Category: General

http://www.eurogamer.net/…rticle_id=62742

Warning: This post contains gratuitous Australian cultural references.

The next version of Singstar will be “Singstar Rocks!”. Judging from the partial song list, it looks like it will contain fairly recent alt-pop-rock rather than 70-80’s glam or 80-90’s rock-and-roll.

Previous versions of Singstar have been localised for different regions. Here, the Australian version of Singstar Pop! includes songs from Shazza and Missy. I wonder if the local version of Singstar Rocks! will have a bit of Aussie Rock crammed in.

Unfortunately, it’s probably unlikely to contain old-school Barnsey or Farnsey. So you may be dissapointed if you’re looking for a working class man. Likewise, you might not want to sing even though “you’re the voice”. (Moan. Bad, bad humour. My apologies.)

The list already includes one Aussie number in “Are You Gonna Be My Girl?” by Jet. I didn’t know that this made it big anywhere outside of Australia… did it?

After numerous bad experiences with real-estate agents not getting back to me, I decided to create a brief pamphlet explaining the fine art of returning telephone calls.

Here is the result:

I think that I’ll keep this handy and send copies to companies whenever I’m on the receiving end of exceptionally poor service rather than informative return telephone calls.

I’ve had to deal with many bad real-estate agents in the past few weeks. A number of which don’t seem to see a need to return our calls or even turn up to organised property inspections.

As a result, I’m creating a pamphlet entitled: Don’t be a tele-phoney, even you can learn how to return calls!.

Here’s a teaser:

I plan on sending these onto people who continually fail to return our calls. Maybe it will help them out. More likely, it will just make me feel a little better.

I should mention that not all real-estate agents we have dealt with have been bad. In particular, we found Ali from GOW Real Estate to be very professional.

Update: Images created using content from openclipart.org. It’s a growing resource of public domain vector graphics. Check it out!

Played a bit more Zelda: Four Swords Adventures on the weekend. It’s a great game and creates interesting social dynamics.

For those that aren’t familiar, it’s a cooperative game played with (ideally) four gameboy advance handhelds connected to a gamecube. Each player can move their character from the television screen to their own gameboy screen. Also, some information only appears on the (personal) gameboy screen, and this can make for novel play mechanics.

Onto the social dynamics. At the end of each level, each player is asked (in confidence on their GBA screen) for their opinion on who was the most annoying, and who was most helpful. This affects the final ranking. So even a player that got most of the treasure and took out most of the enemies could find themselves losing.

As a result, some players who initially irritated others by doing thinks like continually shooting them with arrows (you know who you are!) started to be a bit more helpful. On the other hand, sometimes a player who put so much effort into gathering treasure was voted as annoying by others in an effort to reduce their ranking (or at least some people may have felt that way).

Oh and in case I didn’t mention this in an earlier post: Highly Recommended if you have 3 friends with gameboys.

Heidi and I put in an application for a rental property on Columbo Street in Victoria Park. It’s very close to the causeway and there are quite a few cafes and stores nearby.

I hope we get it.

Update: We should know in around 2 days… (I’m anxious)

http://www.4colorrebellio…design-ds-lite/

I was happy to see this on 4colorrebellion today:

Nintendo have formally announced a new version of the DS!

In the comments for that post Hamblasto mentioned that I was pretty close with my reasonable redesign. So I figured that I would try to see how close I actually was. I took my earlier design and made a few modification to get it closer to the Nintendo DS lite. It took around 10-15 minutes.

All-in-all pretty close. The size was just about right. The faceplate was off. The control placement was a little off. I think that the overall aesthetic was about right though.

Larger (but more compressed) image after the jump.

Update: Oops. I’m missing the power and wifi lights on the closed version of the modified reasonable redesign…

Update: I still wish that they had made something similar to the ipod style redesign.

Continue reading “Nintendo DS lite announced!”

I saw this story on The Register about a flying car captured in an image on Google Maps. Here’s an image from the story (and originally from Google Maps I assume):

Nothing amazing. Maybe a bit of overzealous reporting, but they could be testing something like this out in the bush… I suppose… maybe… except this is supposedly in a frequented park area in the middle of freaking suburbia!

My vote is that the image depicts a white car next to a (very) black car. Thoughts?

The most afeared special item in Mario Kart DS has got to be The Blue Shell (of doom!). It homes in on the current race leader, smacks into them, and explodes. The end result being that it slows down the race leader (and anyone else caught in the explosion) by 2 seconds or so!

I’ve tried many times to dodge the blue shell in Mario Kart DS, but all of my attempts have been unsucessful. So I decided that I needed to search the web for a definitive answer! Is it possible?

I found this thread on Gamespot that claimed it was possible with a well-timed drift boost. Okay, that’s pretty cool. There’s even a video or two linked to demonstrate the required skills.

And then there is this video:

It shows how to fire a blue shell at yourself when you are leading the race, and then dodge it so that it takes out the person following you. Crazy. Crazy. Crazy stuff.

I’ve had this idea stuck in my head for a while now and finally put it together over lunch. I thought that it would be cool to have something that was not just pocket sized, but also sort of shaped like something you might put in your pocket. I also wanted something that opened up like a blossoming flower (awh).

As you can see, it has the same size screen as the current DS, but when closed it’s around 30% the size, and when open it’s around 75% the size. I like the arrangement of the screens (more centered) better than the current DS, but it may be problematic for games that design their input system with the bottom screen position (relative to the buttons) in mind.

Ideally the outside case would be made of aluminium and the hinge mechanism may have to be made of a stronger metal (it would have to be fairly strong). I designed the edges to be covered with flexible rubber/plastic so that it looks alright. Then again, maybe it’s possible to create mostly in plastic; there are quite a few mobile phones with elaborate twist and flip mechanisms and I don’t think that they use much metal.

Technical issues aside, I think this one is possibly my favourite thus far!

In my suburb every house is issued with two “wheely” bins. One is for general garbage and is a uniform green colour. The other is for recyclables and has a yellow lid. Garbage is collected every week and recycables are collected every fortnight.

It was clearly “garbage night” last night as half the street had their green bins out on the verge when I came home at around 10:30pm. I wasn’t sure if it was a recycling week or not. Nobody had their yellow-topped bins out so it seemed fairly unlikely, but I decided that it was probably worth putting it out just in case.

In the end, it wasn’t recycling week and I just brought the bin back in (still full of paper and cans). That’s when I noticed this:

If that’s not quite clear enough, let me highlight a few things using the magic of the GIMP:

I wanted to walk down to see if this continued down the block, but I didn’t really have the time (or drive to be honest).