From Brick Commander, a fine collection of Lego spaceships.

Now, where’s that Lego box of mine…

BigAl

Thought it was probably time that I laid out some of my initial thoughts of the Nokia N800 that I won at LugRadio Live. I don’t have any pictures / screenshots at the moment, but I promise I’ll get some up soon.

Background

It’s possible that I get some of these technical details a bit wrong - apologies in advance
The Nokia N800 is an “internet tablet” - it’s not a mobile phone, or a PDA. If anything, it’s more like a very small laptop. It runs on Linux, using the Hildon desktop, based on Gtk. It has built in wifi and bluetooth, and a beautiful screen. It even has stereo speakers. It has 2 SD Card slots, now compatible with SD cards up to 8GB in size. I believe both of these are hot-swappable. It comes with a web browser, googletalk for IM, and video conferencing with the built-in webcam, plus a media player, and a few other apps. It supports input via a stylus, or using your finger. It connects to your PC via USB, but doesn’t have any syncing software, nor does it charge over USB. There is a stereo headphone jack that also supports a headphone+microphone set on a single jack.

Some Thoughts

The screen is beautiful. It really is. It’s really crisp and bright. The wifi is good quality, and it has become my tool of choice for small bits of web surfing while at home. The clever bit of software that detects if you’re using the stylus or your thumb and displays different menus/keyboard is an inspired piece of work, although if I was doing a lot of typing I’d probably need to get some sort of bluetooth keyboard.
Being basically a Linux PC makes this a massively versatile device. There is tonnes of software available, and most of it is free. I have a few good tidbits installed:

• Maemo Mapper - a free bit of mapping software that can download maps from various sources, including Google Maps and Open Streetmap. If I had a bluetooth GPS and the flite voice software, it could even be a sat nav unit.
• SCUMMVM - for playing old LucasArts games. Great fun! (I am most of the way through Flight of the Amazon Queen thanks to my commute
• Terminal/SSH - surprisingly useful
• AisleRiot - Solitaire with knobs on

There are, however, 3 big things I dislike about the device:

• The N800’s predecessor, the N770, had a hard cover to protect it - the N800 only has a little cloth sleeve which, while being some protection from scratches, etc, wouldn’t stop the screen getting cracked in an impact.
• The battery life is quite poor - even on my short commute usage, in standby for the rest of the day and night, I probably need to charge every 1.5 days. This is very dependent on how much you use wireless, I believe. And it has got better with the latest firmware. However, it’s really a problem considering that:
• You can’t charge the device through the USB port. This was a real plus of my previous media player. Being able to plug in at work (plugging in non-tested devices to the main sockets is prohibited) was a great benefit.

The other thing that I need to get sorted out is Bluetooth networking - the N800 doesn’t support the wireless setup at work, so I’d like to be able to connect through the bluetooth on my laptop, but this is not part of the default setup, which is a shame.

All-in-all, this is an amazing little device. I have lots of things I still want to try on it (installing Django, play with GPS, install a calendar and syncing, etc), but I think it will be a faithful friend for a long while.

mrBen

I’ve deliberately stopped myself from commenting on this series of Who until the end.  And now that we’re here I’m struggling to find the right words to say about it.

Poor.  Lacklustre.  Uninspired.

Hmmm,  I’m in the right direction but it still isn’t right.  Nevermind, I’m sure the right word will pop in my head later on…

But this series HAS been poor.  It started badly and to it’s credit picked up later towards the end but for that last episode, the heavily laden sacharine moments, and the Flash Gordon & Star Wars bits at the end, the less said the better.

Right now I’m thinking that this is the single worst episode in the history of the show.

I’m hoping my opinion will improve.

BigAl 

Gaming under Linux has always been an interesting challenge. There are some really decent games out there (Quake4, Doom3, Unreal Tournament 2004, Enemy Territory), but many games don’t get released for Linux.

Open Source Gaming is even trickier - all the games I mentioned above are proprietary, although id software do release their older engines under the GPL when they’re out of date. For instance, the Quake 3 source was released about 12 months ago, which has led to a number of free standing FPS games for Linux (Tremulous is one of my favourites, but Urban Terror has just been released, and looks pretty good too.)

However, the other day a new game came on my radar. A game that had previously been released commercially by Eidos, but which was open sourced under the GPL a few years ago, and is now available on all platforms, and with some upgraded graphics now. The game is called WarZone2100, and it’s a top quality RTS (real-time strategy) game. Unlike many of this type of game, there isn’t an overabundance of resource management - it’s mostly about fighting the enemy, and battle strategy, but there is a goodly amount of researching artifacts, and designing new vehicles, and the suchlike.

The documentation is a bit lacking on the website - it took me a bit of hunting to find the keyboard shortcuts, but the game is still great fun. Plus, and this is often what separates commercial games from open source, there is a single-player campaign mode, which I’m playing at the moment.

One thing to note - the only thing they couldn’t open source was the video codec library, meaning that there are none of the cut-scene videos, which have been replaced with text transcripts instead. But you really don’t miss anything

Go and try it out, and maybe we’ll have a fight on-line sometime

mrBen

It’s been _ages_ since I posted, so I thought I’d better get something online, and probably a few extra things over the next couple of weeks, as I’m guessing that April might be a bit of a dry month, blogwise, what with other things happening

Firstly - my birthday party was excellent. Loads of people came (thanks) and it was a great night. Thanks to Heather for all her hard work, and to GI for his excellent DJ work, especially covering the graveyard shift. And thanks to you if you came.

The best news is that I got enough money between my birthday and my bonus to buy a new electric guitar (an Epiphone SG Special) and an FX pedal (a Zoom G2.1U). Should be getting them this weekend, I hope. Looking forward to rocking out with BigAl on bass

I’ve got a whole load of posts lined up for this month that should have really come before, including a book review on “Why Men Hate Going To Church” by David Murrow, a review of the church Men’s Weekend Away, and some more details about my trip to Mozambique.

Watch this space!

mrBen

Here’s an idea for a killer product:

I really liked my Creative mp3 player - one of the best things was the small size, and built-in USB plug. It was a shame it was so small. So I was thinking - what about seperating the control elements and the battery from the storage. (In the Muvo, the battery is a little j-shaped sheath, and the controls are on a USB stick that just slides into the sheath). So you have a kind of little remote (like you can get for other players), which controls the player, but also houses a small battery. At the end of the cable, you have a USB socket, into which you can plug any USB key, meaning unlimited, expandable storage.

You heard it here first - I expect a royalty cheque in the post.

mrBen

Oi Oi Oi

Got myself a new media player, I did. I’ve been on the hunt for something new for a while now - casually surfing ebay looking for something suitable. I had a few criteria:

1. It should be bigger than my existing player - not hard considering my current player has only 64MB
2. It should have a screen
3. Most importantly, it should play Ogg Vorbis files.

For the unitiated, the Ogg Vorbis file format is much like mp3, although it is better quality sound in smaller file sizes. More importantly, it is an open standard, whereas when you buy an mp3 player, a little bit of cash goes to licensing that format. I like Oggs, and would much rather have everything in Ogg format. An ogg player would make this a lot simpler.

And so, I found one. For a reasonable price on eBay I picked up a 512MB Xcent XT-100, which fulfils all my criteria nicely. It has a built in battery, which will hopefully save me a bit of cash, a nice screen, although a little hard to read in direct sunlight, really good quality sound, a built-in FM radio, and a voice recorder. Oh, and the line-in jack for recording is a proper size jack (3.5mm) rather than the stupid one we have at church, which is 2.5mm….

It doesn’t have a built-in USB plug, which is probably the biggest annoyance. But the flap covering the usb socket is, at least, a decent, metal hinged flap, not a stupid flimsy rubber thing. Also, it doesn’t turn off randomly - it will stay on for a specified number of minutes, or not at all, even when paused. Which is much better than some I’ve seen, which turn off after 30 seconds of inactivity.

Overall, very happy But I’ll let you know how I get on after a couple of weeks of usage.

mrBen

The question isn’t “Do I really need more Lego in my life”, but it is “where can I find the space for more Lego in my life”.

Batman Lego

Oh, yes.

BigAl

Way back when I was a teenager I was quite into Warhammer 40,000 and Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay (amongst other Games Workshop stuff) and when I went to college/uni I moved onto other role-playing games (Call of Cthulhu, Paranoia and MechWarrior mostly) and some collectable card games (Star Wars mainly, with occasional forays elsewhere).

Nowadays I’m not much of a gamer. I still buy the Call of Cthulhu RPG and card stuff and that’s about it. If there’s a game that catches my attention then I may buy it just for the background and the game mechanics. These days I seem to be more into the structure of a good game than the playing of it.

Which leads me nicely to the Serenity RPG. What appeals to me (based on my enjoyment of the Firefly series) is the good storytelling involved. Sure, we have spaceships and fighting and exciting locations but we also have the sympathetic characters and the DAMN GOOD STORIES. For me that’s the kind of thing that draws me to a roleplaying game, storytelling rather than “bash the monsters”, although that can be good fun too.

So, after watching and enjoying both the series and the film, and on the basis of reviews like this, anyone want a game of Serenity?

BigAl

Easily one of the coolest gifts I’m giving this year (and it’s for my nephew who has no idea that I blog, or even what a blog is, so I’m not really giving the game away) is a Transformer.

It’s one from the Energon range and not one of the ubercool Generation 1 original Transformers, but it IS Ultra Magnus and that’s good enough.

I mean Magnus is cool no matter what series he’s taken from.

On a side note, and one that’ll make SuperGingerMan happy, when I was in Toys B We I noticed an unhealthy amount of Power Rangers tat. And cheap looking tat at that. There was plenty of it, but quality over quantity and all that…

BigAl

There’s not really anything to be said about the last 2 England football games, other than that they were rubbish. Completely rubbish. Plus in the Wales game they did something that I always hated when Liverpool did it under Houllier, and that is trying to sit on a 1-0 lead. Grrrr.

However, the thing that is disturbing me most in sport at the moment is the fact that the test match that starts today is the last test match that will be shown on terrestrial TV for a long time. We live in a country that has a nationalised television service, and (with the advent of digital) a good number of free to air channels, some of them part of the BBC, some funded by advertising. And I believe that everybody should be able to watch national sporting events. Everybody with a TV. Without subscription charge. The loss of the Premiership was bad, but the loss of international cricket, especially at a point when people are becoming more interested in it, is a death-blow to the sport. People won’t traipse down to the pub to watch cricket. And not many will by Sky Sports just to watch cricket.

I have a number of objections to Sky, which I will outline here:

• I object to paying for a service outright, and then having to watch more adverts on Sky than I do on channels funded only by advertising
• I object to have to pay for multiple channels for a single purpose - Sky Sports 1, 2 & 3 just to watch Premiership football?!?
• I object to having to pay additional money (on top of the subscription) to watch “special features” - Premiership+ and the like
• I object to a company having a monopoly in this fashion - Sky don’t get peoples viewing because they are providing a better service, but because they provide the only service.

Suggestions for improving the situation:

• All national sporting associations should refuse to sign ‘exclusive’ television rights for national sporting events.
• Sky should offer packages that allow people to buy the TV they want, but not what they don’t. I would consider Sky if I could pay a simple fee that allowed me to watch all of the Liverpool games.

mrBen

Probably one of the funniest cricketting quotations leads me nicely into a short homage to this years Ashes contest.

I’m a football fan, through and through. But over the last 5 years of so I have come to appreciate cricket in a new light; it’s very relaxing to watch, and, on occasion, can be exciting too. I admit that not all cricket is exciting (but then, not all football is either), but this years Ashes have been something else. I’ve never been so rivetted to a game of cricket in my life. And I, for one, am glad to see people getting back into the sport - some of them even north of the Border.

As an aside, I thought that I would take a look at the demos of a couple of cricketting games - EA’s Cricket 2005 and CodeMasters’ Brian Lara thingy. Here’s a quick summary based on the demos:

• Both games look and sound fine. Both have a tendency, however, to spend ages on replays and crap like that, meaning that playing the game takes a while. BL is probably better than EA in that respect.
• EA is far to complicated to bat. Trying to get anything but a defensive stroke is really tricky. The demo doesn’t let you bowl or field, which is a pain too.
• BL is fun to bat. It was a great feeling to hit Glen McGrath for six You also get to bowl, which I haven’t mastered yet, and some fielding. It just feels more “fun”.

So - buy BL if you really want a cricket game

7 days until the final test.

mrBen

Well, that’s the Introduction to BattleTech out the way.

I’m in two minds about talking Ruth in to playing a wee game (using the quickstart rules, if I can find all the stuff that goes along with it), or just soldiering on to the main Rulebook and investing in a battletech map and a couple of miniatures.

The first option isn’t too likely (of convincing Ruth OR finding the Quickstart game stuff) and the second option means I can dig out all my old paints (which I used for painting my Warhammer 40K troops) and gives me an excuse to buy a couple of mechs.

Not that I need an excuse you understand…

BigAl

Check out www.zemi.net.

Inspiration or what?

Building a space fleet out of Lego is now on the “things I must do before I die” list.

Actually, it may be the ONLY thing on the list…

BigAl

Right. It’s finished. Cloud City arrived on Tuesday and we (Ruth and I) built it last night. And it’s brilliant.

I’ve seen a lot of quality Lego in my time and Cloud City is among the best. The attention to detail is incredible. And it always helps that Ruth picked up the Spiderman Origins set and the new TIE Fighter box on a quick trip to Toys Be We yesterday afternoon.

So it was like this:

• home from work,
• beer,
• build Cloud City,
• dinner,
• beer,
• build TIE Fighter,
• build Spiderman Origins,
• Stargate SG1 and beer,
• bed,

and that’s far too much enjoyment for a school night.

Tonight isn’t going to be half as much fun. I’m going to slog through DC Comics’ Identity Crisis (last years big event) for the first time since it came out. Hopefully I’ll make more sense of it this time.

BigAl

Right, let’s see a show of hands. Who here likes Lego? And although I can’t see any actual hand raising, for the purposes of this post I’ll take it as read that you did raise you hand.

Preferably at work or college with people around about wondering what the hell you’re up to…

Anyway. Lego. Oh, it’s great isn’t it?

So much so that my sister’s shop has all my old Lego in it’s back room. And last night I just went and ordered the Lego Star Wars Cloud City set. Bwah ha ha.

This will join the Orient Expedition hot air balloon, the Knight’s Kingdom small castle and the Spiderman 2 “Spidey saves the train” set which Ruth and I have.

And just so you know, check the Lego website for the set due in September… Death Star II anyone?

BigAl