The grapple gun was fun, though I can’t figure out how to para-sail behind moving vehicles. I assume that’s possible, you can do that in the first game, can’t you?

Controls were usual, with a little tweak in how it handled weapons. Standard WASD movement, E is the use key, R reloads, SHIFT sprints, spacebar jumps. You can single-wield a gun, in which case the left-mouse button fires and the right-mouse button throws a grenade. You can also dual-wield some weapons, in which case LMB fires one weapon and RMB fires the other one. You can get a sniper rifle, which can only be single-wielded, and RMB throws a grenade while the sniper is equipped. I couldn’t figure out how to use the scope, if that’s possible, but I didn’t look it up or anything.

One thing that really annoyed me happened when new missions and black market items unlocked. Instead of having a notification pop-up, a warning flashes on-screen that your PDA is opening soon (your PDA has your map, available missions, amount of chaos wreaked, etc.). Whatever you’re doing is interrupted by the PDA opening. This is the biggest irritation so far. I was in the middle of a stunt, only to be yanked out and brought into the PDA screen. Once you exit the PDA screen the action is resumed from where you were, but it kind of kills the flow. I’m assuming you’ll be unlocking new missions and black market items throughout the entire game, but I hope these annoying and unnecessary interruptions won’t be as common as they were in the 30-minute demo.

Also, I think this is the game I heard about that makes it easy to record stunts and upload them onto youtube. What if my PDA opens in the middle of a stunt? Probably stops/upsets the recording? They probably have that ‘hit a key to save a video of your last 30 seconds of play time’ thing, I imagine going into the PDA resets that, or you end up getting 30 seconds of you accessing the PDA.

I feel like the demo would have been better if it were 10 minutes of tutorial, then 30 minutes of sandboxing, or perhaps a handful of missions before they drop you into sandboxing.

I’m still not sure how the stealth/alert system (not really a stealth system, hopefully you know what I mean) worked. It seemed to be inconsistent but perhaps it makes sense once I’ve read the manual.

I’m hoping they immerse you into the game a little more gently in the full version. All that said, I wasn’t ever bored, and I get the feeling there’s a lot more I could have done, I just didn’t quite know all I could do or how to do it. Many times I wondered, is there something else I’m supposed to be doing? They tell you to try and get 5,000 chaos points, which I finally earned by the end of the 30 minutes (I could do it a lot faster on a second play), but missions were unlocking the whole time so I’m not sure if I should have given one a go, or if I’d even had enough time to try.

I’m really going to have to wait for reviews and the full game for this one. Basically this demo just reinforced everything the trailers have said–you have an impressive sandbox available to do cool stunts, and you can kill people and destroy things in interesting ways. It was fun. $50-60 fun? That depends on the missions and storyline. I’m certainly not paying that much for a giant explodey sandbox. I have a whole batch of GTA games that can do that just fine.

Lark

But that’s not why I’m jealous of Valve at this particular moment. I’m jealous because all Valve has to do is post an update like this for Portal:

Changed radio transmission frequency to comply with federal and state spectrum management regulations

And they get a response like this. 64 pages of posts in 4 hours. Posts full of people scouring Portal for clues of how to use the radios recently scattered across the game, as well as trying to decipher the beeps they emit (morse code, some are thinking).

I promise you this, at this very moment there are a lot of people scouring Portal’s game files. Some are checking the levels with ‘noclip’ on so they can walk through walls and look for newly-added secret areas. Others are unzipping game files to sift through models and maps, looking for anything new and interesting.

Team Fortress 2 gets very similar treatment. I had time sit at the edge of my seat and search for clues of what the last Team Fortress 2 update would bring. Unfortunately I’m too busy to follow the progress with Portal, even though I really, really want to.

Hopefully in a few weeks all will be revealed, and I’ll hear about it from one of my feeds or one of my friends.

Til then, I’ll try to restrain myself.

Lark

For instance, there’s no Shazam app for the N900. I used that program all the time on my old phone to identify music in restaurants and on the radio.

You can’t have multiple ringtones on the N900, for instance giving each contact a custom ringtone. Not a big deal, but still odd that the N900 doesn’t allow it. In fact, that feature is so common in all phones now, it’s not even anything I thought to investigate when researching the N900.

The biggest problem for me was reading RSS feeds in Google Reader. I love Google Reader. On my pc. The interface is a little hard to use on the tiny N900 screen, and using the iPhone’s mobile Google Reader interrface doesn’t sort feeds by web site, nor does it act at all like I want it to.

This was a problem, and I have even been evaluating other web-based feed readers for a better mobile interface, when I read about Grr.

Grr is an app that brings your Google Reader feeds to your N900. The above link explains where to find it and how to install it. It doesn’t have support for marking posts with stars or for sharing items, but I don’t use those features anyway.

The best things about Grr, which I hope never change, are:

-It sorts feeds by site.
-It’s easy to mark all the posts of a site as read.
-You can choose to view all feeds and entries whether they’ve been read or not.
-You can easily open a post in your default browser to read or view it there.

That’s it. That’s all I needed. I told you I was a simple man…

So thank you, developer(s) of Grr, for a simple app that’s exactly what I wanted.

Lark

The ceiling was lower than most people anticipated ($1,200 to 1,500), but the floor is still way too high. Decision: too expensive.

I’ve been looking around recently and am starting to like the Lenovo Ideapad S10-3t (which I stumbled upon searching for Viliv’s S10 Blade).

Compared to the $699 S10 Blade, it has the same GHz processor, a 250GB HDD (vs the Blade’s 60GB), and Windows 7. It has a lower resolution (1024×600 vs the Blade’s 1366 x 768), a negative, but it has a removable battery, a positive! With the giant 8-cell battery (that sticks out of the side) it can get upwards of 10 hours of battery life, same as the Viliv S10 claims (and with that huge battery I’m much more likely to believe the Ideapad can reach 10 hours than the tiny Blade).

Of course I’d like this device for inking, so unless someone comes out with a capacitive stylus soon–a consistent one capable of writing with, I might have to snag the Asus T91MT instead.

Ultimately, I look at the $500 Lenovo S10-3t (yes, $500) and ask myself why Viliv is charging $200 more for a 60GB device that runs XP. Harrumph.

Lark

Running Windows XP on a tablet is a joke–ask anyone who has the Asus T91 (the earlier, non-multitouch version). If I’m going to drop $700 on a netvertible, why not just buy a Gigabyte Touchnote? It’s got worse battery life and a slower processor, but at least it’s got Windows 7 and a 250 GB HDD, right? Also, it appears to have a removable battery, which is a huge bonus in my book.

I’m going to hold out a little more and see what the pricing is for the SSD models and the ones with faster CPUs. I’m 99% sure I’m going to be disappointed. That would be bad news for Viliv but great news for Asus I suppose, because in that case I’ll be buying a T91MT. Judging by the comments at the bottom of this article, I’m not the only one.

Lark

Ubisoft has put some ridiculous DRM into effect that I’m comfortable calling ‘confirmed’, as the source is the magazine PC Gamer.

The game in question? The PC version of Assassin’s Creed 2. The ridiculous restriction? Even though it’s a single-player game, you can’t play the game unless you’re connected to the internet. Yes, that’s right.

If you’re playing the game and your internet connection fails, you will be kicked out of the game.

Guess what? If their servers go down, that’ll kick you out of the game too.

Way to alienate your fan base. Of course, the terrible sales will be chalked up to PC games being a dying market, having nothing to do with increasingly awful DRM.

Fuck that, and fuck Ubisoft.

The story has changed a bit, though Ubisoft seems to be contradicting themselves. Rock, Paper, Shotgun has a really good writeup on the whole situ.

Lark

Just bought the Motorola S9-HD, stereo bluetooth headphones. Thought I’d throw up some first impressions and notes.

Sound

How does it sound? In a word, muddy. Not $5 generic muddy, but certainly not as good as even my JVC marshmallows. They’re okay for watching movies. Good for listening to well-known music while doing the dishes. I don’t think I’d listen to too many new albums with these headphones.

Fit

The frame is made of hard plastic that has a little flexibility in order to “cling” to the wearer’s head. Getting the proper fit takes a little getting used to.

The earbuds themselves are huge. I’m assuming they’re not supposed to fit inside the ear canal like some other earbuds. I’m fine just letting them rest at my ear’s opening, not trying to make any kind of seal.

Not very comfortable. As with all earbuds, it takes a while for my ears to get used to them, but after a little over an hour of continuous use, my ears are pretty sore. I may have to report back on this after some more use.

Use

They paired with my Nokia N900 effortlessly. Pairing them with my HP Laptop took a little more work, because I’ve just upgraded to Windows 7 and hadn’t installed the proper drivers. The headphones were recognized, I just couldn’t use them until I found and installed the proper bluetooth drivers (not specific drivers for the headphones, but specific bluetooth drivers for the laptop).

The S9-HD has buttons for answering a call, skipping to the next track, skipping to the previous track, play/pause, and volume up and down. These all worked well with my N900.

Note that the volume up/down buttons affect the S9-HD’s internal volume, and don’t change anything on the devices it’s paired to.

Windows Media Player recognized the hardware buttons on the headphones with no digging through settings.

Winamp has an option for “multimedia key support” (under “Global Hotkey” settings in “Preferences”). Turning that on allows the buttons on the headphones to control it’s playback, though you can’t pause music in Winamp, you can only hold the play/pause button down for a few seconds and stop the music completely.

If, like me, you don’t like Windows Media Player, there is a freeware program called “Media Keyboard 2 Media Player” (MK2MP) that forwards the bluetooth button presses to VLC, XMplay, and iTunes.

Final Verdict

I haven’t had these earphones long enough to test battery life, so I can’t comment on that. Like I said, sound quality is a little muddy, but decent. The earphone-based controls add a little extra functionality and work pretty much as expected.

Is it worth the price? If you’re after the best sound quality, no. If you’re after some wireless headphones that you can use to watch videos on your laptop without the hassle of cords, maybe.

Lark

I’ve toyed around with Blender’s Video Sequence Editor (aka video editor) previously, but not much. I used it for a slide show once, I used it to put a watermark on a video, but nothing more complicated than that.

It wasn’t until this week that I actually used it to do some heavy-duty editing. An 11 minute video, broken up by scenes, and I used Blender’s VSE to stitch it all together and tweak the timing.

I used Blender to edit this simply so I could use it on both my Linux and Windows PCs. Had I just been working on Linux I would have used Kdenlive, which looks awesome but I haven’t had a chance to use it yet. Had I edited it in Windows…well, there aren’t any good open source video editors for Windows, are there? Well, there’s one, Blender, and it is awesome!

I used to go back and forth between Blender and Inkscape a lot, and that is maddening. The interfaces are completely different. There’s nothing wrong with Inkscape’s interface, but Blender is in a class of it’s own. Blender is designed for speed, and once you figure out how it works you stop thinking and start doing. That really is the best way to describe it, Blender’s interface has a steep learning curve but it quickly becomes second nature.

I have similar problems when I’ve been using Blender for a while and move to Audacity to edit some audio. I try to scrub the timeline, when of course you can’t do that in Audacity (you have no need to scrub in Audacity). Also, the mouse wheel causes panning or zooming in different directions depending on which program you’re using, and it’s hard to keep them straight.

The point is, going from Blender directly into another app is frustrating, partly because Blender’s interface is so capable, and partly because I spend the most time in Blender so that’s what I’m used to. This is one reason why the VSE is so great. The hotkeys are the same as they are in the rest of Blender.

Video and audio show up on the VSE screen as “strips”. You use the same hotkeys with strips in the VSE window as you do any other objects in the 3D window. SHIFT+RMB selects multiple scrips, G “grabs” and moves them, etc.

At first, the experience is a bit different, and it’s pretty intuitive to use the VSE if you’re comfortable using the rest of Blender. If you’re just trying Blender out for the VSE you’ll have a steep learning curve, because it looks and acts nothing like any other video editor.

When you first open Blender, you see two horizontal windows. The 3d window with a cube and a light in it, and below that the Buttons window, which handles most of the object and animation properties. What’s cool about Blender is, like most 3d applications, you can customize your windows. You can have four different 3d viewports, each from their own angle. In the VSE you can set up an editing workspace exactly like you want it.

For video editing, you probably want two VSE windows–one for handling strips, one that acts as a preview window–and a timeline. That’s the bare minimum. You probably want a buttons window, too, in order to view and edit basic properties of audio and video clips.

Once you get some strips in the VSE, you select them with the RMB (right mouse button). If you then click the middle of the strip, you can move it around on the timeline. If you select the arrow icons on the right or left ends of the clip, you can trim the clip from whatever end you’ve selected. If you hit ‘K’, any selected clips are cut wherever the cursor is intersecting them.

I prefer to trim the clips from the ends because it leaves a transparent bar that shows how long the clip was, so if I ever have to fix something and replace an old clip with an updated version, I can see exactly what frame the clip is trimmed to.

Also, after you’ve trimmed a clip you can drag the arrow back to it’s original position to un-trim or tweak the clip at any time. If you use ‘K’ to cut the clip, all you can do to restore it is undo the cut or re-import the clip.

I’ll say again: The fact that the VSE acts just like the rest of Blender will be a hindrance to any outsiders trying to use it. To a Blenderhead, it’s great. Probably the most comfortable I’ve ever been using a video editor, and I’ve used a lot of them over the years.

I do have a few complaints:

Blender is a 3d program so you can set the resolution to whatever you want, 100×200 or 10,000×20,000, and the VSE is no exception. This becomes a problem in the VSE because in it’s preview window, there are no markings to show you where the edge of the frame is. There’s just a black background behind the video. The VSE wiki entry says Blender tries to scale video clips to fit the screen. This makes me nervous, and I’d like a title safe indicator like the 3d window’s camera has, or perhaps a way to easily dictate what happens to clips that are too small or too large for the chosen resolution.

There’s no hotkey to start and stop playback. Out of reflex I tap the spacebar, because nearly every other video player and video editor plays/pauses videos when the spacebar is pressed. In Blender this isn’t possible because the spacebar is already used to open a menu. Blender does track what window your mouse cursor is in, and the spacebar doesn’t do anything in the timeline window, so perhaps they could get spacebar to to start and stop playback only when the mouse is in the timeline window. If they just bound any key to that action though, it would make editing easier.

Most video editors have a clip bank, a media library, whatever they call it, that shows all the clips you have imported, and it also makes it easy to re-use any clip just by dragging it from the bank and dropping it on the timeline. Not a big deal for me, but it would make the VSE feel a lot more like a traditional editor.

In Blender’s VSE, you can’t link audio and video tracks. This is a little silly to me, you’d think this would be one of the first things implemented. However, you can select both a video track and it’s corresponding audio track at the same time. Cuts, trims and movements should apply to all clips that are selected..

Something that’s not a complaint but is something worth mentioning is that you can perform fade in and fade outs as well as dissolves in the VSE, but it’s very strange. There are two tools you need to use (that you can add just like you’d add any other strip), Cross and Color Generator. The Color Generator fills the frame with whatever color you select (via a color picker in the buttons window). You can make it black, put it in a channel over your video strip, then select both strips and add a Cross on top of them to dissolve between your strip and the Color Generator. You can also add a Cross to two stacked video clips to perform a dissolve.

NOTE: The Cross uses what order you select the strips in to determine which strip is fading in and which is fading out. The first strip you select will fade out, the second will fade in. This was quite frustrating for me until I figured out how this worked.

I know that seems like a long list of complaints, but they’re all minor things and don’t dissuade me from using the VSE at all. In fact, I encourage anyone out there who’s comfortable with Blender or willing to take the time to learn it to try it out. The fact that it’s cross-platform makes my recommendation all the more enthusiastic.

Lark

This isn’t meant to be seen as a comprehensive guide of all sites and different types of online ads, just a few notes and thoughts regarding the way I’ve seen some sites display ads. For extra fun, picture me saying it in the whiny, meandering voice of Andy Rooney.

Hulu

I like Hulu. The video looks okay, I rarely have to pause it to let it buffer, and it has a huge selection.

Also, because it’s big, it has a much larger pool of ads. I once watched a full episode of Bones on Fox’s website, and every single commercial break had the exact same commercial. That’s bad enough, but it was a pretty annoying commercial with an annoying song. It drove me crazy. I may never watch another episode on Fox’s website again.

Recently, before watching a video on Hulu a message came up asking me which of two campaigns I’d like to see ads for. That’s a pretty good idea, provided it doesn’t lead to my viewing the same commercial over and over again. By giving potential viewers a choice, it actually invokes curiosity about the ads and makes them more likely to be viewed.

ABC.COM

Another site doing something new to me is ABC. I’ve watched all the new episodes of Scrubs on it, and they’ve got an interesting idea. So far I’ve seen two different implementations of it.

The first was for some hardware store offering holiday decorating ideas. I saw an html page in the viewing window with pictures and links to ideas on how to create these decorations with the hardware store’s help, and after 15 or so seconds I had to click a button in the upper left corner to continue the watching the episode. I had to click the button to proceed, if I didn’t click anything the video wouldn’t resume.

The second implementation also had a basic html page in the viewing window, but it had a video embedded in the page as well as text. The ad’s video was 30 seconds, and this time I could click the button in the upper left corner to stop a 15-second countdown and finish watching the entire length of the ad’s video. Meaning, don’t click the button in 15 seconds, you go back to your show, do click the button, you watch the rest of the ad.

Both are very interesting ideas. The hardware store ad, even though it was probably much cheaper to produce than a video, gave more specific information and provided more ways to engage the audience.

The second ad, with the video longer than the break I’m sure will give sponsors valuable information as to which ads people want to see in their entirety.

Both ideas were fairly innovative and both in theory, should result in better ads.

Text ads

Then we get to my least favorite online video ads, the text ads. I’m okay with text ads in the sidebar of a blog (obviously). Sometimes a particularly relevant one jumps out at you, but they’re off to the side, out of your way and easy to ignore if you don’t want to see them.

On a video they’re kind of obnoxious. They cover part of the screen, they’re actually distracting viewers (I know, that’s the point). I’ll probably try them out to see how I like them on my own videos, but as a (eventual) producer and as a viewer, I’ll take pre-rolls and post-rolls (text or video) over in-video text ads any day. That’s not to say I won’t enable text ads in my own videos, I’ll certainly try them out, but I don’t know if I’ll stick with them.

So there you have it, a tiny little review of a few implementations of online video ads. Months late, but nobody reads this blog anyways.

Lark