Month: October 2008

The Secret Saturdays Cryptid Lab

To promote its cryptozoological-influenced cartoon The Secret Saturdays, Cartoon Network has added a Flash-based Cryptid Lab that lets the user design their very own cryptozoological creature buy selecting from various parts and then modifying/re-coloring them.

It’s no Spore Creature Creator, but considering it’s all done in Flash there’s a surprising level of customization possible.

Path of A Hero – Blog Your WoW Toon

Path of a Hero is a website that will let you blog your favorite toon’s activities in World of Warcraft and provide a nice visual representation of your progress over time.

The idea here is you regularly take a screenshot of your character at the login screen and then upload that along with some text describing your character’s latest adventures, etc. This gets turned into a blog post that includes the image, the text and an import of various data from the WoW Armory.

After you’ve got a few dozen entries there’s a nice slider feature so you can visually watch the transformation of your character’s look, etc., as it levels up and gets better gear, etc.

The one thing I noticed missing is any sort of syndication feature (but then, it’d be nice if the Armory itself had some sort of syndication feature).

Personally, I’d like to see a WordPress plugin that would let me accomplish this locally (specifically the WoW Amory data import)

Stream YouTube, Netflix, etc. to Xbox 360 with PlayOn

Microsoft’s upcoming update to the XBOX 360 will add the capability to stream from Netflix to the device, but I was intrigued when I read some positive reviews of Media Mall’s PlayOn which promises to let the user stream not only Netflix, but also YouTube, Hulu, ESPN and CBS and, eventually, others.

Installing the software on my server was a breeze and my Xbox saw the PlayOn server with no problem. Netflix streaming worked very well…I had no problems watching numerous videos in my Instant queue on the Xbox. You do still have to go the computer to add things to the Instant queue (I’m assuming the XBOX update will have some way of searching within Netflix).

YouTube also worked great. I was able to scroll through recent videos, top rated videos, my favorites and my playlists.

I had problems with Hulu. The PlayOn software wasn’t properly buffering the Hulu streams, so shows there drop after about 10 seconds. The PlayOn software is still in beta, so I’m assuming that’s some sort of bug that will be fixed by the time they get to release.

CBS and ESPN worked fine, but neither had any content worth watching (CBS, for example, didn’t actually have any shows but rather just short clips which is weird since some of the same content is available on Hulu.)

The thing I don’t understand is why Microsoft just doesn’t provide this sort of functionality to watch YouTube and other video sites natively within the Xbox instead of forcing users to go pay for a separate piece of software that then has to be installed on a Windows PC, etc.

Acer Aspire One

My wife’s been looking for a laptop for awhile, but instead opted to go the netbook route for the extreme portable convenience. I ordered her an Acer Aspire One that arrived yesterday, and just finished configuring everything over lunch.

So far, I’ve been extremely impressed with the Aspire. It’s amazing just how much they packed in this tiny package. The screen is obviously small but cranking up font sizes takes care of that pretty quickly.

The keyboard is very good given the size. I touch type around 120 wpm and substandard keyboards really annoy me, but I found myself typing at more-than-acceptable speeds after about an hour of using it. I hated the trackpad/buttons on the Aspire (the button placement on either side of the trackpad is especially onerous), but then I usually pack a trackball with my laptop anyway because I can’t stand trackpads in general.

The real test, though, was 3D gaming. Downloaded the World of Warcraft and Burning Crusade clients, went through interminable patch updates, and finally logged in. The result was respectable. I didn’t install Fraps, but I’d guess it was in the 22-24 frames per second. Wouldn’t want to go raiding with that, but easily passable for doing solo questing, logging in trick or treat on an hourly basis, or doing auctions.

And considering just how small and cheap this was, simply amazing.

I’m also getting a netbook, but am opting for the MSI Wind which while reviews say it has a couple other issue, does not have what I consider the major defect of not only the Acer Aspire One, but pretty much the majority of laptops produced these days — those goddamned glossy screens that add nothing but glare to the computing experience.

The MSI Wind has a matte screen and usually comes in fairly close to the Acer in reviews, so I’m opting out of the extra glare.