidding, I did another system restore, it did nothing. I then tried something different, I used my HP Recovery Manager to restore the original driver for my WLAN. I was fairly confident that that would work. Once again I was met with nothing in the form of Wi-Fi. Needless to say, I was very frustrated and defeated, there was never a computer problem I couldn’t fix.

I decided to take another approach, I uninstalled the Modem and installed the WLAN driver, something interesting then happened. The modem was all of a sudden recognized and installed. What? Why is the Modem installing when I’m installing the WLAN driver? That’s when I had an idea.

I uninstalled the Modem again, as well as the Broadcom WLAN driver and then I installed the WLAN driver through the Recovery Manager, once again, while the Recovery Manager installed the driver, the Modem was recognized and installed, I couldn’t do anything about it since it was automatically going to restart a few seconds afterwards.

Ugh, I was pretty defeated, the Modem was installed again, and the WLAN was still not recognized. I was even considering sending it to a “Professional,” but then I saw the device manager in my system tray, it was installing the Wireless network!

So needless to say, I am relieved and happy to have my laptop working again at full throttle. One good thing did come out of all of this though, I had enough material to write a new blog post.

UPDATE: Just turned it on after shutting it down last night before going to sleep, I guess that wasn't a permanent fix. So, in short: brb depression.

To Go Where No Man Has Gone Before (Or Wants To Go)...

Except for the people who saw it in the last two weeks or so before myself.

I am of course talking about the new Star Trek movie, I saw it last night. This is not a review of the film as I intended originally. I want to rant about the Theatre that I went to in order to see the film instead.

Normally, I’d go to Famous Players in Sarnia, considering that it’s practically next door to the Dormitories at my College, but since it’s summer I went to the Local Theatre in Chatham, the "Cinema 6." I hadn’t been in there since seeing the fifth Harry Potter movie so I wasn’t really familiar with the Theatre anymore.

When my family and I pulled up to the Theatre we all noticed that Star Trek was not on the Marquee. Instead, there was X-men in it’s place. I had checked the show times online before we came so it immediately became obvious that somebody wasn’t doing their job. We went in and learned that X-men was sharing one of the screens with Star Trek, it just looked like Star Trek wasn't playing anymore, nice job. We waited in the Lobby for about five minutes because nobody was at the ticket counter, apparently they wouldn’t sell the tickets until the popcorn had been popped… what? I don’t even know.

About two minutes into the wait, five kids around eleven or so came into the theatre, five loud kids. First off, they were marvelled at the ear-shattering squeak the door made when it was closing, so they proceeded to open it and close it maybe three more times. Then they started to punch the glass because according to one of them, he could “punch super strong.”

Finally, the ticket counter opens, and we buy our tickets. On the chart above the register, it says that Star Trek is showing at 7:00, despite the fact that the ticket and the website both say that it’s starting at 6:35. My Mom and little Sister decide to see Night at the Museum 2, while my Brother, Father (old-school Trekkie) and myself go to see Star Trek.

I went to get some Nachos and proceeded to wonder more about who was running the Theatre, the two kids manning the counter looked to be around 12 years old. I immediately regretted getting anything when I heard their Nacho-cheese-squirting machine turn on, it sounded like a lawn mower and nothing was coming out. They opened it and the bag of cold cheese was empty, so they replaced it with a nice full bag of warm Nacho cheese. Just kidding, they scrunched up the bag and squeezed what little amount of cheese left in the bag to the nozzle and turned the machine on. It came out in large drips, are you hungry yet? After all that, I found out that they didn’t have debit at the counter so I had to use cash to purchase my tray of cheese-covered sand.

So now we enter the Screening room and find that there is only one other group of six people and that’s it. Remember when I said that the website, ticket and chart all said different times? Yeah, turns out they were all wrong. I guess the little kid in the projection room was having trouble lifting the film reel onto their ancient projector considering that the movie started at 6:50.

The movie was great, I loved it, except for the parts where the other movie-goers insisted on adding super-hilarious additional lines to the characters during exciting sequences (including shouting “Weeeeeeeeeeee” when they were skydiving onto the drill), thus ruining the scenes for me.

After the movie we left as fast as we could, my Sister later told me that my Mom was talking during their movie, the end of the world has already begun.

The Speakers! They do Nothing!

So yeah, last night I had a spot of computer trouble.

I had just updated iTunes last night and restarted my trusty laptop and found that the start-up sound didn’t play. The login confirmation sound didn’t play, etc… I looked at the sound manager and drivers and it looked like everything was recognized correctly, so I was stumped. I later realized that I did get sound, but only in iTunes and Windows Media Player, odd to say the least. So I tried reinstalling the sound driver, didn’t do anything, mainly because HP didn’t provide the correct driver for my system (I have an HP tx2010 laptop) so that made things worse. I eventually did a system restore and everything was OK.

That was weird to say the least, but it also made sense considering what I had done on my computer earlier that day. I recently switched from Thunderbird to Postbox for viewing my Gmail account, but Postbox didn’t offer the functionality that allowed it to be minimized to the taskbar like Thunderbird (I used the MinimizeToTray add-on). I looked around the Intertubes for a solution, knowing that there are many applications that allow programs to minimize to the tray, picked one and installed it.

During the installation, it notified me that a certain component in the installation might be viewed as a Virus by the system, but it “TOTALLY WAS NOT!” Yup, they put that in Caps in the EULA. Anyways, it didn’t work and I uninstalled it.

My security system, Webroot Spysweeper, started it’s scheduled security sweep and saw a Trojan, this is uncommon. I had it remove it, I didn’t really care considering that it was probably one of the components from the program I uninstalled.

Long story short, I’m not sure if it was the Trojan or iTunes that qualified my Laptop’s sound for a run at the Gelding’s Plate, but if you’re reading this and you have that problem, just do a system restore, it’ll clear it right up.

Nintendo E3 Press Conference

I just finished watching the Nintendo Press Conference from E3 ‘09, the link to the video can be found here.

I got to say that over all I was impressed by their showing, but it still isn’t as exciting as the conferences where you know some kind of hardware is going to be revealed. Everyone watches when they think that a new console will be announced, that applies to all companies. I’m not here to talk about past conferences, so on with the post.

There was a surprisingly large amount of well-known franchises being announced for the Wii and DS, but I have to say that overall I was most excited about the announcement of Super Mario Galaxy 2 and Red Steel 2. That’s not to say that Metroid: Other M and others didn’t get me excited, I just never started playing the Metroid series until Corruption.

For those of you who haven’t watched it, or don’t feel like wading through around seventy minutes of video to see it, the new Metroid game was announced and the company co-developing it beside Nintendo is going to be Team Ninja of the Dead or Alive and Ninja Gaiden fame. I was actually very interested in this instalment because of the fact that a lot of the game is going to be played in the third-person perspective. Just from seeing the trailer, you can tell that it was Team Ninja, it screams Ninja Gaiden in terms of special moves, you know, like when Samus jumped on top of the purple alien and shot it in the face? Yeah, pretty rad.

There was practically nothing new on the Red Steel 2 front besides the fact that they said that it’s unplayable without the Wii Motion Plus Add-on. That’s great! I really enjoyed the first one, I know that a lot people didn’t like the first one at all and if I ever get anyone reading this they might call me out on that, I still found it enjoyable to have that feeling of control when I shot someone mercilessly in the face. I admit, the sword-fighting sequences felt way too constricting and unrealistic, I still enjoyed the game overall, and the inclusion of Wii Motion Plus will only add to the gameplay. Here’s the trailer for Red Steel 2:

A lot of people in the comment section of that video seem to think that those aren't pre-rendered cutscenes, but then again I imagine many of them believe that Nintendo cares about them and not their money as well.

The second game I was excited about as mentioned above is Super Mario Galaxy 2. I was mostly excited about this because of the scene depicting the snowy level! I love the snow levels in Mario games, they're my favorites. Here's a clip from the Presser announcing the game:

That looks very promising. I really enjoyed Super Mario Galaxy, but there were a few parts of the game I felt were lacking.

For one, in Super Mario 64 and Super Mario Sunshine, I always enjoyed playing around in the overworld, just exploring. In Galaxy, I felt that the overworld was much smaller than both Sunshine and 64 with much less to do. I also enjoy having giant levels in three dimensional Mario games. In Galaxy, there were a bunch of smaller planets, I always enjoyed having a vast landscape to explore in 64 and Sunshine, not that Galaxy didn't deliver those landscapes in some instances.

Another thing I found... interesting to say the least was the Wii Vitality Sensor...

This thing.

I can imagine a few ways that it could be interesting, but overall it would be rather clunky. An interesting way that it could be applied would be in a Horror game, where the vitality sensor would measure your heart rate, and would cause the in-game character to pant, thus giving away his position to the monsters and then be torn to shreds, but I still can't see that happening without it getting in the way.

So overall, I have to say I was impressed by the showing this year, but there were a few things that left me with a quizzical look on my face, I mean, why would they show a game that looks like a soon-to-be bargain-bin game?

Oh man...

This is my first blog post, this could either be totally awesome or totally... not.

I need to start this out on the right foot, I should write the way I feel. My ears feel like they're losing their circulation thanks to these fancy new Skullcandy Headphones, I hope they relax their vice-like grip soon enough, I like my ears.

Let's see here... Edit Html, eh? Let's try setting the text to Heading 1...

butt. HA!

That was pretty crazy right thurr.

I suppose my blog should have a purpose, but what would one write about in a blog? I suppose I could write about anything and everything. The hardest part of writing this will probably be writing it under the knowledge that nobody might ever see it, like my own private corner of the internets.

This is going to be interesting, though I suppose it could get even more interesting once the inclusion of Google Wave is made. I'm really excited about that personally, has anyone reading this actually sat through the entire demo video? If you haven't it's one hour and twenty minutes of interesting stuff that I barely understand, but I was still able to come away from it with the impression that Google Wave will make stuff super-special-awesome.

There are a few concerns I have towards taking full advantage of what Wave has to offer though. For starters, I have a grand total of two contacts who use Gmail; one of my Instructors, and one of my friends, this isn't including my Dad who uses it to view his POP mail account from his iPod. So essentially, unless Hotmail and the lot decide to make a Wave protocol, then Google might not get the kind of attention they wanted, but that's not to say that they won't get hoards of ravenous fans banging on their door, myself being one of them.

I'd have to say one of the more impressive things I saw while watching that video was the dragging and dropping of photos directly from Windows Explorer into the browser window. I certainly hope that that becomes a standard for Html even though I already have Gears installed.

Another thing I remember from the presentation was the realtime typing on both browsers. While it may be interesting to actually see what the other person is typing instead of just seeing the old fashioned "herpaderp is typing something...", it could also turn out to be some sort of curse. Think about it, you might start typing some kind of reply to a wave and then erase it, if the other person was online, they still saw it. I hope they implement that private typing thing they talked about early on.

I hope that Google Wave is released soon, it's interesting to see how Google continuously manages to draw people to the power of the browser in comparison to actual downloaded and installed programs.