The Nintendo DS is kind of a cute little gadget, and what’s cool is that someone is already doing all the heavy lifting of getting TCP/IP to work on its wireless. This uses Adam Dunkel’s lwip implementation. Not quite done yet, but interesting!

How about a plastic bunny that waggles his ears when you get mail? Or you can use it to send instant message. Or songs. Via Wifi. It’s… just… so impossibly useless.

I need one.

I mused about a retro-style game console in today’s podcast, and over lunch I found xgamestation.com, who manufactures a simple video game system which is obviously inspired by the same ideas:

Imagine understanding how video game systems are designed and developed at an engineer’s level. Imagine writing your own games for a piece of hardware you’re personally capable of building. This isn’t a field trip to the factory — this is decades of video game hardware development boot camp compressed into a single product designed to upgrade your brain and take you to the next level of skill and understanding. It was estimated that only 100-200 people on the entire planet understood the workings of the legendary Atari 2600 and its design. What if you could design machines like this and beyond?

Nifty.

It uses the Ubicom SX52 chip, which is an interesting choice. The chips run fast enough that they support the idea of virtual peripherals, and are quite inexpensive. Far too inexpensive to really justify the $199.00 pricetag of the xgamestation, but still, there are probably some good ideas hidden in this.

Logged for later consumption.

Make up for it in volume!

According to this article on Slashdot, Gamespot claims that the Playstation 3 will cost $494 to make, but sell for $399. I’m curious. Does it really make sense to spand a billion dollars to try to win this race? Holy crap. That’s not chump change.

Ultimately, Sony (and presumably Microsoft as well) is banking that decreases in manufacturing costs as well as licensing fees will make up for this initial investment. I’m left wondering: isn’t it possible to make a game system which results in a more cash neutral position, and doesn’t rely so heavily on licensing? Could we actually have a real user friendly machine that encouraged individual creativity and experimentation?

Nintendo? Are you listening?

In the previous post, a couple of people noted problems with the API. Just in case nobody realized this: the key that you use is tied to the website that the request comes from. You can’t simply copy my key and make it work, you need to apply to get your own.

Addendum: Hmmm. It appears that a warning may be produced when the header is used in directories which are more than one level deep in the hierarchy from the registered URL. I’ll have to check this out some more. I may have to disable this until I get it sorted out. Stay tuned.

Addedum 2: I was apparently right. The key is only useful for the directory in which it is generated, not subdirectories. Sigh. Whose bright idea was that? This means that if I embed maps into posts (as I did below) they won’t appear properly (indeed, will generate a Javascript error) when they are viewed in comments or archives.

More discussion.

Now, you can embed google maps into your own websites. Like, well, this:

Okay, it’s not working right yet. I’m still trying to figure it out. Okay, got it working. Problem was that trying to insert script elements into a wordpress post was problematic because it insists on mangling quote characters. I’ll post again when I have this all figured out.

I’ve disabled the above, since it doesn’t work properly from comments and the archive.

Oh, forgot the link to the API description.

Addendum: The Text Control plugin allows you to disable funky quote remapping on a post, which keeps the Javascript from being mangled. Check it out.

Addendum 2: Check this out. Heh.

Well, that didn’t take very long. The first cool hack for Google Earth has already appeared. As is reported on lifehacker, there is a hack to download geotagged photos from Flickr that are close to the location you are looking at. That’s pretty cool. Now all I need is one of those GPS enabled camera phones… and…

I know, everyone and their mother already knows about this, but….

My brother called me at 11:15 last night to tell me about Google Earth. I actually had downloaded it, but not installed it. I’ve installed it. I’ve run it. It’s very cool. But it doesn’t quite know where my house is. Check it out.

I have a couple of friends who are still Lego fanatics. Just in case they missed this, check out BrickJournal – the magazine for Adult Fans of LEGO. It looks pretty cool. You can download the premiere issue as a 35 page PDF file from their website.

Reuters is reporting that TiVO To Go supports transfers to Windows Mobile devices. I’ll dig into this later tonight to see if I can make it work. I often thought it would be cool to have The Daily Show available on my PDA.

Just some cool links to information about the Dell Axim X50v, the PDA that I use to record all my recent podcasts. Some good stuff in here I haven’t seen before.

Aximsite – x50v Quicklinks…Software and Tweaks You “Need”…

Crazy. The gents at SnapStream built PVR using their software and six capture cards. Then, they redid it with the new Hauppauge dual tuner cards. Now, they are offering a package deal so that you can build your own. For < $500, you get the capture cards and software. Pretty neat deal, but things that cause me to watch (or want to watch) more TV are not in my future. 🙂