Category: General

Jason keeps telling me that he’ll get a DS when he can buy (locally) a black one to match his PSP.

Well, PALGN is reporting that dstore has the black DS lite for preorder. The expected release date is September 21. We’ll be waiting…

Phoenix Wright is surprisingly well translated.

They’ve adapted everything from stupid puns to pop-cultural references. I definitely wasn’t expecting these choice quotes from a character called “Sal Manella”:

WTF? Who are j00 d00dz!? LMAO!
Whatever, l4m3rs!
I make teh L33T SH0WZ!

More quotes (with possible spoilers, but not really) after the jump.

Update: Another surprising quote: “Shut your pie-hole!”
Continue reading “Phoenix Wright translated into geek”

I was at Officeworks in East Perth yesterday and noticed that they have a couple of cheap monochrome laser printers on sale. I was in a bit of a rush and didn’t pay much attention, but I remember that one is a Brother for $149 and the other is a HP for $199.

I think that the Brother model is the HL-2040 which I bought earlier this year. I still haven’t had to change the toner and it works very well under Ubuntu.

I hadn’t visited the Iraq body count site in a while:

It’s unfathomable.

It seems that global media is suffering war fatique; I can’t think of any other reason that news about some drunk actor overshadows news of such current human catastrophe.

There are plans afoot for pool tomorrow. Also be sure to bring your Nintendo DS as there may be some wifi gaming during or after.

Details:

• Time/Date: 10am onwards, Saturday 5 August
• Location: Pot Black Northbridge. (opposite Gelare)
• Cost: $12.50 per table per hour or $7 each for free play between 10am and 1pm

Please let me know if you can make it. The more people the better.

The OpenGL hompage reports that the OpenGL BOF (Birds of a Feather) presentations from this year’s SIGGRAPH are available for download (as Powerpoint slideshows).

Highlights include:

• OpenGL 3 directions (Much leaner with a compatibility layer)
• OpenGL New object model (Consistency… finally!)
• OpenGL Upcoming features (Geometry shader, texture as table, conditional rendering)
• OpenGL on Vista (After much fear and debate, I guess this is happening)

These presentations include information that people have been holding out for (the ARB have been very quiet for the last couple of years). However, due to the nature of the presentations, they are still fairly limited on details.

I feel a level of disconnect between her abstract argument and her assignment of roles, but Wafa Sultan makes a thought-provoking stance against fundamentalism:

The clash we are witnessing around the world is not a clash of religions, or a clash of civilizations. It is a clash between two opposites, between two eras. It is a clash between a mentality that belongs to the Middle Ages and another mentality that belongs to the 21st century. It is a clash between civilization and backwardness, between the civilized and the primitive, between barbarity and rationality. It is a clash between freedom and oppression, between democracy and dictatorship. It is a clash between human rights, on the one hand, and the violation of these rights, on other hand. It is a clash between those who treat women like beasts, and those who treat them like human beings. What we see today is not a clash of civilizations. Civilizations do not clash, but compete.

Gosh. Full transcript. Reddit comments. YouTube video.

A news item on the OpenGL homepage announces that the OpenGL 2.1 specification has been released. (I’ve just downloaded it and will post my thoughts after I’ve had a good chance to go over it).

The news post also mentions that:

The OpenGL ARB is also developing an OpenGL 2.1 SDK complete with reference documentation, sample code, tutorials, tools and utilities for release in 2006.

Here are links to the Khronos/ARB press release and the specification download page.

I was reminded of Advance Wars last weekend when Mash brought his DS along to Saturday pool to settle our long-awaited Advance Wars: Dual Strike rematch.

Then I saw this post on bits & bytes & pixels & sprites that linked to Ninjatoe’s papercraft webpage and this caught my eye:

I think there is some sort of rule that states that we have to get these printed out in the largest size available from our local copy centre so that we can make huge versions to play out games “live action” style at various locations in Perth…

Update: Bonus link! The old Quake papercraft models that were floating around the web last year sometime (?): Captin Nod’s Paper Models.

I’m excited about Nintendo’s new cooking tuition program recently released in Japan for DS. The official homepage (part of the Touch Generations website) has quite a lot of information. I’m not sure if it’s called “It talks! DS Cooking Navi.”, but I’ll refer to it as such because it is prominent on top of the homepage.

It seems that Saturo Iwata has really re-focussed Nintendo’s direction with the Touch Generations series of games and the emphasis on expanding the market (to non-gamers) and improving the user interface. The game uses the touch screen to browse available recipes, and to tick off ingredients as they are collected. Then the DS can be put down in the kitchen and spoken to (using a simple “okay” to proceed to the next instruction) since the cook’s hands will be busy!

The online advertising for the Touch Generations games has involved showing people playing the game. When I first saw this on the Brain Training homepage, I immediately thought it was a brilliant approach to communicate the concept and to show various people’s reactions. For “It talks! DS Cooking Navi.”, the video page highlights the many different people who may want to use the software. I found the top left video (the thumbnail image is an image of a man in a brown apron) is quite endearing. A man (who clearly hasn’t spent much time in the kitchen) cooks for his wife and two young daughters. The family sits down to pick out a recipe, and proceed to gently cheer him on as he cooks for them.