Don’t want a Wii

My brother has a Nintendo Wii, I don’t to play it much because he lives 150 miles and a flight over water away from me - but as I was visiting my parents in England this week I got a chance to have a go on the Wii.

I loved it but that doesn’t mean I want one. It was great fun and a pretty good workout but I didn’t win anything. I started playing the various Wii Sport games against my brother and he beat me hands down - he was always the more sporty one - geek+sport isn’t usually a great combination.

Then I played against my mum - now my mum is very competitive but she also has agressive MS and struggles to walk - she beat me at everything - Tennis, Bowling, Boxing - the lot.

Now this in itself isn’t a reason to NOT get a Wii - I did fairly well at Wario Ware and Wii Play - the reason I don’t want a Wii is because it will go the same way as the Playstation 2 and Nintendo DS - they’ll get heavy use for a week and then will end up in a box not to be used again for a year until I next get a flurry of excitement for it.

For me all games consoles have always gone the same way - I buy them, play them heavily for a couple of weeks and then get bored and eventually unplug them from the TV and put them with the games in a box.

You see I’m not too good at games - well unless they’re strategy games - those I’m good at but they’re best on a PC and I’m on my PC all the time anyway - it’s my home entertainment centre - so why bother with a games console that really only handles games I’m not very good at playing.

And anyway - when you have a young family you have to prioritise your geek buys or your wife comes at you with her ‘angry face’. Right now the battle I’m fighting is for a WiFi Radio.

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And Finally … Online

Aunty have launched a new section of the BBC News website, it’s a sort of mix of the oddball stories from across the rest of News Online - it includes a mix of audio/video/text and photo content.

It’s called Also in the News but could easily have been called And Finally… after the classic news story that goes out on TV or radio at the end of the main bulletin.

It’s a nice idea and a great way of quickly finding the quirky stories that usually end up at the top of the most e-mailed or most viewed widget that sits at the bottom of the right hand menu on news pages.

The stories featured this morning include ‘Trafalgar Square Green with Turf’, ‘Captive Shark had Virgin Birth’ and ‘Museum offered Head for Shrinking’.

It’s the stories you tell you mate about down the pub, the stories the breakfast radio presenter hunts out to fill the ‘gap’ between news items, reports and features - it’s the stories that make the Digg homepage.

It’s a nice idea and will probably now feature on every major newspaper site. Another up for Aunty and something that would be so easy and cheap to implement.

I have to say - I also prefer the long page style as well - it has the items in a list instead of in boxes next to each other - then it has a more traditional archive section with boxes underneath that.

It’s almost as if they’ve used a ‘page’ template from their CMS to create the index instead of a traditional index template (see weather pages on BBC Where I Live sites).

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Not enough space

When I brought my first PC in 1996 (before that I used my mums Mac that she got from work) it had a wopping 6GB hard drive - the man that sold it to me said I would/could NEVER use that much space.

Of all the statements I’ve heard people say, never has one been proved so wrong and in such a short space of time. Within three years I had upgraded to Windows 98 and was already running out of hard disk space - most of it taken up with photos my parents and friends had asked me to scan in and re-touch using photoshop.

It was time for a new computer anyway so my next machine had 30 GB - twice as much as before - this time it was a self build so I got as big of a drive as I could afford within the pre-set budget.

The next couple of computers were also self builds, well self mashups - upgrades on that 1999 machine that involved everything from new graphics cards, new motherboards, new sound cards, new memory and a new processor - even a couple of new cases.

The only thing that stayed was the hard drive which, until three years ago was just about big enough - so I replaced the hard drive with a 60GB one which was more than enough - until 18 months ago.

The 60GB upgrade was to accomodate the wealth of photos I was building up of the kids, the island, from event and from holidays - it’s amazing how much space a few thousands photos need.

Then add the audio/video collection into it - for a year I had to delete podcasts after listening to them, keep my mp3 collection on DVDs and delete every TV show before I’d finished watching it - forget downloading movies.

I have a massive games collection but couldn’t install more than one at a time - I had to install it, play it and then uninstall it straight away.

So we brought a 300 GB external hard drive. I moved all the audio, video, web, text and photo files to the new hard drive (which has been a massive help when I’ve needed to re-build) and then installed a chunck of games on the old 60GB.

Now - 18 months later we’re having to think about increasing hard drive space again. I have 50GB left on my external drive - 50GB of 300GB in total and there is about 5GB left on the system drive.

50GB doesn’t go very far - add a few thousands photos (we’ve got our first foreign holiday with the children this year), an ever increasing MP3 collection (I write about new music for the BBC), video files from iTunes, BitTorrent, 4OD, BBC et al and an increasing number of articles, report, half written books and songs in word format and the space is gone.

Then if you add the podcasts I like to archive, the mass of video podcasts I haven’t watched yet and an increasing number of podcasts set to launch from the BBC in line with the iPlayer and you can see why I need more space.

So it’s going to be another external drive. I’ve come to the decision since first buying the 300GB external drive that you should NEVER keep ‘content’ on an internal hard drive.

I’ve re-built my machine four times in 18 months (I’m really starting to get to know the Microsoft activation guy in India) because my wife keeps downloading crap to it or it gets really slow due to so many software programmes or age (it’s more or less still the original 1999 machine but with none of the original parts) and before the hard drive I had to burn everything to dozens of DVDs.

Now I just unplug the hard drive before I start and then plug it in again when It’s all done - and all my stuff is there.

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Multi Blogging

I currently have about five blogs, I know this is completely silly and makes it harder for people to keep track of what I’ve got to say but I’m addicted to launching new blogs.

I’m currently writing Up Your Ego, 5tracks, Our Island, Grumpy Geeks and How to be a Geek. I have other domain names I was planning on turning into blogs as well but thought they’d all be one blog to far.

The main problem with the multi-blogging concept is time - If I was a full time blogger with a budget there wouldn’t be a problem as I could comfortably market the different blogs and link them all together - but I’m not and I don’t.

So I either need to kill off the other blogs and concentrate on Up Your Ego or find another solution - like pulling all the posts from all the blogs into Up Your Ego - but then I might as well just kill off all the other blogs and write them on Up Your Ego.

At the moment if you want my opinion on politics you go to 5tracks.eu, if you want my opinion on Jersey you go to Our Island, if you want my opinion on Media News and New Media you go to Up Your Ego and if you want my opinion on television you go to Grumpy Geeks.

This is a pain in the arse for anyone wanting to know what I’ve got to say on a wide variety of subject - I know there aren’t many of you but I do know you’re out there.

So I set up How To Be a Geek which is a Tumblog. It acts as an aggregator and is pulling in posts from all my blogs, twitter, jaiku, You Tube and Flickr - it’s somewhere I can send everyone if they ask my homepage which is a fairly good solution that seems to have worked so far - but it does still cause confusion.

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The need to download

Photo of Broken Television by Kevin Steele (Flickr)

I have a confession to make, although it’s more of a statement of fact that everyone could probably have already have guessed than an actual confession - a bit like a really camp guy coming out to his parents only for them to say “yeah we kind of guessed”.

Anyway, the confession is that I’m a television addict. Hello I’m Ryan and I’m a TV addict. I love TV and will watch almost anything just for the sake of watching it - everything from Hannah Montana on Disney to Andrew Marr’s History of Modern Britain on BBC TWO - it’s all good.

But it’s not so good because I keep missing it all. I always seem to need to be doing something else while the shows I REALLY want to see are on television.

The vast majority of shows I watch are now on my computer - either sitting in front of the computer or on my TV through the TV out card on my computer.

The only show I watch live on TV is Doctor Who and I didn’t even get to do that this week - I couldn’t watch it live because my three year old wouldn’t go to bed and he can’t watch Doctor Who because the one time we let him he refused to sleep for a week because of ‘monsters’.

So I set the DVD to record to watch it later - something I do quiet a lot - the record not the watch - who actually gets around to watching something you’ve recorded.

Anyway the DVD failed and when I tried to play it I was informed in big letters that it was blank. This is despite the fact that I clearly saw the bright red circle around the record button and was told on screen its recording.

I didn’t want to miss Doctor Who, I love the show it’s the only ‘appointment to watch’ I actually have in a week so I downloaded it. In the absense of a player from the BBC I visited my friendly local Pirate Bay and two hour later was watching the episode.

It would have been 45 minutes if the first download didn’t turn out to be a nasty trojan that sent the five anti-spyware products on my computer into a frenzy of activity.

Going Straight

Which is why we need legitimate ways of download shows from the broadcasters - or at very least a way to stream them.

I’ve been using 4OD from Channel 4 since late last year when it was still in beta and there were very few free shows - now pretty much every show is free for the first week and is available as a download or a stream.

I rarely watch anything ON Channel 4 but I watch loads on 4OD - both free and pay for stuff - just because it’s so easy and I spend more time on my computer than in front of my TV anyway.

Which is why I can’t wait for the iPlayer to get off its arse and launch. I want to be able to do the same with the BBC shows as I currently do with the Channel 4 ones. I’m always seeing things on the various BBC channels that I want to watch but am either busy when their on or can’t be bothered to sit on the sofa.

In fact I’m more likely to watch some old B-Movie on Joost than a carefully crafted BBC show on my TV - just because it’s on the computer and I can do other things at the same time - if I want to.

My computer is really my entertainment hub - it’s wired up to my surround sound stereo system, it’s wired up to the TV and has a TV card coming into it with cable - it gets radio from around the world and now has a mass of TV channels, shows and clips to boot.

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Schools break BBC

Alright the headline is a bit of an extreme, it isn’t the BBC and it isn’t even the full BBC website but it is a small side site. The BBC have launched a seperate website to host videos and ratings for the school choirs hoping to perform with the Any Dream Will Do, Joseph winner.

Basically the site lets any school interested in performing with the Joseph winner on TV submit a video and description that members of the public can vote on.

Since launching the site the BBC have had to suspend ratings a couple of times and put the deadline for submitting videos forward due to massive demand.

You get to watch a video (flash) of the school choir and then rate the school out of five coats. The top twenty schools go through to the final round to win a place on stage.

Whatever you think of the BBC doing reality television - at least when they do they extend it beyond a way of making money from text and phone votes.

And, whatever you think of Joseph and whether it’s just a publicity tool for Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber or yet another reality TV show - at least it’s something a little bit different.

This gives children across the country, so far more than 800 choirs have submitted a video, the chance to perform on stage, get interested in the shows and find a love of music.

My daughter is in Janvrin school choir so if you want to send your vote somewhere and don’t have your own children to vote for then feel free to send your vote their way.

Vote Janvrin - well Vote Janvrin when the voting is back up and running anyway!

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The BBC go 2.0

We’ve known aunty have been planning their switch to the 2.0 world for a while - a world of sharing, mashing and generally being good to one another.

Well now they’ve launched a MASSIVE new site that does just that. As well as pulling in photos from flick, audio from last.fm and text from Wikipedia it provides people like us with video to embed on our blog from the BBC.

The only thing is - the video is only available to people in the UK. But it is stunning stuff - interviews, documentarys, talking heads and features created by the worlds best broadcaster over the last few decades.

It’s based around a new series that’s going to be on the BBC called the Seven Ages of Rock and the ‘tear-off’ video clips are promos for the shows themselves really.

This is a BRILLIANT way of giving something to the ‘organic web’, pulling something from the ‘organic web’ and promoting your show at the same time.

The seven ages of rock are Blues-based Rock, Art Rock, Punk, Heavy Metal, Stadium Rock, Alternative Rock and Indie.

It’s interesting, and possibly a way forward for other broadcasters that the BBC is providing embeddable video from their own site of their own shows instead of using You Tube.

If you pick an artist profile - on the top of the page you get a large picture with scrolling info, then in the second sector a bio from Wikipedia on the left and a timeline on the right - third section has a brief discography from BBC Music and links to related pages - the fourth has photos from Flickr and tracks from last.fm.

Finally they have related artists, influences and people insired by or who insired the artists you’re on.

THIS is amazing, this is what web2.0 is all about - this is how the BBC can and should be integrating content from other places with it’s own valuable media.

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Want a Joost invite?

When I first started beta testing Joost I loved it, but then that love wore off very quickly - mainly due to a lack of shows I actually wanted, a computer that could only just run it and, despite having a 2mb ADSL line, a network connection that was too slow.

It’s got a LOT better recently - the content has improved and the system isn’t nearly as memory hungry as it used to be. I’m actually finding myself using it more often.

Now all I need is more hours in the day to fit all my entertainment in.

Still I had five Joost invites so wrote a blog post offering to give them to the first five people to reply - that was the most popular blog post I’ve had so far in terms of numbers AND comments.

Between first publishing the post and yesterday 22 people had commented asking for an invite. But that was back when the invites were VERY hard to come by.

Well now everyone that is on Joost has something like 999 invites to give to people and that includes me - so I’ve invited the other 17 people I couldn’t invite before and still have more to share.

So if you don’t already have one post a comment, be nice to me and I’ll invite you to Joost. I’m going to give another 20 away on here and then another 20 to people that comment on my similar Jaiku post.

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Another player

One of the most exciting web video applications has just come to the UK. It’s been slowly rolling out across Europe with TV partners including France television, TVE, CNN and the BBC for the last year or so.

It’s more than just the ‘one show at a time’ on demand players that are everywhere else and everyone else is developing. Zattoo is more of a replacement for Cable or Satellite.

The service lets you watch, depending on where you live, live television channels on the internet. It looks like they plan to extend it to include Joost style content channels with shows from indie producers - but for now it’s the TV channels you’d get over the air.

Channels

The UK player gives me all the BBC Channels - BBC ONE, BBC TWO, BBC THREE, BBC FOUR, BBC News 24, CBBC and Cbeebies and I’m sure that list will expand when it leaves beta.

As the service launches the company have said, in the FAQ section, that they plan to launch paid services on top of the free channels available in each area - so this really could be a contender for Cable/Satellite.

What we need now is for boxes like the XBox, Playstation 3 and AppleTV to support ‘external applications’ like Joost or Zattoo and then we can watch them on TV instead of the computer.

The quality is very good - obviously not live TV quality but close enough for watching comfortably on a computer. It’s good enough for me to be able to let my wife watch a shitty soap on the main TV while I watch something else on the computer.

And, considering it’s a steamed service, I’ve had it on for an hour now with no buffering at all - and it only takes a couple of seconds to buffer when you switch to another stream.

I’d like to be able to get channels from other countries - France Television would be a fun way of brushing up on my French - or even get some indie content on there - but for now this looks like a strong contender for the ‘top player’ position.

Other Players

But it’s still ‘another player’. I already have Joost, 4OD, Democracy, iTunes and now Zattoo - soon I’ll be adding the BBC iPlayer and if I ever decide to pay Murdoch the SKY player as well. Then if they ever start offering UK content I’ll add the Vuze player.

Add to that all the content thats steamed online from places like You Tube and soon ITV.com and, although there’s a wealth of content, there’s also a pain in the arse of a system drain.

So I’ve now got 4OD, Joost, Vuze, Zattoo, iTunes and Democracy on my computer - all fighting for system resources. Soon I’ll have the iPlayer and if it’s anything like the iMP trial that will be a drain as well.

How are we going to get around the ‘multiple players’ problem. Is it possible to create a single integrated player that pulls on APIs and feeds from the others or do we just have to live with it.

What about a third party add on system for the AppleTV or XBox 360 - the ability to install all the players on there instead of the PC.

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