Wednesday, April 23, 2008

Break the Time Space Continuum With Email

Hello - If you can read this posting, this means the earth is still intact. By chance the earth was broken into fiery particules by meteors causing colossal catastrophes. OK, maybe I'm lying a little, but that doesn't mean that you can't write emails now and have them send in the future. Using site timemachiner.com, I've written an email to be delivered in 2030. Hopefully email, and I will still exist. I wrote an email to remind me to have my bag changed.
Try not to break the future!!

Shop Online Even Cheaper

Website freeshipping.org allows you to ship free from over 600 online stores. You know when you go to check out at the online shopping cart and it has that little box for promo codes that you never have?
Now you do!
Just go to freeshipping.org, find your store and get free shipping promo codes. Some of the stores that they list are Macy's, Kohl's, and Home Depot. Pretty soon you wont have to get off of your couch ever. See my upcoming add concerning the new couch toilet.

Monday, April 21, 2008

GTA IV Q&A (this game drops in 8 days!)


Gamesradar scored an audio Q&A with Matthew Smith, Craig Conner and Will Morton, three members of the Rockstar North Audio team. Some quotes of note are:

It’s difficult to quantify how many speaking parts there are, but at our last count there were over 740 unique voices in the game. There are over 80,000 individual lines of dialogue, more than 7000 of which are Niko’s lines. If you were to listen to each line back to back, it would take over 29 hours. Also, these figures don’t take the radio, TV, and mo-capped cut-scene dialogue into consideration.

Stand in the street and you’ll hear three different radio stations at any one time coming from passing vehicles, all sounding appropriately tinny or boomy, depending on the type of vehicle and whether its doors are open, its windows broken, etc

We also decided to make the pedestrian dialogue more realistic in GTA4. As an example, peds in previous games would walk around and randomly chat to themselves if they weren’t doing much else. In real life, people (generally!) don’t go around talking to themselves, so we dropped this behavior from GTA4. However, we realized that the random chat of old GTA games was a good way for the player to pick-up on what sort of personality a ped has, so we created the cell-phone conversations in GTA4 as one realistic way of portraying personality

The DJS have far more AI than previous titles. They know what time of day it is, what the weather is like and what’s going on in LC. They've even done their research on their playlists, some of their own tracks appears on them. In fact all the DJS are either famous singers or musicians (or both.) They have plenty to say about their chosen genre of music as they've lived it, loved it, or are living it

It was our aim that you could place the player in a random position on the map, shut your eyes and listen, and be able to tell where you are, and what time of day it is, and I think we’ve achieved that pretty well

BTW - This game officially went GOLD on Friday, eliminating talk of a possible delay.

Friday, April 18, 2008

Google Maps Predicts Traffic Conditions

Google Maps can now predict traffic information for any day of the week and time of the day, based on past conditions. By default, if you click on the Traffic button in a supported area from the US, Google Maps shows real-time traffic information. "Comprehensive traffic data is available in over 30 major US metropolitan areas (including Los Angeles, New York, Chicago, and others), with partial coverage available in many more," according to Google Maps help center. There's also a traffic layer in Google Earth and Google Maps Mobile, but these applications don't include yet traffic prediction.

Wednesday, April 16, 2008

All GTA4 Radio Stations Revealed

Here is the list of all GTA4 Radio Stations including format:

WKTT - We Know The Truth (right wing talk radio)
San Juan Sounds (latin)
Integrity 2.0 (chat show, hosted by Lazlow)
Liberty City Hardcore (punk/hardcore)
Liberty Rock Radio 97.8 (classic rock)
The Vibe 98.8 (soul/R'n'B)
PLR - Public Liberty Radio (radio phone-in)
The Classics 104.1 (old-skool hip-hop)
Jazz Nation Radio 108.5 (jazz)
Vladivostok FM (eastern european music)
Radio Broker (alternative rock)
Tuff Gong Radio (reggae/dub)
Electro Choc (dance)
Massive B Soundsystem 96.9 (dance hall)
IF99 - International Funk (funk)
The Beat 102.7 (contemporary hip-hop)
K109 The Studio (disco)
Fusion FM
The Journey (ambient/chillout)

Sounds Good

Monday, April 14, 2008

Brand New GTA4 Deets





OXM magazine has given GTA4 its first 10/10 review and they has also released some new details for you to slobber all over:

*Skipping a trip in a taxi costs more than simply sitting back and enjoying the view of the driver's head

*The Statue of Happiness is clutching a coffee cup rather than the torch her real life counterpart has
Some celebrity voice actors play themselves in the game.

*Like Crackdown's Orbs, the collectable (hidden packages?) in GTA IV make a soft sound as you get close to them, aiding you in finding them all

*Your in-game email account will get the odd piece of spam

*Driving through flames will set a car's tires on fire, causing them to burst after a while

*One mission involves traveling across town with two bodies in the trunk - if you hit a bump and it opens, you'll have to scramble to close it again before any passers-by notice

*The mobile phone you receive at the start of the game is an old, second hand model capable only of calling and texting. You'll need to wait for an upgrade later in the story to unlock the full functionality that people get from more modern models.

First Grand Theft Auto IV Review




OXM - UK's Official Xbox Magazine has given the first review of the new GTA4. GTA4 has received its first of many more to come - 10's out of 10 scores.





Here is an except from the review:
"It says something that even at the end of a three-day session, with every island and a substantial chunk of the sidequests unlocked, I was still ploughing on because I wanted to see how the story ended. And I was still finding new stuff: the way a police klaxon goes strangled and gargley if you dent the light bar, the pedestrian who had the original GTA theme as their phone ringtone, the way that headshot drivers can fall on the horn and accelerator so you're run over by a dead man...This sets the standard for what you should expect from a truly next-gen game. You owe it to yourself to play it."

GTA4 drops on 4/29/08.

Thursday, April 10, 2008

60s And 70s Rockers: Then And Now

From the Boss to Ozzy, these pictures show how rockers from the past have aged gracefully -- or not so gracefully.

read more | digg story

Tuesday, April 8, 2008

Dash Express with eye-spy

As pointed out by Dash Express forum member mdoar: "I wonder why Dash added support for a camera."

Upon clicking the link to the openmoko wiki page you can see several specifications you'd expect to see in a common GPS:

1.1 Processor
1.2 Flash
1.3 RAM
1.4 GSM/GPRS
1.5 SD-Card
1.6 LCD Module (LCM)
1.7 Camera
1.8 Light Sensor
1.9 Power Management
1.10 WiFi
1.11 GPS

WAIT!! 1.7 - Camera!!

We already know that DE has wifi and GPRS capability - we could only dream about the wild possibilities that a cam could bring into the mix. Here are some crazy ideas that I hope stick.

1. traffic cams - man this would be great to actually be able to log in to traffic cams along your route to confirm the info Dash is already sending to you.

2. backup cam - this way I could see you before I run you over

3. webcam - this way you could see me before I run you over

Here are the basic specs for the cam chip: Camera
The Omnivision OM7670 Camerachip Image Sensor, is a low-voltage, low-power CMOS camera chip, capable of operating at 30fps on VGA resolution.

You won't be producing any hollywood movies (unless there is another writers strike - FOX network, can you hear me!), but it will get the job done.


Anyway's the possibilities are endless - I guess now that the cat is out of the bag, we'll wait to see if Dash has anything to say about this feature.

Monday, April 7, 2008

Heart Transplant Patient Kills Himself in Same Manner as Donor

HILTON HEAD ISLAND, S.C. — A man who received a heart transplant 12 years ago and later married the donor's widow died the same way the donor did, authorities said: of a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

No foul play was suspected in 69-year-old Sonny Graham's death at his Vidalia, Ga., home, investigators said. He was found Tuesday in a utility building in his backyard with a single shotgun wound to the throat, said Greg Harvey, a special agent with the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.

Graham, who was director of the Heritage golf tournament at Sea Pines from 1979 to 1983, was on the verge of congestive heart failure in 1995 when he got a call that a heart was available in Charleston.

That heart was from Terry Cottle, 33, who had shot himself, Berkeley County Coroner Glenn Rhoad said.

Grateful for his new heart, Graham began writing letters to the donor's family to thank them. In January 1997, Graham met his donor's widow, Cheryl Cottle, then 28, in Charleston.

"I felt like I had known her for years," Graham told The (Hilton Head) Island Packet for a story in 2006. "I couldn't keep my eyes off her. I just stared."

In 2001, Graham bought a home for Cottle and her four children in Vidalia. Three years later, they were married after Graham retired from his job as a plant manager for Hargray Communications in Hilton Head.

From their previous marriages, the couple had six children and six grandchildren scattered across South Carolina and Georgia.

Cheryl Graham, now 39, has worked at several hospices in Vidalia. A telephone message left Sunday at a listing for Cheryl and Sonny Graham in Vidalia was not immediately returned.

Sonny Graham's friends said he would be remembered for his willingness to help people.

"Any time someone had a problem, the first reaction was, 'Call Sonny Graham,' " said Bill Carson, Graham's friend for more than 40 years. "It didn't matter whether you had a flat tire on the side of the road or your washing machine didn't work. He didn't even have to know you to help you."

Thursday, April 3, 2008

Pipe feeds to your Dash Express



I am loving my Dash Express! One of the great things about this device is playing with georss feeds. This is currently the only device in which you can pull in georss information from the internet, and then search it live from your gps. I have found some great feeds on yahoopipes. Some of the feeds you can add to your device are live weather forcasts, news from just about any source, apartment listings, etc. Using yahoopipes also allows you to customise specific information that is relevant to you. For instance, not only can you search for an apartment close to you, but you can narrow it down to searching for aparments near Starbucks, and near a train station, or any other options that you can think of. You could literally spend hours dreaming or twisting pipes to see what you can pull out. If you don't have a Dash yet, consider it for your next GPS, if you like tinkering, and playing with future tech, you won't be disappointed.

Tuesday, April 1, 2008

Digg This: 09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63-56-88-c0

Most dugg story in 365 days??"But now, after seeing hundreds of stories and reading thousands of comments, you’ve made it clear. You’d rather see Digg go down fighting than bow down to a bigger company. We hear you, and effective immediately we won’t delete stories or comments containing the code and will deal with whatever the consequences might be."

read more | digg story

Futuristic Floor Glows With Each Footstep

Now this is cool!! A glowing rug could replace nightlights and keep you from stubbing a toe.

read more digg story

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