Jail Break

Well, I couldn’t wait for iPhone 3.0 any longer… I jailbroke my iPhone. But, it’s not all bad. I installed a few themes, with the Team Fortress 2 RED theme being my fave so far.

All my games, with the TF2 RED logo and theme.

You can also see the new ‘OPTUS’ service logo, and the weather in the top bar. Also, the obvious 5 columned SpringBoard, which I quite like, even if it is a little cramped.

This is quite cool too

The RED logo there too, and the Control Point capture indicator as the battery charge. I’d love if I could change the font to the TF2 font…

The things I installed through the Cydia App Store

Here’s where I had a lot of fun; unofficial 3rd party apps. So I have the ability to tether my phone to my laptop via wifi, so I can use the iPhone as a 3G modem. I can turn apps on/off, finally removing that pesky stocks app I never use. And bluetooth file sharing, which didn’t work too well, yet. And, as already demonstrated, WinterBoard, a theme customiser for the SpringBoard (see the pun? ha).

I’m actually glad I jailbroke my iPhone, but I only see this as temporary for now. I like having a cherry iPhone, even if that means the system is closed off.

The world we live in

A random conversation with my Mum on MSN the other day made me realise… a lot of things we take for granted today, things we use without probably realising it, are converging to be based around the internet. These days, we can have push email to be a substitute for SMS (though, I have to admit, I just managed to set this up on my iPhone, it’s not perfect yet), VoIP for phones, with Skype being on some of the major smartphone platforms. Youtube, and other internet video sites (I think it’s called Hulu, but Australia doesn’t have it yet… if ever) are replacing TV slowly, but surely. You can even rent movies on iTunes and other places. Steam lets consumers buy games and download them through the internet. Hell, I even ordered pizza from Dominos online the other day.

Is it a good thing? I’m not sure, it makes everything convenient, and it’s not like the internet can easily go down in one big hit. If that were to happen, I doubt we’d be worrying about how to order pizza, or which movie to rent over iTunes, but rather, finding a place to stay safe from the nuclear fallout. But we all know, the services I listed are mostly for entertainment and communication. What about the other stuff? Like financial, or business? They’d be screwed.

But maybe I’m looking at this way too superficially. Maybe the internet isn’t something that’s a phase that’ll pass with time. Who knows though. Phones are becoming more and more obsolete as technology advances. But seeing as we’re drifting towards a digital future, I think the internet is almost certainly going to be something that will never disappear, at least not completely.

Personally, I love it. I use the internet quite extensively. It’s interesting drawing comparisons to older technology though. Like, my Google Reader is like a newspaper, but I choose the content (and unlike a newspaper, I read it everyday). iTunes is my media library, instead of having lots of CDs and DVDs cluttering my room. Steam is my collection of games, that lets me track achievements and friends. And when I’m out and about, my iPhone becomes a personal assistant, giving me internet, email and IM anywhere (as long as Optus allows it =.=).

El Rationale

http://stewpenguin.alumnaie.net

There’s my website, showing off all the current consoles on the market, sorted by company. I used notepad for the HTML and CSS, using resources on the internet, either asking friends or looking up tags on google. I tried to use CSS for formatting as much as possible, but ended up using a table for aligning text where I wanted to. The colours worked on the browsers I tried, except for IE, which messed up spacing and colours a little. But it still worked on Firefox and Safari for me, I forgot to test in Chrome, but seeing as it uses a similar renderer to Safari, I’d assume it works there too. Obviously, in a much more professional project, I’d test thoroughly on all browsers, but this is a casual topic, and decided to cater for browsers I think that my target audience would use.

Video games are a knowledgeable  topic for me, and as much as I would’ve liked to do all the consoles in existence, I wanted to keep the site minimalistic. Using plain colours for the website, with brighter colours making important bits of data stand out, and using a very standard layout for the data, with a banner, navigation bar and a tiny footer with more information, like links to more sites, or just more information on the generation and why I chose the topic.

I chose to cater more towards Firefox and Safari for my target audience, assuming they only use IE for downloading a new browser. Instead of having a huge, comprehensive site filled with data on video games, I chose to have something that would just be interesting to look at; more of a concept website than a useful one. I took the time to make things line up, and tried for a subtle way for a person educated in video games to know which brand they’re looking at. I wanted to avoid nitty gritty data, like which console has which CPU, how many SKUs each console has. I only went into detail about major hardware revisions, such as the DSi, and the latest update for the PSP.

I built a template for the website first, getting the layout just right. I decided to use images in the nav bar instead of text, to force the user to see the 8-bit-esque font, and to help with the spacing. The background images came about asa way of making the website feel a little more inhabited. Orange is a personal favourite colour of mine, and it contrasts well with grey, which may be overdone in websites, but I find it handy for making a website have my own personal touch. Also, orange and grey don’t have a direct connection with any consoles on the market, with them being either black or white.

More than anything, I used this assignment to learn more about CSS, and to brush up on my HTML. I was rather surprised with the quality of the result, as well as the amount of HTML I remembered.

Random post…

I kinda wanted to use this blog for reviewing gadgets… kinda got sidetracked, eh. Well, I figured I’ll at least make a list of the gadgets I have, motivate me into doing something.

• Xbox 360
• Playstation 3
• Nintendo Wii
• Playstation Portable
• Nintendo DS Lite
• My computer…
• Macbook
• iPhone (already reviewed, but will do the 3.0 update when it comes out)

That’s about it, won’t put my crappy TV and speakers on there… But if you want me to review one, let me know, I’ll take it into consideration.

On another note, I’ve decided on what I want to do exactly for my ‘online exhibition’. A look at all the video game consoles, by generation, and a few important games for every console. Maybe starting from the NES generation, otherwise I’ll be going into all the old consoles with all the exact same games, just looking different. So I’ll get started on making that tomorrow, already have the design ideas panned out.

Quick Post

Just a quick update: going to make a webpage full of my favourite video games, try to find an interesting way to show it off. 

Trying to learn Japanese on top of learning German… can I do it? Probably not, but hey

Fun with the Internet

Starting to look into APIs with certain services, and found Adium for the Mac. Mostly chat stuff, but you can also put Google Talk and Facebook chat into it, which I thought was a great feature. Kind of like an RSS feed, but for chat services.

I want to look into getting Last.fm and Raptr onto my blog too. Raptr, if you don’t know, is a service similar to Last.fm, but with video games instead. ( Raptr ) It tracks my Steam ID, Xbox Live gamertag, and shows which games I play the most. Pretty cool, I thought. The downloadable client uses Adobe Air, which I think is a program that uses data purely from the internet, in a kind of… special broswer window. I could be horribly wrong though…

Do they process Blogs at a blumberyard?

Not much happened the past week. Worked on HTML and CSS in the tute, but I already knew HTML pretty fluently, and I picked up CSS pretty easy… I want to learn some more though. This week is going to be a short post… I really can’t think of anything this week, sick and all. Hopefully I can start on my assignment soon, and then all the posts will come.

This week in blogging…

Not much news in the world of my blog, lately. Been kinda thinking about the first assignment, though. One of the options, to look into the flow of information of a website, caught my eye. Reminded me of my HTML class in year 12, where I was browsing the web, BZPower in particular (www.bzpower.com) , and my teacher glanced at it, and called it horrible. So maybe I’ll go into why it’s horrible

I do need to work on putting my posts into categories, and adding tags to everything. I’ve kinda been lazy about that, but more… oblivious to most of what I can do in WordPress…

First Post! Again…

This will be my first post for the Networked Media Production class, so might as well introduce myself. Troy Wassenaar here, web designer, 3D artist, and video game fanatic. Lego is my main hobby, as well as drumming. Currently in the tutorial, being told to post! Because I already had a blog! But go back and read some of my other posts, and I’ll be sure to post lots more from now on. Going to try anyway…

Hehehe

Well, started uni! Which also means I’m back in Canberra, still catching up on sleep after my 19 hour bus ride. But my god… Life has a strange way of turning things around. Uni is going to be awesome, got to catch up with some good friends… and meeting new people . Anyway, dinner is cooking, so I’ll post more later.