Tim Child

A man flying in a hot air balloon realized he was lost. Reducing altitude, he spotted a man on the ground and descended to shouting range..

“Excuse me,” he shouted. “Can you help me? I promised my friend I would meet him a half hour ago, but I don’t know where I am.”

The man below responded: “Yes. You are in a hot air balloon, hovering approximately 30 feet above this field. You are between 40 and 42 degrees North Latitude, and between 58 and 60 degrees West Longitude.”

“You must be an engineer,” responded the balloonist.

“I am,” the man replied. “How did you know?”

“Well,” said the balloonist, “everything you have told me is technically correct, but I have no idea what to make of your information, and the fact is I am still lost.”

Whereupon the man on the ground responded, “You must be a manager.”

“That I am” replied the balloonist, “but how did you know?”

“Well,” said the man, “you don’t know where you are, or where you’re going. You have made a promise which you have no idea how to keep, and you expect me to solve your problem. The fact is, you are in the exact same position you were before we met, but now it is somehow my fault.”

I installed xgl and compiz on top of  Gnome running on my Ubuntu install the other day and it looks fantastic.  Ubuntu was always the best looking desktop Linux distro I have tried and believe me I have tried a fair few but it was always lacking the polish of OSX and XP/2003 but no longer I think.

It really is a fantastic looking desktop environment, and the 3D graphics are really smooth on the NVidia 6800GT card I installed it on.  In fact I would say that in some ways it is nicer to use than a windows XP installation.

I have some screenshots to come that I have taken, and as soon as I get  the correct software I will probably do some movies aswell.

I have instructions (though a little rough around the edge) up here:

http://debian.timc3.com/index.php?title=XGL_Compiz

In America and Japan at least.  I haven’t yet heard when it is going to be arriving in Europe, but its going to be a 11th of November launch in America for $249 including the games to show off the new controller – tennis, bowling, boxing, golf to name but a few.  Hope it gets here soon.

Read engadgets overview of the press conference here : http://www.engadget.com/2006/09/14/live-at-nintendos-nyc-wii-press-conference/ 

Its only going to be in white in the US, with only one controller bundled, but the online service is looking good with such things as photo sharing and avatars built in.

So recently it was my birthday and I got a Nintendo DS Lite.  Some say that I am too old for this kind of thing, but I recently found out that it could be modified to run some homebrew code quite easily, including Linux and I couldn’t help myself.  My Xbox modifications have turned it into one of the best things I own, so I wanted to see what this does.
Well that was all I needed to get on the case, so I went into Bergen to get a black DSLite – the new small formfactor model, and I think it looks quite nice even though I probably bought it in the most expensive place in the world for it:

Then I ordered from a site called hopebuy  that initially looked quite dodgy, but turned out really well.  To get it working you need a gamecard running custom software, then a device to store your homebrew applications on. These usually are based around some kind of flash memory.  I decided upon a superkey card, and a supercard lite in black with a 1Gb Micro SD card.

It arrived in about 4 days from Hong Kong.  And all worked straight away, I formatted the MicroSD card (which is amazingly small – like a small fingernail), then put in the superkey in the back of the DS Lite, with the supercard lite in the front holding the MicroSD card.
Software is free available on the web from dev-scene.com and here are some highlights:

• DS:Linux.  A Linux port running on the DS – amazingly small text but I am going to use this for its SSH client I think!  With the built in WiFi it becomes fully networked.
• DS:DrumMachine: A TR909 and TR808 emulator for the DS. – haven’t got this to work yet but I am sure that I will do soon.
• DS:Organize: A palm pilot kinda app.
• DSVNC: A VNC client which I haven’t used yet because I don’t run VNC at home.
• Moonshell Media player for MP3s, videos etc..
• Nitrotracker – an xm tracker for the DS.  This is my favourite application so far, its alot of fun, and you can even record from the built in Microphone.

There are emulators, homebrew games and much more, but I haven’t had time to look at them all yet, and so I am going to go and have a play.  I will report back!