#oneaday, Day 288: Where’s The UK’s Netflix?

So the new Xbox Dashboard went live today. Pretty neat, isn’t it? Lots of new sound effects, a clean white aesthetic, Kinect compatibility and all manner of other goodies. In fact, let’s take a look at the list of new features, shall we?

Kinect Integration
ESPN on Xbox LIVE
Zune Music
Netflix Search
Improved voice chat quality
Improved Gamertag creation
Streamlined virtual keyboard
Improved wireless networking
Improved family settings

Pretty nice, I’m sure you’ll agree. Particularly if you’re an American, because here’s the list of new features I got in the email today:

Kinect Integration
Zune Music

Granted, some of the features that weren’t mentioned were fairly minor ones. But it’s still pretty clear that if you’re a European Xbox gamer, you’re missing out quite a bit on some of the things that make the Xbox and its LIVE service particularly appealing.

One of the biggest things us poor Europeans are missing out on is Netflix. I don’t watch many movies and thus feel rather ill-equipped to contribute to conversations that start with the words “Have you seen…”. The reason I don’t watch that many movies is that I have it in my mind that buying DVDs with movies on is a bit more of a waste of money than buying box sets of TV series that I’m more likely to watch several times. Once I’ve seen a movie, I tend not to watch it again unless I really, really loved it. As such, I don’t own many movies on DVD or Blu-Ray, and I rarely remember to get to the cinema in time to see movies while they’re on the big screen.

If I had access to a service like Netflix, however, I’d be more inclined to watch more movies, since paying a monthly fee for access to whatever I wanted seems like less like a waste of money than purchasing a DVD or Blu-Ray I might never watch ever again.

So then, Points of View, I ask why oh why oh why don’t we have a Netflix-like service here in the UK? The company LOVEFiLM (or however the hell they capitalise it) already offer a similar DVD rental-by-post system, as well as a streaming service via web browser. So isn’t it about time they pulled their fingers out of their celluloid arseholes and got on with integrating their service with the Xbox 360, PS3 and Wii? A huge number of households now have one or more of these devices hooked up to their fancy-pants HDTVs. So LoVeFILm would probably stand to make an absolute fortune from new subscriptions if they got on with integrating their service with various devices.

I’d go off on a similar rant about ESPN’s lack of appearance on the 360 in the UK too, but for me watching sport on TV is an experience only mildly less appealing than having my eyes pulled out through my bellend.

So… Netflix-or-UK-equivalent YES PLZ. I’m sure it’ll happen. Eventually. It’s just a shame we get it years behind you pesky Americans. YES, YOU. You are pesky. You may gloat in the fact that while we have the greatest condiment in the world (HP Sauce) you have an awesome streaming movie service available via your Xbox.

Hmm. I’m actually not sure which one I’d rather have, thinking about it…

#oneaday, Day 270: Go Go Gadget, uhh, Gadget

I love gadgets. Anyone who knows me in “real life” will not be surprised by this revelation. But I’m always impressed by quite how much we can do with various little portable implements these days. And even not quite so recently, too.

The most recent mind-blowing moment I had was during this last week when I had my little expedition to the woods. I was standing in the middle of a forest with absolutely no trace of civilisation except a little crude wooden bench by the side of the muddy path. And somehow I had better mobile signal than I do in the house I’m sitting right now. So, without thinking, I popped out my iPhone and fired up eBuddy to say hello to my buddy Chris in California. He responded back and we had a nice discussion about music.

Let’s just think about that a minute. I was in the middle of a wood in Cambridgeshire, England. Chris was somewhere in sunny California. And yet there we were, chatting away like this was a perfectly normal thing to do. That’s awesome.

One of my favourite gadget moments, though, was a good few years back now. I was up in Edinburgh at the Fringe with the Southampton University Theatre Group, or “Rattlesnake!” as we’d inexplicably decided to call ourselves. At the time, I had somehow managed to end up with the responsibility of keeping the Theatre Group website up to date. I’d prepared a special Edinburgh page and everything, and I decided that it would be pretty awesome to keep an online diary. The concept of “blogging” was but a pipe dream for all but the biggest nerds (even bigger than me) at this point. And doing so via a mobile device was absolutely out of the question.

I did, however, have my Palm Tungsten with me, to date my second-favourite gadget after my iPhone. You could play Shining Force on it, for heaven’s sake. That’s awesome, if beside the point. No, the reason my Palm came in handy was that I could type up my diary entries into the Notes application on it and then use the handily-provided SD card (32MB!) to transfer said material to a computer in the conveniently-located Internet café we found one day.

One may ask why I didn’t just type said diary entries straight into the computers. Well, the advantage of doing it on the Palm was that I could write things as they happened. I could write a rehearsal report. I could write what we were up to in the park. I could write about flyering the Royal Mile. The Frankenstein pub. (AMAZING) Being on top of Arthur’s Seat drinking sake as the sun rose. (DOUBLEPLUSAMAZING)

Sure, I could have written about these things after the fact. But the immediacy of being able to write about it there and then was pretty damn cool. Each new generation of gadgets makes this sort of thing easier and easier to do. And while it has its downsides—the sea of people filming concerts on their mobile phones instead of actually watching the damn things being one—on the whole I think it’s really great to be able to share life’s exciting little moments (or, in the case of some of you out there, the details of your latest bowel movements) with people that you care about it. Of course some of this is vanity. But the other side of it is being able to share things with people that you don’t get to hang out with as often as you like.

So gadgets are awesome. For everyone. Not just nerds.

#oneaday, Day 238: Nerd Rage

As a new acquaintance from Twitter would say, nerd rage is one of the most formidable forces known to Man. It is a dreadful and terrible force, both specific and unfocused at the same time, often showing itself via the personification of inanimate objects who really don’t know any better and are just attempting to do their job and failing. Raging at said inanimate objects or poorly-constructed pieces of software rarely does any good, but it is commonly assumed that it makes one “feel better”.

As the years have passed, though, everyone’s bullshit-tolerance threshold has lowered significantly to the stage we’re at now, where if something doesn’t work immediately and instantly and then remain working 100% of the time, people blow their top and spew their vitriol to whoever will listen, which is usually the Internet. Assuming the Internet connection isn’t the thing which is causing the nerd rage, in which case alternative outlets have to be explored.

This is why issues such as the Xbox 360’s infamous “red ring of death” smart so much. Not only is it a shoddy flaw in the system which should never happen in the first place, but people’s tolerance for such shoddiness is far lower now than it would have been, say, twenty or thirty years ago. Hell, in the days of the NES, everyone was quite happy to accept the fact that if a game didn’t boot up first time, it clearly and obviously meant that you had to blow in it to “get the dust out” despite no actual evidence that it was actually dust causing the game not to work correctly. And no evidence that those tiny flecks of gob that probably got into the cartridge circuitry while you were blowing in it actually helped matters, either.

It’s also why we get such whingers in places such as Apple’s App Store. “OMG 1 STAR COZ IT DIDNT WORK ONCE THIS IS A DIGSRACE REFUND PLZ”. “Is it working now?” “Yes, but…” (etc.)

It’s fair enough to want things to “just work”. Apple in particular like to pride themselves on the fact that their products “just work” (which they do approximately 95% of the time, which means the remaining 5% incites nerd rage of a degree you’ve never seen before, particularly amongst recent converts and/or Android users). But it’s worth remembering a time not so long ago when we enjoyed tape load errors, boot errors, numerical error codes you had to look up in a book, garbled graphics, tape decks that chewed up tapes and then spat them out, CD players that seemed to deliberately wait for you to insert your favourite disc then sprout internal blades to scratch the crap out of it and dial-up network connections where it was possible to get a “busy” signal for hours at a time. And there was no Internet to spew your vitriol over back then.

Nowadays we have complicated devices and software that no-one except superhumans understand really, and established solutions such as blowing on it, shaking it, hitting it, shouting at it, turning it off and back on again and setting fire to it don’t work. So the only thing left to do is get frustrated. And possibly call up one of those superhumans. Because everybody knows at least one. (Note: If you don’t know a superhuman nerd or don’t want to bother them, you can save yourself a lot of time by referring to this chart.)

In other news, the router here is rubbish and crap and I hate it and it disconnects Xbox LIVE every five minutes when I’m playing Fable II and it doesn’t like WordPress and SRSLY who uses AOL nowadays anyway and… (repeat to fade)

#oneaday, Day 199: Waving Goodbye

So, Google Wave is going bye-bye, huh? Can’t say I’m particularly surprised. As cool an idea as it was, there just wasn’t the buy-in from people that it deserved. Largely because a goodly proportion of the Internet population didn’t seem to understand what it was actually for.

It’s easy to assume people who didn’t “get” Wave are just a bit slow. But the fact is, Google never did a great job of explaining what the technology was for in the first place.

“Yay, collaborative editing!” they’d say.

“Yay, we can do that with Google Docs!” everyone else would say.

“Yay, you can see people typing!” they’d say.

“Yay, who gives a shit?” everyone else would say.

“Yay, it’s like a combination of email, Twitter and a word processing document!” they’d say.

“Yay, I’ve never wanted to combine those three things together!” everyone else would say.

It’s a pity, as I’ve seen some genuinely interesting uses of Wave out there. One particularly cool Wave I was invited to took the form of a moderated “text adventure”, where participants could direct the protagonist (played by the moderator in the role of an interactive fiction-style narrator) by inserting commands. Eventually, the non-linear nature of Wave allowed two parallel storylines to develop at once—one happening in the present, another as a flashback. Wave’s ability for anyone to edit and insert new content at any point in the “conversation” meant that these two things could continue going on without becoming overly confusing.

Then there were all the possibilities for things like education. But then you have to deal with your average teacher’s technophobia.

When I was working in schools, I had a grand idea that Wave could be used for the preparation of interactive resources. The fact that media such as YouTube videos, flash thingies, pictures, text, hyperlinks and even iFrames could be inserted meant that Wave could have been an ideal tool to use on interactive whiteboards during lessons, and also a good means of collaborative planning if teachers in question weren’t able to meet and discuss things. As they frequently aren’t.

As a result of many of these things, I had a Wave account which largely went unused because no-one else was using it. This is a shame, as I could see the potential in the service. But the fact the service was invite-only for so long, and then by the time it went public people were still scratching their heads and wondering what to do with it—these things meant that it didn’t have a particularly “mass market” appeal for the average Internet user.

All is not lost for the moment, anyway. Wave is going to remain open—Google have just said they’re stopping development on it. They’ve also open-sourced a goodly proportion of the code, so enterprising clever people with mathematics in their brains will be able to pull it apart and make it better, faster, stronger, I’m sure.

So it was a swing and a miss for Google on this one. To be honest, though, I think it’s good to see them experimenting with different technologies as a company. It would be very easy for Google to just think “Right. We do these things. And we do them well. Let’s just stop there and make bundles of money and stick them in our ears.” But no; they seem to be on a constant quest to make the lives of the Internet’s denizens better. Sometimes these things work. And sometimes they don’t.

So raise a glass to Google Wave, the web app that couldn’t. And start speculating on what they might be up to next!

#oneaday, Day 159: Obligatory New Phone Gushing

I picked up an iPhone 4 today. Cheap, too, thanks to the contract I went for. I was already on a £45 a month contract, so continued with that and got a new iPhone 4 16GB for £29. Nice. Plus I can recycle my old 3G and get at least £150 for it, so that’ll be good too.

The new phone is absolutely astonishing when coming from the ageing 3G. I’m not sure if it was the OS updates or that apps were just getting more and more sophisticated, but the 3G was really starting to struggle with a lot of things. Even doing simple tasks like sending a tweet were causing momentary pauses, requiring you to wait before it would respond to an input. Some apps were better than others, but unfortunately some of the apps I was using most frequently were the most severely affected.

No such issues with the 4. While I was waiting in the queue at the Apple Store, a former colleague came up to me and showed me how quickly apps started on the new phone. It was impressive stuff. It’s noticeable with games, too – I tried out Warpgate earlier, a game which stuttered and juddered all over the shop on the 3G. On the 4, the loading is so quick that it really doesn’t need loading screens any more.

The biggest wow is the screen, though. It really is not an exaggeration to say it is pin-sharp. You can’t see the individual pixels. Unless you look really, REALLY closely, but then you’re just the guy pressing his nose against his phone. It’s particularly noticeable on text. Everything has a lovely smooth-edged but sharp look to it, which makes text beautifully readable. The high resolution also means that web pages can be viewed zoomed out and still be readable, too.

Gave the camera a brief try tonight, but not a serious one. It certainly seems good, though, and the preview image on the screen looked ludicrously sharp. The flash seems to work well, too, and the iMovie app is neat. Not sure if it’s £2.99 neat, but it’s cool to be able to trim and edit video, including adding stills and audio, on your device. And for a dinky little phone to shoot 720p video? That’s pretty awesome however you look at it.

In short then, it’s great. I haven’t spent a significant amount of time with it yet, but I very much like what I’ve seen today. Those of you still with a 1st gen or a 3G iPhone should definitely make the upgrade. If you’ve got the 3GS, I’d say it’s less pressing, though the extra speed, the lovely screen and the enhancements to the camera are all very nice indeed.

And I haven’t seen any evidence of the “you can block the antennae with your hand” thing yet, but maybe that’s just because I naturally hold the phone in a way that doesn’t cause that problem!

Yeah, I’m an Apple geek. Sue me. If Android had got to me first, I’m sure I’d be a fan. But as it is, I’ve never felt the need to even look at an Android phone. The iPhone does what I need it to, and it does it well. I’m sure Android does some things better; but frankly if that’s the case I’d rather not know!

#oneaday, Day 64: Act Your Age, Fanboys

Why does the phenomenon of fanboyism still exist? And more to the point, why does it exist amongst men (and it pretty much is always men) who are old enough to know better?

The simple and easy answer is, of course, that it’s always been around. I remember growing up as an Atari-based family and all of the Atari magazines at the time belittling the competition with stupid names like Spectrash (Spectrum) and Crappydore (Commodore 64). Then came the schoolyard arguments – SEGA vs Nintendo. Sonic vs Mario. “We’ve got Street Fighter II! Hah! …Oh wait, now you have, too.” It got pretty silly.

Once the Dreamcast came out, it was hard to justify fanboyism because, certainly once SEGA’s wondermachine came out, it was so far ahead of its competition – the 64-bit Nintendo 64 and the 32-bit PlayStation – that half-hearted attempts to call it things like “Dreampants” always came across as more than a little desperate.

Things then kicked off again with Sony vs Microsoft, with Nintendo kind of relegated to “background observer” by this point. The PS2 and the original Xbox both had fiercely loyal supporters when, in fact, you’d have a far better experience if you bought both systems, played the relevant exclusives on their respective platforms and played multiplatform titles on the Xbox. That’s what I did, and I never felt the need to slag off any of the systems.

And it still goes on today, despite each of the consoles arguably offering a more distinct and unique experience from each other than ever before. The Xbox 360 offers its legendary ease of online play, the PS3 is home to a variety of unusual and interesting games (like Flower, flOw, Linger in Shadows, the Pixeljunk games) and the Wii is the family-friendly bundle of fun.

Still the hating goes on, though.

But nowhere is it more apparent than in the world of smartphones, particularly between the owners of iPhones, BlackBerries (let’s pluralise it properly, please) and Android-based phones. iPhone owners are either Apple fanboys who bang on about how great Apple is all the time or jailbreakers who bang on about which ludicrously-named hack they’re installing this week – and, of course, which apps they could get for free rather than paying for them on the App Store. BlackBerry owners seem to be updating their OS every night. And Android owners seem to be particularly sore about the iPhone for some inexplicable reason.

The question is: why? When it came to the early console wars, slagging off the systems your friends had was just schoolyard banter. You didn’t really think that the systems were inferior, otherwise you wouldn’t have gone around to their houses and played those games with them. The fact that this juvenile banter has grown up with people who have been using gaming and other consumer electronics for years is utterly baffling. Even people who started gaming at the same time as me – or before – are still bitching and moaning about how much better their handset is that [x]’s handset, and blahblahblah open source, blahblahblah build quality, blahblahblah BlackBerry Messenger, blahblahblah… You get the picture.

Am I alone in thinking that all of this stuff, without exception, is seven degrees of awesome and we should appreciate the brilliant things we have? Yes, some of them have more features. Yes, some of them are objectively “better” in terms of capabilities, power and technical specifications. But is that really any reason to act like 5-year olds telling each other that their respective Mums smell of wee?

No, it’s not. So why does it still go on?

One A Day, Day 29: Netbook ’em, Danno

I bought a netbook today – specifically, an Asus Eee PC 1005P. Why that one? Well, it seemed to have a number of decent reviews around the Net, was reasonably up-to-date specs wise (though it could possibly do with another gig of RAM) and was reasonably priced.

A while back, I was under the impression that netbooks were particularly pointless. I even remember a number of us fairly mercilessly laying into our buddy Luke for picking one up – though this was largely due to the fact that at the time he bought one, netbooks were very much in their infancy, no-one really understood quite what they were for, no-one really understood Linux (which was all you could get them preinstalled with) and, of course, we all worked for Apple at the time.

Nowadays, they’re a different beast to what they were. This machine – which I’m typing on right now, in fact – runs Windows 7 Starter (with the opportunity to upgrade to Home Premium) and seems plenty quick enough to do most things on the Internet. The 10-inch widescreen is a comfortable size – not too small to be illegible, yet compact enough to be endearingly cute. The speakers are on a par with most laptops – i.e. shit – but they’re plenty loud enough to be able to hear the soundtrack on a video.

The reason I bought this was so that I actually have my own portable computer to take with me to PAX. My wife has a MacBook but I would only be able to pry that out of her cold, dead fingers – and I don’t particularly want to kill her purely for the sake of having something to blog on in Boston. We have several laptops in the house right now – my wife’s old ThinkPad (complete with that dumb “nipple” pointing device), a Sony Vaio laptop that switches on if it’s in the right mood (which it usually isn’t) and the MacBook – and now this.

Every time I buy a new computer, it strikes me how far things have come. This thing that’s sitting on my lap right now is about ten times more powerful than the first desktop PC that I owned, yet it’s an “entry-level” machine with “limited” use. Hell, I remember being excited the day we upgraded our 386 to a 486 DX2 66MHz – finally we were able to run DOOM in high detail mode.

I’ll be intrigued to see how well it handles various tasks. It’s certainly more than fine for email and web browsing – I’m going to be seeing if latest Squadron of Shame mission Machinarium will run on it as soon as it’s finished downloading. Reports will inevitably follow on Twitter.