Lego Deathstar

I had to steal yet another story from Gizmodo. Lego is set to release a Star Wars Deathstar set for $300 and weighing in at a mind bending 3441 pieces!!! It will be available on September 30th for all those 30 year old Star Wars freaks with or without kids.
This story is especially funny to me because my son and I just watched Episode IV last night, he loves Legos, and I eventually end up putting them together for him before he smashes them to pieces. As Gizmodo puts it;

"Of course, if you’re anything like I was when I was nine, you’d have your father spend six hours putting the whole set together just to smash it into a wall in a tragic “accident” 10 minutes later."

Oh how true...except somehow I think this one might take more than 6 hours.

Apple commits to Blu-Ray

Apple announced that they will join the Blu-ray Association which, to me, means that future Macs will support the Sony-created technology for High Def content. Steve Jobs declared this year the “year of High Def” in his last keynote, so it appears this is a step in that direction.
The dual layer version of Blu-ray discs can hold 50 GB of data making room for High Def movies a cinch. Blu-ray players have been available in Japan, of course, for months now, but the first guaranteed taste of the technology that the US will see will be in the form of the Playstation 3. It can’t come soon enough.

The Next Xbox

And it’s not going to look anything like the above picture…
Some Specs for the next Xbox have been put out by Gamespy. They’re just speculation at this point, but they’re based on what was told to them by numerous game developers who are actually working with the development hardware. The three core 3.0 Ghz processor has me blown away. How this is going to cost less than $500 is beyond me. A 720p minimum resolution for games is a welcome feature too. An optional hard drive is a good compromise, if it’s true, and should keep the modders out there happy.

Bit Torrent 4.0

Looks like version 4.0 of the ever famous Bit Torrent is out. Windows and Linux versions are available, but no OS X one. Typical...Hopefully Azureus fixes this.

...and the MPAA & RIAA can be heard collectively weeping

PSP & OS X, perfect together?

The Sony PSP is a work of art in terms of geek factor. It’s shiny black, it has a huge clear screen, it plays games, it plays music, it displays pictures, it basically does it all. But what are the chances of such an uber toy being supported on the Mac OS? Slim to none right? Apparently not. Sony announced that they will be releasing software for not only Windows, but for OS X as well. Sony said the software would be out within a year which seems a bit far off since the PSP is coming out in the US in two weeks and has been out in Japan for months. There is, however, a program that is out already which does everything you’d likely want in regards to sending content from your Mac to your PSP called iPSP. I’m guessing that the Sony software will not be as well integrated as iPSP, at least from what I can tell just reading the site. It supports iPhoto smart albums, iTunes playlists, automatically backs up your game saves, converts video to the PSP supported format, it even converts DVD .vob files for viewing on the PSP. Ok, so the PSP is releasing at $250 (they force you to buy the package with the accessories unlike Japan where they were given a choice between the accessory pack or a stripped down pack for less money), the iPSP software is $20-24, and a 1 GB memory stick DUO is $130-140. That makes the whole multi-media-geekfest package easily over $400. The latest 30 GB iPod Photo is $350 by itself and while it can’t do a lot of the things the PSP can it does have 29 more gigs of storage for your music and picture collection. That kind of comparison is going to be made quite a lot in the coming weeks as Sony has made it clear that they’re now gunning for the iPod market share. Now if only they can make enough of the damned things!

The perfect phone?

Ok, so the W800 is a bit of overkill for most, but this handy dandy K700 looks perfect. And from the sound of this broken english review it's as good as it looks. Now to win the lottery and place my order!

SadPod

I love this picture. Some older iPods had a feature called Disk Scanning which would sometimes occur when you powered it on. When it was running you would see various hard drive icons and then the above picture if the scan found problems that it couldn't fix. Could you imagine seeing this thing on your screen? Sure it's funny now, but if this is how you're told your $300+ gadget is dead I really doubt you'd feel the same way. Older Mac hardware had similar Sad Mac icon that occurred at start-up if a hardware test failed. In addition a car crash sound would play!! What sick-o thought this was a good idea?!

Forza Demolition Derby

I found these pictures of Forza for the Xbox. Apparently they’re going to have a demolition derby style mode where you can smash up exotic cars like the NSX pictured above. That makes GT4’s lack of in-game car damage even more confusing. Maybe Micro$oft just paid more money to the car manufacturers so that they could show realistic damage. All I know is it gives GT4 an almost goofy arcade quality not expected in "The Real Driving Simulator" that they tout it as.
These pictures are of the New York City board without any cars on it. Sure they look photorealistic, but how will the game play and the cars handle more importantly? If the demo they have out is anything to go by then it will play like a piece of poop. The demo is horrendous with beyond normal load times, bad controls and jaggie graphics. Yes, it’s a demo, but why would a company put out a demo if it wasn’t regarded as good in their opinion? If the demo is considered ‘good’ by its developers Sony has absolutely nothing to worry about.

W800 Preview

I would love a shiny new Sony Ericsson phone. Any one of them really. My problem though is that my current phone (a Sony Ericsson t68i) works just fine. I guess I could use better reception as they’re said to have poor reception due to their not-so-great internal antenna, but who knows if a new phone would even be much better. Anyway, the upcoming W800 Walkman phone by Sony is a nice as hell looking phone, but I don’t really think I could realistically justify the cost of the phone based on the features. A phone with a camera might be cool, but is it really worth upgrading a phone based on that? I mean it’s a 2 megapixel camera which would make it 4 megapixels shy of what my digital camera has. No sense in that. The W800 also comes with a 512MB memory stick you can load up with a bunch of MP3s that can be listened to using either the included headphones or a nifty composite line-out cable you can plug into a home stereo. That’s cool, but my 40 gig iPod does that better by a factor of 80. I’m also not sure if I like the whole orange and white creamsicle case thing they have going on there. Regardless, Club Sony Ericsson has a short preview with a lot of cool pictures so check it out.


maybe the K700i is more my speed...

Borrow your music!

Market analysts are speculating that Apple will be forced to offer a music rental/subscription service to go with its iTunes Music Store in order to compete with Napster. What?! Since when is Napster a threat? They upped their revenue forecast a million bucks so all the sudden that means everybody wants to rent their music instead of owning it? I’m sure there are a ton of people out there who love pop music who this kind of system works well for, but I’d prefer to own my music, not borrow it. I might as well just listen to the radio. I also can’t see how Napster isn’t in a bad financial situation with their service being cracked by users so that they can save the files indefinitely using a winamp plug-in. But, who knows, with the record labels chomping at the bit to raise the fee for downloaded music, maybe Apple really will be forced to at least add the option.

Marv coming to a theater near you!

I must admit I was a bit skeptical about the idea of a live action movie adaptation of my favorite comic book, Sin City, but from the looks of the trailer this movie is going to be freaking awesome! They may have overdone it with how many stars are in the thing, but what are ya gonna do? Just look at all these people;

Bruce Willis as Hartigan
Jessica Alba as Nancy
Rosario Dawson as Gail
Benicio Del Toro as Jackie Boy
Mickey Rourke as Marv
Brittany Murphy as Shellie
Jamie King as Goldie
and series creator and comic book god Frank Miller as a priest

It’s directed by the guy that did El Mariachi, Desperado, From Dusk Till Dawn and…Spy Kids, Robert Rodriguez with a guest director nod to Quentin Tarantino. I hope Tarantino has some kind of input into the Miho scenes if anything. She needs to be reminiscent of Kill Bill if anything. The look of the movie is perfect and the special effects match the over the top mood of the series. Now if only they’d make a worthy movie of Miller’s Dark Knight Returns series…
Check out the trailer and the official site for more.

Virii to screw another platform

If you live with the virus infested OS that is Windows you might not mind this new up-and-coming trend. It seems there are reports of a virus infecting Symbian based smartphones. This article mentions the possibility of an example being found “in the wild” but it hasn’t actually been proven so it may be a big scam to sell some Antivirus software to a new platform. It also only affects Nokia Series 60 phones based on the Symbian 6.1 OS so at least it’s limited in that regard. At any rate, the little bugger spreads itself via MMS messages and even scans for other victims via Bluetooth in order to propagate itself! The MMS ‘feature’ could be a real problem for people that pay per message too. Similar cell phone virus reports have been made in the past as well as proof of concepts, but this time it seems a little more problematic due to the financial damage this particular virus could cause to users. Is the Symbian OS the cell phone Windows equivalent?