Take That Governments, First Private Rocket Makes Orbit

After a few failed attempts SpaceX's Falcon 1 rocket has made it out of the earth's atmosphere to become the first "privately developed liquid fueled launch vehicle to achieve earth orbit.", a rocket in space in other words.

Previous attempts have been plagued with problemss and disasters, but SpaceX (founded by Tesla Motor's Chairman and Co-founder of PayPal, Elon Musk) has finally done it.

The liftoff was webcast live via the company's website which was continuously updated with news, including a message written at 16:26PDT reading:

T+0:08:21 Falcon 1 reached orbital velocity, 5200 m/s

Nominal Second stage cut off (SECO) - Falcon 1 has made history as the first privately developed liquid fueled launch vehicle to achieve earth orbit!!!!!!

Thanks for the heads-up Engadget.

Truck Drives Backwards At 70 MPH

I get the feeling that this truck driver (video below) has watched Pixar's Cars film too much and thought he'd try Mater's backwards driving trick for himself. Of course Mater isn't a huge transport truck nor is he even real.

Make sure you listen to the woman taking the video saying that they're doing 70 MPH and the truck was pulling away from them... backwards! 70 MPH is around 112 KPH, imagine that truck jackknifing in front of you!

The only reason I can think of someone risking so much to pull off this stunt is to keep their tacho down, but seriously, is it worth killing yourself (and maybe a bunch of other people) over?

IIS7 On Windows Server 2008 Shinanigans

Once again I have been delving into the brave new world of IIS 7, Microsoft's enterprise strength web server software. This time round it was running on a Windows Server 2008 64 bit server. I had a few "gotchas" and seeing as I had little success with Google searches I thought I'd share them with you. If you're not a web developer I suggest you stop reading now and go watch the beached whale video on YouTube.

First up we have the battle of the bits. Upon deploying my .Net 3.5 site over to the new server I immediately starting seeing this error (click the image for full size view).



The error reads "Could not load file or assembly 'System.Data' or one of its dependencies. An attempt was made to load a program with an incorrect format". A mention of System.BadImageFormatException is down in the Exception Details too, another red herring.

System.Data, WTF? How can a grassroots part of .NET be broken? Well, after a bit of Googling I'd found a few people suggesting I should set the server to run everything as 32 bit. Sure, but what about the other websites running on this machine and why bother with a 64 bit server in the first place? Plus, I was doing my builds on my Vista 64 dev machine, surely it's all 64 bit.

After building and rebuilding with various target CPU settings to no avail I stumbled upon this setting in the Application Pool in IIS that my website was running in. Oh, look... it says "Enable 32-Bit Applications".



Set it to True and watch the magic happen. So apparently, even though I'm running Vista 64 my .NET DLLs are 32 bit... or something like that. Anyway, that was the first hurdle.

The second problem was I couldn't get access to the site either through anonymous access or via the Forms Authentication. At first I thought it was my custom MembershipProvider but that didn't explain why the authentication errors were from the SQL side of things.

More poking and prodding later (and a weekend of beer drinking) I came to the realisation that my LINQ to SQL entities were using the connection string name in the app.config, not the name of the connection string I had in my web.config. *slaps forehead*

So a quick rename of the connection string on the remote server's web.config and we're back in business... *phew*

Well, that's it... I hope the whale video was entertaining for you.

Tetris Remade In LittleBigPlanet

LittleBigPlanet is the ONLY reason to buy a Playstation 3. It looks great and promises such cool gameplay but just recently the developers of the game have been telling us that it isn't a game, it's a universe full of tools to create anything and everything.

So to prove that, someone's gone and created a LittleBigPlanet version of Tetris (see the cool video below). Doing things the LittleBigPlanet way this isn't just a simple recreation of the classic Russian game. Keep your ears out for the old Tetris music playing in the background.

Thanks for the tip Kotaku!

What Scared You As A Kid?

My 3 year old son is literally scared s*itless of Monster House. I can't even highlight the icon in MediaPortal without him running out of the room screaming let alone actually start the movie. Of course it must be the scary possessed house that freaks him out or the fact that said house eats pretty much everyone in the movie. Actually, it's neither. It's the old guy who yells at the little girl at the start (that's his ugly mug above left).

Kids are scared of the weirdest things. When you think they'd be scared of something they'll surprise you and not bat an eyelid but then there are those occassions where something ordinary makes their bowels loosen and the tear duct flood gates open.

An old school friend of mine told me once (in confidence) that he used to hide behind the couch when the people-in-a-suit cow came on Fat Cat. Two people in a black and white spotted sheet and a fake cow head gave him the heeby jeebies. I'm sure you've got some weird phobia from something you saw as a kid.

Well, BabbleBaby have written up a list of the 26 most disturbing kids movies of ever, with Monster House proudly showing at #22 although there's no mention of Fat Cat... but that's probably due to it being a TV show and not at all disturbing, except to my old school friend.

Breaking News: Jack Thompson Disbarred

Big news today from Kotaku as we hear that Jack Thompson, video gaming's worst enemy, will lose his right to practice law in the sunny state of Florida in 30 days.

As Kotaku puts it, "Judgment has been entered in the case that started last year and came to a head when Judge Dava Tunis recommended permanent disbarment for the bombastic, showboating law man. The court has approved the report and has ordered that JT is officially disbarred as of 30 days from today."

To quote the court, "The Court approves the corrected referee's report and John Bruce Thompson is permanently disbarred, effective thirty days from the date of this order so that respondent can close out his practice and protect the interests of existing clients. If respondent notifies the Court in writing that he is no longer practicing and does not need the thirty days to protect existing clients, this Court will enter an order making the permanent disbarment effective immediately. Respondent shall accept no new business from the date this order is filed."

Here's Jack's response to the judgement and here's a game developer's celebratory cake.

Chevy VY Commodore SS

Chevy? WTF? Yes, as previously mentioned in another post Aussie hoons are buying Holdens and rebadging them (or buying them prebadged) with Chevy markings.

I was driving home yesterday when I pulled up at the lights behind this VY Commodore ute with a big fat Chevy logo stuck on its back. I'm not sure about the logic behind this strange phenomenon because this guy has gone to the extent of getting a personalised license plate to tell everyone how proud he is of his purchase then he goes and ditches the Holden lion frisbee.

The obvious link is GM owns Holden and Chevrolet but why change the branding on a car that is only sold as a Holden? Does ANYONE know what's going on here!?

Freaky New Xbox 360 Advertising Campaign

...and I don't mean freaky as in the David Bowie sense, more in the Hellraiser sense.

Video (ignore the "Error" if you see it, just click on through):

Audi Sees Red... and Amber and Green

Audi, those whacky Germans who like to build crazy fast station wagons, have announced some pretty cool tech coming our way some time in the near future.

The new tech, called Travolution, involves traffic lights but don't let that get you down as its ultimate goal is to save you some cash. As Autoblog puts it, "Travolution establishes a connection between a red light and a vehicle, so that as a specially equipped car moves toward a red light at an intersection, stop light gantries fitted with communications modules can let the car know when the light will turn green. The car then lets the driver know what speed he should maintain in order to pass through the intersection without having to brake for the light and then accelerate again. " Nice.

Unfortunately the traffic lights themselves need to be updated so it's quite a big buy-in for local governments but hopefully Audi have made Travolution an open standard so other manufacturers can get in on the action.

Chevy Volt On The Move

Sick of seeing photos of the Chevy Volt? Well, feast your eyes on these videos!

The first video shows the Volt driving around slowly to the anesthetic sounds of this year's greeny marketing band, Coldplay. You also get some more footage of the interior gadgets etc.

The second video is from My Ride which has a lot of the same footage but the voice over gives you plenty of information on how the E-Flex system works among other things. It also shows (finally!) how you plug this baby in and how, running 240 volt AC power like we do here in the land of Oz, you can charge the Lithium Ion battery pack in only 3 hours.

Still no video of someone using that giant gear shift thingy in the center console though and it would be nice to hear the car running (if that's possible).

Thanks for the tip Engadget.

Coldplay valium:


Informative video:

Metallica vs Guitar Hero: You Decide

Further to my post the other day about the new Metallica album sounding better on Guitar Hero than the CD comes this easy to hear/see side-by-side comparison of the two (video below).

Ted Jensen, head engineer at Sterling Sound, who mastered the album, allegedly responded to fan concerns, writing "I’m not proud to be associated with this one, and we can only hope that some good will come from this in some form of backlash against volume above all else." Ouch!

Anyway, thanks to NME comes the previously mentioned video where YouTube user florixg has dropped the level of the CD mix to sound about the same volume as the Guitar Hero mix. Florixg switches between the two sources during a rather heavy solo making the horrible mess of the CD (in comparison) quite apparent, most noticeably in the drums. Remember, this is comparing the mixes, not whether you like Metallica or not.

Which mix do you prefer?

Mood Stones Gets A Birthday Makeover

As you may (or may not) be aware, I created and run a little Facebook application called Mood Stones. It's a simple idea carried out in (hopefully) the simplest way. Well, this month my little baby turns one so to celebrate I gave it some love at the weekend to spruce it up a bit.

I ditched one of my advertisers to save some vertical space (the majority of users are still running 1024x768) and replaced the boring dropdown list with a hover-over menu which is a lot more visually pleasing (see below). I've also switched it over to use the wider Facebook canvas that became available with the new Facebook design a week or so back.

Since going live in September of 2007 (I'm unsure of the exact date but the first stone was created on September 1st and the first Wall post is dated September 5th) I've battled through multiple Facebook API "updates" and have just recovered from the recent Facebook redesign and can now start looking at adding in some of the new features Facebook offers. I've made it harder on myself by relying on 2 third-parties to get to my users: Facebook (obviously) and the Microsoft-commissioned .Net Toolkit. At least it works now.

Mood Stones has also grown from a little one-man-band to a three-person band with Hannelore Reynders of Belgium joining the team in June this year and in August Émilie Léger of Montreal had her first set of stones go live. I've also had heaps of help from the fans during the year with input for mood descriptions among other things from Heather and lots of great flower photos from Ledena. There are many others so thanks to you all!

To give you an idea of some of the numbers there are 87,046 registered users (people who have it installed) with 1,187 of them registered as "fans" of Mood Stones.

Happy birthday MS, here's to another 12 months!

I'm A PC

As a sort of follow on from the Jerry Seinfeld/Bill Gates ads comes this new angle on PC advertising (remember, PC isn't just Microsoft, it's everyone except Apple... which apparently doesn't make personal computers). According to the new ad lots of people have PCs, who would have guessed!? I'm a PC and I don't have a beard.

New Metallica Album Is Too Loud, Even For Metallica Fans

Metallica's latest album "Death Magnetic" was recently released with praise for the band's return to good ol' Metal being overshadowed by the terrible mess made in the mastering of the album. The beef a lot of fans have with the new album is the volume has been pushed so far that the quality of the recording has been compromised by introducing distortion (not the good kind).

"How can that be so?", I hear you ask. Well, thanks for asking. It's a simple matter of physical limitations of audio recordings. Digital recordings have a volume "ceiling" where if you step over it by a minuscule amount you will "clip" the sound causing harsh distortion. Analog is a little better in this respect as you get a tiny bit of leeway once you go past the physical limitation of the magnetic medium but you will still distort the sound. So the trick when mastering an album these days is to get the maximum volume while staying within these physical limits. There are various methods you can use to help the mix sound louder while remaining under the ceiling like compression (audio compression, not data compression) which reduces the dynamic range of the recording. Check out the video at the bottom of this post to see what I'm rambling on about and how over the past few decades this problem has worsened.

Ian Shepherd, a mastering engineer and general expect in this field goes into great detail on his blog about the history behind this messy Metallica mix giving examples of some reasons people give for doing this (and shoots them down in the process). Basically, the listener has ultimate control of the volume so if they find the mix too loud they'll just turn it down.

The story gets even better with fans saying that the versions of the Metallica tracks available for Guitar Hero sound better than their "proper" album counterparts. Again, Ian Shepherd performed a few simple tests to show without a doubt that the mastering/mixing on the album just takes the "loudness war" too far.

What's even funnier (in my opinion) is that a leaked version of the album that was available to download from your local BitTorrent site weeks before the album came out has a better mix. Now that's a big WTF!

Concept vs Production: Chevy Volt

For those of you interested here are some side-by-side shots of the concept Volt vs the production Volt.









The shape is different due to the fact that the production vehicle needed to be as aerodynamic as possible to ensure good mileage but the GM designers did a good job in keeping the overall "feel" the same, especially in the hind quarters. Perhaps when we see some modded versions with larger rims etc. and in different colours the production Volt might look sportier.

It'll be interesting to see what GM do with rebranding the Volt internationally with it being confirmed recently that it'll go on sale in Europe as an Opel or Vauxhall depending on where you live and may be branded as a Holden in Australia, of course after shifting the steering column to the right side of the car. At least there's no gear box to worry about getting in the way.

Happy 100th Birthday GM: The 2011 Chevy Volt

Here it is, right on schedule. GM's saviour the Chevy Volt. I'm not going to say much except YAY! Finally! Here's a bunch of pictures and videos for you to look at but there are more over at Autoblog. I'd love to see it in another colour (black!) but I do like the view from above rear, the black roof looks great. Note the funky LED fog lamps and cool (although quite plasticy) touch-based interior controls. In the video you see the driver's console reporting on all sorts of things including the current tyre pressure!



Autoblog on location at the Reveal. (video below)
Intererior walkthrough. (video below)
Photos from Autoblog Shanghai.

Reveal:


Interior Walkthrough:

Spaceballs The Animated Series

That's right, you didn't misread the title. Spaceballs, Mel Brook's 80s pisstake of Star Wars (and sci fi in general) has been made into an animated series with the first four episodes airing on G4 (the folks that brought us Code Monkeys) on the 21st of September.

Obviously John Candy won't be reprising his role as Barf with Tino Insana taking over, Rick Moranis is still too rich to play Dark Helmet who is voiced by Dee Bradley Baker and Bill Pullman is too big a star to return as Lone Starr leaving it up to Rino Romano to do his part. That said, according to IMDb, Mel Brooks and Daphne Zuniga will be back to voice President Skroob and Princess Vespa respectively. Looks like Daphne gave up waiting for a Melrose Place reboot and went with the easy money.

If you can't wait until then and you like big, bouncy lady parts and in-your-face inuendo you might like to watch the following very silly trailer. Caution, it may be a little NSFW (especially the big-breasted Princess Peach I spotted flashing by) so wait until nobody is looking.

I see your Schwartz is as big as mine!

Get A Sneak Peak At Heath Ledger's Final Role

Poor Terry Gilliam, he really is unlucky in the movie business. The once-animator from Monty Python now award winning feature film director has had more than his fair share of mishaps. Unlucky to the point of having his film about Don Quixote crash and burn so badly that the making-of documentary was released in theatres.

So what happened on his latest project The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus? Oh, nothing but one of the actors went and died on him. Poor Heath. Anyway, it appears as though he filmed enough of Heath Ledger's part to keep him in the film. I just hope that his death doesn't overshadow everything else about the movie.

You can see a clip below of the film thanks to Movieweb. Note, Terry Gilliam is the guy who brought us some pretty cool flicks including Brazil, Twelve Monkeys and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. His new project is "a fantastical morality tale, set in the present day. It tells the story of Dr Parnassus and his extraordinary 'Imaginarium', a travelling show where members of the audience get an irresistible opportunity to choose between light and joy or darkness and gloom." and is due for release some time in 2009.

Happy Birthday IC

From the super nerd vault comes an interesting piece of news today. The Integrated Circuit (IC) turned 50 on the 12th of September this year. Why is that interesting you might say well see that ugly looking thing above/left, that's the first IC which was created by Jack Kilby. This unassuming bit of wiring and other bits ended up having a huge effect in taking the then house-sized computers to the tiny circuits we now have in pretty much everything from your iPod to your car's fuel guage.

To quote Engadget, "As the story goes, the very first microchip was demonstrated on the 12th of September in 1958, and it passed its first test: "producing a sine wave on an oscilloscope screen." Doesn't sound like much but you can thank the brains behind this sine wave generator for the computer you are currently reading this on.

hip-hip... HOORAY!

Jussy In Technicolor

As promised earlier, here's the video of Jussy's stint at the 2008 Australia Tech.Ed.

Tesla Completes Updated Drivertrain For Roadster

My favourite little EV-that-could looks like it'll finally be getting the drivetrain it was supposed to be originally released with.

Tesla announced that they have completed "Drivetrain 1.5" which includes an upgraded electric motor and swapping the original two-speed automatic transmission for a Borg Warner-sourced one speed. This means the Tesla Roadster's instant torque will go from 155.5 Nm (211 lb-ft) to a relatively huge 206 Nm (280 lb-ft) while also improving its range by 10% to a shockingly impressive 244 miles. That's 392.6 kms of uninterrupted, fossil fuel-free fun.

Drivetrain 1.5 also means Tesla can get serious with the output of these little rockets with them producing 10 Roadsters per week and up to 40 per week by next March.

There's also good news for the 38 lucky people who already own a Roadster as Tesla will be keeping its promise to retrofit those models with the new drivetrain.

More info and pics over at AutoblogGreen.

Batman Still Kicking More Butt

After the past weekend in the US box office it looks more and more likely that The Dark Knight will be the fourth film ever to make it over the $1 billion gross worldwide box office takings mark.

As mentioned previously in another post I wanted to know if anyone was taking bets on whether or not this runaway hit would make it over the 9 zero line. Well, I think the odds are looking very good indeed.

The film was the third highest grossing at the US box office this past weekend taking in another $5.5 million with it still showing in theatres around the world but it needs to gross an extra $50-odd million to make it over the line. It's currently sitting in 6th position for all time box office gross but has dropped to 3rd place in IMDb's Top 250 Films Of All Time. I'll be keeping an eyeball firmly targeted in this direction.

Either way, congrats to Chris Nolan and Co. (see below) for making a shipload of money, now PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE do not make another Batman movie with an antagonist (that's a bad guy for those of you who failed grade 6 English) we've seen already. No more Pengiun, Joker, Riddler, Poison Ivy, Catwoman etc. please! But before you do that go and knee-cap Sam Raimi before he makes another bloody Spider-man movie, 2 and 3 were bad enough.

UPDATE: The deal is sealed, if it can't make the $50M it needs now it looks like Warner Bros. are angling to re-release the film in January to garner some Oscar attention. Read about it here on Movieweb.

Cute LittleBigPlanet Billboards, Collect 'Em All

Ever since I was a young'n I've loved miniature stuff so when I saw these tiny LittleBigPlanet "billboards" on Kotaku I just wanted one. Take a look at the details on the little billboards there. Tiny ladders for the sackboys and sackgirls to climb up, miniscule (but fake) lights poking out at the front. So cool!

They're all part of a marketing campaign for the soon-to-be released Playstation3 puzzle building/solving game with 100 1,000 of the mini billboards being planted (literally) around major US cities.

To quote Kotaku, "They were first noted in an eBay listing. Some lucky guy wandered outside of his work one day to find one of these tiny signs planted in the nearby dirt. After doing a bit of research he discovered it was destined to be pitched and instead got his hands on it. It was labeled 99 of 100."

After a brief eBay search I found it but unfortunately it's currently sitting on $112 USD with 2.5 days to go and the description says 99 of 1000 (not 100). Ahwell, they're still cool and makes for an interesting marketing campaign. Gets those chubby, pasty gamer kids outside into the sunshine and makes them use their hidden package hunting skills for something outside of a GTA game.

Check out some of the other designs available over at Kotaku.

Google To Take Over The Oceans

So what does a multi-billion dollar tech company do after releasing yet another browser into a world filled with browsers? Apply for a patent on ocean-going data centers, that's what.

Engadget tells me today that Google has applied for a patent for floating data centers (which apparently isn't such a new idea) using the water as a coolant and the waves as a power supply. The diagram submitted with the patent application shows some kind of ocean-going vessel with a cable system and floating bits and pieces. I guess the servers are onboard the ship as salt water doesn't do good things for electronics.

The cooling thing is pretty obvious but check out the video (below) on how the "Pelamis Wave Energy Converters" work (they're the sausage looking things coming out the back of the trawler in the diagram above/left).

Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google, have said for a long time now that they'd like to reduce the power consumption, or at least the carbon footprint, of their massive data centers so I guess this is a step in that direction. Let's see if this becomes a reality or if it's just Google doing their thing.

Yanks Love Aussie V8s

While I think a 6.2 litre V8 isn’t exactly the thing we should be driving these days it is still heartwarming to see the local (Aussie) car manufacturers getting some love from the USA.

Autoblog often waxes eloquent about the local grown produce and comes across as having a warm fuzzy place in their car-loving hearts for the Pontiac G8 (AKA Holden VE Commodore) not too suprising through after considering it will eat up the road using all 415 horses (309 kw).

Reading up on the G8 on Wikipedia I found this interesting tidbit. "...Some G8 buyers are removing all traces of the Pontiac brand from their vehicles by installing Commodore front bumpers and other parts.". I've noticed the opposite here with Aussie hoons choosing to replace their Holden markings with Chevy logos and whatnot. Weird.

For comparison here's a photo of a similar Holden, the VE SS V-Series.

Production Chevy Volt Photos Leaked!

The moment we've all been waiting for has arrived. After months of spy shots and teaser photos we finally get to see shots of the production version of GM's wunderkind, the Chevy Volt.

Props to gm-volt.com for bringing us these leaked studio photos but I must say I am totally underwhelmed. I knew the Volt was going to look different to the out-there concept but they've managed to make it look boring. Then again, it could just be the weird angles most of the photos are taken from.

Understandably the production Volt is a lot more rounded than the concept which was just a tad un-aerodynamic and I have to admit it is a lot more attractive than the whale-like Prius. I don't mind the rear and the black (glass?) roof is a nice touch but the best thing about it is that this thing is real. Real full electric propulsion, real E-Flex system, real plug-in charging. W000T! I'd buy one.

By the way, if you're wondering who the guys in the suits are they're GM senior execs.

More photos and original story available here.

Edit: More (and higher res) photos available at Autoblog.

Jussy, King Of The Australian Nerds

Just as a follow on from my previous post highlighting Jussy's kingness in the land of nerds comes this new shot taken from a certain video (which you may see at a later date) of the man in action.

This is from the Australian Tech.Ed 2008 Keynote... I'm quite pleased how well the voice-to-text system built into my camera worked too.

Tech.Ed Summary

Well, Tech.Ed Australia 2008 has come and gone leaving me with a bursting brain and a bursting belly.  Instead of going into detail about what is currently at the front of my mind I'm going to list a few bullet points in no particular order.  I may expand on these at a later date...

• RFID is a good idea, if it works
  
• The best thing you can do for UX is to chuck everything out that you don't need (i.e. the KISS principle) and to START with the design.
• Empty drink fridges for most of Thursday are NOT cool
• I'd like to see something ELSE running on the Microsoft Surface other than the photo app
  
• Tips of the Show: Ctrl-. and Copy/Paste References in Visual Studio 2008
  
• Full Text Search in SQL Server 2008 kicks ass
  
• Scott Hanselmann is an absolute pisser and knows his stuff/audience
  
• The Windows Mobility team are insane
  
• Dr Neil tells it like it is (and is a bit of a stirrer)
• I still prefer LINQ to SQL over LINQ to Entities
• I can't decide if Adam Cogan was acting stoned

All up, it was well worth the time and expense (thanks J&A!) and I can't wait to get in to work on Monday to start fiddling with stuff.  Chucking my database on 2008 and the site on IIS7 (bai bai Cassini!). *fingers crossed*

Video Of Production Volt

Further to my post last week about the spy shots of the production Chevy Volt that were taken on the set of Transformers 2 comes this video of the same thing. Here you can clearly see the "VOLT" logo on the back of the car and get an idea of how this EV moves.

The first half of the video shows more familiar Transformers driving up the road with Bumblebee and the new silver Corvette concept car (that has yet to be officially announced) in the lead but then it cuts to the purply blue Volt being unwrapped then driven off.

If the video below doesn't work try this link... and I'd still prefer it in black.

Jussy, King Of The Nerds

Tech.Ed Australia 2008 Keynote! Check out that website up on screen in this photo... and the dude to the right of Dr Beard Neil Rodyn.

Don't tell anyone I told you... ssshhhh!

PS: This is from NZ Tech.Ed and will be reproduced on Wednesday morning in Sydney... but remember it's all hush hush.

Red vs Blue Goes Animated

I can't put my finger on the date or time when "cartoon" became "anime" but according to Joystiq (and the following video) Red vs Blue, probably the most famous machinima ever to grace our computer screens, has now gone all animated.

At first I thought this was a bizarre turn of events seeing as the whole POINT of the series was that it was *in* the Halo world but after watching the clip it appears as though the banal banter and stupid humour still stands meaning RvB is still RvB.

In a world where everybody is jumping on the CG bandwagon it's good to see someone jumping off the bandwagon and back to the good ol' days (of bad 80s cartoons). It's a bit hard to see through the shaky cam video so I'll reserve my final judgement until I've seen the final product.

Now back to this misuse of the word "anime". Anime is Japanese animation often based on a manga (comic) and is not a general word to describe any and all hand-drawn or CG animation. Blame Nickelodeon for the poor kids these days who don't know the difference.

Your 110" 1080p Setup Still Sucks

It seems that in today's gadget society the manufacturers are trying to make smaller projectors and larger TVs. Of course the large TV thing has been going on for a while (I remember when my dad got our huge 68cm Philips TV back in the day) but now it's got to be big and high resolution and for those suckers who thought 1080p was the be-all and end-all, think again.

Digital cinema has used 4K for a while (4,000-odd pixel wide display) but now it's coming to a home near you with Panasonic displaying (pun!) this gigantic 150" (3.8 meter) plasma TV at IFA running at a crazy 2,160 x 4,096 pixels.

The good news that this isn't just a pipe-dream like the 8K display we saw earlier in the year as these behemoths are going into production around May 2009, that's only 8 months away. Of course you'll need to sell off your house (and family) to afford one but imagine what it'd look like under the bridge you'll be living beneath.

This time last year the "biggest" non-projected display was a measly 103" plasma and can be seen in the image above/left being dwarfed by its giant little brother.