I attended the DigitalLife show this past Saturday. I got a chance to see some interesting little toys, get some hands-on time with the PS3 and got a chance to hang with Robert Heron, Patrick Norton and Jim Lauderback of dl.tv/PCMag. Here are some of my impressions:
- The new Treo 680 is a nice (but incremental) improvement over the 650. It definitely does not reflect the two year gap between the 650 and the 680. It loses the antenna, but keeps the awful VGA camera and same processor.
- Dell was everywhere. I didn't see many non-Dell/Alienware machine on the floor.
- The 20" Dell notebook is a hoss. I can't imagine anyone buying it and actually taking it anywhere. If it would actually fit on an airplane tray table, I can see the table just snapping off under the sheer weight of this machine. Even for LAN parties, I think a Shuttle box and separate display might be easier to manage, and would be a whole lot more upgradeable.
- While I didn't get to hold the controller, I did see the Wii on display. The system is about the size I expected, but the controller looks a lot smaller than I thought it would be. Elebits was the game on display, and while it didn't look particularly fun, it did do a good job of showing off the Wiimote.
- The PS3 controller is a nice incremental improvement over the PS2 controller. I like the way R2/L2 were converted to semi-trigger buttons and the slightlly smaller grip felt a bit better.
- Sonic on the PS3, although 70% complete, was pretty buggy. Lots of clipping issues were apparent and the 360 version (85% complete) felt a lot faster. The graphics on the PS3 were great, although they didn't seem that much better than the 360.
Technorati Tags: DigitalLife, New York City, Javits Center, dl.tv, Robert Heron, Patrick Norton, Jim Lauderback, Palm, Treo 680, Dell, Alienware, games, Nintendo, Wii, Wiimote, PS3, Sega, Sonic the Hedgehog
I've been ridiculously busy with OCR (on-campus recruiting), aka trying to find a job for after graduation, so I haven't had much time to blog, let alone read half the links I open up from my RSS feeds. Here's just a few of them I opened up today and yesterday:
Get free Digital Life tickets. It looks like a cool little conference taking place in NYC in a few weeks. Tickets are cheap enough that I might have gone anyway, but this really seals it. If anyone else is going or wants to go, let me know to meet up.
Woz will be on the Colbert Report this Thursday, promoting his new book. Woz is a big prankster so expect some good laughs.
The Treo 750v will be the face of Windows Mobile in Europe. The latest Business Week has the Cingular 8125 (by HTC) in a bunch of ads, so maybe they're just trying to please their two big licensees (BTW, does anyone else besides Palm and HTC make Windows Mobile phones anymore?).
Harvard Econ professor Gregory Mankiw talks about getting rid of the penny (again). I hate pennies and try to use my debit card most of the time to avoid them. We're already rounding gasoline to the nearest penny, why not round everything else to nearest nickel?
Technorati Tags: Digital Life, free, tickets, conference, Woz, Steve Wozniak, Colbert Report, Steven Colbert, economics, penny
New York Magazine has a 13-page guide on how to behave in a city, specifically New York City. It covers things from meeting celebs, riding public transportation, and of course, proper iPod etiquette.
There are four levels of iPod interaction (I'll let you read the situations that fall into each):
LEVEL ONE
Continue at full blast. Consider increasing the vigor of your head-nodding and/or humming.
LEVEL ONE AND A HALF
Subtly turn down volume.
LEVEL TWO
Make a big show of pressing PAUSE.
LEVEL THREE
Remove headphones, toss them jauntily over shoulder.
LEVEL FOUR
Completely remove and enclose in nearest pocket/bag/purse.
This pretty much describes my levels of interaction whilst listening to my iPod. The only modification I'd make is to Level 3. Instead of tossing them over my shoulder, I just hang an earbud over my ear.
And let me just throw this in because it's happened to me a couple of times. If you're riding in my car, don't listen to your iPod. I think it's rude that you decide to completely ignore me while I'm courteous enough to drive you around.
Technorati Tags: etiquette, city, urbanism, handbook, New York Magazine, interaction, iPod, courtesy
Here are pictures of Tokyo and New York City utlizing High Dynamic Range (HDR) imaging techniques, where multiple exposures of the same scene are taken so that you get much greater range of colors in your images. After combining images, you get all the details in the shadows while not having the rest of the scene blown out.
The images are very cool looking, haunting almost.
Technorati Tags: HDR, photography, imaging, images, High Dynamic Range
…and she's a girl.
New York Hack was started last August by female taxi driver Melissa Plaut about her experiences as a cab driver. The blog gives a great insight into the lives of cab drivers and its even more special because she's only one of the 197 female cab drivers in New York (of 42,000 total). Her entries are accented with pictures of traffic, angry drivers giving her the finger, and perhaps even more rare, pictures of inside the dispatch station and airport taxi lots.
I'm having a lot of fun reading past entries and its always great to learn about the lives of people who you would think you really wouldn't want to know about.
Technorati Tags: New York, New York City, NYC, taxi, cab, driver, female, blog, jobs
(via Yahoo! News)
