1542: Terebi Desu

Our new TV arrived today at some ungodly hour in the morning — which felt all the more ungodly for the fact that excellent Vita dungeon crawler Demon Gaze had kept me enraptured until 3am — and I’ve been having a bit of a play with it. (For the curious, it’s a Samsung Series 6 55-inch LED TV; it has a catchy three thousand-digit model number but I have no idea what it is.)

When Andie suggested we grab a new TV, I was a little concerned that it might not be a significant upgrade over what we already had — a 40-inch Samsung, albeit one that is now about four or five years old. After all, despite the fact that my previous TV was an end-of-line model when I bought it — making it much cheaper — it was pretty good. Three HDMI ports, built-in Freeview tuner, full 1080p support — it had pretty much everything I needed, though it would have been nice to have an optical output port. Everything I connected to it worked just fine, though, ranging from the PlayStation 2 through the SCART port (yummy, blurry standard-def picture) to the various games consoles and PC through the HDMI ports.

With the previous TV working just fine, why buy a new one, you might ask? Well, having spent this evening playing some Final Fantasy XIV on it and having watched some anime and TV on it earlier… yes, it was a good investment. The increase in size is extremely noticeable — it’s big enough to have a touch of “peripheral vision” now, giving a much more immersive feel to both video and games — and the LED screen is lovely, bright and clear. I have no idea if I’ve optimized its settings appropriately — I’ve put the PC input into Game mode, because prior to that there was noticeable input lag, but haven’t really fiddled with much else — but it certainly seems to look very nice, although as Andie pointed out, the bigger the screen you get, the more of a dog’s dinner standard-definition footage and TV broadcasts look. Oh well.

It’s a Smart TV, too, which means it has two remotes, one of which has a trackpad rather than, you know, just being normal, plus “apps” for doing shit old, dumb TVs don’t do. There’s stuff like BBC iPlayer and Netflix built into it, for example, and even apps for things like Spotify and the like. (There are also games to download, but somehow I don’t see them being particularly worthwhile, and as such I will be giving them a wide berth.) I’m not entirely convinced how much I will use the “smart” features over time, but it’s nice to have them there, I guess — not to mention the fact it is seemingly now impossible to buy a new TV that isn’t 1) “smart” and 2) 3D.

The 3D thing surprises me somewhat, I must confess. I thought 3D TV and gaming had been a colossal failure, and yet all the televisions we looked at over the weekend were 3D in one form or another. The TV we ended up getting is “active 3D”, which is supposedly better because you have to turn the glasses on before they work properly (and for some other reasons, too) and sure, it’s quite fun — we watched a couple of trailers in 3D earlier and it was quite cool — but it’s not something I can see myself using a lot of, and certainly not for protracted periods of time. It will almost certainly be something to show off to people who come and visit, but little else.

Anyway, I’m very pleased with it. It fits nicely on our TV stand and doesn’t look too big or too small, and it’s a noticeable upgrade over what we had before — plus the almost bezel-free design, with the picture going right the way to the edges of the front of the unit, looks absolutely smashing.

I’m sure I’ll be taking it for granted before long — and I’m not looking forward to moving it when our new house is sorted — but yes; I’m glad we got it. And now I’m off to bed because I’ve been staring at it all evening and I think my eyes could probably do with a rest!

1518: New Media

I’ve been contemplating the ways that people “consume” (ugh, I hate that word, but it seems to be the one in use most frequently these days) content online, and trying to determine a way it could be applied to our currently-stalled podcast over at The Squadron of Shame.

The Squadron of Shame SquadCast certainly worked extremely well for the episodes we did it for, but it did often end up being a little more demanding on the editing time than I would have liked, particularly as we’re all amateurs making use of not-brilliant equipment that often results in things like background hum, echo and other annoying flaws that are difficult to edit out. Much of my editing time was often spent manually trimming out echoes and funny noises, and in the case of a 2-3 hour episode — which most of our episodes tended to be — it would take the majority of the day to do this.

One of the things I’m wondering right now is how relevant the podcast format still is. Obviously I know that there’s enough of a market for sites like Giant Bomb to keep making one every week, and for established podcasting personalities like Garnett Lee to be able to start a new show and have people follow him to see what he’s up to. But I’m also conscious of the rise of alternative means of “consuming” (blech) content in the last couple of years, with YouTube being one particularly disruptive influence, and live broadcasts such as Twitch streaming and Google Hangouts being another.

Awareness of these alternative forms of media has made me ponder whether the standard podcast format is absolutely the best possible thing for the SquadCast going forward, or whether it’s worth contemplating an alternative means of presentation (with an accompanying means of archiving/downloading where necessary.)

The SquadCast has always been a “book group” style of discussion surrounding a game or gaming-related topic, and it’s worked well for us in the past. But gaming is also an inherently visual medium, which makes me wonder whether some form of video presentation might be worth experimenting with, perhaps combined with live broadcasting.

Another reason I bring this up is that Skype, which we have previously used to talk to one another and record the discussions we have, has become a largely unworkable mess ever since Microsoft bought it, making it impossible for me to “archive” the complete conversation just in case someone’s individual recording fails to work properly. I haven’t needed this facility on many occasions, but on the couple where someone’s recording was destroyed by Audacity’s frequent crashes, having that backup facility was a godsend. With the way Skype works now, though — you can’t run it in more than one user account on a Mac at once, which is what I used to do — working this way is impossible without an unnecessarily convoluted setup involving more than one computer.

What I’ve been pondering is making use of something like Google Hangouts, which allows for a number of features that would seem ideal for a discussion about games. It allows participants to converse via either audio or video chat, and it also allows for the footage of the participants to be intercut with other things such as videos from YouTube and the like. For example, while discussing a particularly interesting scene in a game, making use of Google Hangouts would allow you to find that scene on YouTube and then broadcast it to the people watching the Hangout, which strikes me as an eminently good idea. Presumably it would also allow for playing footage while the conversation continues over the top, which is a little more interesting than just gazing at a bunch of talking heads for a few hours.

Google Hangouts can also be easily archived to YouTube, and then one of the many YouTube-to-MP3 converters out there can be used to archive an offline version of the discussion’s audio, which can subsequently be released as a standard podcast for those who wish to continue listening in that way. It’ll be rawer due to the lack of editing and its inherently live nature, but I’ve often felt when I edit a show that I was making the job a lot more difficult and time-consuming than it really needed to be.

Anyway. I’m just thinking out loud here. Interested to know your thoughts, though, particularly if you’ve been either a listener or a participant in the SquadCast at any point in the past. (Those who are neither, you can educate yourself thanks to our archives here.)

1182: Fixed That For You

I’ve had a week of not having a lot of luck with technology. Firstly, I was reminded that my electric piano was suffering a sticky key issue on the B above middle C (which is quite a commonly-used note) and proving rather difficult to play effectively. This was annoying, because as I noted yesterday, I’d just come into possession of the official piano arrangements for the Nier and Final Fantasy X-2 soundtracks along with some fan-arranged printouts of a variety of anime and game pieces.

Secondly, my PS2 Slim mutilated my Ar Tonelico 2 disc right in the middle of one of the endings I hadn’t seen, causing it to freeze up completely and not be able to go any further. (I have since replaced the PS2 Slim with a PS2 Fat — which hasn’t arrived yet — and acquired a new copy of Ar Tonelico 2, but that’s some money I didn’t really need to spend.)

Fortunately, one of these problems has been rectified thanks to Andie’s willingness to get her hands dirty and tinker around inside things. (Get your mind out of the gutter.) Loosely following some instructions online, we took the casing off my Yamaha P80 and had a look inside. It wasn’t immediately obvious what was causing the key in question to stick, but as it happened, the process of popping it out (which we didn’t even manage to do completely, just sort of half-out) and popping it back in again completely fixed the problem. This was, as I’m sure you can imagine, extremely pleasing as it means 1) I don’t have to attempt to fit my piano into the back of a Peugeot 207; 2) I don’t have to drive it 25 miles to the nearest Yamaha engineer; and 3) I don’t have to pay aforementioned Yamaha engineer £100+ to get it fixed. Don’t get me wrong, I would have happily paid Captain Piano-Fix his fee in order to get things sorted, but given that the fix was apparently that simple — I guess the key must have got knocked out of its normal place somehow, perhaps while we were moving house — I’m glad that I don’t have to do any of the above three things.

This isn’t the first time I’ve seen something get “fixed” by peculiar means. Back in university, I came into possession of a Sega Saturn, which I still own to this day (though I no longer have any games for it). The controller that came with the Saturn didn’t work very well, so, having nothing better to do that evening — my housemate was out and no-one fancied going down to the Union to get obliterated on Juicy Lucies — I took it apart and decided to see what I could do, despite not having any clue whatsoever about how it worked. Eventually, I ended up cleaning the contacts on the circuit board using a piece of kitchen towel dipped in vodka — I honestly have no idea why this particular combination of things seemed like the right thing to do at the time; I was possibly a bit drunk — and putting it back together again. Astonishingly, it worked after this. To date, I have no idea if my ridiculous efforts to “fix” the thing actually had any effect or whether it was just the simple process of taking it apart and putting it together again.

I guess the moral of this story is that if something is broken (and out of warranty) then there are worse things you can do than pull out all the screws, pull everything out and then put it back together again. Obviously don’t try and do this on a human body, however, because 1) human bodies don’t have any screws and 2) they’re a lot harder to put back together once you’ve disassembled them, which is why degrees in Medicine take so long to complete.

1155: The Tablet Revolution

I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m a dusty old bastard who is set in his ways like an old man. That or everyone else is just plain wrong. Or perhaps a combination of the two.

I’m specifically referring to the “tablet revolution” — that futuristic gubbins that supposes everyone is going to replace their computer/console/handheld/everything with a tablet such as an iPad or whateverthefuck the bajillion Android tablets are called these days. I even read an article earlier where someone from Zynga said that tablets are “becoming the ultimate game platform”.

I must respectfully disagree — at least for my needs and wants, anyway.

Our house has three tablets — an iPad 2, a Motorola Xoom and a Nexus 7. The Nexus 7 is currently in for repair, but got a fair amount of use by Andie, largely for free-to-play mobile games and Kairosoft titles. The iPad 2 also gets a fair amount of use by Andie for the same reasons. My Xoom gets barely any use, though the fact I have SNES, Mega Drive and various other emulators on there ready to go at a moment’s notice is pretty cool.

But yeah. The fact stands: I hardly use these devices at all. Why? Because for my purposes, they don’t offer a superior experience to other bits of kit. For gaming, I have consoles, dedicated handhelds, a laptop PC and a desktop PC. For work, I have my Mac, the aforementioned laptop PC and the desktop PC at a pinch. For browsing the Internet, I have… you know how this goes by now. For me, all of these devices offer a considerably superior experience to all of the tablets we have in this house.

Oh, sure, tablets can ably perform several of these functions, but they don’t do any of them as well as the pre-existing devices. About all they do offer, really, is the fact that they’re incredibly quick to turn on (assuming they have some charge left in them, which my Xoom in particular rarely does) and are a lot more portable and lightweight than many other devices.

But personally speaking, the fact that, say, the iPad is thin and lightweight isn’t enough to make up for the fact that it’s a lot more difficult to type on than an actual physical keyboard. And yes, I know, you can pay through the nose and get an iPad-compatible wireless keyboard (or a generic one for Android) but not only does that remove one of the main benefits of a tablet — its all-in-one portability — there’s other issues too: the pain in the arse it is to access the file system (on iOS, anyway; this is one area where Android is marginally better), the fact that proprietary iOS and Android apps rarely play nicely with established formats (just try getting a Microsoft Word file with any formatting or layout whatsoever to look even a little bit right in Pages for iOS), the fact that some of the work I do requires the precision of a mouse rather than the cack-handedness of a touchscreen, the fact that some websites I want to use are designed for use on a computer with a keyboard and mouse rather than a touchscreen and a virtual keyboard.

And don’t get me started on the games. “The ultimate gaming platform”? Don’t make me laugh, Zynga. While mobile and tablet games have been enormously successful in getting more and more new people into video games, and that’s a good thing for the industry as a whole, there is no way you can say with any good conscience that tablets are an adequate replacement for more established systems — and better-designed control schemes in particular. Have you ever tried to play a first-person shooter on a touchscreen tablet with no buttons? It is one of the most bewildering experiences you’ll ever encounter: why would anyone want to put themselves through that? There are certain genres that work well, of course: strategy games, board game adaptations, word games and adventure games are all good uses of a touchscreen interface… as are the never-ending throng of isometric-perspective building/farming/dragon-raising games that are little more than vehicles for monetisation. There are very few tablet-based games that hold my attention for more than a couple of minutes, in short — the last was Ghost Trick, which doesn’t really count as it was a conversion of a Nintendo DS game.

I guess that’s sort of the point, though. The main benefit of tablet devices (and smartphones, for that matter) is their immediacy — you turn them on, you tap a button and you’re (almost) straight into a game, and you can be out of it again within a matter of minutes if you just needed to fill an awkward silence or wait for someone to come back from the toilet. And that’s good, in a way; it just doesn’t really fit with how I play games. As I noted in a reply to Anne on yesterday’s post, I play games as my main form of entertainment. I don’t watch much TV, I don’t watch movies, listening to music is something I tend to do while engaged in some other activity, and so games are my main “relaxing time” activity. I want to sit and play something for an hour or two (or more) at a time, and between freemium energy please-insert-credit-card-to-continue bullshit and the “bite-size”, disposable, forgettable nature of most mobile/tablet games, I just don’t get a satisfying experience from them.

Meanwhile, the laptop I bought a short while back is easily my favourite piece of kit in this house. It’s powerful enough to play pretty-looking games like TrackMania, yet portable enough to carry around in a bag. Its battery life is decent (though not a patch on a tablet) and it has a nice screen. It’s a good means of playing visual novels without having to tie up the TV, and it copes well with anything I might want to throw at it while working on the go. In short, it’s an all-in-one device that does absolutely everything I want it to without making any compromises or dumbing the experience down at all. Sure, it takes a bit longer to turn on than the iPad, but it’s also infinitely more useful and fun to me.

Fuck the tablet revolution, basically. Long live the laptop. And the games console. And the desktop PC. And the dedicated handheld. And, you know, sometimes, just a piece of paper.

1089: Ding, Dong, Ding, Dong

(Buffy’s Swearing Keyboard. You’re welcome. NSFW, obviously.)

Andie and I bought a doorbell the other day. This is not something I have ever had to purchase before, but it was something of a necessity — we live on the second floor (third if you’re American) and there were doorbells for flat 1 and 2 in our block, but not ours. This meant a distinct chance of missing out on deliveries of orders from Amazon and Chinese takeaway due to a lack of any means for someone at the block’s front door of letting us know we were there. And that will never do. A man needs his Chinese takeaway and AMAZOO.nep deliveries.

Actually, the statement that said I’ve never had to purchase a doorbell before isn’t quite accurate — in my second year at university, I lived in a first (second) floor flat which didn’t have a doorbell. The front door was at ground level and opened straight on to some stairs up into the main part of our flat, so if my housemate and I were in our rooms or the living room, chances are we wouldn’t hear anyone knocking. (We sure as hell heard the fight outside our door one night, though, and got a bit scared when we heard shattering glass. Luckily the aggressor in the incident had punched through our neighbours’ door, not ours. I say “luckily” — obviously not for our neighbours, who then had to spend the next few months with their front door boarded up because the landlord of the building was too lazy to do anything, ever. But these brackets have gone on for too long so I’d better close them before I lose the point of what I was saying.)

Anyway, yes. I popped down to our local massive hardware store, which was but a short walk from our flat, and investigated doorbells. At the time, wireless doorbells, which would have been the ideal solution, were rather expensive. As a student, spending forty quid on a doorbell was out of the question, and I didn’t really feel like drilling holes in the doorframe and poking wires through, largely because I didn’t have a drill. So on that occasion we survived without a doorbell.

Not so this time, though. Both Andie and I are in gainful employment, and as such we were more than able to afford a doorbell for our new place, particularly as wireless doorbells appear to have come down in price considerably over the course of the last ten years. Wired ones didn’t appear to be an option, even. I am fine with this.

The doorbell we chose was a bog-standard model with a single sound that thankfully isn’t too horrendous — it just makes a nice, normal (if obviously electronic) doorbell sound. It doesn’t play a horrible monophonic ringtone-type tune and it doesn’t go on for longer than it needs to, which were the things I was worried about. There’s nothing more embarrassing than a doorbell that outstays its welcome. (Well, there is. Lots of things are. But you know what I mean.)

What I was particularly surprised about as we were browsing the fine selection in B&Q (which I maintain is one of the most tedious stores in the world despite the presence of chainsaws) is the ridiculous features the more expensive doorbells offered. The most expensive one they had there — which was about the same price as the basic wireless ones from ten years ago, as I recall — not only had a wide selection of built-in chimes for you to pick from at your leisure, it also had the ability to play MP3s.

Think about that for a moment. A doorbell. That plays MP3s. Truly we are living in the future. An incredibly pointless future where instead of flying cars and cures for cancer we have doorbells that play fucking MP3s.

I express mock outrage at this but I guess it’s sort of amusing. You could, with that doorbell, essentially have anything as your chime. If you wanted Brian Blessed shouting “GIMME THAT FUCKING BADGE BACK!” (possibly the best video on all of YouTube, that) every time someone was at the door, you could. Or perhaps the chiptune ALF theme from the dancing chicken man video I used to love so much. (Used to? I just put it on and fell in love all over again. CAN’T STOP WATCHING) Or, if you really wanted to drive yourself absolutely insane, this. Or this. Or perhaps the song that gave us Epic Sax Man. Or… well, yeah. You get the idea.

Damn. Now I sort of wish I’d splurged on the stupid MP3-playing doorbell. Much better for trolling Andie with than getting Siri to call her “Bumface”.

#oneaday Day 932: Take Control

I’m generally a pretty disciplined sort of person. I’m good at prioritising, and if I have something that I have to do I’ll make sure that I complete it before I do things that I want to do.

It’s when it comes to prioritising the things that I want to do that things go a bit pear-shaped.

It’s easy to stumble through your days as normal and just let things happen. But if you do that it’s easy to fall into routines and patterns and then wonder where the minutes, hours, days go. Those things that you want to do sometimes get forgotten amid your default activities, your comfort zone, the things that you do without thinking.

In order to fit in all the things that you want to do, sometimes you have to take drastic steps. Steps like scheduling your time.

This approach doesn’t work for everyone. Some people are terrible at sticking to schedules, others simply don’t like the lack of flexibility. But I’ve discovered (and rediscovered) several times over the years that I actually seem to work better and be rather more efficient if I plan out my time carefully rather than simply taking things as they come. It’s a hangover from quite enjoying the sense of “structure” from school and university (even if — ssshhhh… I didn’t always show up to my university lectures and seminars) and it’s something that I should really start doing more of in my daily life if I want to fit everything in. Because even with scheduling, it’s sometimes tricky to squeeze all your desired activities in, and that’s when you have to decide how to make compromises and sacrifices. Thankfully, with the things that I want to do at the moment, I haven’t had to make too many of the latter.

The ironic thing about people not wanting to organise themselves these days is it’s so easy to do so now thanks to technology. You can make your phone remind you to do things, set email-based nags to pop up in your inbox, create task lists that synchronise between devices, take snapshots of things and store them “in the cloud” (urgh) for future reference. You can even get social and be public about the things that you want to do, making use of your friends as a means of browbeating… sorry, “encouraging” you to actually get on and do stuff.

I use a few simple tools to sort myself out. Firstly and most simply is Google Calendar. I use this in favour of iCal on my Mac because it’s easier to sync between devices, is stored online rather than tied to a single device and works with iCal and iOS anyway. Google Calendar is a decent tool with enough features for what I need to do — multiple colour-coded calendars, email reminders, the ability to invite people, time zone support — and it proves valuable when I have taken on lots of things and only have a limited time in which to do them. It was especially valuable this time last year when I was going to Gamescom in Germany and every developer and publisher in the world suddenly wanted a bit of my time. (Apart from EA. They ballsed up my appointment — their fault, not mine — and wouldn’t let me in to their stupid high-security compound. Fuck them. I went to go and see Larian Studios instead, which was much more fun.)

Alongside Google Calendar, I’ve tried several other tools over the years. Evernote is pretty neat, for example. Epic Win was a cool idea that gamified your own productivity, but development seemed to stop quite a while back and it’s still lacking a few features that many other task manager apps offer. Most recently, I’ve been playing with Springpad, which I like a lot, despite a few rough edges.

Springpad is quite a bit like Evernote, but with a few interesting twists. It’s based around the concept of “notebooks”, which are ways of grouping related content together. Within a notebook, you can create a wide variety of different notes, ranging from simple text notes to checklists (mini to-do lists, essentially) via tasks, recipes, books, product information (scannable via the RedLaser barcode-scanning interface on the mobile apps) and all manner of other stuff. A webclipper bookmark allows you to easily clip things into your notebooks, and the interface generally does a pretty good job of figuring out what kind of content you’re trying to store — I tried it with a recipe from BBC Good Food earlier and it successfully recognised it as a recipe, though failed to import the ingredients list correctly.

Springpad also features a “social” component which allows its users to make its notebooks public, too. While I’m not entirely sure that this has been particularly well thought out, it does provide an interesting alternative use for the service, effectively turning it into a kind of blogging platform. Notes can be used as entries, the more specific types of notes used to provide specific information, and the site’s in-built commenting facility allows users to build up a community. It’s a neat idea. I’m not entirely sure how useful it is, of course, but it’s a nice idea.

So anyway. Armed with these simple (and free) tools, I’m attempting to organise myself a bit better. After two days, I’ve already managed to do a bit more than I would have done otherwise, which is pleasing. I shall continue with this system for a little while and see if it’s something that I want to make stick. It will be an interesting experiment if nothing else, and it might actually spur me on to get some things done that I’ve been meaning to get done for a while.

Further updates on exactly what when I have something to share.

#oneaday Day 882: Microsoft Mysteries

As I type this, Microsoft’s mysterious event at which something may or may not be revealed is about to start. The usual rumours and speculation have been flying around and are just as infuriating as ever, but there’s been something a little different about this event: unlike, say, Apple events, for which we tend to know the vast majority of the content well before it’s announced, there’s been nary a whiff of what this might be all about.

A lot of people seem convinced that the company are going to launch a tablet device, and that would make a good degree of sense what with the impending launch of Windows 8. But then there’s a new Xbox on the cards. And Windows Phone is surely due for a kick up the arse. And then there’s things like Surface, and all the things that Microsoft Research are up to — though let’s not forget that they unleashed the monstrosity that is Songsmith on the world. (And now it’s stuck in my head again. “You sing into a microphone while the drummer plays along…”)

But the truth is that no-one knows. At all. No-one has any idea whatsoever what is going on, and this means that the event has the potential to be exciting. (It also has the potential to be a crushing disappointment, but that’s part of what makes it exciting.)

This is something that to a large extent we have lost in the modern age of PR, leaks and the reporting of every little rumour that sneaks out. Think about it. If you reveal everything about your product months before it actually comes out, you walk a fine line between building anticipation and pissing people off with oversaturated marketing. I feel it all the time with modern high-profile video games, and I’m pretty certain tech enthusiasts feel the same way about new gadgets. I don’t know to what degree it happens in other sectors, but given the way a lot of modern PR seems to work regardless of industry, I can imagine it is the same across a lot of different areas.

I can’t be the only one who prefers to be surprised now and again by something. For all the mindless speculation that goes on around Apple product launches, the company itself is pretty good at keeping things under wraps until the last minute (though they let the cat out of the bag with iOS 6 somewhat). Microsoft has gone one better with this one by not letting even the slightest hint out to the press or the public. It’s had a far greater effect on the public’s anticipation than carefully-orchestrated “leaks” (most of which I doubt are really “leaks” at all) and “official” teasers — and as a result, everyone is on tenterhooks, watching the currently-running announcement (which still hasn’t announced anything as I type this paragraph).

Basically, the lesson to be learned here, I think, is that sometimes it’s okay to shut up and not tell anyone what you’re doing. Because when you tease something and then respond to all questions with “we’re not ready to talk about that yet” or “we do not comment on rumours or speculation” you just come across as a bit of an arse, really.

Ah, and there we go. The big announcement is the Microsoft Surface, though it’s changed a bit since the table-sized device we last saw. The new gizmo is an iPad-like device with an interesting twist: its Smart Cover-like kickstand has a full multitouch keyboard secreted within it. There’s also an optional other case with actual proper, tactile keys.

The fact the Surface is running Windows 8 means that it can run things like Office and the like. There’ll apparently be a scaled-back version for Windows RT, and one with Intel chips for the full Windows PC experience. The latter will also incorporate stylus and “digital ink” input as well as multitouch, and apparently has the power of a full desktop PC — though whether or not it will run Crysis is yet to be seen as I type this…

#oneaday Day 862: Lion and Logic

I’ve been meaning to reinstall my copy of Logic Studio for ages now. For the uninitiated, Logic Studio is a suite of music and audio production tools for Mac that has become an essential part of the podcast editing process for me. I have a podcast to be editing right now, in fact, but am unable to do so until I reinstall Logic Studio, which somehow buggered itself up in the transfer process from my old Mac to my new one.

So it was that today I decided to bite the bullet and begin the several hours long process that is reinstalling Logic Studio. (There are lots of DVDs of content.) I popped in the first disc, opened up the Finder window for the disc and double-clicked the installer, only to be confronted by a message that I really wasn’t expecting.

“You can’t open the application LogicStudio.mpkg because PowerPC applications are no longer supported.”

WHAT.

Logic Studio is a Universal app — for non Mac users, this means that both older PowerPC-based Macs and newer Intel-based Macs can run the program. However, for some reason that remains unknown to seemingly everyone on the Internet, Apple decided to make the installer application for Logic Studio a PowerPC-only application.

On past versions of OS X, this wasn’t a problem, as a technology called Rosetta was included to allow newer Intel Macs to run PowerPC-only apps. This feature was phased out in the latest version of OS X (“Lion”), however, meaning that you’re seemingly fucked if you want to reinstall anything from disc that is more than a year or two old. (This is obviously not an issue for anything you have purchased from the Mac App Store, since when you download from there you always get the most up-to-date version.)

It’s pretty clear why this situation is how it is, even if no-one from Apple would like to admit it — the latest verion of Logic Studio is, naturally, available from the Mac App Store, meaning that those who are really serious about their music and audio production needs should just drop £130 and upgrade. Some of us (like me) aren’t made of money, however, meaning a frantic scrabble around Google to try and figure out what to do next.

There was plenty of advice on how to get Logic Studio actually running once it’s installed (it seems that Apple included some sort of “obsolescence” tech in the app to actually forcibly prevent it from running under Lion — another nudge in the direction of the upgrade, no doubt) but very little on how to install it in the first place. Fortunately, I eventually found the information I needed, and I thought I could serve anyone suffering the same problem well by sharing said solution. So, without further ado, I present:

How to Install Logic Studio 8 Under OS X 10.7 “Lion”

You will need:
1 copy of your original Logic Studio discs.
1 OS X 10.6 “Snow Leopard” DVD (10.5 “Leopard” may work, too, but I didn’t investigate)
Lots of time

1. Insert your Snow Leopard DVD into your Mac and open the disc’s Finder window.
2. Double-click on the Optional Installs folder.
3. Double-click on the Optional Installs.mpkg file to run the installer.
4. Agree to all the bumf and choose your OS X install drive.
5. Rummage through the list of optional installs and ensure that the checkbox next to “Rosetta” is ticked.
6. Begin the install process. It should be pretty quick.

You’ll probably get a warning message that Rosetta is not supported on Lion, but ignore it and proceed.

7. Remove the Snow Leopard DVD and replace with the Logic Studio Install DVD.
8. Open the disc’s Finder window and double click on the Logic Studio.mpkg file.
9. Follow the instructions as normal. The Logic Studio install process takes hours, so go and do something else and check back to swap discs every so often.

Voila! Sorted.

I haven’t finished reinstalling Logic Studio as yet so I don’t know if any of the poking around to get it actually running is necessary as yet, but the installer certainly seems quite happy. This Rosetta trick also has the happy side-effect of allowing PowerPC-only applications to run under Lion, which was previously impossible — though obviously you do still need a Snow Leopard disc to pull this off. They don’t have license keys, though, so if you have a Mac-toting friend with one, just borrow it — or doubtless some enterprising young individual has put it online somewhere, too.

I’m normally pretty patient with Apple’s idiosyncratic ways of doing things — I believe things like the App Store, the “walled garden” nature of iOS and numerous other gubbins are all excellent ideas when you consider the demographic that the Apple of 2012 is trying to court — but all this seemed rather heavy-handed and unnecessary. To lock customers out of an application that they had paid several hundred pounds/dollars/whatevers for because of their desire to be up-to-date with their operating system seems ridiculous — particularly as there’s no real reason that I can discern that the app itself shouldn’t work. I guess we’ll see once I actually finish reinstalling and try to get the bloody thing working again.

In other news, expect a new Squadron of Shame SquadCast by the end of the weekend, all being well!

#oneaday Day 834: RUMOUR: Rumours ‘Rumoured’, Says Rumour-Monger

If you’ve ever started a conversation with “I heard that…” and then gone on to explain exactly how you heard somewhere/from some guy in the pub/from “The Internet” that something awesome/awful is going to happen, then I urge you to think before you speak in future. Because if you continue with that sentence, you’re simply feeding the rumour mill, and the rumour mill doesn’t produce good things and help us make the Bread of Truth. It produces garbage and poo, and then squishes it all out into the world’s most unpleasant pâté.

Tortured (and gross) metaphors aside, it’s a fact that I wish more people — particularly in the press — would cotton on to.

Today, for example, saw news that Liberty X “might be” reforming for a new album and a tour. Firstly, I don’t think anyone wants that, and secondly, the only evidence that such a reunion “might be” happening is the fact that they were photographed together outside the ITV studios and — get this — they were smiling. Stop the fucking presses.

There are a ton of journalism sectors that are particularly prone to this. Showbiz columns report who might be sleeping with whom. Sports columns report who might be moving to some other club for a disproportionately enormous amount of money. Music and arts columns report who might be working on what. And then, of course, there are the tech-related industries.

Anything related to Apple is accompanied by an inordinately huge amount of rumourmongering, for example. In the run-up to the company’s announcement of the third-generation iPad, all sorts of nonsense was flying around. This ranged from suggestions that it might not have a Home button to the frankly astonishing assertion that the reason iOS apps had started having textures like leather and the like in the background was because the new iPad would have a haptic display — i.e. one where you could feel textures as well as see them.

The video games industry is far from immune, either. Rarely a week goes by without one outlet reporting on some rumour from a mysterious, anonymous source and the “story” then being picked up by every other news site on the Web as if it were fact. This particular rumour mill goes into overdrive as a hardware generation starts to wind down and people start wondering what the next generation of consoles might look like. Inevitably, the vast majority of stories turn out to be absolute bollocks, and on the rare occasions when an outlet or reporter writes something that turns out to be true, there’s at least a day’s worth of smug, self-satisfied cries of “Called it.”

No you didn’t. You were throwing darts blindfolded, and you happened to hit a lucky bulls-eye. Your other fifteen darts are embedded in the barman’s testicles, the barmaid’s left boob, the right ear of that hard-looking dude who drinks absinthe by the pint and the TV that was showing the Bolton v Wigan match. (Everyone is angry. I’d run, if I were you.)

So why do we persist on reporting on these festering sores on the very arse of journalism? Because they attract attention, particularly if they’re controversial. If one site prints a story that Liberty X is reforming, or that the next Xbox will feature a system to prevent used games from working on it, or that the iPhone 5 really, totally, absolutely positively is coming out this time, then that will attract commenters like flies around shit. And that means page hits, advertising revenue and the little graphs that make the men in suits happy moving in an upward direction. Who cares if it’s absolute nonsense dreamed up by someone who cleans the toilets at Microsoft? Print it!

I make a point of not reading any stories that start with the prefix “RUMOUR:” now. And should I ever find myself back on the news desk for a popular gaming website, I will most certainly do everything in my power to avoid reporting on such nonsense — unless some actual investigation turns up something interesting, of course. But blindly parroting another site’s “anonymous source”? No. Just no.

So, then, I reiterate: think before you speak/write/publish. Because rumours are rarely helpful. Remember that time it spread around the whole school year that you’d shat your pants when in fact you’d just sat in some mud?

Yeah. That.

#oneaday Day 822: Xoom, Xoom, Xoom, Xoom, I Want You In My Room

I’ve been spending quite a lot of time with my shiny (well, rather fingerprinty now) new Motorola Xoom since it arrived the other day, and I have to say I’m a big fan. While Android seems to be a little more clunky than iOS, particularly prone to slowing down for no apparent reason on occasion, I’m appreciating the things it does do. Having a fully-customisable homescreen is very pleasant, certainly, and the cool quasi-3D effect it does with the wallpaper is pretty neat.

What’s becoming abundantly clear to me as I continue to use it, however, is that using it simply feels very different to the iPad. It might be the fact it’s designed to be used in landscape as opposed to the iPad’s default portrait orientation; it might be the unique array of apps on offer on both devices; it might be a combination of interface elements. I’m not sure exactly what it is, but I can say that both devices certainly have a place in my life at this moment for different reasons — and also that getting the Xoom has caused my desire for a 3rd-gen iPad to drop to zero.

If anything, the Xoom seems particularly suited for more “serious” tasks (and by “serious” I mean “not games”) — I’m particularly fond of using it for Twitter, chat, email and that sort of thing. Google Currents has become my go-to app for reading the daily news. The built-in “share” functionality, which allows you to easily send stuff from one app to another easily, is pretty neat. The keyboard I have installed, which lets you type by drawing wiggly lines rather than tapping keys, makes me feel like a wizard, particularly with the sparkly particle pattern that comes from aforementioned wiggly pattern. And the inclusion of a USB port (albeit a micro-USB one that requires an adapter for pretty much every peripheral ever, making one wonder exactly why they didn’t just put a regular USB port on it) means that it’s possible to do things like hook up a keyboard and practically use the damn thing as a sort of laptop.

A big draw for me was the thriving emulation scene on Android, however. Within a few short moments of getting the device up and running I had downloaded NES, SNES, Mega Drive and arcade machine emulators and a few minutes later had successfully transferred my collection of ROM files of dubious origin. What I have now is a portable gaming device that plays pretty much any NES, SNES or Mega Drive game, and a whole heap of arcade games.

This… is awesome. I hadn’t anticipated quite how awesome this was going to be, but the ability to play Final Fantasy VI while on an exercise bike at the gym, or Elevator Action while on the toilet, or Golden Axe while waiting for the kettle to boil… well… yes. It’s awesome. The fact you can hook up a USB controller (or, for that matter, Wii Remote with Classic Controller via Bluetooth) and play these games as they were meant to be played — with actual buttons rather than floaty, crappy touchscreen controls — is a happy bonus. The fact you can use floaty, crappy touchscreen controls at times when having a controller is not convenient or socially acceptable is also most welcome.

I’m certainly not going to become one of those gits who bangs on about how much better Android is than iOS because there are things that both do far, far better than the other. But I’ve been very pleasantly surprised by my first experience with an Android device, and the fact it’s turned out to be a portable retro-gaming powerhouse is just a happy bonus, really. Now I can finally get around to beating all the Final Fantasy games that are still on my “to-do” list. (V and VI, as it happens. Also Chrono Trigger, which may as well be a Final Fantasy game.) And, as previously mentioned, playing Elevator Action on the toilet.

Now, if you’ll excuse me…