williamhartz.com/blog

Click here to continue…

So I downloaded a free trial of the yet-to-be-released game, Spore. It comes out September 07, 2008.

Spore is a game in which you start out with a single-celled organism floating around in the vast ocean of the world they find themselves in. You only see the world on a microscopic level. And so you float around and do your single-celled thing for a bit, eating smaller things that float past you. Eventually you start to grow and evolve into a bigger organism. As you get bigger, so does your world. And as you progress in the game, you get to enhance your creature, adding new limbs and body modifications for it’s evolution.

And so it progresses. You end up on land. You find more of your species. You form tribes that progress into villages that progress in to cities. Eventually you have a whole civilization of your creature on your hands. Their technology develops and eventually reaches a space-age level in which you can leave your planet and explore your world on a universal scale, visiting other worlds - some more advanced and some primitive. Depending on their civilization and your actions, you can affect these worlds in a great many ways.

It sounds like an awesome game. And so I played around with the free trial… the “Creature Creator.” Basically it lets you setup your creature and play around with basic functionality. There’s no actual gameplay involved in it, but even the creature designing was really fun. I named my creature Thaddeus. I have not as of yet come up with a surname for him, but we shall see what becomes of it. I have a photo on Flickr (above) of my boy Thaddeus and a short video on YouTube (below) of the Creature Creator in action. Enjoy.

You can pre-order Spore on Amazon.

Happy Download Day, all!

It’s June 17… the official Firefox 3 Download Day! The day we celebrate the throwing off of the bonds of inferior web browsing experiences and embrace the Webernet surfing light shone by Mozilla.

It’s a day where we’re trying to break a Guinness World Record for the most software downloads in a 24-hour time period. All you have to do is download the latest build of Mozilla’s new browser, Firefox 3.0 on June 17, 2008. Register your name at sharefirefox.com as well to be counted amongst the record-setters.

Click here to download the new Firefox 3.0.

Everyone loves the Firefox. He is your friend.

A video of mine, Baby Dance, was recently featured in the official Viddler blog for the introduction of their new Wedding group for online video. Very cool!

I took the footage at my brother’s wedding last month. It’s a short little clip I recorded with my Canon S2IS, which I was using as a last minute backup since my SD900 broke just before we went down to the wedding ceremony (thank God I keep a spare camera in my bag) and also because I didn’t feel like carrying the HV20 around while at the reception. It shows my niece and nephew dancing with each other on the reception dance floor.

Check out the Viddler blog post

or see all my other videos on Viddler.

I am somewhat hesitant to post this. I feel that, after it is all written, I will come off as insensitive and an overall jerk. This is not my intent. I just think that, despite the circumstances of the story, it has a twist at the end that must be told for its awesomeness. I shall refrain from names or identifying details, and you shall soon see why. And here we go:

I have a friend who works for EMS somewhat close to where I live. They received a dispatch to report to the scene of an accident on Thursday. “Man hit by train,” it said. And so they responded. The scene was quite gruesome from what I was told. Without going into uncomfortable and unnecessarily graphic detail, they found pieces of the person all over the area, under the train and strewn about over a 200′ radius.

They did find one way, and only one way, to identify the unfortunate soul. In fact, this was the only thing remaining of the victim that was still in tact after the accident. This identifier, I am told, was found “without scratch, defect, or spoil…” in perfect working order and still-excellent condition. The item found…. the victim’s iPhone.

No lie. And while I am saddened for the circumstances of what happened and while I feel sorry and mourn for the family left behind, I can’t help but think, “Wow, those Apple engineers sure designed a solid piece of equipment there.”

Ok, go ahead and start flaming me.

I found this article while going through my Google Reader feeds this morning, and it really made me laugh… especially the noob and RIAA parts. It was originally posted by Mikebert on Everything2. And so now I present to you the L337 Lord’s Prayer:

0?r $¥$@dM!n, \/\/|-|0 ©|-|!££$ !n |-|34\/3|\|
ph34r3d ?3 7|-|¥ |\|@m3
†|-|ÿ p\/\/n@g3 ©0|\/|3, †|-|ÿ $©r!p7$ b3 d0|\|3 !n /earth @$ i7 !$ i|\| /heaven.
$33|) u$ 7h!5 |)@ÿ o?R d@!£ÿ R0|\/|$.
f0rG!\/3 u$ 0?r n00b 3xP£017$ @$ \/\/3 f0rG!\/3 $©r!P7 |<!dd!3$ 7|-|@7 h@x0r @Ga!|\|$7 u$. R3\/34£ t0 u$ |\|07 ?3R0 |)@ÿ \/u£|\|$, ?u7 $A\/3 u$ fR0|\/| t3h RIAA.
f0r 7|-|!|\|3 i$ t3h |\|37\/\/0R|<, @|\|d t3h rm -rf*, @|\|d @££ 0?R ?@$3 @r3 ?3£0|\|G t0 j00, f0R3\/3R @|\|d 3\/3R.
4|\/|3|\|.

Translated into English:

Our sysadmin, who chills in Heaven,
feared be thy name.
Thy pwnage come, thy scripts be done in /earth as it is in /heaven.
Seed us this day our daily ROMs.
Forgive us our n00b exploits as we forgive script kiddies that hax0r against us.
Reveal to us not 0 day vulns, but save us from RIAA.
For thine is the network, and the rm -rf /, and all our base are belong to you, forever and ever.
Amen.

I finally got my iMac back from Apple repair! It was a long and somewhat painful process, but I’ve learned my lesson and tell the full story of what happened to get me to this point.

Today is also Tolkien Reading Day, and we discuss a bit of why this day is so important in those regards. The Lord of the Rings is one of my favorite books (series of books, maybe?) and also some of of my favorite movies. If you haven’t read or watched them, I do suggest you do so… right now. I’ll wait.

This is Me Today.

Can you tell the difference between a standard 128-kbps mp3 and a high quality 320-kbps mp3?

Take the test here: http://mp3ornot.com/

I was able to tell the difference between the standard and high bitrate version and am interested to know how many others can do the same.

Leave a comment below and share if you were able to differentiate.

Jimmy sent me this video today from a recent Diggnation where Kevin Rose talks about rumors of a possible iPhone hardware upgrade coming “very soon.” He mentions 3G support, something everyone expects and is waiting for. He also speculates the possibility of a video-chat capable iPhone with a second camera in the front of the phone.

This sparks my interest because, two weeks ago, I noticed something strange on my new iPhone. (I got the 16Gb model right after it came out.) I was looking at the phone’s speaker area (not the iPod speaker) while applying new Crystal Film to protect the screen. The light caught it just right and I thought I saw a small little black dot along with another little black shape next to it. It’s really hard to see unless the light hits the black backdrop just right. It looked just like the little iSight camera on my Macbook Pro and iMac. I double-checked to make sure I saw what I thought I was seeing. I even showed to it to Jose, who was with me. He confirmed my suspicions. Something very iSight-like rests at the top of the front of my 16Gb iPhone.

Now that these rumors are surfacing, I’m getting a little bit excited as I would love to do video chat on my mobile device. I guess we’ll have to wait a few more months to really see what becomes of all this.

I love this ad for the new IBM ThinkPad X300. It takes a stab at Apple’s Macbook Air, spoofing several of it’s promotional phrases, typefaces, and notes on the ultra-portable notebook Market. Pretty clever and great satire, if you ask me.

After looking at some of the ThinkPad X300’s features, I’d have to say it has Apple beat on most things it offers… well, except that it’s running Vista instead of OS X. And the ads have no problem boasting about said features… It’s got 3 USB ports where the Air only has one (and that in a cramped little bay door), a DVD drive built in, both input and output audio componants, 10 hours of battery (probably more like 5), and an easily accessbile ethernet port. The X300 comes with a Solid State Drive with the same 64Gb as the Air, but, unlike the Air, doesn’t offer a standard hard drive model. They’ve even tried to one-up Apple, who boasts the Air as only being 3-lbs by saying the X300 starts at 2.9-lbs.

All other thinks being somewhat fairly equal, the X300 is a little bit cheaper than the MacBook Air as well… not much, but still. It looks like a really nice machine… it just that Windows thing…

We’ll see how Apple responds to this. Good job, IBM!

Click here for full specs on the X300.