One Wii for Me !
Nov 28
Yesterday I picked up the phone and did something I had never done before. I made a reservation .. for a Gameconsole ! Yep , its official, The Knightcastle is proudly expecting the arrival of one Nintendo Wii ! What else is new, I hear you mumble, well , for me thats kind of a big deal since I have not owned a game console since 1984 (Trusty Atari 2600 ) . I have passed up all the Sega"s so far, All the Dreamcasts, the Cubes, the Playstations (god forbid) and the X-boxes. Why ? Because I thought that gameconsoles where a complete waste of time. Sitting on the couch with some lame ass controller in your hands , hunched over while trying to steer some stupid little car through a maze was not my idea of a good time. If i did want to do something non-productive and de-stressing, a good game of Wolfenstein or Halflife on my PC would do the trick. And even that has been ages ago.
So why change my mind. I seldom play games, hate most console games anyway and whenever i"m NOT behind the computer, I kinda NOT want to be behind a computer. And the whole Graphics hype left me hot or cold aswell. Who cares that Laura Crofts breasts are now made up of 78 polygons instead of 23 ? If a girl like that ever existed in real life I doubt she would be able to do all those flipflops with a rack-like-that. I even dare to presume that standing UP would be her biggest challenge. Many arguments ( for example with one of our loyal listeners DJ Sharky) where about the spectacular evolution of graphic design but the stagnation in gameplay.
When I saw the Wii , it blew my mind. Not only did I applaud nintendo for their great innovations in gameplay on the Nintendo DS (A device I found utterly useless until I saw the Braingame) the hook line and sinker for me was that : This was a console for the family. Me and my wife love playing games together (retract mind from gutter please) and can get very competitive. We where looking at setting up a multiplayer Lan at home to talk out our differences over a good shoot-em-up, but Nyana doesn't really fancy the blood-and-gore. So imagine playing tennis together, bowling with the family, conducting an orchestra and all that jazz. The Wii would be the device for us, not only because of the freaky console but because of the "famlily centered" nature of the machine. Its not for nothing that the Wii is pronounced as WE (as in US). The gameconsole has torn the family apart for the last five years, and the Wii is going to glue them back together. I wonder what we will be taking along to this years christmass dinner at the inlaws… To keep everybody including ourselves, occupied.
Trackback to my first WII post : Things that make you go Wii
Related Posts
The Knightcast Episode 37 : Remote Domination part 2,
Nov 24The Knightcast Episode 37 : Remote Domination part 2,
Direct link to the show. https://knightwise.com/podcasts/kc_24112006.mp3
Summary : Join us for episode 37 : Remote domination part 2 as we dive further into the world of remote controlling your computers. Learn how to use Hamachi to become the ultimate road-warrior, Set up remote assistance scenario’s or roll out your own severfarm across the net.
Shownotes :
Hamachi : http://www.hamachi.cc/
HamachiX : http://homepage.mac.com/lxr/homepage/spaceants/hamachix/
Wiki Hamachi : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamachi
Hamachi on Security Now : http://www.grc.com/sn/sn-018.htm and http://www.grc.com/sn/sn-019.htm
Screencasts Online : http://www.screencastsonline.com/sco/Shows/files/category-10.html
Use Hamachi and VNC : http://www.help2go.com/Tutorials/Software_Utilities/Remote_Control_Another_PC_Securely_with_VNC_and_Hamachi.html
Setup Hamachi on a linux system : http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=135036
Music :
Alienation : Morning Sky
B-4 Now : Tresspasing
Related Posts
TEENAGE HARDCORE WEBCAM SLUTS … erm .. I mean : Unintended concequences.
Nov 24
Just before the week is out, a quick roundup of what has been going down on Casa Del Knightwise. Be warned, that if you are offended by bad language, pornographic content or adult material, you might not want to read this specific post. You also might want to consider never coming outside again, blowing up your tv and radio, burn all your magazines and glue your ears and eyes shut with glue before sealing yourself in a coffin that is parked in the top left corner of the church. Only that way will you never be offended again.
Unintended concequences.
The reason for this warning is a funny event that happened this week with the Knightwise.com website. As you know we keep logs of who visits the site and from where they are redirected. These stats ( Gracefully set up and checked by Codemonkey Rob) tell us where our visitors come from, what they like .. and what they search for. While digging through our logs, Rob found some very strange searchterms that led users to our site. Before I go on , let me quickly disclose how a search engine works. A seachengine like Google send out a Spider program that litelary "reads" through somebody's website and indexes the content accordingly. Mostly these spiders just look at the words but not exactly at the context they are written in. This lead to some 'unintended conciquences' following the combination of our BRUNO article and our MSN article. Suddenly we found visitors stumbling onto the Knightsite, their fingers still sticky after typing in all kinds of NAUGHTY searchterms. After typing in TEENAGE MSN WEBCAM SLUTS the Knightwise.com website popped up on ranking number seven. GAY HARD WEBCAM brought people to our "coin du www" using some other obscure searchengine. How come ? Well , since searchengines READ the posts , the found these specific words either in one post (the MSN post) or in a combination of 2 posts ( MSN and Bruno). Talk about disappointment for these pornsurfers when they got here. So what is the conclusion ? Sex sells. So hello there fellow internauts looking for scandly clad girls behind webcams. I'm sorry to disappoint you but you might want to stick around and see if there is anything else you want to learn today. Cause lets face it .. there is more out there then just sex …. No wait … There isn't !
Closing the post the haunting thought dooms on me that , because I have used so many words like xxx, webcam, sex, porn, teenagers, slut, gay, hard, core and so forth.. This will probably get me in even more of these x-rated search results .. Oh well … Like the song says : The internet is for porn.
Related Posts
Me and Slashdot Review !
Nov 23Some people ask me : Knight, how come you know all this stuff. Mostly they are referring not to my intricate knowledge of quantum-mechanics and the fact that a cup of cappuchino holds the key to the secrets of the universe, but .. Other stuff.
I hate to disappoint their faces everyday when the come and run up to me with the hottest news on the web either about some new peace of software hitting the market, or for example, the juicy story behind Steve Balmer getting his eyebrows plucked. " Yeah .. I know" I answer them in a blasé way, only to give them the full details on the story. They look at me as if struck by lightning : How Do You Know All That. ?? they manage to mumble. I dramaticly turn my head , ruffle my nonexistant evil poncho and whisper … " I have my Sources ".
One of those sources is a little elf that has been sitting on my shoulder, whispering information into my left ear whenever the sun hits the skyline every morning. Well , perhaps not an elf, but a loyal podcaster by the name of Andy McCaskey who religiously hosts a podcast called "Slashdot Review " (now christened SDR News) where he reads the headlines of the most popular geek news websites on the internet. For more then two years now I have been a daily listener. Most of my comutes start out with " This is Slashdot review for …." as the first thing that pops out of my ipod. 15 minutes later , after andy has given me a quick roundup of the "real news" (not the one on the radio) I am mostly up to speed with the web as it exists today.
What is quite funny is that, through my membership of the Techpodcast Network , I've gotten to know Andy personally and he is the coolest geek alive. Being a gazillion time the age of most average geeks and podcasters, Andy is somewhat considered the "Godfather" of the TPN Scene, but his modesty prevents him from rolling out his powers and sending out his thousands of listeners to … thrash Appelby's or something. I was very honored yesterday when the episode of SDR-news ( now with the headlines of Digg, Slashdot , and others) picked up my little story about Cyber archeologists . So if you are interested : Here is the link to the show.
Thus if you want to stay tuned to whats goin down on the digital frontier, be sure to subscribe to this one. Regular as clockwork, accurate as a laserscalpel and clear as mountain dew. Andy McCaskeys .. SDR News.
Related Posts
Feedyourzune : What microsoft failed to deliver.
Nov 21Great Story from Dave Gray , over at the Roosters Rail and The Global geek podcast blog about the player no one wants. The presumable Ipod Killer from Microsoft : The Zune. Welcome to the social is their catchphrase if you want to believe the Zune Homepage. But Balmer sports no love for us podcasters. Since no doe is to be made from the podpeople Podcasting is as nonexistant in the Zune software, as are its drivers in Vista. A vacuum in developement leaves room for : FEEDYOUZUNE.
Great As regular readers of this blog would know the Zune will ship without podcasting support software. But that is okay, what Microsoft could not or would not deliver an independent 3rd party developer has managed to do just fine. Not as hard as Microsoft would have you believe. But then podcasts are free quality content, there is no money in that. Feed Your Zuneô is a featured RSS reader and a media player. It has some great features and looks to be very slick and well designed. It is a pity there is not more about the features on the site or some larger screenshots. With this development so close to the release of the Zune it beats me why Microsoft failed to deliver a product that could give the user access to features such as:
- Automated downloads of video and audio content and synchronisation to your Zune
- RSS playback of Video Podcasts, supporting all video formats
- Built in channel guides from Network2 and FireAnt (with the promise of more to follow)
- Open web architecture supporting RSS, Bit Torrent and permalinks
- The ability to create playlists, favourites and manage disk space
The program is a pretty hefty 12MB download. But it looks very shiny with a clean design and lots of functionality. The interface looks simple and uncluttered with a typical looking RSS feed layout. Clearly some time has been invested to bring a quality product. Did I mention that it is free? It even looks a bit like Windows Media Player 11, I wonder if this was a jibe. Or was it good marketing, to give the user a strong brand association with a product that they know? We talked about the Zune release on the latest episode of The Global Geek Podcast. My co-host Knightwise; suggested that perhaps the lack of Zune podcasting support was due to the fact that podcasts are free. Microsoft would not be interested in promoting free content when they are trying to push their own online music store. With the quick release and functionality of this client it does not seem to have been beyond the reach for Microsoft to have provided something like this on release. So perhaps his opinion has some weight. Money may well come first for Microsoft, at the expense of making podcasts more accessible to the user. This could also make way for other 3rd party applications to be developed in the near future. I hope so. As has been proven time and time again it is often the first iteration of a product in which users make their choice, anything else is a clone. Digg and YouTube are good examples of this trend. In which case users may well disregard and openly reject any offering from Microsoft that supports podcasting in favour of the applications that they are used to. Microsoft could have just shot themselves in the foot. Or will it be another case of the browser/operating system scenario? Where built in software overrides any other third party application to the point it is impossible to use anything but theirs. If nothing else it will make the space well worth watching. So until Microsoft decides to counter offer have a look at Feed Your Zuneô to keep your Zune happy and well fed.
