I don’t know how I missed this a few years ago but did you know there was a fully-featured Last Starfighter videogame made for a documentary on the film. With all this talk of Tron I wanted to check out the other major CG-infused release from my childhood and after watching it (Don’t. You will be disappointed. It’s not as good as you remember it.) I found this site from RogueSynapse. It doesn’t appear to work under Win7, however.
TLS was one of the first movies to use rendered space ships in a battle, a major step forward. Considering Return of the Jedi still used stop-motion special effects, the fact they stuck in CG animations is a milestone in sci-fi. I think the that the game was made for a small featurette called “Crossing the Frontier: Making the Last Starfighter” that may or may not appear on the Blu-Ray version of the movie. The chronology here is all very murky.
Joel and I were so angry at each other in this picture that Cat Schwartz literally had to keep us apart.
I don’t usually want to bring people’s personal lives into focus here on CG. After all, we’re dedicated to, as Joel himself always pointed out, self-deprecation and dick jokes. However, since Joel is my mentor and friend I wanted to point you guys to a great interview with him on DadWagon where he talks about abuse at the hands of his step-father, Glen.
Joel wrote his piece [Warning: The first line is a doozy] last week and it spread rather rapidly among a certain group of people. Joel, the former editor of Gizmodo and Boing Boing Gadgets, is brave and both pieces are definitely worth reading – the interview for its reasoned stance and the actual memoir for its brutal honestly.
His level-headed interview with Matt at DadWagon is even more interesting in that he explores many of the emotional barriers that we tech geeks – and techie dads – rarely think about, namely the ways our relationships effect the ones we love. This is not to say we’re all in Joel’s situation or that we could even imagine the impetus for his step-father’s actions, but technology gives us a shield and an excuse. Joel, in this case, refused that respite.
He’s still the best tech writer I know, but he’s now also the best writer I know.
Short Version: Hard drives that claim to do it all are a dime-a-dozen. Finally, however, I’ve found one that delivers on those claims.
Features:
Mac/Windows/Linux compatability
Built-in Windows Networking, UPnP features
Web accessible sharing
Two SATA/SATA II compatible slots
USB 2.0 port supports USB HDD or printers
Pros:
Small size
Expandable
Seamless Windows Networking
Cons:
Front panel is flimsy
Some web UI issues
Obtrusive app loads at login
Review:
We’ve seen a lot of hard drives at CG so far. Some of them, like the the IoMega Home Media Network Hard Drive seemed to deliver what they advertised, namely a centralized server for media in the home. However, in my experience I’ve always come away slightly disappointed with the web-based sharing systems many of these hard drives had to offer.
When I opened the Netgear Stora I was expecting the same “meh” reaction. After all, I’ve seen UPnP compatible drives before. However, on hooking up the Stora I was pleased to discovered that things worked as advertised.
First, the drive appears on your computer as a Windows Share, DLNA, and UPnP-compatible storage location. It is literally as plug and play as you get. If you want to get fancy, however, you need to create a login. This will then place the drive on the Internet, allowing you to browse and share files with anyone in the world. For example, you can stick your collection of photos on the drive to share with your family or you can stick on important files that you can then play or download remotely. The Stora has a built-in web interface that is quite robust and useful and, more importantly, it’s quite fast. The software comes from HipServ, a company that has produced web solutions for other hard drive OEMs including Iomega.
The version I tested, a 1TB drive, came clad in a black plastic case and was completely silent. The biggest issue I found was that the front panel, designed to hide the drives inside, popped off far too easily for my liking. If this drive is designed to sit quietly in a corner, that’s fine. However, if you have nosy kids around they could put a sandwich into the open drive slot.
That leads us to the second drive bay. The $229 version comes with 1TB drive already installed. You can add a second SATA or SATA II drive and the drive supports RAID 1 mirroring.
Some problems: the Stora application, which is essentially a launcher, starts itself automatically when you turn on your computer. This is bad. The web portion also includes a 30-day trial of the premium Stora services which include Flickr and RSS support. You don’t really need this, but I suppose it’s nice to have. I also ran into some problems with Flash playback of videos. This is minor, however, as you can easily download the file to view it.
Bottom Line
The Stora just works. It’s not too expensive for a NAS and mirroring makes it a bit better as a back-up solution. The included software and web-based management system will seal the deal for most home users.
Truly sad news, sports fans. The inventor of the Frisbee, Walter Frederick Morrison, has died at the age of 90 at his home in Utah. Aside from a plain ol’ ball, has there ever been a more universal toy?
The Frisbee, which is technically a brand name, was originally called the Pluto Putter, and was first released in 1948. Morrison sold the rights to the disc in 1957 to Wham-O.
If blogs were around back then, you’d be seeing stories like: “Say goodbye to your free time: Hands-On With Wham-O’s new Frisbee toy.”
As always, necessity is the mother of invention (a claim I dispute, but it fits so well here): Morrison was trying to devise ways to better throw cake pans on a California beach. Thus resulted the Frisbee.
Morrison seems to have lived a pretty fulfilling life, too. He was a pilot in the Air Force in the Second World War, which is certsinly more than I can say; I play WoW when not doing CG.
And what’s with the name, Frisbee? Turns out that what college kids were calling the Pluto Putter, naming it after a local New England pie shop.
Short version: This camcorder is certainly small, and the swivel head can be handy, but the lack of digital zoom hurts, and the poor video quality, focus trouble, and low light performance pretty much sink this little bugger. Cute, though.
Features:
Swivel head for easy vanity shots
1080p resolution (720p at 30/60fps also available)
Built-in USB plug
360-degree lens accessory (extra)
MSRP: $169.99
Pros:
Very compact
Nice screen and layout
Swivel head works great
Cons:
Video quality pretty bad
No close focus
No zoom
Full review:
I saw this little Bloggie at CES and was impressed by its form factor. The swivel head and 360 lens accessory were unique and seemed practical. Plus, it’s 1080p and all that. We got one of the first to review and, well, I’m afraid it’s not all I wanted it to be. Sure, the swivel head works great, and the 360 adapter, while kind of janky, looked like a lot of fun when I saw it at CES, but the fact is that this lens and sensor simply can’t handle 1080p. I understand you’ve got to look like you’re on the cutting edge, thus 1080p on everything, but when the product suffers, that’s no good.
I compared it against my own Sanyo CG-10 for clarity and low light performance. The CG10 is last year’s 720p version of the new pistol-grip Sanyos, and really has more in common with this Bloggie’s big brother, but I felt that at least they could compare based on price and video quality.
It’s pretty easy to see that there is a huuuuge amount of motion blur in the Bloggie due to the small lens and necessities of a 1080p stream, although it’s difficult to tell since it’s been resized and re-encoded. For comparison, here are some stills from the Bloggie (left) and CG10 (right).
As you can see, neither one is going to win any awards for clarity or low light performance. To be honest, I expected better from both. The truth is, compact HD cameras are pretty terrible these days if you really want sharpness or color accuracy. You need a good lens, and even the Sanyo’s, which is probably twice as big as the Sony’s, can’t do much with medium- and low-light situations. So know that going in: these things, from whatever company you like, are HD in name only.
Image quality when there’s little movement is okay, but you still have a lot of compression, and as you can see in the video, action can get pretty choppy. I found there were few manual controls in the menus to, say, close the aperture a bit to increase the shutter speed.
The lack of an optical zoom is pretty weak, but many other pocket cams don’t have optical zoom either, so I can’t really ding it too much for that. Unfortunately, the fixed lens also can’t seem to focus well up close — you can see that when I go up close to the bookshelf in the video. That’s a problem for many common camcorder uses.
Conclusion:
I can’t recommend this thing, though I wouldn’t count out the Bloggie line entirely. There’s a version for $30 more that has optical zoom and a better lens, at the cost of some portability. I’d suggest that one over this without even seeing it, but we should have a review soon of it as well, so you’ll be sure then. In the meantime, stay away from the MHS-PM5/V — its useful features can’t outweigh its shortcomings.
The International Federation of the Phonographic Industry is sorta like a worldwide RIAA, representing record labels, artists, and musicians to make sure their agenda is always out there. That, of course, makes it pure evil. It just published its Digital Music Report 2010, which tries to detail the situation vis-à-vis digital music, piracy, and so on. The big, scary headline: music piracy is right up there with climate change as an issue of monumental, worldwide importance. Sure, OK.
Before we get into the IFPI’s claims, a little anecdote: people steal our stuff all the time! Do you know how many Web sites are set up that merely take our posts, and publish them verbatim on their own site? Copyright infringement, and theoretically lost revnue. Do we care? I certainly don’t. And here’s another one: there was, and maybe still is, a dead trees publication called The Printed Blog. This bright idea was to take certain really good blog posts, and put them together in a paper publication. Get it, The Printed Blog! Now, why on Earth you’d want to print blog posts is beyond me (most aren’t worth the plain text they’re written in, my stuff included, obviously), but so be it. So it turns out that one of my posts was used in this publication, completely without my permission, or the permission of the CG bigwigs. They just took it! Infringed it, if you will. I didn’t even get a copy of the damn magazine, and my stuff is in there. So, no pay and no magazine. Do I care? Not really, no, largely because The Printed Blog strikes me as a bit of a joke and I’d prefer to have no relationship with it altogether. The point is: your friendly neighborhood CrunchGear writers are victims of copyright infringement all the time, and you don’t hear us whinging about it every waking hour.
Back to the IFPI. The report this year is a little more nuanced in its verbiage, admitting that big-time music pirates also happen to be big-time legitimate buyers of music. Go figure. And how many people are pirates out there? Around 15 percent of European Internet users admit to infringing copyright regularly. But piracy is still as important as climate change!
Other highlights include the fact that the international music business is now one-third smaller than it was in 2004. It should be noted that, since 2004, sales of legal digital downloads have increased quite a bit. Digital downloads are generally cheaper than CDs were. Keep in mind that CDs were notoriously overpriced, too, so complaining about lower sales doesn’t make too much sense. Like, are you upset that the value of your home has gone down in the past year or so? Well, what you thought your house was worth was actually incredibly inflated. You know what I mean.
The IFPI hopes that as so-called three-strikes policies go into effect, piracy will decline. (Three-strikes refers to plans, like those in France, that kick people off the Internet for committing copyright infringement three times. I look forward to being kicked off the Internet, by the way. It’s just not fun anymore.)
You will recall that we had totally fixed the music industry’s problems a few months ago: ban music altogether. Maybe we should publish a report?
I don’t know how I missed this a few years ago but did you know there was a fully-featured Last Starfighter videogame made for a documentary on the film. With all this talk of Tron I wanted to check out the other major CG-infused release from my childhood and after watching it (Don’t. You will be disappointed. It’s not as good as you remember it.) I found this site from RogueSynapse. It doesn’t appear to work under Win7, however.
