Counting Down to Rock Band release in Europe
Being a huge fan of Guitar Hero and other rhythm games such as Amplitude, Rock Band is one game I simply can't wait to get my hands on. Finally the chance to pretend to be a drummer and play along with a virtual band. Will I ever grow up?
Nope. 
Who Turned On The Light?
Like many people I have quite a bit of trouble waking up in the mornings during winter. Well, also during summer actually, but during winter especially. The shrill sound of the alarm buzzing or squeaking or vibrating (if it's my phone) awakens me with a start and after several snooze sessions, I shuffle to the kitchen to make coffee, usually without turning on any lights and usually quite grumpy.
Rather than simply going to bed earlier, I of course decided to engage a gadget to tackle the symptoms: The Philips HF3451 Wake-Up Light. It's an ugly blighter to have next to your bed - but I desperately wanted to experience this apparently revolutionary, natural way of waking up - as if to the gentle, warm rays of the rising sun - in your very own bedroom. And with birds chirping.
It's a simple concept. A 75W softtone bulb attached to a dimmer attached to a timer. If you set the alarm for 7am the light will start to increase gradually from 6.30 am over a period of 30 minutes. At 7am the birds start twittering. If you buy the more expensive HF3461 version you get more sounds, such as the ocean, forest noises and a radio.
I found myself waking up between 6:30 - 7:00 am getting very annoyed at even the slightest bit of light. By the time it was on full strength at 7am I felt like someone had barged into the bedroom and snapped on the lights. Conclusion: I am a Gremlin and the wake-up light is not the answer for me.
Thankfully I could bring it back to the shop and get my money back. Now I am back to using my Nokia E61 mobile phone as a vibrating alarm clock. Under the pillow it's really quite relaxing 
Logitech MX Air (eek! it's a mouse)
This is one of those gadgets that I've had my eye on for some time and finally purchased a couple of weeks ago. On the whole I have been very pleased with Logitech mice, but this particular mouse is quite a new concept. As the name suggests, this mouse is used in the air rather than on a desk. It's not a pointing device I'd ever consider for my desktop (although it also works on a desk), but as a remote control for our Mac Mini Media centre I thought it might be more practical than the (already half-broken) wireless media keyboard we have. After all, what I usually do from the sofa is open a folder, point to a downloaded AVI, right click it and select "open with VLC", with little need to type. So grabbing the keyboard with its built in mouse and broken scroll wheel is often overkill.
Although the box does not mention Mac support, the Logitech Air Mouse does work on a Mac without installing any drivers (there are in fact no drivers available). Even some of the function buttons work (muting sound and scrolling), but not all. Controlling the cursor takes a bit of getting used to. You basically hold the mouse with two fingers resting on the left and right buttons and tilt it up and down. You can reposition your arm, but I do find myself holding it in the air quite unnaturally a lot of the time.
Between the two buttons there's a scroll strip which makes a very satisfying clicking sound as you fly through vertical lists and pages (I tend to scroll rather too fast, it's hard to flick your index finger down the strip with just the right speed). The mouse actually looks very sleek, black, with orange lights and a chrome undercoating. Fits snugly in the hand. Its rechargeable battery seems to last less long than my MX revolution, which may be due to the fact that it keeps the lights lit all the time.
At €119 it's priced pretty steep and I'm not yet 100% convinced it was worth it, but I think I still need to perfect my control of it. Inspired by the latest Harry Potter which I am presently reading, it makes me feel rather like I'm waving my wand at the television from the sofa. Alakazam!
Nabaztag – Supawabbit
Almost a year ago I wrote about the Nabaztag as a very desirable, totally useless gadget. Now there's one in our house. It's officially Merel's Nabaztag, although I am playing with it extensively, of course . She christened it "Supawabbit". However useless it might be, it is definitely fun. We are particularly enjoying the spoken clock which says the time in numerous different ways. After some repetition I'm sure we'll tire of that though. How endearing a piece of white plastic with movable ears can be!
What is even more fun though, is having other friends with Nabaztags and getting them to speak phoenetic Dutch or English, or even German. You can send supawabbit a message via www.nabaztag.com.
Terra Bytes the Dust
A month ago I purchased two 1TB Lacie Big Disks. One as a backup for my MacBook Pro (using Leopard's Time Machine) and the other as much needed extra storage for our Mac Mini Media Centre.
Yesterday I connected one of the Lacie's to the Mac Mini and transferred all our Eye TV recordings (some 60GB) to it to free up space on the two smaller Lacie disks we had been using and had pretty much filled up. Then I left the computer on as it was downloading episodes of Dexter to the the 1TB.
This morning, heading for the loo with sleepy eyes, I heard a helicopter in the living room. CRSSSCCCHHH CRRSSCHHH tjakktjakketjakketak. It was the 1TB. Forced to switch it off without unmounting, the helicopter spun down and switched off its engines. Silence. The silence of lost data. No remounting possible for this month-old terrabyte.
I am glad there was not a huge amount of personal and irreplaceable data on there (except for some damn excellent Eye TV recorded documentaries - grrr). There are people who have had it a lot worse. But this kind of thing really damages one's trust. It's not the first time a disk has crashed on me.
Tech lifestyle is rather like romance. The giddiness of being in love with a new gadget as you explore and discover the beauty of it. Tentatively you let it deeper into your life, settling down a bit, relying on each other more and more. Then, just when you think you'll be together forever, Lacie suddenly breaks up with you. No signs, no warning. Bam! And it hurts all the more because you were so open. You shared music, photos and spreadsheets with her. She burnt them all. The bitch.
Then you're on the rebound. Looking around for a replacement but finding that you're more cautious than before. Cynical, in fact. Monogamy has lost its charm and polygamy seems the way to go. Cover your bases. It's hard to ever open up again and let the bytes back into your life.
iTunes Artwork and OCD
It took me a while, but I have finally digitized my entire CD collection into iTunes. That's over 600 CD's - pffff. But now comes the hard part - if you have an Obsessive Compulsive streak like me - the artwork and genre indexing. Combining my music (which is way in excess of 600 albums as I have downloaded a lot music too) with Merel's collection, brings us to over 25.000 songs. Over 100GB of music. Some of it without artwork and much of it labelled with genres that mean nothing to me. So how am I tackling this gigantian job?
FD artikel
Afgelopen woensdag stond er een interview met mij in het FD. Het ging over hoe ik denk dat mijn werk er over 10 jaar uit zal zien. Klik op de kleine foto om het artikel groter te lezen.
I Switched!
Well, I finally took the plunge and it feels damn good so far. Thoughts of switching completely to Mac have been dogging me since April and yesterday I handed over my credit cards (not enought limit on just one ) and bought a MacBook Pro 15" 2.4GHz with a glossy screen and (as of Monday) 4GB of RAM. By then this little baby should be flying through processor-intensive apps and be pretty well customized to meet my stringent demands of a computer. On Monday I am also picking up the 30" Apple Cinema Display which should make for a rather enjoyable desktop experience with its 2560x1600 pixels.
Flexibel toetsenbord
De ALDI heeft sinds gisteren weer diverse aanbiedingen, waaronder een flexibel, opvouwbaar en waterafstotend keyboard van het mij onbekende merk Zolid. USB aansluiting en keuze uit zwart, groen, blauw of roze voor slechts €6,99. De layout van de toetsen is vergelijkbaar met de huidige MacBooks, dus Merel en ik kochten er meteen twee.
Eenmaal thuis aangesloten waren we meteen blij verrast dat alle functietoetsen meteen werkten op Windows XP, zelfs zonder driver. Gewoon typen bleek echter wat lastiger. Iets tè Zolid. Er was meer sprake van 'hammering' dan touch-typing en er ontbraken opvallend veel letters en spaties in onze test alinea's. Waardeloos dus. Weer zo'n goedkoop-duurkoop ALDI ding wat in een kast geflikkerd wordt en jarenlang vergeten stof ligt aan te trekken. Ik woon zowat boven de ALDI dus we hadden geen excuus om ze niet meteen terug te brengen. Heel even overwogen we nog om er eentje te houden voor gimmick-value en voor het geval we ooit een kind zouden krijgen die met Nutella-vingers Teletubbies-Tetris wilde spelen - maar de overweging sneuvelde vrij snel.
ALDI heeft er dus weer twee exemplaren bij - dus mocht je je vingerspieren willen versterken...
The Internet Has Crashed – Data Lost
Google is taking over the world as we know it. There's nothing new about that. In just a few years they will hold all our information: our e-mails (GMail), our love-letters and personal finance spreadsheets (Google Documents), our personal and business appoinments (GCal), our photographs (Picasa Web) and our positioning (Google Maps / Google Earth). Privacy is a Twentieth century phenomenon. In the 21st we choose the conveniences of communicating and working via the Internet over keeping our information physically in our vicinity. We choose to publish rather than whisper our opinions and we are constantly letting others know what we're doing (Twitter) or where we are (WAYN) and storing our information online.
If the Internet were to disappear, how incapacitated would we suddenly be? Nissan sponsored a viral video of a spoof news report about the Internet crashing. It's quite humourous. I like the premisse as it seems to me like a 21st Century version of Orson Welles' 1938 War of the Worlds radio broadcast.