Here’s another one for the more-cool-than-practical files. PortableVNC, a VNC client for the PSP. It’s amazing how well it works, even if it’s pretty awkward to try to view a 1280×1024 desktop on a 480×272 screen. The only major drawback right now is one that’s common to all homebrew apps that make use of the 802.11b connection. Apparently no one’s figured out how to get a connection using DHCP to work yet so they all require you to assign a static IP. While that works fine at home, it’s not really a viable solution for using a public access point on the go. I’m sure that that will get taken care of eventually though. Meanwhile, Sony’s released version 2.0 of their firmware and it finally includes a web browser. Of course that comes at the cost of losing the ability to run any homebrew apps. I think I’ll pass, thanks.
Monthly Archive for July, 2005
Kimmee has just posted an awesome video taken at the San Diego Comic Con featuring amazing footage of nerds in their natural habitat. (And yes Carrie, they even got Stormtrooper Elvis.) SPOILER ALERT: She meets the actual real honest to goodness Lando Calrissian and wins at life. Man, I’ve really got to make it out there one of these years.
Having recently discovered both Geoblogging and Google Earth, the immediate thought that came to mind was: “Wouldn’t it be awesome if there was a way to view Geoblogger’s data in Google Earth?” And indeed there already is. It turns out that one of the more powerful but less advertised features of Google Earth is to allow what they call “Network Links“. What that means is that you can point to a remote source to display a point or set of points on the map, complete with descriptions and links to other content, just like a point from Google’s own data (like a result from a local search for a restaurant, for example). This makes Google Earth very open ended in terms of what data it can display and opens up some interesting possibilities. In a sense it’s like having RSS feeds for location based content, and Google Earth could be thought of as the feed reader. For example, if you wrote blog entries while traveling a lot, it would probably be pretty easy rig up a script to associate each blog post with the location where it was written in a network link file for Google Earth. Then any user of Google Earth could add the URL for that file as a network link and be able to see on the map where each post was written. I’ll admit I’m hard pressed to think of any practical use for that particular application, but I sure think it would be cool. Actually now that I think about it you could already do this since Geobloggers will already pick up any bookmarks that you geotag in del.icio.us. So you could just save the links of the relevant posts to del.icio.us, geotag them, and your travelling blogging would be mapped.
We got back from L.A. Sunday evening, and as much fun as the trip was it was kind of a relief to be back in the calm, quiet, somewhat not insane midwest. Mostly for the driving. I don’t think I’ll ever complain about the traffic out here again (hah) no matter how much construction there is. Traffic in L.A. is crazier by several orders of magnitude. As an example, the entrance to our hotel in Hollywood was on a 7 lane street. That meant that turning into it required a left turn across 4 lanes of heavy traffic. And that’s to say nothing of the freeways. I don’t know that we would have survived without the GPS in the rental car. It was a good trip though. We saw some sights (Hollywood Blvd, Santa Monica beach/pier, Beverly Hills), the wedding went well, we got some good pictures, and we even got to briefly meet up with kimmee and ovalteens at Amoeba Music. I definitely wish we could have spent more time with them, but the weekend was just too short. Out of everything in L.A., Amoeba was my favorite by far. It’s probably just as well that I don’t live near it or I’d probably spend obscene amounts of money there regularly.
Jolayne and I are heading out to LA tonight to go to a friend’s wedding this weekend. We won’t be there long but hopefully we’ll still get the chance to see some sights, get some good pictures, and possibly even hang out with Kimmee. It should be interesting since I’m totally the stereotypical paranoid midwesterner who’s convinced that LA is a gang-ridden, celebrity-infested, Mos Eisely-esque hive of villany, and that was even before I played Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas. Seriously though, it should be cool and it’s too bad we’ll only be there a couple of days.
Mobile GMaps is a Java app for cell phones that displays maps and satellite images from Google Maps. Pretty cool, seeing as how I now consider access to Google Maps to be a basic element of survival ranking somewhere in between food and shelter. Of course, most of what makes Google Maps what it is is its responsive interface, somethat that would no doubt be lost as a slow loading cell phone app. At least I would assume so. While I was surprised that my aging phone could run it, it turns out that my phone only supports .png images and this only displays the maps as .gif’s (since that’s what Google serves up the images as). As a result, I can see the interface but no maps and that’s no fun.
So Jolayne’s parent’s are in town this weekend and we’re taking them around KC and we happened to end up at the City Market today. We were looking around at an Asian market when I saw the most amazing thing in the world. Commando. Bear. 2000!!!! Holy crap. It’s an energy drink, obviously. No one’s going to name a fiber shake Commando Bear 2000. Although until today I thought no one would name anything Commando Bear 2000 so that shows what I know. I can only imagine this beverage being named by a room full of coked-out marketing execs on a deadline. “Ok, so this drink is like a dude who’s a commando by day but at night he turns into a bear! Or maybe a talking bear commando! Whatever! The point is he has to go back in time to the year 2000 to save the world! And he needs this energy drink to do it!” Commando Bear 2000 is an clearly an energy drink with a back story.
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