Saturday, June 16, 2007

Weewar For Life

As if I wasn't already addicted enough to Weewar as it is, I've recently been given a pro account for my bit of work on the wiki. There's been a lot of interest in this awesome idea over the past few weeks, and I really look forward to seeing some of the suggested features make their way into the Weewar experience.


As for my update to the mobile Weewar experience, I recently updated Minimo on my Nokia 770 to version 0.2 (Antonio is doing really great work with the project), and put it to the test with a Weewar battle. It works surprisingly well, albeit a bit slower than on a desktop, but I'd bet it's even better on an N800 than the 770. All in all, Weewar has become that much more awesome now that I can play from the tablet.

Wednesday, June 13, 2007

The Cows Have Come Home

The Chick-fil-A Dwarf House in my hood has free wifi now. One more reason for me to love the awesome little restaurant. Maybe I can get some more work done during lunch time without having to go too far from home and work. Now if only Wal-Mart threw up some free wifi (like that's going to happen) the world would be nearly perfect.

Thursday, June 07, 2007

Two New Toys

I got a couple new gadgets this week, the Nokia 6030 and the Samsung YP-U2J and have had a little time to play with them a bit, so here's my initial thoughts:

Nokia 6030
Needed a "quick fix" of a phone recently, and picked up the T-Mobile prepaid 6030 phone just for the situation I was in at the time. I've set up a few T-Mobile prepaid phones before, and so I decided it would be the quickest to get going for my purposes. The phone is a simple candy bar style with no noticeable extra features, but enough software functionality to keep things together if using it as a simple organizer. More sleek and stylish (also smaller) than the old Nokia 3595 I used a while back, the 6030 does the job of the most basic of basic mobiles and a little bit more. Along with all the goodies you'd expect in most low end Nokia phones, there's instant messaging (which works surprisingly well), FM radio (using headset), and a speaker phone feature (that works with the radio too). Not much more to say about this simple but stylish phone. It just works like expected.

Pros: Compact stylish design, useful IM feature, responsive buttons and navigation pad.
Cons: FM radio quality is not that good, not much storage for saving data.

Samsung YP-U2J [1GB]
This little mp3 player has a lot going on for such a small package. Although it took a slightly tricky firmware upgrade for it to work with my Ubuntu system, it was well worth the little bit of setup time. Now I can drop mp3s in with no problem, and the audio quality is very good through the earbuds that come with the player. It serves well for other data storage quite well, and as a neat little voice recorder. The FM radio function works quite well, but I don't see myself using it that much quite yet. The little display is really cool, and the navigation controls are well thought out. Haven't used it long enough to say how well the battery time is. I'd buy it again without hesitation. Oh yeah, the LED lights are pretty cool too. :)

Pros: Good sound, many useful features, small size, nice menu navigation, radio sounds better than the Nokia 6030's.
Cons: Poor headphone jack placement, tricky firmware update required for use with Ubuntu [Linux], little bit of a learning curve for non-geeks.

Monday, June 04, 2007

Wee Time Killer

So, I've been a wee bit distracted by Weewar recently, gobbling up time I don't really have. But it has to be one of the coolest little games I've played in a while. I just wish it was playable on the Internet Tablets.

Anyways, I'm back to work on some solid.gold.code projects and another 3pm update. It's really hard to find the time for it all these days, but I'd rather put the quality into my work than to rush and have to come back later to have to fix things. So stay tuned for more cool stuff from the labs and in the meantime, check out my latest concepts [1] [2] of bluetooth keyboard phones that would make the Internet Tablets that much cooler.