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Mario Kart Wii
April 10th, 2008
Well I’ve spent most of my free time today playing this game so you can safely assume that it’s good.
If you feel like playing over Nintendo WFC my friends code is: 2750-1219-5606.
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Funny thought for the day
January 6th, 2007
Robert X. Cringely has come out with an entry for his 2007 predictions that is both funny, and quite scary…
7) The Sony news is SO bad that it deserves two predictions. I would predict the fall of CEO Howard Stringer again if there were clearly somebody at Sony who wants his job. The business is in such difficulty that Microsoft is discussing internally how to help Sony from going under, since that would create a raft of antitrust problems for Redmond. I am not making this up.
You can read the rest of the predictions, and the results of last years, over on his site.
It’s the last bit that is scary and funny. As crazy as it sounds, you can actaully believe that there are people in Microsoft worried that the PS3 will fail and leave them in a possibly nasty anti-trust situation. Ok, maybe they’ld be able to claim that Nintendo are enough competition, but even the most avid Nintendo has to agree that Nintendo’s past console sales don’t compare to that of the PS2. That isn’t to say, of course, that the Wii wont change all that, as the DS has already proved that Nintendo are more than capable of producting a market leading device.
I still find it strange that one company should have to worry about the stupidity of another. It’s not like Microsoft have tried to make the PS3 fail. If it does, it’ll be a mistake of Sony’s own creation.
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What to do when you get beaten to market?
December 23rd, 2006
I’ve been happly working on a web based media center for the Wii for a couple of weeks now. It can stream MP3s and video files (mostly, still got a few bugs) and I thought it was a pretty cool idea.
I was going to release it for free when I’d gotten the bugs out in the new year, however someones beaten me to it. Wii Media Cetner X by Red Kawa does the same.
Looks wise, theirs is nicer, but that’s easily fixed with a stylesheet so that’s not a worry. They’ve also taken the time to pull the relavent bits out of ffmpeg and build a stand-alone Wii video encoder which is nicer then my way of just calling FFMPEG and dealing with that.
The question is, what do I do now? I wasn’t intending on selling it so, as long as theirs works is there any point in me carrying on the work?
On the good side, it does give me more time to play with all my other projects :).
Since I was only writing this to fill a need, now that someone else has filled it is it worth carrying on, or should I just do something else with my time?
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Wii Internet Channel (Beta) Review
December 22nd, 2006
First off it’s pretty responsive. Load times are maybe a little bit slower then a normal machine, but not enough for it to be a pain. Whether this is due to the wireless interface being a bit sluggish or the rendering taking a bit longer I don’t know but it’s not enough to be anoying.
Entering URLs with the onscreen keyboard is ok. USB or bluetooth keyboard support would be nice, but I’m guessing that the idea is for the Wii to be used to check stuff quickly rather then as a replacement for your normal browser. This being the case you’ld only need enter it once and store it in your favorites list for repeat visits.
For Flash support I was expecting the worst, maybe version 6, but more likely 5. Luckly a quick trip to Adobe’s test page showed that it’s got 7.0.70.0, which is great for what I’m planning at the moment, but more about that in the new year.
Scrolling around the page by holding the B button works fine, the only complaint being that the zoom mode only goes in a single step. This makes it anoying to read text on the screen if it’s more then about 600px wide, however one of Opera’s clever mobile features made an appearance that goes a long way to fixing this.
Pressing the 2 button on the controll drops you into a text mode. It looks like it swaps to a simple style-sheet and increases the font size, giving you a single, screen wide column of text that’s perfectly readable on my 23″ screen. If you’re laying out your site using tables or using some WYSIWYG tool expect your pages to fail badly in this mode. Anyone making pages properly, and doing all styling with ul, li, spans, divs etc; will be fine, so it’s another reason to learn how to do things properly.
I haven’t pushed it very far yet, but there’s at least some support of CSS2 (overflow works fine) and pages render almost identically to the desktop version.
The browser also seems to respect the wide-screen setting of the Wii, since the output on my screen is wider then the 600px rumored. It’s probably close to 800-900 px.
Overall it looks like the Internet Channel might come in useful for quickly checking news and web-comics when you haven’t got time to boot your desktop machine, but it’s not a desktop replacement yet (but I wasn’t really expecting that anyway).
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