David's blog ^pro

My wife and I just recently watched a very interesting video about money and our economy, called "Money As Debt", by fellow Canadian, Paul Grignon

I'm glad Linux / open source based web browsers come with the ability of easily blocking unwanted cookies, when browsing the Internet. It's amazing to see just how many cookies get thrown at you when doing your day-to-day web browsing.

Yes, movies like "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow" and "Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith" are very technically advanced and successful movies. But, did you also know that the idea of actors performing in CG rich environment was not pioneered by any of these movies.

Although the environments were not created by computer - but rather miniatures - actors performing in "blue screen rich" environments was (as far as I'm concerned) pioneered by CTV and their short lived sci-fi television show, "The Starlost", back in 1973. Although the CTV did not invent the technology, they certainly were the first to base a production around it.

I find it quite amusing to see the patents that Nintendo have filed for in the U.S. in the past few months. One of them is for a sort of "saddle riding" motion controller and the most recent one for a motion control "football". Both seem kind of silly, but really, with the way American companies are so sue-happy, can you blame them?

Last October we bought ourselves a Neuros OSD video recorder. I have to say that the OSD has been a wonderful addition to the home entertainment center. We've recorded a lot of video content and last week I finally had to go out and buy ourselves a second 1TB hard drive for our videos.

It's been just over a week since Wii Sports Resort, bundled with the Motion Plus, was released in North America. In the past eight days, it's reported that Nintendo has sold over 500,000 copies of Wii Sports Resorts to anxious gamers.

"Nintendo has announced the early sales of Wii Sports Resort: the game, which includes the MotionPlus peripheral, has moved over 500,000 units in only eight days. A franchise is continued, a peripheral finds success, and Nintendo remains on top."

Nintendo gives new meaning to the name "Wuhu Island"!

More on this at: ars technica

This past weekend, my wife and I took a trip to WuHu (Woo-Hoo) Island and it was a lot of fun! Of course, I'm talking about the latest game from Nintendo for the Wii console, Wii Sports Resort. This is the sequel to Nintendo's Wii Sports video game, which makes use of the new "Motion Plus" peripheral for the Wii-mote.

I know this thought is not going to sit well with many of my fellow Linux users, specially those who use Ubuntu. But recently I wached a key note speech presented by Greg Kroah-Hartman on the topic: "The Linux Ecosystem - What is it and where do you fit in it?" Although I can appreciate what companies, like Canonical, do to help get people using Linux, I have to admit that I agree with most of what Greg has to say on the subject. As popular as Ubuntu is in the Linux world, I think it's shameful that they contribute so little upstream to the further development of Linux.

Well, it's been a week since I started taking the electric bike to the office and so far it's been performing better than expected.

Our e-bikes (a.k.a. electric bike or electric scooter) have finally arrived and we took them out today for their maiden voyages. Overall we're very happy with our new modes of transportation. I'm looking forward to riding mine to work on Monday.

Here I am, sitting with my wife watching a program on ABC, an American television broadcaster, called "Earth 2100". It's a program about the dangers of climate change and what could happen if our world cultures don't change. And it appears to me that this is a program produced (or at least sponsored) by ABC, itself.

My wife and I recently decided to take more steps at reducing our carbon footprint. So on Friday we ordered ourselves two electric bikes (aka e-bikes) from a local distributor for Daymak, an e-bike importer located in Toronto.

I did quite bit of research on the subject and found a few such distributors in both the Toronto and Vancouver area. We settled on Daymak and the bikes should be arriving in T.O. sometime early next week. Our local guy will then get them about five days after that.

I'll take a few pictures and post more details once we get them home.

The major “bummer” about Nintendo's DSi is that it's sound/music player does not support playback of mp3 or ogg formatted files. This, of course, renders our large digital music collection unusable on the DSi.

However, I have discovered that with a couple of media conversion applications and a bit of Bash code, you can easily use convert mp3s and oggs into aac (or mp4) format that the DSi will recognize using your Linux PC.

... in contributing to the recovery of the economy. This weekend I decided to pick myself up a DSi, Nintendo's latest version of their portable gaming console.

Okay, well, Billy Van might not have been totally responsible for turning me into a computer geek. But one of the major influences that set off my interests in computer all those many years ago was a television program called Bits and Bytes - an educational program on TV Ontario, with hosts Billy Van and Luba Goy.

Today I read an article on the cnet news site, discussing a new gaming company that will put the “traditional video game console business... in danger”, according to the writer of the article .

The company is called OnLive, and what they've announced is a gaming distribution service that streams games to your Mac, PC, or TV (with the use of a plug-in device). Unlike other on-line game services, like those from Nintendo or Microsoft (X-Box), you don't download games from OnLive, but rather OnLive hosts the games on their servers and streams the visuals and sounds to you as you play.

Not long after the Nintedo Wii hit the market, Nintendo released a web browser application, built on the Opera web browser. Since then, some web sites have launched versions of their sites specifically designed to be viewed with the Wii on your T.V. screen.

Yesterday I picked up a new game for the Wii. This one is the recently released, "Deadly Creatures", in which you take on the roll of either a tarantual or scorpion and enter the deadly world of the insect.