“Cars” 2-Disc Blu-Ray coming
Well, it was bound to happen eventually, I just wasn’t expecting it so soon. According to an article on thedigitalbits.com, Disney will be releasing Cars on Blu-Ray in June. And because of the amount of extra content and the ridiculously high resolution of the movie on the disc, they’re going to be releasing it as a 2-disc (dual layer) Blu-Ray package.
Just to put this into perspective here, a standard DVD (such as the single-disc DVD of cars that came out last year) holds 9GB of data. A dual-layer Blu-Ray disc holds 50GB of data. And they’re using two of them!
For demonstration purposes, here’s what you can expect the difference in quality to look like:
Cars on Blu-Ray
Cars on Standard-Def DVD
Now if only they had given the Incredibles as a 2-disc Blu-Ray release. Then I might be actually tempted to buy a Blu-Ray player.
Havok Physics in the new Star Wars game
Video footage of a Lucasarts presentation of the technology they’re going to be using in the next Indiana Jones and Star Wars games. This includes the latest version of the Havok physics engine.
Besides the killer technology on show, this video is also interesting for the part where they blow up Jar Jar Binks encased in Carbonite.
Forget Barcamp, where’s Ireland’s SXSW?
BarCamp Dublin will be taking place in a couple of months and, despite the fact that it’s happening on my front door (I work in the Digital Depot), I probably won’t be attending. In short, this is mainly because I don’t think it has that much to offer to me. I have a blog, but I write mainly for my own enjoyment rather than as a means to rack up subscribers (you should see some of the some self-indulgent posts I have lined up for the next couple of weeks - wow). So with its heavy focus on blogging, search engine optimisation and unexciting technology which, frankly, was of no interest to me three years ago and is of even less interest to me now, BarCamp Dublin gives me no compelling reason to attend.
Now I’ve spent the day browsing through the SXSW website and drooling over the list of nerd-focused talks they will be giving, I can’t help but wish that Ireland had something similar. What attracts me to the SXSW stuff is the completely open nature of the festival. Rather than limiting themselves to a few topics, they’ve made sure there’s something for all types of nerd: movies, music, games, design, blogging, programming are all on the agenda. And because of this, it seems to be completely open, no sense of exclusion because of a lack of interest in a particular topic.
Panels that really caught my eye were:
- Worldchanging 2.0 - common-sense geek solutions for a more sustainable future
- Convergence Culture: A Conversation with Henry Jenkins - Henry Jenkins should get a medal or something. That is one smart cat.
- Making Your Short Attention-Span Pay Big Dividends - man, if I could harness my short att- Hey look! A shiny thing!
- Design Aesthetic of the Indie Developer - Just look at the panel! Jesus! The room will throb with Mac geniusery.
- Tech Tools for Film Artists
Why hasn’t Ireland seen a similar event? It’s not for lack of talent. We have an abundance of talented, charming and articulate nerds that could give similarly interesting talks on a similarly diverse range of topics (although there’s also an abundance of ’squeaky wheels’). Perhaps it’s because the geek community is so fragmented that it’s hard to rally them all together. The bloggers converse with other bloggers, the designers converse with other designers and so on. Perhaps rallying them together for a truly welcoming unconference with something for everyone would be too much effort.
But it would be a thing of beauty.
Then again, what do I care? I’m out of here soon.
Soft-modded Xbox Media Centre!
Remember a few days ago, I wrote about the TV shows I love? Well. apart from Grand Designs and the Channel 4-led shame-fest of Supernanny, Brat Camp and It’s Me or the Dog, I don’t tend to watch much TV on er… TV. The ease of availability of just about any show I want to watch (thank you Uknova and Mininova) means that I find it easier to just download the shows I want to watch. If I wanted to be fancy, I could call this “time-shifting” or something, but let’s just call a spade a spade and say “laziness.”
This generally means watching them on my computer in work (during lunch, honestly!). I’m not particularly delighted with this. A dodgy CRT with a crappy set of speakers can’t really compete with my setup at home. And it also adds another layer of hassle with shows that my girlfriend also wants to watch, like Lost. In these cases, I’ve got a DVD player that will play DivXs, but is extremely fussy about what kinds of DivXs it wants to play. So I end up
- Downloading the file
- Using FfmpegX to convert the file (even on my dual G5, this takes 20 minutes)
- Burn it to a CD
- Bring it home
And this doesn’t take into account the loss of sync between the audio and visuals that FfmpegX tends to helpfully drop into its newly-converted files. Nor the amount of hassle involved in doing this for multiple episodes. It also means that once I’ve watched the episode, I’m left with a lovely new CD coaster taking up space on our already-overflowing shelves (visual evidence of overflowing shelves).
What I needed was a media centre. Something that would let me download episodes, bring them home on my iPod and watch them on my TV. Originally, I had planned to use a G4 Powermac with Front Row at home for the media centre but lack of a graphics card with decent TV-out put an end to this idea. I thought about buying myself a mod chip for my Xbox and installing Xbox Media Center (XBMC), but even this struck me as too much work (and in the couple of weeks it would take for my mod chip to arrive, I would probably be bored of this idea already).
Luckily, I stumbled across a bunch of articles last week about soft-modding the Xbox. This meant I could install XBMC without a chip. So on Friday, I gave it a go.
I used a hacked save game for Splinter Cell which, when launched from within the game, ran a program from within Linux that did all of the hard work for me. Once I installed the softmod, installing XBMC was simple. Now, I can stream movies (I tried it against .avi, .mov, .wmv - all worked) off that same G4 Powermac and still play Xbox games - even play on-line with Live! And the cherry on top of all this is that these movies look absolutely beautiful on the TV. Way, way better than my converted DivXs ever did.
The total cost to me for doing all this was the princely sum of… nattin. I had all the tools lying around (Xbox, memory card, usb/memory card convertor, media server) and it only took a few minutes to complete. Next up: putting a new hard drive in the Xbox. Let’s see if that’s as easy.
Broadband at last!
Reports are coming in of a working broadband installation in my apartment. Rumour has it that my girlfriend rang up the guys in Clearwire yesterday and they delivered the modem today - she just plugged it in and away she went.
(Incidentally, right now, her IRC conversation consists of “SO HAPPY”, “THIS IS THE BEST DAY OF MY LIFE” and “THIS IS HOW LIFE SHOULD BE! EASY!” repeated again and again.)
Can’t wait to get home and get my hands on it. What will I download first?!!
Technorati Tags: broadband, internet, clearwire
Simple Wifi Setup?
Our office is reasonably thin, but quite long. It’s also broken up into three areas
* Developer Room
* Front office
* Board room
The developer room is, obviously, where most of the action happens. It’s got an existing wireless connection, but since our office is so long, its range doesn’t quite extend to the front office. It would be nice if the people in the front office could also get access to the wireless network, since most of those people use laptops anyway. And since we’re kitting out the building, why not give the board room its own wireless access point too?
I didn’t think it would be unreasonable to assume that there existed a wireless access point that contained two “remote” APs, that weren’t actually APs at all, but simply extended the range of the main Access Point. This would mean that someone could connect in the developer room, walk the length of the building and enter the board room (where most of our meetings, both internal and external) are held, without having to disconnect and reconnect. Surely this would be a fairly common request?
Apparently not. I spoke to our supplier about this and he told me he never heard of such a solution. He said that most companies just make do with the disconnect - move - reconnect scenario.
There must be *something* out there like this. Has anyone heard of anything like it?
Technorati Tags: Gadgets, technology, Wifi
Minor update
I’m still waiting for Irish Broadband to contact me about an installation date, so I’ve had four days away from a computer. And so much has happened.
[Apple to use Intel Microprocessors beginning in 2006](http://www.apple.com/pr/library/2005/jun/06intel.html)
Christ.
This had been rumoured for a couple of weeks now (and a couple of years before then), but still… wow. John Gruber suggests that [Apple may not transition to x86 chips](http://daringfireball.net/2005/06/see_you_intel). But then again, he also [discounted the possibility of Apple releasing the iPod Shuffle](http://daringfireball.net/2004/12/flash_gordon) and last week attempted to [debunk the rumours of Apple switching to Intel](http://daringfireball.net/2005/05/intelmania). But this is so completely *huge* that it’s easy to understand why he was a litle skeptical. Apple say they’re looking at completing the transition to the Intel chips by the end of 2007.
[Nintendo Revolution’s classic Nintendo games will be free](http://www.joystiq.com/entry/1234000843045537/)
Nintendo, who have been keeping quiet in this round of “Our console will have hi-def” “Ours will massage your feet while you play!” have dropped a bombshell in the form of massive amount of backward-compatibility for free! They will be releasing almost every game they published for their previous consoles as a free download, available from the launch of their new console, the Revolution. This includes things like *Ocarina of Time*, *GoldenEye*, *Perfect Dark*, *Zelda II* and one of my favourite games, *Uniracers* (*Unirally* over here). Miyamoto (the creator of Mario and Zelda) has said that he’s tired of sprawling epic games and is appealing to developers to create something unique and fun (but not neccessarily *huge* or *big-budget*) for the Revolution. I guess this is Nintendo paying attention.
**Update**: [Full list of games available for download](http://www.cubed3.com/viewnews.php?storyid=3958)
My copy of [Difficult Questions about Videogames](http://www.publicbeta.org/dqav/) was waiting for me when I arrived in work today. This should give me plenty to chew through for the next couple of days, at least until [GTA:SA](http://www.rockstargames.com/sanandreas/) and [God of War](http://us.playstation.com/Content/OGS/SCUS-97399/Site/main.asp) arrive and start soaking up all my free time.
**Update**: A few pages in, and I’m convinced of something that I’d always suspected - [Kieron Gillen](http://www.kierongillen.com/) needs to find himself an editor.
Movie release calendar
This is still very much beta - use at your own risk
Today, I set about teaching myself the basics of web scraping, with the intention of putting it to some good use. Coincidence or providence, I read Kottke’s post about [creating an ical for summer movie releases](http://www.kottke.org/05/05/summer-movies-calendar), and immediately thought of a personal itch I could scratch.
The Irish Film and Television Network provide a list of [Irish Theatrical Releases](http://iftn.ie/diary/index.htm), but this is just one big flat HTML file that is only marginally helpful. It still relies on me to remember to go to their page and see what’s out and when. It would be much more useful if this information was somewhere I tend to spend a lot of my day looking - say, my calendar program - and even more helpful if it was somewhere I could carry it around with me - say, my phone.
Well, now I can. Using various combinations of bash, sgrep, awk and sed, I created a script that will automatically grab the ‘releases’ page of IFTN.ie and export it as an .ics file, which can be read through iCal/Sunbird, and from there, synched to my phone.
You can grab the .ics file here:
[http://www.fuckcuntandbollocks.com/dorkus/irish_releases.ics](http://www.fuckcuntandbollocks.com/dorkus/irish_releases.ics)
If you find this useful, [please let me know](mailto:johnke@gmail.com).
And now the caveats:
1. IFTN’s listing page is braindead. I can’t help this, and my script can’t predict its unusual behaviour. For example, why does it have two release dates for “Kicking and Screaming”, one on June 3rd, the second on July 29th? And why does it randomly have two “2005″s after “Fever Pitch”?
2. This is my first real time creating a .ics file. I ploughed through [RFC 2445](http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc2445.txt) for pointers, but I might have commited some mortal vcalendar sin without knowing it.
3. Bug reports to the [usual address](mailto:johnke@gmail.com)
*Update*
For my next trick, I did the same for videogames using [Eurogamer's release dates](http://www.eurogamer.net/releases.php). Grab the calendar file here:
[http://www.fuckcuntandbollocks.com/dorkus/irish_game_releases.ics](http://www.fuckcuntandbollocks.com/dorkus/irish_game_releases.ics)
BBC Backstage
Tim O’Reilly suggests that at least part of the reason for Amazon and Google’s success comes from their open API. This allows people to access their information in ways that fit people’s individual needs (”rip, mix, burn”), giving them a massive advantage over monolithic proprietary apps. He gives the example of their own use in O’Reilly - they monitor the ‘technology’ section of Amazon’s books for how well their books are doing, their prices vs. their competitor’s prices, what new books have been released and so on. With Google, we’re seeing this *as it happens* as people continue to extend maps.google.com to tie in with other services, such as Flickr, producing [Geotagging](http://brainoff.com/worldkit/flickr/).
Well, the BBC must have been listening. Yesterday, they launched [BBC Backstage](http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/), which is set to provide a one-stop-shop for all of the BBC’s web content, from their RSS feeds to their Search API (not available yet). Most interestingly for the casual user (read: *non-developer*), they’re also using this as a way to track the ways in which people are using the BBC website, such as providing a way for people to provide their own “external links” for stories, or giving stories [del.icio.us](http://del.icio.us)-style tags.
I look forward to seeing what sorts of things people come up with.
Pongmechanik
As part of the exhibition going on in the Digital Hub, there are a bunch of games set up in the old Medialab building - for example, Eyetoy hooked up to a large projector screen, World of Warcraft and Halo 2. But the star of the show, for me, was a mechanical version of Pong, which seems to be doing the rounds among the game festivals in Europe.
[Pongmechanik](http://www.cyberniklas.de/pongmechanik/)
Bleedin’ Spyware
I’m putting it down to a momentary lapse in concentration.
Esat told us our line went ‘live’ on Friday, so I spent a while trying to remember what my username and password was. I must have spent a good half hour trying various combinations (It turns out the username goes in the form of *$username*@iolbb, not @iolbb.ie as the salesman told me).
So when I finally did get the right combination, I was so thrilled at having broadband at home again that I left the laptop for a few minutes to go bop around the room. I must have bopped for less than 10 minutes before I realised I’d left a Windows machine connected directly to the internet.
Too late.
And so, my first few hours of broadband are being spent de-fucking my laptop. It must have five different types of spyware on there, and no one tool is catching it all. Although, loathe as I am to admit it, Microsoft’s Antispyware has, so far, been the best, having already caught four things. There are still a couple of other things left on there, if I’m reading windump and ‘netstat -ao’ right.
I hate the internet.
Digital Ireland
The BBC are reporting that [Irish cinema is set to go digital](http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/northern_ireland/4365875.stm) with the announcement that all cinemas in Ireland are to have their traditional film projectors replaced with digital projectors.
I would love to have some dates on the rollout of these kinds of things. Major directors like Michael Mann and George Lucas aside, ‘digital filmmaking’ has been relatively slow on the uptake. Perhaps this is the kind of kick in the ass it needs.
Personally, I’m thrilled at this. Aside from the technical issues, such as flickering and scratches and disjointed sound (which happened at the screening of Hotel Rwanda I saw in UGC - completely jarred me out of the movie), the major improvement I’m hoping this will bring is a quicker turnaround on movie releases here. Ireland traditionally has to wait in line to receive film reels as they do the rounds. For large films, such as the recent Hellboy or Incredibles, this wait can be as long as six months.
With digital filmmaking eliminating the needs for individual reels to be printed up, it eliminates that excuse.
Although I’m sure we’ll still have to wait in line to download the 1TB that will make up the movie.
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