Archive for February 16th, 2006
Both Drinkin’ and Bloggin’ in it
Posted on February 16, 2006, by Conor O'Neill, under Drink, Ireland.
Guinness has a blog. All the skinny at gapingvoid.
Looks like a pretty decent attempt at a corporate blog. They have a posting about great Guinness ads. One thing I’ve always hated about their web-site is that if you want to see their genius US ads instead of their dire “meaningful” Irish ones, you have to pretend to be in the US when signing in on the home page. Boys, dump the swimming across the Atlantic crap and give us “Brilliant!” over here please.
[tags]Guinness[/tags]
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DS - not such a toy after all
Posted on February 16, 2006, by Conor O'Neill, under Gadgets, Technology.
I think I like Oscar’s Nintendo DS more than he does. He got Karts for christmas and I was blown away by how easy it was to set up with my wireless router so that I could play against other people on the web. Obviously I always come last.
But one of the hinges on the DS broke recently. Looks like a design flaw to me (considering the new DS Lite has a much meatier hinge). Glue would not work. I spent hours searching for replacement parts. Finally, I found a guy on eBay in Pennsylvania who sold replacement cases and would ship to Ireland. $24 plus shipping and a week or so later, I had the case. Then I discovered I needed a special screwdriver to open it. This time Lik-Sang came to the rescue and for a few Euro I got the screwdriver in the post less than a week later.
Last night we took apart the old one, moved all the bits over to the new case and were shocked to find that it worked! Fiddley as f**k but a damn sight cheaper than buying a new one.
But it got me thinking about the DS. It has two ARM CPUs and the main one has about the same welly as a Palm Tungsten T. It has two screens, one of which is touch senstitive and it has Wi-Fi. Would it not strike Nintendo to offer a web-browser as a plug-in cartridge? Or an MP3 player or a multitude of things other than games which would make use of all its features? I know it is outside of their comfort zone and they don’t want to make the mistakes that Nokia made with the N-Gage. But still, it is a PDA in all but software. I fell asleep with that thought in my mind.
Anyway, I start checking blogs this morning and what do I find? Opera are releasing a browser for the DS!! Fan-bloody-tastic. Obviously, I ‘ll be keeping that cartridge for myself and not letting Oscar anywhere near it. I can’t wait to browse the web at a wireless hot-spot in an airport using a kids toy.
And Nintendo are going to release a digital TV receiver for it too. Not so awesome for us as we are now about 8 years behind on getting digital terrestrial tv in Ireland but would be tres cool for Freeview viewers in the UK.
PSP my bum.
[tags]Nintendo DS, DS Parts, DS Karts, Opera, Wi-Fi, PSP, Lik-Sang[/tags]
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