Archive for May, 2008
Boom Blox review
My review of Boom Blox for the Wii just went up on IOLTechnology.co.za.
Awesome game, lots of fun, go read my review. 
Go on.
Geekdinner #8
So it was the 8th Geekdinner tonight. And I think 4th one I’ve attended.
Another success I’d say.
Great venue (Thanks Mel’s Kitchen, Rondebosh). Great food (Gluhwein, soup, lamb/chicken/veg curry, pudding+custard). Great people, saw some faces I haven’t for a while (Hi Luke. Hi Allan. Hi all you other people I forget to mention.), even met one or two whose names I know (Hi @kerry_anne) and never met, some interesting talks, good wine (Thanks Perdeberg, I’m not a wine ‘spurt, but I sampled both the Sauvignon Blanc and the Pinotage, and they were both excellent!)
The talks. Oi vei. OK, so Jonathan (I forget which number he is) spoke about Game Theory. Funny that, I came across it on Wikipedia the other week for some reason. Interesting.
And the Jonathan (Yet another one) spoke about 5 ways to live in Cape Town. Very cool, really liked it. Some very true points, I’ve been wanting to do as Romans do for a while. Funds limit the possibilities though I’m afraid.
And then Ian had a nice talk about GM foods and GM products and why it’s not necessarilly a bad thing, but how it’s a bad thing if not tested properly. I think everybody, including the big corporations, know this, but it’s all about money and immediate needs. Yes, we need to cater for the 6 billion people on earth, so let’s do it quick and make money while we’re at it, screw the environment, or the planet. That’s a few generations down the line’s problem. I’m still on the fence about it all, but I’m definitely for proper testing of GM stuff though.
Tim did the Slideshow Karaoke, on the mating and sexual habits of some obscure Australian ant-eater mammal thing. Funny. Seemed like well-researched material, Tim managed quite well, even when the four-headed penis topic came up. Don’t ask.
All in all though, I think it was great, had lots of fun, even the coffee was good. Lovurly.
Battle of the Planets
For some reason yesterday I thought of a TV series we watched as kids. I remember my dad renting videos with two episodes per cassette. I couldn’t remember the name, but Google helped, naturally. All I could remember was that I watched it in the ’80s, and there were 5 kids that had numbers on their helmets, and they could transform into some super-powerful thing. This search on Google ( anime+five+numbers+helmet+1980′s+series ) led me to a page that sells figurines from the tv show.
The series was called Battle of the Planets, see if you remember this:
I absolutely loved the show. It featured “5 incredible young people with incredible super powers” called G-Force, assisted by an R2D2-like robot called 7-Zark-7. Oh man I loved that show.
Some interesting notes about the show on the Battle of the Planets wikipedia page and the IMDB page.
Weezer music video and Youtube
The first time I ever heard a Weezer song, and watched one of their music videos for that matter, was when we unpacked the Beta version of Windows 95 back in 1994 (It came as part of an MSDN package if I recall), and there was a music video. (A quick search reveals it was their song Buddy Holly) I liked the song, and never really latched onto their music much.
But it came as no surprise to me when I came across this really awesome music video of their’s, their latest song called “Pork and Beans”. The Youtube video’s had over 1.2million views in a single day.
In a nutshell, they took practically every online video meme that’s ever made the rounds, and made a music video out of them, by putting themselves into the videos. And either they managed to get some really good lookalikes, or they tracked down the original people that featured in these memes and used them.
I came across the Weezer music video via this digg post, that links through to a nice list of embeds for each of the source Youtube videos used in Weezer’s music vid.
And I must say, the video is absolutely fantastic, and uses several of my favourite memes that’s gone around, including Daft Hands, Coke+Mentos, Afro Ninja, Dramatic Gopher, and a whole bunch more. (Not to mention All Your Base that predates Youtube by years!)
Wii chip delays, and alternatives
Argh. OK, so it’s been a while since I ordered my Wasabi+wii-clip combo, and it *was* a pre-order, but due to Team Wasabi having delays at their manufacturers, I still don’t have it.
I’ve been keeping in touch with Jay at ConsoleChips where I pre-ordered at, and the new d2pro9 chip seems to be a better option all-round than the Wasabi chip. But! The d2pro9 can’t be firmware flashed via dvd-rom without some extra piece of kit that needs to be soldered onto the chip, and for a short time there was no wii-clip for it either.
So, I finally got fed up, and asked for options. My requirements were simple:
- I want to solder as little as possible onto the actual Wii’s board
- The chip must be D2C compatible
- The chip must be able to allow me to play NTSC games on a PAL console
- I want to be able to firmware upgrade the chip via DVD
The answer? There are no chips, currently, that can do all four. Most do only two or three of them. Even the Wasabi didn’t manage to do “No soldering” if I wanted region-free functionality (which was the point after all).
However! The d2ckey, the first chip to work on the D2C chipset drives, does the first three. In fact, it requires NO soldering AT ALL if used with a wii-clip. So its firmware can’t be update via DVD, or at all, but so far, it’s not had to, at all. So that’s what we agreed on. Jay immediately packaged up and despatched the D2CKey soldered onto its wii-clip, and refunded me the difference of cost.
I must say, Jay‘s been great, he kept in contact and offered alternatives when my request didn’t work out.
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