Entries Tagged 'internet' ↓

ah, nothing like a site outage. Some confusion with my host, but all is cleared up now.

Version 0.3 of the Homebrew Browser for the Wii is close to releasing. It’s already a great service, but it’s getting a great facelift and some nice features, such as a ratings system and a download queue. You can check out the full list of V.03 features.

If you haven’t installed the Homebrew Channel, you can see from the video just how much Wii homebrews have grown. While many are ports or simple puzzle games, the variety is increasing. And a ratings system is a great addition to the community.

My blog never appears on digg’s gaming front page, but I read it enough to know what it takes to make it there.

1. Pretend to be an expert in something you know absolutely nothing about.
2. Make a World of Warcraft movie.
3. Talk about something commonly known as if it’s your little secret, such as the best MMOs according to gamerankings.com.
4. Create the thinnest of straw man arguments, for example, ‘Reasons Duke Nukem Forever really is late.’
5. Dwell on some obscure aspect of a game genre, like the darkest darkened alleys in adventure games, hardest puzzles that required a rope, sluttiest Leisure Suit Larry girls, hardest FPS corners to hide behind, or RTS references to ‘all your base are belong to us.’
6. Claim that Microsoft is about to fix red ring of death problems with the latest rumored modification.
7. Write for someconsolefanboy.com.
8. Find some evidence that girls actually play video games, especially if it allows you to say [heh, heh, beavis] ‘joystick.’ Bonus points if you can make it about girls who play in the nude.
9. Talk about how the Wii is about to fail because its graphics suck.
10. Make up a Star Wars gaming rumor, like ‘Bioware is working on a Princess-Leia-in-the-slave-costume game. My cousin’s friend who’s a really avid gamer in Edmonton said he heard Bioware devs talk about it at Dadeo’s.’
11. Don’t bother with anything about the PS3 because no one cares enough to even make fun of it.
12. Come up with a list, preferably one that’s not a multiple of five.
13. Say something about the currently best selling game or an overhyped game yet to be released.

I’ve been meaning to do this for a while . . . I finally added WordPress plugins to make this blog appear in more friendly formats for the Wii, PSP, and DS. The Wii version has the Wii blue theme but looks good on the Wii’s Opera browser, though I did decrease the font size a tad. [If I feel up to redoing the graphics, I might change the theme up some.] I don’t have a DS Opera browser, but I used the browser in DSOrganize, and the site did look a little better, after I created a modified version. [If anyone's interested in what I did, see below the break.] And because I don’t have a PSP, I couldn’t test with it.

If you visit this blog with any of those platforms, let me know if you have suggestions or complaints.

Thanks.

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If you’re a blogger, you probably know about WordPress [the tool and the blog host]. If you’re thinking of blogging [and let's face, everyone is], then you should.

WordPress 2.5 is coming out around March 10, and it’s quite a nice upgrade. I was able to try out a demo of the administrative tool before it was taken down.

• The administrator interface is getting redesigned, including a widget-based dashboard. The management of widgets on your blog site looks to be much improved.
  • The Dashboard view looks much improved and faster, including the ability to edit the different parts of the dashboard more easily.
  • The post editor is much better and more responsive. The WYSIWYG tools are improved, including an advanced toolbar that includes embedding videos. [I personally love the toggle that changes the editor to a full window view.] unfortunately, they’ve located tools such as selecting the post category below the post editor instead of on the side. However, it could be that this is easily customized.
  • A tag manager is now included.
  • Gravatar support is included as part of the Reading settings.
• Themes get updates, including multiple sidebars and the ability to have front-page specific content.
• 2.5 includes several programmatic changes for security, defects, and optimizations.

I’m very much looking forward to 2.5 and will probably upgrade within a week or two of its release. Who knows. I might change my theme yet again, though I’m partial to the current one for its simplicity.

Chris, gnome, and I have a new game blog called Game Cabaret where we won’t be talking about game news but noodling on old and new games, on gamers, and on the gaming life. The first two posts are about games, musicals, freud, and homoeroticism.

We’ll also be having guest bloggers to help stir up the smoke of the game cabaret.

No reservations required. Nor shoes, pants, or shirt.

I’m usually tolerant of people grammar on the Internet. I’m not going to generalize, but this post from gamefaqs.com is just plain sad:

This game rox guys! wat u all tink? b4 i play tis game i din even hear of ben 10 b4. but aft i play it, i think tis game rox man.

Just a note that this blog is the #1 site for the search phrase “yorick comic nude”.

Unfortunately, that’s the only really interesting search phrase for this site, although I had a few hits for gay+comics.

I definitely need to start working in more varied word choice to get more interesting hits.

In our house, the Cartoon Network website gets a lot of hits, even though we don’t have cable. The reason is that it has a lot of games that the kids enjoy playing. So, the news that CN will offer a new browser application to the Wii and PS3 consoles is welcome.

This new multi-platform window called “Mega Series” lets either PS3 or Wii owners use their custom Flash players to play a series of games based upon Cartoon Network and Adult Swim programing. This new application will be launching sometime between late 2007 and early 2008.

“Developing applications like MEGA Series is an important complement to our existing online and mobile businesses and a part of Cartoon Network’s digital growth strategy,” said Paul Condolora, senior vice president and general manager of Cartoon Network New Media. “Not only does MEGA Series extend our reach, but more importantly provides an opportunity to offer a unique content and user experience for our audience.”

For one, I’m curious what the ‘browser app’ is exactly . . . is this just a flash app? Or something else? Also, I wonder if, for the Wii, this is something just available through the Internet channel. [unless I have missed it, I wish I could use one of the initial channels for a web site.]

This is one of those things, too, that gets more mileage out of our consoles. I have, in fact, used the news channel in the mornings to scan the news [but, man, that weather channel forecast is way inaccurate, but then Texas weather in the spring can change minute to minute]. Also, it’s not clear if this is a specific app just for consoles or one that is refactored to work for the PC as well as consoles. Regardless, I would think this is not something a tv network would take on lightly: they have no need to take risks and can afford to be responsive. Apparently, they already see something to warrant this development expense.

I was responding to a comment on my star wars: lethal alliance post when I decided to check the details by searching the internet. And guess what I found? Someone posted my minigame descriptions to the lethal alliance entry on wikipedia.

Ah, the internet.

Back in my academic days, and the early days of the web, I was fascinated with how online attribution and ownership was different from that of print. that said, if I were concerned about ownership and attribution, I’d have a copyright statement. Well, at least the information is in a better place to help folks because I’m pretty sure more folks read wikipedia than this little blog.

heh.

i’ve made an update the site. I changed the theme for a couple of reasons.

1. the previous theme was nice, especially with the curved corners, but it was slow loading.
2. i upgraded to wordpress 2.1.3 for several reasons, and the theme just didn’t work well with it or with the wordpress widgets.

It’s a little more plain, but it’s close to what I had.

I’ve been a gaim [now called pidgin] for a long time now. I wasn’t thrilled with the 2.0 redesign which seems, if anything, less user friendly. Worse, I just installed the latest beta version 6, and the app crashes when I try to add an account in Windows XP SP2. Its memory usage is also no longer noticeably smaller than Trillian. Going back to 1.50 is not much of an option because of filesend issues, among other nits. Unfortunately, I’m not crazy about trilian, which I use at work for a couple of reasons [such as that the tabs with the name of people I'm IMing is much smaller in Trilian than in Gaim]. And then there are the issues with Gimp. The next version of Trillian looks more robust with web 2.0 compatibility which assures us a larger memory footprint though they’re claiming version 4 will use less memory.

Unfortunately, Miranda’s interface is even worse. I’ll probably stick with Pidgin for now [and try to find someway to add and edit accounts] until trillian 4 comes out.

I finally found something useful on youtube.

First, I’m a big fan of Genesis, particularly with Peter Gabriel. But I’ve never seen that version of Genesis play live. Around 1983, I knew a girl at college who had a VHS of Genesis in concert, and I’ve searched in vain for it since then. So, with that, I try to recreate a song set I would have loved to have seen. even though genesis is reuniting for a tour, they coming nowhere near Texas, so this will have to do.

[sidebar: my wife is not a fan of gabriel, but I dragged her to his 'up' tour, and it was one of the most enjoyable concerts we've seen. as she said, he really puts a lot into making a show as well as creating good music. i loved the human gerbil ball myself. I know it's supposed to be a womb, but it looks more like a gerbil ball. when he started bouncing in the ball, the crowd went wild, and it was just so fun it made me tingly. It was more upbeat even than the version in the linked video. we also enjoyed 'animal nation' , which my son insisted on playing again and again when he was little.]

I’ve seen bits of ‘i know what i like’ live but it’s nice to see the whole thing:

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The library of fan films for Batman is out there if you’re brave enough. But some are well done, even professional.

This one, though less polished, does something interesting the throw-away Robin character.

This one dosn’t suggest a very interesting story, but I did dig all the Alex Ross inspired shots:

according to this article, 12 million Americans have a blog. 3.6% of America has a blog. I think it’s official then . . . there are now more bloggers than Elvis impersonators. [back in the 80s, one of my favorite statistics was that at the then current rate of growth, everyone in the U.S. by 2010 will have been an Elvis impersonator.]

back in ’93 i started a website, back when there was actually a ‘new website of the day’ website. it was a modest thing, a page dedicated to my collection of sundry bbq chips, which I reviewed and rated, which in turn got me bbq chips from all over the place, including a box from australia, england, and hawaii. i even got a mention in a couple of magazines, including the texas monthly with anna nicole smith in a red dress on the cover. i grew bored with it and it fell to the wayside. now, here I type on a blog that two people read. the interesting thing is that one of them, i think, lives across the atlantic. now, if i had another reader over there, i could add the line to my blog “a popular blog in europe.”