CrunchGear |  |
- Daily Crunch: The Spy Who Texts Me Edition
- Fun Fact: New Super Mario Brothers is totally amazing when you play it with a sniper rifle
- Resident Evil on NES? Now wait just a darn minute
- Text-to-donate total exceeds $10m – I think we’re onto something
- Ever wondered what an image would sound like?
- Mathletes appreciate the Pi shower curtain
- Interview: We talk to the lead developer of Plex Media Center for Mac OS X: It was doing Boxee-like stuff before Boxee was cool
- Rumor: iPhone Boot Camp listserv confirms January 27th event?
- Smartbook trademark owners not as specifically intelligent as their product
- First look: Inkia MID500 5-inch slate computer
- Resistive screens are dead: HTC now selling a stylus for capacitive screens
- Conan O’Brien puts his Tonight Show set on craigslist
- Two-week iMac rentals for $8.56 per day?
- Poll: Do you want a Wii HD?
- Ringo Starr is not good at Rock Band. And?
- Video: There’s a lot going on in this Star Wars Adidas commercial
- Activision alludes to DJ Hero 2: Go ahead and pretend to be surprised
- PolyTune: The Violent Femmes tune all their guitar strings at once on the bus
- Free Wi-Fi at McDonald’s starts today. Buh, buh, bup, buh, bah, I’m lovin’ it!!!
- CrunchDeals: Xbox Live Gold for $30
| Daily Crunch: The Spy Who Texts Me Edition Posted: 16 Jan 2010 12:00 AM PST
Here’s a handful of Friday’s noteworthy stories: Text-to-donate total exceeds $10m – I think we're onto something
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| Fun Fact: New Super Mario Brothers is totally amazing when you play it with a sniper rifle Posted: 15 Jan 2010 06:00 PM PST |
| Resident Evil on NES? Now wait just a darn minute Posted: 15 Jan 2010 05:10 PM PST
Not that NES game piracy is a big issue these days, at least not in cartridge form. And although this RE clone is pretty unexpected to find in a physical medium, this kind of game is increasingly common. “De-makes,” as they are called, are all over the place, from Left 4 Dead to Gang Garrison II — TIGsource had a whole competition based on them.
There are a ton of these “pirate originals” cartridges, but unfortunately it looks like they’ve recently been taken off the auction block (bought?). Ah well. Now you know what to search for. [via Technabob]
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| Text-to-donate total exceeds $10m – I think we’re onto something Posted: 15 Jan 2010 04:23 PM PST
The success of this campaign raises some questions about the way this sort of thing should be handled by the telecoms. A $10 charge will appear on my T-Mobile bill, I’m assuming; they volunteered to support this effort, so I think that’ll be the end of it, but now that I’ve gotten a taste of it, I want more. Not necessarily just for donations, but for mobile charging in general. I don’t mean to minimize the importance of the donations and things going on right now, but they bring up a few issues worth discussing. The ease of payment is made possible by the fact that T-Mo already has my card and address. Making a donation was easy; wouldn’t it be just as easy for an online retailer to say “text 342856 with BILL to buy this item!” This would work better for single-serving sites or those with limited numbers of products, but still, it’d be nice. But that makes T-Mobile into an arbiter of normal transactions. The $10 I’ve donated to the Red Cross has been given to them, but it won’t be paid back to T-Mo until my monthly payment goes through. What if it were a $20 donation? or a $50 shoe purchase? It would be good to have a system in place for this that is well-understood by consumers. Having an e-wallet of sorts, perhaps managed for an extra $5/month by your service provider or something, would be a great way to avoid having your credit card information spread over 10 or 15 sites. Easy pay systems are here and there, I know, but they’re far from mainstream yet — this donation rush might just be the thing that tips the scales, though. People might find, as I did, that it would be just as easy to buy as it was to donate. It’s something we’ll have to deal with sooner or later. Of course, there are things like Square out there, but doesn’t Square strike you as a bit of a weird hybrid? It’ll last for a bit, but the marriage of the old card system with a new cardless system seems like a sideways step instead of a forwards one. The challenge will be to make a system that is secure, robust, and easily accessible from any phone.
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| Ever wondered what an image would sound like? Posted: 15 Jan 2010 03:30 PM PST
Intrigued, I thought I’d spice up this Friday afternoon with audio created from some of my favorite images, but alas! it was not to be. It seems there’s a patent on this technology, and Kenji Kojima, the creator of RGB MusicLab, was told to stop:
Some samples are still online, if MIDI is your thing.
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| Mathletes appreciate the Pi shower curtain Posted: 15 Jan 2010 03:30 PM PST
You've been adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing all day long. The sweat gathers in the arm pit region of your short-sleeve button-down work shirt. Your pocket protector feels like it weighs a thousand pounds. Only 15 minutes to go and you can hop in your Subaru, drive home, and take a nice, long shower. If only there was a shower curtain to reflect your status as one of the world's most elite mathletes. Now there is. Available at ThinkGeek.com for $30, the Pi Shower Curtain showcases the Pi logo from afar (you have a tattoo of it, of course) and, upon closer inspection, contains the first 4,600 digits of the sexiest number in the history of numbers. Pi Shower Curtain [ThinkGeek.com]
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| Posted: 15 Jan 2010 02:30 PM PST
As far as XBMC forks go, Boxee certainly appears to have the most heat. It has VC money pouring in, flashy deals with content providers, and you’ll soon be able to buy a dedicated D-Link box to more easily use it on your TV. But Boxee isn’t the only XBMC-based media center that’s worth your time. It’s not even the first XBMC fork to go out and make a name for itself. Plex, which is exclusive to Mac OS X, was Boxee before Boxee was cool. I recently talked to the lead developer, Elan Feingold, to get a better understand of what Plex is, what it does, and where it’s going. Needless to say, if you’re running Mac OS X, you ought to give it a shot. It’s good. Plex is a media center that’s based on XBMC, which began its life as Xbox Media Player, a media center that ran on hacked Microsoft Xboxes. Xbox Media Player was first released in 2002, and was far and away the most feature-rich media center of its time. As the project matured—and the project was in no way endorsed or supposed by Microsoft—it became XBMC, of which Plex (and Boxee and MediaPortal and Voddler, to name a few forks) is based upon. In other words, every time you praise Boxee (or Plex, or any other XBMC-derived media center), keep in mind how it all started: a hobbyist project designed to play and organize videos, music, and photos on hacked Xboxes. (You may even want to go further back and give credit to the developers of mplayer and FFmpeg, the two core, open source "engines" that powered Xbox Media Player from Day One.) Let’s give credit where credit is due, is all. With that, here’s my conversation with Elan. Hopefully it’s illuminating. CrunchGear: What is Plex? How would you describe it to a total computer novice? Did you ever use XBMC/XBMP for the Xbox1? Elan Feingold: Plex is a media center, which is to say it’s a program which gives you a “ten foot interface” for your media. You sit on the couch, drink beer, and view your videos, photos, and play music. It came out of the desire to get the XBMC code running on a more powerful machine that could handle higher resolution media, and the perfect platform seemed to be the Mac (especially with the Mini’s awesome form factor). I used XBMC for a few years on an old XBox (which is now sitting in my garage gathering mold) and loved it. CG: When did development begin? How many people are on the development team? What’s your relationship with the XBMC guys? Elan: The XBMC code was first downloaded to attempt to build it on the Mac in December 2007. My wife was out of town and I was bored, basically. Currently we have about five developers working on the different aspects of Plex. When I posted a progress report with screenshots about progress on the Mac port, I was contacted by the XBMC team, and brought on their team. Over the next few months, I made some early releases of the port, which I’d called “OSXBMC”. However, it became clear pretty early on that I had different goals and vision for the project than the XBMC team did, so we ended up forking the code to become Plex not too long afterwards.
CG: Oh man, I remember OSXBMC! I remember the day it became Plex, too. Elan: Do you remember all the shit I got about the name? CG: Meh, people are haters. Elan: You can’t please everyone. CG: Right. Elan: That [the OSXBMC time period] was a pretty hard time emotionally for me, just because of all the work i was doing on the code and all the strife and vitriol. CG: Wow, OK. Now I have to ask do you (or the team) make any money off Plex? (How many mugs did you sell?) Or is this a labor-of-love sort of thing? Elan: We have a donate link [the top-right hand corner] that people have been very generous with, but it’s not much more than is needed to cover servers, services, equipment, etc. I think we’ve sold a dozen or so mugs! So for now this has been very much a labor of love for us all. CG: Gotcha. Now is Plex *just* a labor of love, or do you guys one day hope to make a few dollars for yourselves? Elan: Don’t get me wrong, we’d all love to be doing this full-time and getting paid for it. CG: You guys seem to have more of an "indie" feel to you than Boxee does. Elan: I have been known to sport trendy facial hair. CG: What a phenomenal response. Elan: But that’s exactly the word we like to use to describe ourselves, “indie.” CG: OK, well one of the big Boxee features is that you can have all sorts of apps on it. Correct me if I’m wrong, but Plex has had that for a little while. In fact, XBMC on the Xbox had little apps you could install, Shoutcast radio, X-Link Kai. Basically, Boxee didn’t invent the idea of media center apps, which I sorta feel is the perception out there… Elan: Yeah, we’ve had the equivalent feature for over a year now. We have over 130 “apps.” They are easier to write than their Boxee counterparts, or their XBMC counterparts for that matter. We actually had our “app store,” called the Plex Media Server, running before Boxee came out with their “app box” or whatever it’s called.
CG: So how much coding knowhow would it take to develop a Plex app? What are some of the more succesful ones? Elan: Basically, you need to know a bit of Python, which is very easy to learn. You can write a Plex app in as little as 10-15 lines of code, since we have a really great framework for writing them, which ws developed by James Clarke, one of our main developers. Our most popular ones are Apple Movies Trailers, You Tube, Hulu, Netflix, MTV Music Videos, BBC iPlayer, Vimeo. We’ve had over one million app downloads so far. CG: Now do you guys run into any issues with those guys (Hulu, Netflix, etc.)? I seem to recall Boxee and Hulu going back and forth for a while. Elan: Yeah, so Netflix and Hulu have been polar opposites. We’ve had lots of friendly chats with Netflix and have a great relationship with them. We are listed in their app gallery as an official Netflix approved app. With Hulu our relationship has been a bit less congenial. They’ve taken quite a few direct actions to attempt to break our support for their site. Which i really appreciate, as it helped us make our support for those sorts of sites much, much more robust. And I’m flattered, they once named a div in their HTML “PL” which i assume stood for “Plex” (since it was trying to break us). CG: That’s great. Well, not great, you know what I mean. Do you have those sorts of problems with any other content providers? Elan: Most other content providers (such as Spotify, lots of other Swedish providers) really like being on our platform. Many have approached us, even offering support. Amusingly it seems to depend on the country. For some reason Swedish content providers really seems to like Plex, and, funny fact, Sweden has the highest per-capita of Plex users in the world. CG: How does the U.S. rank? Do you have stats like, "We have 100 downloads from Texas, 400 from Paris, etc."? Elan: I’d have to find the report, but in the top 10 certainly, no thanks to the content providers! CG: Do you talk to the Boxee guys at all? Have they tried to hire away one of your devs (or you) with offers of sweet VC money? Elan: Funny story, I actually cooked dinner for Avner Ronen when he came out to Maui to see me. Besides that, I don’t think he’s approached any of our team. I made him a really spicy green Thai curry, and we had a friendly chat. CG: Let’s talk Boxee box for a bit. Let’s say Netgear approached you guys about making a Boxee box-like box, would it be something you’d consider? Elan: We’re not convinced that people want yet another box. That said, we do realize that the Mac Mini at $600 is too expensive to get the number of eyeballs we want.
CG: And the Apple TV is still too underpowered to run it properly right? Elan: So we’re committed to getting Plex to people more cheaply, just not with a piece of hardware. Yeah, I think the Apple TV is not a viable platform. It’s underpowered and closed. CG: The Apple TV hasn’t done too well either, compared to other Apple products. Elan: There’s been some buzz with XBMC lately with their support of a Broadcom chip that can do HD decoding, but you have to take apart your Apple TV and install the chip, which we don’t think many people who don’t live in their parents’ basement are going to do. CG: Exactly, I was that kid, modding Xboxes, staying up all night trying to figure things like that out. Elan: Yep, I started off life as an electrical engineer, so I was that kid too. CG: So what would you say is the ideal Plex setup right now? I used to run a long HDMI cable from my iMac to my TV, then plug the iMac into a cheap 5.1 rig. Obviously not everyone is going to do that… Elan: If you can afford it, the new Mac Minis are awesome: quiet, small, play HD content perfectly. That plus a surround receiver and you’re set. But yeah, people do use their laptops and iMacs as well. Fifty percent of our users use a Mac Mini, 20 percent use MacBook Pro, 12 percent use MacBook, 11 percent use iMac, 3 percent use Hackintosh. And apparently five of them use an XServe. CG: That’s great, some guy at a server farm watching movies during the night shift. Now is Plex going for the “average guy” right now, or more the power user? Elan: Plex is going for the average media-saavy consumer, and we realize that we have quite a bit of work left to make it easier to use. We don’t want to dumb it down as much as, say, Front Row, but right now there are two many sharp edges you can hurt yourself on. CG: Like a new user interface you mean? Or that Plex is too Swiss Army Knife-y? Elan: Like an evolved user interface, yes. One of the things that software projects have to keep in mind is that adding a feature adds a non-zero support cost. We don’t think having more features is necessarily better or more compelling, except to a small minority of people. CG: Yeah, I’m one of those people who’d rather see software do one thing well than do 100 things not so well. Elan: Precisely, and open source projects are notoriously bad at that. CG: Yeah they are. So are you developing a new UI now, or is that something you have on your checklist of things to do in the future? Elan: We’re in the process of evolving the current interface, we’ve spent quite a bit of time mocking things up, even building Flash interfaces to usability-test them. CG: Oh, before I forget, do you have an official Twitter account? Twitter is all the rage, so I hear. Elan: @Plexapp CG: Excellent. So what’s next for Plex, just continued development? Elan: Well, we’ve been hard at work on the Plex/Nine series. CG: Will there be anything as dramatic as the Plex Media Server again? That sorta came out of nowhere. Elan: Yes, you’re going to see a very interesting new Plex feature within the next couple of months. CG: Excellent. Any hints? Elan: Also with the Plex/Nine series will come the new Library system for managing your local content. It’s built from the ground up to kick ass. CG: I was just gonna ask, built by you guys? Elan: The new library system is built 100% by us, yes. So it should be an exciting year for Plex, I think, between the new Library, evolved user interface, and this surprise new feature. CG: Very cool. What else do you do besides Plex? Elan: I’m a freelance software consultant during the day. It’s only at night when I change into my shirt with the giant “P” in front. CG: When can we expect Plex/Nine? Elan: That seems to be the question everyone is asking! CG: Like a rough estimate, or you can say "when it’s ready!" Elan: I would say that you’ll see pieces emerge over the next few months. We’ll be releasing different bits and pieces over time. We’ll have the stable Plex/Eight series, and then we’ll begin introducing some of the new features into the Plex/Nine releases for people to play with. One of our main focuses has always been stability, which is why there have been five releases so far of the stable Plex/Eight series, with a focus on bug fixes. CG: Has Apple ever contacted you guys? Maybe just to say, "Hey, cool app, guys." Elan: We have never heard from them, although a number of people who work in Apple retail stores have commented, "I recommend Plex to customers!" But nothing from Apple corporate to even acknowledge our existence. That’s fine with us, we’ve always tried to stay on its good side by not releasing Plex for a hacked Apple TV, etc. CG: Have you given any thought to an iPhone App, like a fancy remote control or something? Elan: Well, there are a few remotes out there already for the iPhone that support Plex. They seem to work pretty well. CG: Oh, I don’t have an iPhone so I wasn’t sure. Elan: You don’t have an iPhone? How can that possibly be? CG: No sir! Elan: How can you live? Oh, right, New York City. If you want to actually make phone calls the iPhone doesn’t work too well there I hear. CG: It really doesn’t. It’s pretty shocking. A piece of junk Verizon phone sounds better. OK then, I have World of Warcraft to play so I’ll let you go. I’m not kidding, either. Elan: Goodbye, and thanks! Plex runs on Intel Macs running Leopard or higher. You can follow its development on Twitter, Facebook, or on its blog.
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| Rumor: iPhone Boot Camp listserv confirms January 27th event? Posted: 15 Jan 2010 02:27 PM PST
True? False? I have a line in at the boot camp folks but presumably devs would be the first to know what’s up. This could also be a big old shot in the dark by the Boot Camp people. We’ll soon see.
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| Smartbook trademark owners not as specifically intelligent as their product Posted: 15 Jan 2010 02:00 PM PST
For some odd reason Slashgear has been using the term smartbook in their posts, a portmanteau that is, arguably, about as descriptive as “sandwichbacon” or “cleverob/gyn” in that it conflates two terms in with the suggestion that other members of its own classification are not equally sandwich-oriented, clever, or smart. While we will forgive them this slip, they just got a fax from the law firm in Germany tasked with protecting this term in the market.
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| First look: Inkia MID500 5-inch slate computer Posted: 15 Jan 2010 01:25 PM PST
Cons
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| Resistive screens are dead: HTC now selling a stylus for capacitive screens Posted: 15 Jan 2010 01:11 PM PST  When it comes to touchscreens, you just can't beat the feeling of a nice, high-quality capacitive screen. If you've been using an iPhone, Motorola Droid, or any one of many capacitive smartphones made in the past few years, try to hunt down one with a resistive screen; the difference is almost shocking. Touches to a capacitive touchscreen are registered with the lightest tap, while moving things around on a resistive screen requires you to press down so hard that people probably think you're angry at it. Of course, resistive screens have their benefits; namely, they play friendly with styluses. As predictive text gets better, this isn't too big of a deal for English speakers - we only have so many characters to deal with. But for the many languages of the world in which there are simply too many characters to squeeze into any sort of usable user interface, character recognition is the only option. As a result, a stylus -- and thus a resistive screen -- is a must. HTC wants to combine the best of both worlds, and have just launched a stylus that plays friendly with capacitive screens.
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| Conan O’Brien puts his Tonight Show set on craigslist Posted: 15 Jan 2010 12:49 PM PST
We forgot to mention this, but if you want to buy Conan O’Brien’s Tonight Show set make your way to Craigslist. Conan is asking for your best offer, or Coldplay tickets if you’re willing to trade. Boo, NBC!
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| Two-week iMac rentals for $8.56 per day? Posted: 15 Jan 2010 12:30 PM PST
I noticed the fellas from PoketyPoke each carrying around an iMac box after the Digital Experience event at CES last week. "Wow, you guys really went all out," said I. "Yeah," said they, "Did you know you can rent an iMac for two weeks for $120?" I had not heard of this, no sir. But it seemed like a smart idea, especially if you've got a product to show off at a large gathering full of reporters. And people love iMacs, from what I understand. I wondered aloud what kind of program Apple had in place for such rentals. Apparently Apple's iMac rental program is called "a 10% restocking fee." Jamie Siminoff of PoketyPoke did a little math for us:
I actually used to have a supervisor at Best Buy waaaaay back in 1995 who would swap out for a new computer every month. Back then there was no such thing as a restocking fee and the return window on computers was a full 30 days. The managers at my Best Buy (Store #5, Edina) finally told my supervisor that he couldn't keep swapping out computers like that, to which he replied something along the lines of "Yes, I can. There aren't any rules or fees to make what I'm doing illegal." And that's how we got restocking fees and 14-day return windows. At least, I'm almost convinced that he was singlehandedly responsible for restocking fees and shorter return windows becoming commonplace in retail electronics stores. That might just be my own personal urban legend, though.
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| Posted: 15 Jan 2010 12:00 PM PST Mr. Nintendo America, Reggie Fils-Aime, basically said to CNBC that Wii buyers could care less about high-definition. Is that true? Sound off in the poll and the comments after the jump. Do you want a high-def Wii
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| Ringo Starr is not good at Rock Band. And? Posted: 15 Jan 2010 11:30 AM PST
Famous rock star Ringo Star was on Late Night With Jimmy Fallon last night, and he admitted that he’s “crap” at Rock Band. This is news only in the loosest sense of the term because the headline should read, “Old man not good at video games.” I’ve embedded the Hulu version of the clip here for our American readers; international readers, what can I say? Yell at Hulu, not us. I’d say it’s a fair trade: Mr. Starr is no good at some random video game, but he’s also a former member of The Beatles. You may have heard of them.
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| Video: There’s a lot going on in this Star Wars Adidas commercial Posted: 15 Jan 2010 11:00 AM PST
Star Wars sneakers from Adidas are coming. Fair enough. This new commercial features what looks like a scene from Indiana Jones at the very beginning, then we've got a random shot of Snoop Dogg, Darth Vader, and then Daft Punk looking at Darth Vader as if to say, "That guy stole our shiny helmet look." You guys look more like bounty hunters, Daft Punk. Just saying. You like stickball? Cool, that's in there. Howsabout urban foot races? Covered. Break dancing? Yes. Swing sets? That too. R2D2 sweatshirt? Check. Hip hop remixes of Star Wars music? Affirmative. Shots of the actual shoes? Maybe for a split second or two. Not really, though. [YouTube via Newlaunches]
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| Activision alludes to DJ Hero 2: Go ahead and pretend to be surprised Posted: 15 Jan 2010 10:30 AM PST
There will be a DJ Hero 2. Yes, I realize that saying that—Activision will make a sequel to one of its games—is akin to saying earthquakes are bad, or that candy is delicious, but there you have it. The sequel was confirmed as part of a contest. The deal is that Activision is giving musicians at the MIDEM 2010 show a chance to appear in “a future installment of DJ Hero.” If your song is picked, then it’ll be in the next version of the game. This really isn’t too hard to follow. So, DJ Hero 2: bank on it. The original game didn’t do too well, either commercially or critically, so it is something of a surprise to see Activision give it another shot. Then again, this is Activision we’re talking about here, and Lord knows how much money it sunk into the game’s development and marketing. So, release another game that’s technologically the same as its predecessor (read: much smaller development costs), and just market the hell out of it. If the numbers work, the numbers work. Light cigars with $100 bills, et cetera. What could be a problem for Activision is that I’m pretty sure music games have peaked in popularity. (Is it safe to say Rock Band was the genre’s highest point, commercially and critically?) So if Activision keeps throwing money down this hole (music games), it might find that it’s not working out like it had planned. In other words, Activision has squeezed all the money out of this genre, as was expected from Day One. Time to find a new cash cow. What will the investors say?
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| PolyTune: The Violent Femmes tune all their guitar strings at once on the bus Posted: 15 Jan 2010 10:00 AM PST You know how when you play someone’s guitar for the first time at a party and one string is way high or low and you start to tune it and find that the guitar is total garbage and can’t be tuned anyway and so you play “Closer to Fine” on an untuned guitar in the corner of the part and people are all like “Who’s the douche playing Indigo Girls in 2010? I think his guitar is out of tune.” Has that ever happened to you? Definitely, right? Well Polytune tunes all your strings at once. You strum and it tells you which strings are out of tune. You fix those strings, strum again, and then people will never make fun of you again. The Polytune is shipping in March from TC Electronic and there’s no pricing but I would totally buy this.
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| Free Wi-Fi at McDonald’s starts today. Buh, buh, bup, buh, bah, I’m lovin’ it!!! Posted: 15 Jan 2010 09:30 AM PST
Ah yes. Nothing better than toting your laptop into McDonald's and going through a handful of napkins every time you need to type something or move the mouse cursor. The food there is greasy, I guess would be the main takeaway from that sentence. Wireless internet access is free, starting today, at 11,500 out of 14,000 McDonald's locations throughout the country. It had previously cost $2.95 for two hours of access — roughly an hour and 45 minutes longer than just about anyone has ever spent inside a McDonald’s. McDonald’s to start free Wi-Fi at most U.S. stores [Yahoo!/Reuters]
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| CrunchDeals: Xbox Live Gold for $30 Posted: 15 Jan 2010 09:00 AM PST
If you're still chugging along with the free Silver membership, here's what upgrading to Gold gets you:
Should the service be free? I vote for YES! But Microsoft will never listen to me. And $30 is better than $50, I guess. Xbox Live 12-Month Gold Card [Walmart via dealnews]
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Chances are you’ve heard of the text-to-donate system set up by the Red Cross to provide relief to quake-devastated Haiti. It seems that the ease of donating and the immediacy of the disaster have prompted a response 
Walmart is selling 12-month Xbox Live Gold cards for $30. The full retail price when purchased | You are subscribed to email updates from CrunchGear To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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