The Bear

If it wasn’t for music I don’t know what I’d do sometimes.  I recently caught an episode of Penny-Arcade: The Series, and there was this track featured by Alex Mauer simply called “The Bear.”  The song was so provocative that it inspired me to purchase Alex’s full album on-the-spot.  Truthfully, I didn’t know I was purchasing a physical album (I presumed it would be an MP3 download) but I’ve since received (and ripped) Alex’s  ”9999,” and it was well-worth the purchase.

Unfortunately there is no online version of the song that I can find, so you’ll have to watch the episode of Penny Arcade linked above to see what I’m talking about.  I’d recommend taking a look either way, since their show personifies my dream job.  The song shows up at approximately 7:00 minutes.

Random

Posted via web from dmkemick’s posterous

Which company inspired this design?

I’m sure you’ll never guess!  (click to enlarge)

Hip-Hop: Can-I-Bus and Eminem Battle Reignited

This is kind of an “off-topic” post but since Canibus is my favorite rapper this news has me pumped. Today a new track leaked with Canibus, DZK and D-12 on the same song dissing Eminem. This is a continuation of the original Bis/Eminem battle that was never resolved. A lot of people are confused by the timing because Canibus has been talking a lot about collaborations being the future of rap, an idea he’s supporting with SpitBoss.com. In recent interviews he’s talked about the rebirth of lyricism coming from unity and big names working together, and he’s also hinted at being out of the rap-battle scene, so why does this track come out now?

Honestly, and this is completely unofficial, I think that Canibus might have reached out to Eminem to put this behind them and maybe put out a song together. Eminem might have ignored/declined the offer, leading Bis to write the verses contained in the song. The song seems to scream of provocation. I think Canibus is just trying to get Eminem’s attention here so that he can come out with a solo track like 2nd Round Knockout down the road. Either way it’s very exciting. The video is below.

Server Closet

Whoever ran these cables must have been very short.

Posted via web from dmkemick’s posterous

My monthly post.

It seems like I’ve fallen off with posting lately.  Honestly, I feel that talking about most of the things I would normally talk about is kind of a waste of time because there’s a lot of other (better) ways to keep up on what’s hot in the tech industry.  First and foremost I’d recommend listening to as many TWiT netcasts as possible.  The most obvious of the bunch would be This Week in Tech itself, but I’d also recommend taking a look at MacBreak Weekly and Windows Weekly while you’re there.  Those are my primary sources for tech news.

On the gaming side of things I’d recommend the usuals.  My favorite of the bunch is the Joystiq Podcast, the hosts of which not only review the news from the past week but also provide an often-times hysterical delivery.  My second standby when it comes to gaming podcasts would have to be 4 Guys 1UP, previously the 1UP Yours podcast with Garnett Lee.  Garnett has since moved on to bigger and better things at Gamefly but David Ellis has done a great job in his stead.

The latest additions to my repertoire are CheapyD’s CAGcast and CO-OP by Area 5, a band of 1UP alumnus.  The CAGcast (short for Cheap Ass Gamer, a website dedicated to gaming deals) is probably the most laid-back of the bunch and, to be honest, I mostly listen to it for CheapyD and Wombat’s off-topic banter.  CO-OP on the other hand is a masterfully-produced Revision 3 video show that reviews the past week’s releases.

So, now that I’ve more-or-less put myself out of a job by sharing all of my sources for information, what can I offer?  How about a Canibus song (best rapper alive):

Google Voice

I was fortunate enough to get invites to both Google Voice and Google Wave this week, but for now I’m going to stick with discussing Google Voice. This is mostly because nobody I know has Google Wave yet and, for a product that’s about collaboration with other people, it makes it hard to form an educated opinion about its usefulness.

Google Voice is a new service from Google which lets you link multiple phone numbers (home phone, work phone, mobile, etc.) to one new number of your choosing, as long as it’s available.  You can search for numbers via keyword (for example your name), area code or zip code.  Once you’ve chosen your new number all you have to do is link your pre-existing numbers to that one and you’ll have access to the host of cool features that Google Voice provides.

The most obvious feature Google Voice provides is call forwarding.  Using the site’s settings you can set Google Voice to forward calls and messages to one of your various phones automatically.  For example, you could set your work phone to only receive Google Voice calls between 9 and 5 on weekdays, or your home phone to only receive calls on weekends.  You can even setup and manage certain groups of contacts and set the default phone for each – for example, if you want to direct work calls to your mobile phone you can do that.

The next feature I like is getting Google into some hot water with carriers – free SMS messaging.  From the Google Voice website you can send text messages to any phone, for free.  Many people have presumed that this feature alone is why the Google Voice application was denied from Apple’s App Store.  You can be sure that AT&T wasn’t too excited about the idea.

One of the best features you get with Google Voice is the purest form of free visual voicemail I’ve ever seen.  Voicemails sent to your Google Voice account are automatically transcribed to text and forwarded to the Google Voice website where you have an inbox for all incoming messages.  The transcriptions are surprisingly accurate, but you can also playback the message from the website if there are a few missed words.  As you would expect, from your Google Voice inbox you can read incoming messages as though you were reading email from your Gmail inbox.  You can search for messages, leave notes to yourself and even add stars to important messages so you can come back to them later.

All said I think Google Voice is an excellent service.  I can only hope that someone at Apple or AT&T decides to let the application through to the App Store.  If not, you can bet that Google will work on a mobile web version of Google Voice like they’ve done with most of their other services, and we’ll get access to it anyways.

Snow Leopard – Impressions after 24 hours

So I’ve had 24 hours to use Snow Leopard on my iMac, and I have some thoughts. First, some background.

Though my original intent was to do a fresh install, I decided to go ahead and try an upgrade from Leopard instead. I have all of my data backed up but being that this week has been a busy one I didn’t really have the time to restore it (especically because my iPhone is connected to the iMac). So, I went ahead and upgraded. It took about a half hour which is bit longer than expected, but not altogether bad.

On the first boot of Snow Leopard I had two reactions:

1. Oooooh, pretty wallpaper
2. Okay, what else changed?

Snow Leopard has been getting more negative attention than a lot of people expected because the changes are so minute.  Sure there’s dock expose, the 6-7GB of extra space after install, and scrolling stacks but most changes will go unnoticed.  For example the entire Finder has been rewritten, but it works 98.8% identically to how it did in previous versions.  It’s a bit faster but other than that there are no noticeable changes.

To be honest, Snow Leopard does feel like sort of a service pack for Leopard.  In fact, to an average user, the changes might be completely non-existant.  Things are a bit snappier and most of the animations look a lot better but otherwise there isn’t much to say.  Here are the few features I’ve noticed and liked so far:

• Improved Text-To Speech - I use the mac’s text-to-speech to alert me of the time every half hour.  The new version is noticeably less robotic and overall sounds much better.
• Animations – When flipping between spaces or opening a stack the animation is much more fluid and cooler-looking
• All New Stacks - Stacks basically work like they should have worked from the beginning.  You can scroll through stacks, and most importantly you can navigate folders in stacks without having to open up the Finder
• Selectively Snappier - Though I haven’t noticed much of a boost in speed in all-around computing I do notice that the Finder, Spaces and Stacks respond much snappier in Snow Leopard
• New Wallpapers
• More HD Space – Freed up about 6GB of space after my upgrade, kind of negligible on a 500GB hard drive but it’s better than losing space I suppose

So is Snow Leopard worth it?  Honestly, maybe not.  The changes aren’t all that impressive to me yet.  Maybe over the next couple weeks I’ll really begin to appreciate the new upgrade but right now it’s a slight improvement at best.  I think this weekend I’m going to go ahead and do a fresh install and if that improves the experience at all I’ll make sure to do a follow-up post.

Summer of Arcade

This is just a quick rambling AudioBoo about the quality of downloadable games we’ve seen this summer, which only further justifies the medium as a contender in the video game market.  I haven’t purchased a single hard copy of a game since Fight Night Round 4 in June, and in the meantime my attention has been kept by arcade games like Battlefield 1943 and Shadow Complex.  I bet GameStop loves to hear that.

Is the PSP Go overpriced?

I think I’m one of the 10 people on Earth that is looking forward to plunking down the cash to buy a PSP Go this Fall.  To be honest the hook manifests itself in the downloadable games – I totally covet digital downloads and the thought that I don’t have to carry around a bunch of UMD discs is extremely attractive.  On top of that the new design is pretty neat, and the overall package is significantly smaller.  What’s not to love?

Well, a couple things.  First off, and this is the lesser of the two qualms, gamers tend to be upset that Sony didn’t add a second analog stick to the device.  I’m completely lost on this gripe.  It’s been clear to me that the PSP Go was more a refinement of the PSP line than an evolution, and therefore since the device relies on the PSP’s back-catalog of games there’s no point to add a second analog stick.  If the focus of the Go is to play all of the PSP games that are already out, games that haven’t been developed with 2 analog sticks in mind, why would they add one now and change everything?  Not only that, but they’d put developers in a jam since they’d have to decide whether it was worth adding support for a second stick to appease the Go customers only.  I’m always against splitting the market, especially when it comes to game consoles, and that’s exactly what a second analog stick would do.  Save it for the PSP 2.

The more obvious complaint about the PSP Go is its price.  At $250 it costs the same as the standard PSP did at the product’s launch in 2005.  It’s $80 more than the previous model right now, and to be honest it looks like even more of a sham with the PS3’s price dropped to $299.  Basically, consumers are faced with the choice of getting a PSP Go for $250, or paying just $50 more (less than the price of a game) to get a PS3 which plays blu-ray movies and next-generation games.

Additionally, Microsoft is dropping the price of the Xbox 360 Pro in reaction to the Sony price cuts, so you can get a 360 with a useable hard drive for $250 now.  That’s right, the same price as the PSP Go.  That’s not even mentioning the Nintendo Wii.  Based on the value-transfer in the console market just in the past few weeks, I really think Sony needs to cut the price on the Go if they want to sell more than 10 of them.

There’s a couple ways they could do this.  The first and most-obvious way would be to drop the price to $199.  However, at Sony they might think that cutting the price of the Go before it hits the market would degrade its reputation as a premium product to potential purchasers.  The question of whether or not average consumers even know about the PSP Go yet, or more importantly if they know what it costs, is an entirely different matter.

The second route they could take is to just bundle in some extra games or accessories.  Right now Sony has started a program where, if you register your PSP G0 by October 10th, 2009, you’ll get a free copy of Gran Turismo PSP.  Why not bundle $50 worth of PSN Store credit with the device?  Or at least bundle 3 downloadable games.  That way they could stick with the $250 price but say it’s basically $199 since you’re getting $50 worth of games for free.  Makes sense to me.