Category Archives: Tech

Wii attention to detail

Ace campaigner Ed Maxfield very kindly came to Nottingham yesterday to help out with delivering leaflets and canvassing in some of our key ward campaigns.

As a treat, he got to christen our guest facilities (which are nearing completion not because I have finally sorted out my junk mountain, but rather because much of the junk mountain has been relocated to the attic) and have a go on the Wii.

Although Wario left him cold, he was rather taken with some of the Wii Sports games, and really took to Wii Tennis. After a few rounds we found we were actually quite well matched, and some close games ensued.

Whilst we were playing this, I noticed a fab detail – whenever a point is won, the game replays the foul or the out, etc from a different camera angle.  The camera tracks the tennis ball across the court, and as it does, the four players there variously come into and go out of focus, depending on how far they are from the ball’s position on the court.

That’s quite some attention to detail.  A nice touch of verisimilitude.  I wonder how many people will have even spotted it?

Location messaging

OK, so using my sat nav program to send location texts to Twitter didn’t work.

You can set the sat nav into “beacon” mode to send a message at an interval you specify. I had it running this afternoon whilst scouring the Derbyshire countryside for stationery.

According to my SMS log, the messages it sends look like this:

!NLOC1.1:o|W1.39792|N53.20134|329|556466871|

It’s fairly easy to pick out the bits – it includes Northings and Eastings in decimal longitude and latitude. The 329 is probably a bearing. If you pop W1.39792 N53.20134 into Google Maps, it helpfully converts it to +53° 12′ 4.82″, -1° 23′ 52.51″ and puts a green marker down in Grassmere, where I was at Frank Berry the Stationer.

Unfortunately, Twitter doesn’t like the format, and every time sat nav fired off a missive like that, Twitter responded direct to my phone

Sorry, we didn't understand your message. Try again?

Probably just as well, because the machine format text message wouldn’t have made a whole lot of sense to either of the people who seem to be following me on Twitter. They’d be in sharp contrast to the ones from MikeTD, which are always entertaining when they turn up on my phone.  Slightly freaky that the technology allows you stalk someone you know only slightly!

RSSFWD

Gosh. This might be useful. www.rssfwd.com

You put RSS links into it, and it e-mails them to you.

I can see applications for that. It would have been really useful before I figured out how to use RSS in Thunderbirrd.

And it might be more useful still for getting less technical people to follow a feed.

Twitter

OK, I heard about twitter yonks and yonks ago – Alan started using it, then so too did Mike.

Then Mike published a list of texts he’d sent to Twitter last night whilst waiting for a date, and that pushed me back into investigating it this morning when I should have been getting ready to go out. (It’s so often been the source of me being horribly late… “Oh, I’ll just check my e-mail. And Cix. And usenet. And the blogs I follow, and the websites I click on every day. Ooh, that looks interesting…”)

So, Twitter is a quick thing, you tell it a one line post and it puts it on its own website, and makes it available for you to put on other websites. You can update it on the internet and by sending it a text message and through an IM client, although only a set of services I don’t use, like AIM.

So, it’s a bit like a mini-blog. Quick to update, but not so much space for wittering. A bit like the “status” bit of Facebook, but possible to incorporate it in other sites in a very Web 2.0 way.

Two further things occurred since I set it up this afternoon. What if I gave my Sat Nav program the Twitter SMS number? Navicore has a “beacon” function that texts your lat and long periodically to an SMS number of your choosing. I haven’t yet found a use for that, but when I was off round France for a long time, it would have been cool to send a regular series of co-ordinates to somewhere central to record them, and then plot them on a map on something like Google Earth.

Then I wondered about political uses for Twitter. It would be interesting to have people in the media eye to use it. “Ming Campbell is going into PMQs” for example. Or even “I’m in Full Council. This is taking ages!”

Both of those uses open up the chance for people whose interests are not terribly well aligned with yours to use your activity against you. Or stalk you. Is that a risk worth taking?

Weird Google

I’ve been away from the net for a few days – busy busy!

I come back and check in and find a huge number of hits – hundreds over the last few days.

I seem to be the top hit for “Facebook” if you google in the UK.  Why?!

Anyway, this is largely content free, so please find attached one of many youtubte vids of cats in giant gerbil-style wheels

Second Life – Niles Fratica

I’ve just spent the last three hours playing with Second Life, a pretty cool internet thing where you get a body and you wander around talking to other people.

You create a character for free, and it drops your character on an island that teaches you how to use the engine, and then teleports you to a starter place.

What was going on in the starter place was just bizarre. First time I was there, three people summoned Chthulu, which was rather impressive, until Chthulu started to devour my immortal soul.  (I didn’t know whether it was possible to die, so I was slightly concerned at this point.)  There was also a huge great skeletal dragon thing. The second time back to the starter place, someone had flooded it with bright yellow floaty things that sang “Ring ring ring ring BANANA PHONE!” over and over again, which was a little annoying.

I wasn’t sure what things happen in SL, so searched, erm, ‘gay’ to see what I could find and spent an interesting half hour on a place called Fire Island talking to the people there. One of whom lives only a few miles from me in real life, although the place was populated largely by Americans.

I will be going back, it was certainly interesting.  My character name is Niles Fratica if you want to try and find me there.

Back to Wii

Oh dear. Someone on Cix asked if anyone had a Mii that looked like Tony Blair, for the purposes of Wii boxing, so back to Google it is.

No Tony Blair, but have found a really good John Prescott.

And a site dedicated to sharing Miis through your PC, using a bluetooth dongle and your Wiimote. I just happened to buy a BT dongle this week because I can’t find either of my phone cables.

Apparently Toys’r’us had a stock of Wii.