Month: November 2005

I thought this would look cool on a sweat shirt:

I thought this would make a neat poster (following trends, but making fun of them on the way):

I like this as a desktop background:

I don’t know exactly who is to blame, but Heidi and I have been royally dicked around with our telephone and internet connections the last month or so.

First, our telephone just stops working. We call iiNet and they tell us to talk to Telstra. Telstra tells us that it’s the phone (even though it been working for a 9 months now). We try a different phone, it also doesn’t work. No surprises there. Telstra say we need to get them to come over, but we need to organise it through iiNet. We call iiNet and they organise for Telstra to come over, but someone has to be home. They can’t give us a specific time, so we give them a mobile number for Telstra to call half an hour before they arrive. We get no telephone call, but the next day Telstra claims they stopped by and nobody was home (even though I was waiting). We organise another time for them to come out. I take a day off work. I get a phone call saying that it’s working now and they don’t have to come out after all. All this after 10 days of dicking around.

So that was incredibly irritating. 10 day with no landline. Numerous mobile phone calls, 2 days waiting around, and the whole problem of getting another phone when they just had to check their end and fix the bloody problem!

Second, our telephone and ADSL are disconnected on the 22nd. Heidi had called on the 21st to inform iiNet that we are moving and asked that they disconnect our line on the 22nd of December. Even though she went to great lengths to emphasis this fact, they disconnected us on the 22nd of November. Now that happened in less than 24 hours, so surely they could reconnect us in a similarly short period of time. No such luck. They said it could take up to 48 hours. We still aren’t reconnected (3 days later). Fine, they made some sort of human error. That’s forgivable, but you would expect them to have standard operating procedures in pace to avoid this sort of thing, and when something does go wrong you would expect them to make every effort to correct it as soon as possible. Instead we were told:

• “You’re lucky that you’ve been connected for more than 6 months since you won’t incur the early disconnection fee”

What a load of crap! Just to get to this point (where we may be connected by Monday) has involved over 3 hours of telephone calls from a mobile phone. We now have a direct number to call, but that was only given to us today after 6 request to speak to a manager (which were obviously all questioned/refused before the last one was begrudgingly accepted).

While on the matter, almost every telephone call to iiNet had to be from a mobile phone (clearly our landline wasn’t working) and started with around 30 minutes on hold. We’ll be sending them a bill for all that. As for the gross inconvenience of not having a telephone line or internet right when we are organising to move and need to find new tenants for the place we are renting, and arrange our relocation, I don’t know how they can make up for that.

This is freaking ridiculous! What happened to iiNet service!?

Update: Fixed after 1 hour on the phone today (Monday, 29 November)

Update2: Data rate is now much lower than before (1.5Mbps/256kbps). Yay, disconnected for 5 days and then reconnected at a slower speed.

After looking at the last post, I realised that the whole “slide-out” thing was entirely unnecessary for a nice-looking system and really restricted the possible size of the screen. Here’s a version without the gimmick.

Update: Welcome StumbleUponers. It’s crazy that this design is still getting interest after almost four years. You might also want to check out the 3D animation someone put together a couple of years ago!

Yet another redesign. This one is obviously inspired by the (fairly) recently announced controller for the Nintendo Revolution.

Less obviously, it’s also inspired by a really cool digital clock I used to have that would open in much the same way. It made a very satisfying “clik-clak” sound when opening or closing because the screen would sort of flick up and click into place.

I’m fairly confident that this isn’t a plausible design for the next DS, but I think it looks pretty cool. It was also another opportunity to develop my digital art skills (design in Inkscape and touch-up in GIMP).

I’ve got some sketches from different angles but they aren’t as interesting. I’m not sure if I will take the time to make them look all fancy and shiny as well. Check them out after the jump. Continue reading “Revolution-inspired DS redesign”

After making the DS mockups for my personal amusement, I read an article entitled How would you redesign the Nintendo DS? on Joystiq and sent them a link to my blog so that they could evaluate the worthiness of my designs. A few days later, they were two of many featured in this Joystiq article: Joystiq readers redesign the Nintendo DS.

From there I became the latest entries to the 4colorrebellion Nintendo DS Mockups page. The slider design is also the current favorite at Infendo: More DS Mockups.

Please let me know if you see these designs anywhere else. I haven’t really posted anything to a gaming site before.

Yet another mockup of a possible new-style Nintendo DS.

I like this one because it’s compact and can be used easily as a Gameboy Advance or a Nintendo DS. Although the top screen is “vunerable”, the touch screen is protected when the unit is carried around.

In other news, I think that I’m getting much better with Inkscape 🙂

I decided to try to improve on the “squiggly line” look of the previous mockups. I made these mockups in Inkscape. I started by tracing the old version and then just kept touching it up from there.

Update: I made a few tweaks and the image above is new. The old images are after the jump. Continue reading “Nintendo DS redesign revisted”

After reading about how Nintendo is planning a makeover for the DS (ala the GameBoy Advance SP), I made a quick mockup of what it could look like. It’s basically a bit of GameBoy micro + the original DS prototype shown at E3 (last year?).

I made it much smaller than the current DS, and the stylus is housed sideways (slides in from the top right). The start and select buttons are at the front as are the power and wireless LEDs. I didn’t include a GameBoy cartridge slot; I figured that they might drop backwards compatibility like how the GB micro is only GB Advance compatible (it won’t play GB or GBC games).

I guess if they want to stick with the “faceplates” thing that seems to be all the rage at the moment, they could make quite larges areas that could be “personalised” (with designs you can buy from a store). Here’s one in colour with areas in red that could be replaced with a “showcase of your individuality”:

More after the jump. Continue reading “New style DS mockup”

Another post with a lot of images, but I do feel that I’m nearing the end of my art kick. It’s probably because I’m feeling much less stressed and ready to get back to work. I guess that it’s served its purpose.

Anyhow, here are some potential onetwenty splash images in the “modern” (artsy) style people seemed to approve of on the wiki.

Warning: a lot more after the jump! Continue reading “Possible splash images”

http://www.singstargame.com

I picked up SingStar 80’s for $39.95 at my local GamesWizards store. A day before official release and $10 cheaper! So I was already happy before I even played the game. And then… it got even better!

The obvious highlight is “Ice Ice Baby” by Vanilla Ice, and Heidi and I sang (rapped) that first. We then continued through around a third of the available songs including “Karma Chameleon” by Culture Club and “Uptown Girl” by Billie Joel (shouts out to David Chan!).

I’m a little dissapointed that some of the songs that I’m sure I saw on a preliminary list aren’t in the final version (notably “Echo Beach”), but this is definately the best Singstar game I’ve played so far!