‘Warcraft’ Sequel Lets Gamers Play A Character Playing ‘Warcraft’

This is too funny…

via @justinkeller

Wii Fit First Impressions

Nintendo’s new fitness product/game, Wii Fit, came out today. This is a long anticipated product that has been touted since the early days of the Wii launch.

Unfortunately, I was involved in a car accident yesterday so I won’t be able to really try it out for a little while but I am supposed to stay active so I’ve tried some of the lower impact aspects of the Wii Fit.

This $90 bundle comes with the Wii Fit software, a manual, four batteries and a balance board that is not unlike a really big weigh scale with some sensors built in.

Initial impression of the package is that it’s solid. The box is actually quite heavy when you pick it up for the first time and the balance board is all to blame. It’s a combination of plastic and metal that supports up to 330 lbs or 150 kg.

The first thing you do after putting the batteries in is to sync it with the Wii like any new controller by pressing the red sync button on the Wii and the similar button the balance board inside the battery door. There is a familiar blue power light on the bottom of the balance board and it’s meant to be turned on with your foot. You can use it on carpet or hardwood flooring. It even comes with extra feet extensions in case you have extra deep (shag?) carpet….ew.

Once you’re all synced up you’re ready to begin.

You start off by choosing a Mii to use for your profile. Then it asks a number of questions related to you like your height and birthdate.

The program then takes you through a number of tests to gauge your center of balance and determine your BMI (body mass index) among other things. Since the balance board actually is a scale, you can’t cheat on your weight since it knows. Once your BMI has been determined by your height and weight, the program explains what this all means and allows you to set a goal if it determines you’re above or below your ideal BMI. Basically it tells you if you’re fat or not. While at first blush this could be construed as a bad thing, it does so in a nice way. Besides, who couldn’t afford to lose a few pounds - I know I do - and this is why there aren’t any screenshots of my personal progress.

Once you set your goal, you can see a chart that graphs it on a day by day basis with some slick animations when transitioning between different things. Then you can begin your training. You start off by choosing a male or female personal trainer who will guide you through the various exercises and mini-games.

So far I’ve only tried one of the balance games due to my accident (which is actually quite similar to one of the exercises I’m supposed to do) so I’ll wrap this up for now until I’ve had more time with it. I like what I’ve seen so far and hope that this device leads to more of these kinds of exercise games and I’ve heard that there may be other software titles that can utilize the balance board.

iPhone Music Making App: Band

There is a new app on Installer is called Band from Moo Cow Music that lets you annoy everyone around you by playing instruments and samples on the iPhone’s touchscreen (also works on the Touch). It’s pretty slick with a number of different instruments, samples and settings to play with.

Here’s just a couple of the instrument screens:

You can record, mix and edit your notes/samples as well as save/load them. It’s a pretty slick little app. I just wish I could play something decent myself. I can only imagine what someone like Derek or Paul could do with this.

I made a quick and dirty little video of it in action… apologies for the poor quality but I think it gets the idea across:

There is a longer, better video of someone playing it on the MooCowMusic page.

It’s a pretty polished application for a beta although I did have a couple of issues with multi-touch not always responding as expected and a couple of crashes. This can only get better so check it out if you like to mess around with these kinds of things.

MacBook - Thin Enough

The parodies keep on coming…

Via @Veronica

Family Guy Enters the Matrix

Too awesome not to post:

via Gizmodo

Hawaiian Vacation

Things have been pretty quiet around here because I’ve been on vacation with my wife in Hawaii. This was my third time to Hawaii and I have to say, it was probably my best trip here yet. I highly recommend it if you’ve never been. I’ve taken a ton of photos and even a couple of videos to play with Flickr’s new video feature.

Here’s a couple of videos and photos to give you a taste of what things are like on Oahu:

This video was playing on our hotel tv…they have three separate channels for different activities to do (shopping, dining and tours). We saw this before we went snorkling for the first time and we couldn’t help but think of the video while underwater.

We went for a drive to the famous North Shore and weren’t disappointed. The first beach we stopped at was the basking beach for the Hawaiian Green Turtles (known locally as Honu) and it was amazing to see these guys up close. Previously I had gone to the Big Island of Hawaii and was able to play with a number of turtles while swimming but that was about 15 years ago.

One of the turtles had a GPS device attached to his back. The volunteers at the beach would record the turtles movements for scientific purposes.

We were able to find a semi-secluded beach to spend some quality time at….the only downside was that it was particularly windy so the shorebreak was a little difficult to navigate…made for some fun in the surf though and a great workout.

It wasn’t quite as windy as it sounds on this video….just a point and shoot camera mic with no windscreen so it sounds worse than it was.

Let me know if you want more details as I can’t recommend this place enough. You can check out the rest of my Flickr set for more photos and videos.

The cows came home

I finally received my Moo cards that I had ordered at the beginning of February. This was my third batch and it was strangely the only one to take a really long time to arrive. I wonder if it had anything to do with an influx of orders from people getting them for SXSW which is also the place I was first exposed to them in the first place.
What are they? I tend to call them my ‘personal cards’ as opposed to my somewhat boring ‘business card’ that I have for my corporate day job.

Moo cards are small (about half as tall as a business card) but are very personal. You order them in batches of 100 and are comprised of text on the back and photos on the front. You can customize the text that appears on the back and the cool part is that you also get to choose what appears on the front. Since they partner with a lot of photo sharing sites (I use Flickr), you can easily pull your own photos into Moo and create the card front with these photos. Unlike getting cards from a traditional printer, you can choose how many of your 100 cards has which photos on them. You can get 100 of the same or 100 different photos on the front of the cards or mix and match as much as you want. Pretty cool for only $19.99 plus shipping - just try to get card stock photo cards from a local printer for that little.

My third batch has turned out the best…I decided to order a lot of different photos this time around instead of just a couple of my favs. I also got a few geekier photos in there since I’ll probably be giving a lot out at SXSW soon enough. I expect to come back from Austin with a ton of other people’s cards and look forward to the Moo party down there as well.
You can use an Altoids Chewing Gum tin as the perfect case for them too.

Northern Voice 2008 Wrap Up Part 2

A few of us have been noticing that there hasn’t been as much chatter on the internet about Northern Voice during or immediately following the event. As well, the page views on Flickr seemed to be a lot lower than last year. Personally, I think it’s just that everyone hasn’t fully had a chance for it all to sink in yet. As I’m finding by new followers on Twitter, new contacts on Flickr and a bunch of new feeds I’ve been reading, it’s slowly gaining some momentum after the fact.

Let’s face it, a weekend of conferencing takes it’s toll on people and especially since most of the attendees have normal day jobs that they returned to almost immediately. It takes awhile to get your head around what you participated in and find a way to record or publish those thoughts. Not to mention taking care of all the things you didn’t tend to during the conference.

So in that vein, I thought I’d followup my somewhat brief recap with a few more cool things I’ve found since the weekend:

• my pal, Duane Storey, pulled some awesome out of his hat with his amazing photo mosaic of all the tagged photos in Flickr he could hoover down. He called it 1600 reasons to love Northern Voice and I’m sure he’ll have to rename it as that photo number keeps growing as attendees get out their card readers and upload more shots to the Flickr stream. As Gene said in his post, if you can’t find yourself in those photos, you weren’t there.
• I twittered about it a bit and mentioned it in my first recap but I keep coming across blog posts and photos of people that I wish I had a chance to either spend more time talking to or even just meeting at the conference. I guess one of the cons of going to a conference in your own town, with a lot of friends in attendance, is that you don’t get outside your circle as much as you would if you were somewhere you didn’t know many people. That and there is never enough time.
• I wish I had an opportunity to chat with Stewart Mader whose presentation about Wiki’s I really enjoyed at last years NV and missed his this year. He’s been rounding up some great links and comments from other people as well as doing a great job liveblogging a lot of sessions
• Another missed meet/chat was with Alan Levine who gave a great presentation on “50 Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story” in which he outlines some of the amazing web tools out there you can use to tell a story. Something he did with all 50 tools and the same story. Alan also managed to capture one of my favorite open mic sessions at the Opening Night party by Scott Leslie called Trackback Love.
• Bobby Dassler took an awesome set of polaroids that turned out really cool…and I’m even in there
• DaveO’s amazing “F*ck Stats, Make Art” session is now available via Audio (MP3) thanks to Cosmo and Matt’s keynote audio is here although he says that it may not be a great experience without the slides. Stewart has a transcript as well.

There is a ton more stuff that I missed that I hope makes its way online eventually. Needless to say, I’m looking forward to next year already.

Check out the Northern Voice wiki for other things you (or I) may have missed.

Update: Looks like videos of Miranda’s natural light talk and Reilly’s modified light talk have been posted. Both are great parts of PhotoCamp. Great video capture job too!

Bowl for Big Brothers Classic

Thanks to an email from Rebecca, I’ve just joined ‘Team Blogger’ for this years Bowl for Big Brothers Classic event taking place on March 16th. So far I’ll be joining Corinna, Duane, Keira-Anne, John and our team captain, Rebecca. Check out Rebecca’s post if you’re interested in joining the team.

The theme this year is ‘beach party’. This could be interesting…will they allow flip flops on the lanes? Will there be wifi as you know a bunch of bloggers will want to liveblog the event.

I’m always down for hanging with the gang except this time it will be for charity so it should be a fun and worthwhile event.

If you’re interested in sponsoring me, please visit my sponsor page.

I’ve set my personal goal to be at the $150 mark in order to get the beach towel prize which is the minimum. I’ll draw a name from those that sponsor me and give them the prize if I reach that mark (or any mark in case I manage to surpass the minimum).

Now to find my hawaiian shirt.

UPDATE: Looks like we now have a ringer on our team now that Tod Maffin has joined us!

Going to SXSWi? Part 1

If you’re planning on heading to Austin in early March to attend South by Southwest Interactive (SXSWi), here’s a few tips that might be helpful to you. I’ve been twice before and this year will be my third trip to Texas. Every year it’s gotten bigger than the last and I expect this year to be no exception.

SXSWi is actually only one part of the whole South by Southwest conference. Interactive happens the same time as the Film conference with the Music one starting when the film/web geeks vacate the hotels. Judging from the pictures I’ve seen, the music part is pretty amazing but I’ve never been able to stay for the full run of both conferences.

1. Pack light and bring a big suitcase.

You WILL get a lot of swag (or at least offered it) so be prepared to bring a bunch of stuff home and give it to your friends/coworkers that didn’t get to go (unless it’s cool).

Since it’s usually very warm in Austin so you can wear shorts and a t-shirt most of the time and a light jacket at night. You can even just wear the swag you get to save even more luggage space….last year I came home with about 15 t-shirts. Last year was a little cooler and it rained but it was still shorts weather.

2. Bring/wear comfortable shoes

You’ll be doing a LOT of walking between the panels, parties and your hotel so bring a good pair (or two) of comfortable shoes. Hopefully they’ve changed the panel layout this year after last year’s craziness of having a panel end at one end of the convention center and the next one begin at the other end. It is Texas and the convention center is easily the size of a small Alberta town.

3. Don’t stress about note taking

This event is easily one of most blogged/photographed/podcasted events and since you can’t expect to be everywhere at all times, you should have no problem getting the full scoop from someone else. SXSWi also publishes videos and podcasts of many panels. Although these seem to be posted over a very long period of time (like months) and not right after the event.

4. Get your DSLR tagged
kk+ gave me this tip last year (unfortunately before I had my Nikon) - if you have a ‘pro camera’ (or something that resembles one) you may be asked (but do it if not) to get your camera tagged by the Event staff. This lets people know you’re taking event photos….however they didn’t seem to care about my little Casio point and shoot. This also has the added benefit of helping you get into some places you may not normally (think Press Pass) when combined with your SXSWi lanyard. YMMV on this one.

5. Plan your power usage

EVERYONE brings a laptop to SXSWi and there are so many Apple computers there, you’d think that you were at MacWorld. Plan on charging your laptop at night for the next day. As long as your battery is decent, you should be able to last through most of the day unless you’re Twittering the whole time. If that’s the case, expect to have to share the power outlets that are strewn throughout the place with a bunch of others. Forgot your power adapter in the hotel room? No worries, as someone is bound to have the same device as you and I also witnessed some of the event staff lending cords to forgetful attendees (again it was Apple adaptors as most of the event is powered by Macs).

6. Stay in touch
If you are going to SXSWi by yourself, be prepared to meet a ton of people - you WILL leave with new friends. Chances are there are already a few people that you know going. You can find out by stalking the Online Registrants Directory, and watching Twitter/Jaiku/Pownce for SXSW messages. You might also want to get some Moo cards and be prepared to go through them all. As March draws closer, there will be a ton of online services to help attendees get organized. Panel schedules, party planners and more will be everywhere. If you want to get a head start, check out the SXSW Insider.

You’ll also want to find out about your mobile situation. Depending on your plan, make sure you understand the implications of using your cellphone in Texas. If you’re from Canada like me, prepare to get screwed on roaming charges. Even if you forward your phone to voicemail, you may be charged the roaming fees if it rings through in Austin. A better bet is picking up a disposable (don’t really throw it out when you’re done) cellphone or pay as you go SIM card if you rock the GSM. AT&T has a cheap phone you can pickup almost anywhere south of the border for $10-20 that will give you a cheap local number while down south. I got my phone/sim from Radio Shack for $10 with a $10 credit (free+tax) then added a $25 card. T-Mobile also has SIM cards you can get from ebay but they apparently don’t let you use data on the prepaid SIMs unlike AT&T. Make sure if you do get a phone down there that you can find additional add on cards for it…the first year I took a US Virgin Mobile phone with me and couldn’t find the cards anywhere and they didn’t accept my Canadian credit card to top up online or over the phone.

Unless your company is paying (and doesn’t care), the pay as you go route will be infinitely cheaper than anything a Canadian provider will charge you. Don’t forget to change/disable/reroute your Twitter/Jaiku/Facebook mobile notifications as well as those can get costly when roaming depending on your plan.

That’s all for now….more as SXSWi gets closer!