Real Rants
Greatest Goddamn Game To Grace God's Green Girth
September 22nd, 2009
By Gazok (Permalink)
If you've never played any of the games based on the Worms 2 engine, you are a filthy slut, and I hereby disown you from life.
That is all.
The New iPod Shuffle
April 14th, 2009
By Gazok (Permalink)
Apologies in advance for the quality of this preview, as it's rather late.
I was on the Apple website, doing research for an article idea. Yes, I've been neglectful; like, a parent stabbing their child repeatedly in the heart neglectful. But I'm going to resume trying to make this site worth the £24 it's costing, as soon as I can be bothered.
Anyway, while on Apple's website, I found that they've released the next generation iPod Shuffle. The gimmick here being that it speaks to you. Now, Text To Speech has been rapidly improving over the years, and my own MP3 player has a pretty impressive array of voices to choose from for reading text files. The only real difference is that TTS is the Shuffle's equivalent of a GUI. It tells you what song you're currently listening to, the artist's name, and the next song in your playlist. The TTS "Voice" you get depends on the operating system with which you transferred the song. Funnily enough, the PC voice (Vista's "Microsoft Anna") is a lot smoother and sounds more natural than the Mac alternative. It's somewhat ridiculous the way adverts are putting so much emphasis on TTS support, when as a technology it's such old news, but I guess this is Apple, and I think Steve Jobs would probably haemorrhage if someone suggested he sell a product without some "new, innovative feature", whether it was true or not.
It strikes me that they could have saved an awful lot of time and effort had they simply put a screen on it. There's enough space - just - to embed a small LCD screen to the side; make it a high enough definition, and you could display far more information, possibly making the device more user friendly. However, I'm not an Apple employee and have never owned an Apple product (except an iPod Nano which broke in less than three months of little use), and so obviously know nothing about media player ergonomics, and my opinion that you can't possibly get as much information from a voice as from a screen invalid.
Still, it would be unfair to say that that the interface is all bad. They've had the good idea to put the controls on the headphones, which I think is far more hype worthy, because it will mean you won't have to dig the device out of your pockets to change song. However, this could still backfire, as Apple headphones are usually pretty fragile, and putting the only controls on them makes them both more susceptable to breakage and irreplaceable.
When I first saw the advert, I thought that it used voice recognition software so you could control it with speech. That would be cool, but my first thought was that people (like me) would endeavour to annoy people (like you) by jumping on trains and shouting, "UNLOCK SKIP SKIP SKIP SKIP..." until they ran out of breath.
With this generation just over half the size of the last, it won't be long before Apple releases a Shuffle you can lose under your fingernail.
What's The Crack?
March 17th, 2009
By Gazok (Permalink)
Well, happy St. Patrick's day, everyone!
I celebrated by not celebrating, unless watching the Simpsons episode WE GOT FIRST counts - which it doesn't.
Got a hot new project on the make, and I might just elaborate later.
Toodles.
ICT
March 11th, 2009
By Gazok (Permalink)
Well, I would be happy with a fail in ICT, but my teacher is getting a bit angry, so I'm going to see how long the entire project will take me in minutes.
Edit: As it turns out, I'm too lazy to even try.
God-Sodding-Damnit!
October 24th, 2008
By Gazok (Permalink)
My headphones have broken again. That's the third pair in just as many months.
Well, the first pair (£5-£7) didn't break, as such, but they were so badly designed they cut into my ears, the sores from which still haven't receded. (Don't buy Advent, kids!)
The second pair were awesome, though (£11-12). Really nice and comfortable, with better sound quality. I beat them regularly, though, dropping them on the floor from a height, so it's no surprise they broke.
The third and current pair (£14) seemed a little more robust, but I didn't drop them at all, and they still ended up broken in the same way as the second. I was watching some interesting right-wing propaganda, and I noticed that it wasn't working when it started working again for a second. These ones had even better sound quality, but hurted my ears something awful.
The problem is really strange, in that it's only the headphone opposite the wire connection that breaks, but the angle of the wire right at the base of the other headphone affects it, while I would have assumed a break further along the wire. I guess I'm going to have to dike out the wire and see what I can do, but in the mean time I'm ordering a pair of Razer Piranha headphones, as it's my birthday's in 5 days (I've heard some really bad stuff about the Barracuda range, and the ship really sucked in Freelancer, so I'm going with the cheapo option).
The Naming Award
August 1st, 2008
By Gazok (Permalink)
Today, my friend Jack found an online writing competition. He showed me, and we were all geared up to considering entering, when we found out that it was marked on length, and that if you met a certain length you won, and so did everyone else. That's all very well and good, but as proponents of the Quality Not Quantity theory, this seemed like a pretty sissy criterion. we were outraged.
So we decided to make our own. And so that's what we're going to do. The problem is, we have no idea what to call it. I wanted to call it the Finxi Awards (Finxi being latin for Fiction), but Jack then made the fair point that it sounds like a dog's name. Here's our maybe list after several hours of bickering:
The Finxi Awards
The Antagonist Award
The New Age Writing Award
The Final Draft Award
Suggestions welcome!
Edit: We have now chosen The Finxi Award. I'm sure I'll be updating again with more detail when it's not nearly midnight.
Icendoan
>_> Only 50,000? I would write for it but I'm crap at it.
Icen
Friday 1st August 2008, 22:39:32
Chloe
Perhaps Award doesn't need to be in the name?
Think of something unique?
I dunno...
It's too early in the morning...
Chloe
Saturday 2nd August 2008, 22:39:32
Dave
I tend to think of uniqueness as insane and self-stating obvious-conclusions. It's also a plus if said uniqueness happens to contain enough cliche's to above some arbitrary critical mass to warp reality and shoot past and around infinity and become something solely original.
Monday 4th August 2008, 01:16:15
Dan W
I like 'The Final Draft Award'.
Tuesday 21st October 2008, 21:34:11