Cool Terminator Salvation Poster

Good to see some people using technology to improve things. While this isn't curing cancer it does show a new take on the old movie poster.

Original is here.

Stig Drives Veyron, World Doesn't End

If you've ever watched an episode of Top Gear you'll know about The Stig, his strange habits and amazing driving skills. Well recently The Stig mounted one of the world's most powerful road cars, the 16 cylinder, 64 valve, quad turbo, 736-kilowatt (1,001 PS/987 hp) Bugatti Veyron to see how it performed on the show's test track.

You'd think a car like this could out perform the current ranked car on Top Gear's test track, the Gumpert Apollo which posted a time of 1:17. Check the video below to see what happens when The Stig meets The Veyron, luckily the universe didn't collapse in on itself.

Watch out for the Veyron's rear foil as it changes angle depending on the required downforce, kind of like a plane's flaps.

Popcorn Hour A-110 Does Your Evil Bidding

About 6 months ago I upgraded (read: replaced) my home theatre PC (HTPC) with a brand spanking fancy pants machine which, basically, kicks ass. My criteria second time round was for it be to quiet and be able to play 1080p MKVs with no problems. I settled on an ATI-based system using the funky new motherboards that do the decoding onboard in a sub-$100 Antec HTPC case which is so quiet my projector sounds noisy in comparison.

Fast forward to today and look what I'm sent, an item which fills all my criteria and then some, the Popcorn Hour A-110 "Networked Media Tank". Ignore the stupid name for the moment and take a look at the stats on this $215 USD RRP ($344 AUD, the cheapest price we found) baby. It decodes/plays pretty much everything including video and audio streams in MKVs containers and outputs via HDMI 1.3a, optical SPDIF audio and others. Has USB inputs and a single USB output so you can even use it as an external hard drive (i.e. copy files directly to it from your computer).

What's more is you can whack a hard drive in it and use the inbuilt BitTorrent web client to do your totally legal downloading for you. It has networking protocols up the whazoo and is tiny enough to put up on a shelf somewhere out of the way.

There's a handy video review below for those of you who don't like reading words or there's this Engadget UK review for those of you who do. I have to say I disagree with the reviewer's comment on optical audio. I've used optical SPDIF since my first MiniDisc player back in 1994 and not once have I had a problem.

Thanks for the tip Ottey!

Man Shot, Needs New Phone

Like something out of a B-Grade action movie a New Orleans man has been shot in the chest only to be saved by the extremely lucky placement of his mobile phone.

Ronald Richard was mowing his lawn when he felt a hard object hit him in the chest. He took off his sweater to discovered that he'd been hit by a .45-caliber slug and that his Motorola RAZR had literally taken a bullet for him.

Engadget says, "The angle of the bullet and the modest stopping power of the cellphone were all that stood between the man and serious injury or even death. Instead, this lucky gent got away with little more than a fairly significant bruise..."

No mention of where the stray bullet came from or why someone was shooting randomly in their neighbourhood but then again, it was in the US, do they need a reason?

Talk about lucky, and now he's got a great excuse to buy a new phone for himself and I have discovered a use for Motorola phones.

I Shall Call Him... Mini Me

After all the hype and excitement building up to the release of the new Xbox 360 dash (the total opposite to the lack of communication for the Facebook redesign) we have this little guy. Say hello to my new Xbox 360 Avatar.

While the new dash is fun to play with it's these Avatars which were always going to be the big thing. We all know Microsoft took the success of Nintendo's Miis and ran with it. Miis are basic. How basic? Miis are so basic they'd make a Lego man blush.

The Wii offers more options for rearranging facial features on your Mii than the 360's Avatars but the rest of your Mii is basically choosing a colour for your top (including you ball hands). The Avatars feel more like Sims and look a lot better with their detailed cloth textures and far surperior lighting. Another benefit is it's all hooked into your online presence via Xbox Live/Windows Live (take a look at my gamer tag over to the right there) so your little console guy is available in the "real" world.

Of course Microsoft plan to take this funky little idea and make money out of it with a limited selection of tops, pants, shoes and accessories available for dressing your little You up. How will they make money? By offering extra items like themed shirts/outfits for a small payment, e.g. a Guitar Hero t-shirt for 100 points. The most obvious instance of forcing this is in the ladies shoe department where a total of 8 shoes are offered. Ladies don't like shoes do they? I'm hanging out for the Prada shoe pack! I'm sure it'll only be 15,000 points... bargain!

Anyway, it's all good fun and the new themes are pretty funky too... oh, and if you're lucky to live in certain countries you get the Netflix integration where you can watch HD movies directly through your 360.

Amazing what you can get for free these days (not the movies).

Big Week In Gaming

If the excitement of the New Xbox Experience wasn't enough for you then wait until the awesomeness of Left 4 Dead hits your screen. Out on PC and Xbox 360 L4D is Valve's latest twist on the first person shooter game genre, this time with way more zombies, 4-player co-op play and a server-side AI "director" which determines what will happen to you in the game ensuring you get a unique experience each time through.

I played the demo last week with a mate and two AI characters as we cut a path through hordes of festering zombies. The majority of the them go down with a couple of shots from your shotgun, assault rifle or pistols but there are a few "hero" zombies which take more damage to defeat.

Today the full version of the game was released both in old style retail outlets and via Steam, Valve's digital distribution network/tool. I had a quick bash of the game this morning and even managed to luck my way into an achievement.

There are 4 of us lined up (in the real world) to play through the game in its entirety via the internet as the "survivors" and I can't wait. Friday night we hit the streets of Dodgeville to try to battle our way out of the city and hopefully safety.

Chrysler With Tesla-Like EV

A few months ago Chrysler were behind their competition in the EV stakes then they introduced us to the Dodge EV prototype which is now a reality and doing the show circuit.

Chrysler kind of cheated in the Tesla way by basically taking a Lotus Europa and replacing the engine with an electric powerplant. That said this little beasty with its 268 hp electric motor has a 0-100 time under 5 seconds and it will run for up to 200 miles (320 km) on a single charge.

Not quite the rocket that Tesla have but I reckon this thing will be half the price of the Tesla Roadster and being badged as a Doge will probably be within reach (geographically speaking) of many more people. To give the Chevy Volt a run for its money the word on the street says is it could be available as early as 2010. Of course it's still only a 2-seater so won't be in direct competition with the Volt. Looks like fun though!

Air Traffic Worldwide

I love examining data through charts and whatnot so when something like this comes along I need to reach for a box of tissues.

The video (below) shows a single 24 hour cycle of the air traffic around the globe with yellow dots depicting each flight. You can see the daylight and night shadow run over the Earth's surface and how the various flights in each country (check out the flights from America to Europe) fluctuate during the cycle.

North America and Europe both become a mass of yellow during the daylight.

Thanks Jussy!

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Video Playback, Windows 7 FTW

If you've ever tried to set up a computer to play the varying forms of videos you can get on the internet these days then you probably know how much of a headache it can be. Codec packs have been the answer for a few years now (I'm currently using K-Lite for my home theatre PC) but news today may make them a thing of the past.

On Long Zheng's blog, I Started Something, he has posted an item detailing the Codec support found in Windows 7 and how Microsoft's "Vista 2.0" will play almost everything out of the box. Great news for those of you who "acquire" TV episodes or "backup" your own DVDs as most MPEG4 formats are supported (XVID/DIVX/MP4 et al) plus those whacky 3GP Codecs your mobile phone is so fond of.

What interests me the most is the support of the H264 (MPEG-4 AVC) Codec, which is the current standard for high definition video encoding, and the total lack of support for the Matroska (MKV) container format (just like the Xbox 360/PS3) which appears to be totally intentional on Microsoft's part.

I'll keep my eye on this one and props to Microsoft for at least making our Codec Pack horrors slightly less painful.

You WILL Bow Down Before Me

RED, the company behind affordable yet crazy high definition video cameras has released their latest product(s) which will amaze and bedazzle you. Just today their "Digital Still and Motion Cameras", AKA Scarlet and EPIC, were unleashed on the public and as expected they do crazy high res video and stills for 1/10 the price of other cameras.

Engadget says, "Scarlet will launch in 4 choices ranging from $2,500 (and possibly less) to $12,000 with a variety of lens mounts (yes, Canon and Nikon) capable of shooting 3K @120fps on up to 6K @30fps."

"Epic will offer similar mounts with capabilities spanning 5K @100fps ($28k) to 9K @50fps ($45k) -- a 28K system hitting 25fps is expected in 2010 for $55k. Still image resolutions will range from 4.9 megapixels to a freakish 261 megapixels. The first Scarlet systems could come as early as Spring of 2009 while EPIC should arrive by summer."

As you can see from the image it is highly modular so when RED release a new bit (including the main processing part) you can just replace that one piece. RED also introduced a 3D camera configuration today seemingly as an afterthought (see poster below).

If you don't know what those numbers above mean, the ones ending in a K without dollar signs are the resolution. e.g. "5K" is a resolution of approximately 5,000 pixels wide (1080p is 1920 pixels wide). The "fps" figures are the Frames Per Second with regular TV being between 25 and 30 frames per second (depending on your country of origin). Thus, 5K @ 100fps means the video camera is recording a 5,000 pixel wide image 100 times a second.

RED also claim to have eliminated the wobbly "jelly" look that current video recording DSLRs have a problem with which is an odd effect you get on the video when panning horizontally.

Toshiba Uses Bullet Time v2.0 To Sell TVs

In this world of viral marketing it's good to see a viral-type advertisement that looks like a lot of time and effort went into it. The video below is a Toshiba ad which builds on the techniques of bullet time, so well documented on The Matrix DVD, by introducing HD video cameras to replace the still cameras.

Engadget says "a circular rig with 200 Gigashot HD camcorders and 20,000 gigabytes of data later, they created this little number, which mixes full motion video, Matrix camera moves and a healthy dash of hipsterism." Hipsterism dammit, HIPSTERISM!

Enjoy!

IIS7 URL Rewrite Module Goes Live!

Just a quick note to say that the RTW version of IIS7's Rewrite Module has gone live! Go grab it from iis.net! If you aren't running IIS7 just ignore this message. If you'd like to read up on URL Rewriting you could always check it out on Wikipedia.

New Terminator Salvation Pics

A whole stack of very cool concept art from the upcoming Terminator Salvation film fell onto the internet today. This is the film starring Christian Bale as John Connor with proper Terminators that are mean and don't have nervous breakdowns like certain Terminators on a certain TV show do.

The designs stick pretty close to James Cameron's original designs with the "old model" T600 terminator looking very cool indeed. The motorbike design concept is just too stupid for me to even start thinking about commenting on while the giant robot is cool but ultimately silly.

Still looking forward to the film though which is due for release mid 2009.

While we're talking concept art and movies there are a few new Watchmen posters out today showing some of the characters in their outfits.

Fuel Prices Have Dropped. Yay, Let's Buy SUVs!

Here we go again, the price of petrol ("gas" if you don't know the difference between liquids and solids) has dropped back to the price it was a few years ago and people have already forgotten how much money they were forking out only a few short weeks ago to fill their tanks.

Autoblog Green tells us the sad tale of a manufacturer kicking their SUV/Truck manufacturing plants back up a notch in anticipation of increased demand after almost shutting them down over the past year and people who went through a car downsizing are now feeling buyer's remorse.

All price and environmental issues aside, oil is a fossil fuel and therefore a finite resource. Why go burning through something we'll still need in the foreseeable future for the production of plastics and the like when there are alternatives already available. All the people who were bitching and moaning about the price of petrol, imagine if you drove up to the bowser and there was no petrol at all.

Now I'm not a big fan of hybrids as they don't really solve the problem, they just make people who would have driven a medium sized car use the fuel of a small car or a more efficient car. Ultimately you'll still need to stop and fill up with fuel which is a chore and plug in electric cars are still a few years away from being in my garage.

So while I wait for my Holden Volt or Mitsubishi iMiEV I've been trying to drive more efficiently using some basic hypermiling techniques (apparently it's the word of the year for 2008) and tracking my success with Fuel Frog. My last fill up shows I averaged 7.7 litres per 100km, not too shabby, and that's basically from accelerating and braking slowly and coasting when possible.

While I was stoked to pay only $1.19 AUD per litre for my tank of dead dinosaurs I still hate having to stop for petrol. At the weekend we drove to Marysville which has a lot of trees and not much else for half the trip and I was thinking how screwed we'd be if we ran out of fuel out there.

And if that's not enough, now we have ninja kittens driving around on our roads!

While I'm on the topic, take a look at these car ads from the 1970s during the "energy crisis", look familiar?

99 Bricks Teaches Abject Lesson In Physics

Just when you thought you'd seen every possible iteration of Tetris comes this funky bouncy Flash-based online game. This one (of course) has a little twist, instead of trying to make lines of tetriminos you've got to make the tallest tower possible out of 99 bricks (hence the title).

Sounds easy? Fat chance! These things are squishy cushion-like bricks that obey the laws of physics like gravity. Just when you think you've lined up the perfect drop with an L-shaped tetrimino it'll tumble off the edge taking a whole bunch of bricks with it.

Loads of fun and a nice clean interace to boot!

Check it out here.

Steamy News For Gamers

Back in March Valve Corp. announced the upcoming release of Steam Cloud, a series of services that allows gamers using the Steam platform to store game configuration settings in "the cloud". Well it's coming out just in time for the release of Left 4 Dead, Valve's new multiplayer zombie shooter.

This means that if you're like me and rarely use the default keyboard configuration you can upload your settings to the Steam Cloud and grab them any time you like. So if you buy a new PC or your game is really buggy and resets the config each time it crashes (I'm looking DIRECTLY at you Bioshock) or you're on your mate's PC or whatever, you can set everything to what you're comfortable with.

"For some time now, Steam has allowed gamers to log on from any computer in the world and access their applications. This also makes it easy to upgrade a PC without worrying about losing your games," said Gabe Newell, president and co-founder of Valve. "Steam Cloud is a natural extension of the portability Steam affords gamers and developers, and we intend to expand its feature set as it is used in Left 4 Dead and other games coming to Steam."

What would be really great is if games that share a common engine or common settings could import from another game. For example, imagine loading up Left 4 Dead for the first time and a prompt appears asking if you'd like to import your Half-Life 2 control settings.

Enough Already, Stop Using IE6

As most of you know I run a little Facebook application called Mood Stones which attracts a wide variety of users. I rely heavily on alpha transparency in the PNGs I use and Internet Explorer 6, which doesn't do alpha transparency in PNGs, has been a thorn in my side for ages.

Earlier this year I added in a little bit of JavaScript which displays a small message telling IE6 users that they should upgrade and, while the percentage of IE6 users has dropped since then, there are still a lot of them.

In the first 3 months of 2008, 75.4% of Mood Stones users were running various flavours of IE with 28.4% of those running IE6 (21.4% of the total). Flash forward to the past 3 months (ending October) IE's overall usage has dropped to 67.4% of the total with 22.9% of those running IE6 (15.4% of the total). The usage stats on this blog are slightly different (more Firefox oriented) but still there are enough IE6 users to worry about.

I've wondered why those people running IE6 aren't up in arms because so many things on the internet would error or just plain not work with their browser of "choice". But then I had a support request at the weekend which shone a light on the situation.

One Mood Stones user said her stone image was over the top of the text on her Facebook profile. I immediately thought of IE6 and its total lack of CSS standards support and asked her which browser she was running. She said it was IE6 so I suggested she upgrade to IE7, Firefox or even Safari. I then got the following response:

"Hi Michael THANKS SO MUCH!! I upgraded to IE7 and it's working great now...so is everything else...lol...never realized how good some things on the internet were supposed to work!! thanks again!!"

At this point I had a moment of clarity and thought that perhaps most IE6 users don't realise there's something wrong with their browser and their the assumption is that the internet is inherently broken and most stuff just doesn't work. Well, if you're using IE6, the internet isn't broken, your browser is. It was released 7 years ago and you should get IE7 or Firefox or Safari or even Chrome... just get rid of IE6.