Oh. My. Word! I remember these!

Check it out, Joystiq has an article that induces NOSTALGIA in anybody in their mid-to-late 20′s (Even older, my dad used to play these things too, and he’s over 50…). Some person calling themselves Petromyzon gathered a bunch of pictures of original electronic handheld games. Definitely worth a trip down memory lane… We owned the Pacman one… Many an hour were spent perfecting the gobbling of them dots.

Man I love this site. Thinkgeek is just filled with goodies to buy.

Some of my favourites recently:

• Star Wars Force FX Lightsabers – Real looking Lightsabers!
• DX1 Input System – A really customisable keyboard. Move the keys where you want them.
• TV-B-Gone – Switch off practically any TV. I must get one and try it at HiFiCorp one day. *efg*
• No, I will not fix your computer T-Shirt – Always a nice one to wear.

Wow. I’m drooling here.
I own a Sony Playstation 2, and I love it. Solid games, excellent graphics, and best of all, no blue screens of death. The same goes for my Nintendo GameCube. Great graphics, excellent games and gameplay. Loving it.

A couple of weeks ago, it was the 2005 E3 expo… I missed most of the hype about the new consoles at that time, waiting for some solid news, instead of rumors. I was just sent a link to some specs on the Playstation 3, and, as I said, I’m drooling…

howstuffworks.com has a nice write-up on the Playstation 3. This thing is awesome! The sheer computing power it holds, and the amount of features it has is simply amazing. 6 USB ports. Bluetooth. SD, CF and Memory Stick Pro memory slots. 3 x Gigabit Ethernet ports. Go read that link, you’ll be impressed.

The new X-Box, called the X-Box 360, also has a mention on howstuffworks.com. The two consoles seem to contain pretty similar technologies under the hood, if you compare speed and amount of memory, etc. I’m eagerly waiting for them to be released so that I can see, with my own eyes, the excellence these companies came up with.

The third next-gen console that was announced at E3 this year, was the Nintendo Revolution. I’m not sure if it’s the final name for this console, and there doesn’t seem to be any concrete specs on it yet, but it’s definitely a console to look out for as well. I’ll update this post if and when details become available.

One thing I’m predicting though, is that instead of these companies competing with each other for being tops in the next-gen console race, they’ll most likely end up complimenting each other, and with having exclusive games releases for each console, we’ll likely find that more often than not, your serious gamer will end up with one of each of these consoles, instead of sticking to just one for loyalty’s sake. Let’s face it. There are those die-hard Playstation fans that went and bought an X-Box purely for the reason to play Halo 2. I think the same will be true for these new consoles. We’ll see…

I’m not even talking about handheld consoles here… Those are a whole new story.

One of my Google Alerts this morning was on a review of a laptop that came pre-installed with Ubuntu Linux.

The laptop is for sale from linuxcertified.com. The model number for the laptop is LC2210D. The specs look pretty decent, and include a Centrino 1.80 Ghz processor, 512 MBs of RAM, Intel Extreme onboard graphics card (apparently these are not that great for gaming though…), 40 GB drive and a 14″ screen.

From reading the review and the laptop’s specs, it seems that linuxcertified.com managed to get the installation a bit wrong, with things like default settings etc. On the spec sheet it mentions that the S-Video port was not tested under Linux, and in the review it mentions that default settings like the mouse acceleration was too fast and that things like mp3 playback didn’t work. I suspect this is probably due to the fact that it’s a relatively new laptop with newish hardware components, and they likely did a vanilla install of Ubuntu and changed nothing in the settings for the front-end.

Perhaps Linux needs a proper non-interactive automated install system (Maybe there is one?) for similar hardware setups? Similar to those Windows CDs you get with your name-branded laptops (Dell, HP, etc), that end up putting a vanilla install of Windows on the laptop, with all the hardware specific drivers and tweaks loaded…

*shrug* Don’t take my word for it, go have a look at the review yourself. I don’t have one of these laptops, so couldn’t tell you myself.

Did I forget to mention that it’s only $1089 (on special ’till 15th of May 2005) for the Celeron version?

Update 2005-05-13: Another Google Alert this morning pointed me to this article at Tom’s Hardware about HP working with the Ubuntu Linux project (my current Linux flavour of choice) to come up with

an operating system that is tailored to work 100 percent with the hardware – including wired and wireless network, Bluetooth IrDA and IEEE1394

. That’s what I was talking about. Excellent news.

Heh-heh.

This just caught my eye while I was browsing through my bloglines blogroll.

Newscientist (via engadget via picturephoning.com) reports on a prototype ‘compound eye’ lens for cameras that may make camera phones smaller, but with better lenses.

Last last year I was browsing the iPod website and I came across an advert to iPod your BMW. Basically, you fit an iPod Adapter to your BMW car radio system, replacing your CD shuttle system.

I then called BMW SA to find out if they had it and after spending about 20 minutes on the phone was told that they do not have it but will contact me when they get it (if they do).

I left it and then some time later, a friend of mine pointed me to a website that carried a story that the iPod Adapter for the BMW was finally in SA, blah blah blah.

This is when the fun and games started. I called only to be told that they had no part codes, pricing structure or installation fees applicable. This is after the Marketting Manager for BMW SA said how much it would cost (roughly) in the article. To cut a long story short, it took me 6 weeks to get the damn thing fitted.

Well, it was defenitely worth the wait, while BMW SA got skilled up in how to fit it and what wires to put where, really shocking service.

You have five playlists to play with, each playlist is accessed through the front panel radio system, CD 1-5. CD6 is a playlist that plays all of the songs on the iPod (everything). The volume and track skipping happens on the radio as well, with the multifunction steering wheel also getting in on the action. The iPod also charges while it is in connected.

There are a few downsides: the device is stored in the glove compartment with a loose cable that will get bent, when skipping a few tracks ahead it waits a long time for the iPod hard drive to spin up and play the requiested tracks and lastly, the display on the radio can only contain two digits for the track number and when you have 300 items on a playlist, this may prove tricky to navigate.

Other than that I’m very happy with my iPod Adapter for my BMW, now all I need to do is spend a few hours putting my entire CD collection onto my iPod – wish me luck !!

–salvo