Joost Schuur

I picked up a Flip Mino HD and iLife ‘09 a few months back and haven’t done much with either since, so I thought it would be interesting to film my regular commute to work with the camera mounted on my bike:

Learning iMovie ‘09 was a lot of fun, and I look forward to another excuse for a video. This barely 13 minute video quickly blew most of my 500 meg weekly limit on Vimeo and it was already too long for Youtube. My options seem to be better editing, shorter videos, more compression or upgrading to a Vimeo Pro account.

I can’t for the life of me figure out how to properly fasten the Flip velcro mount, and from the looks of it, it’s not even available anymore from their accessories section of the store. Beats filming by holding your iPhone up in the air while riding a bike with one hand though.

I’m fortunate enough to have lived close enough to the office for almost 10 years now since I moved out to California, that I’ve been able to commute by bike every day, even across 2 office moves. 5-8 miles of biking a day is nice exercise, but I’ve started to up the ante a little lately by doing a little running too, using Nike+ to track my progress. Now that iPhone OS 3.0 has their software built in and you don’t need their receiver dongle anymore, it works nicely with my existing gadgets.

If you want to follow my future video antics, follow me on Twitter.

As part of Operation Leave The House More Often, I went to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Labs this past weekend in nearby Pasadena for their annual open house weekend. Over 30,000 space geeks and their families turned up to talk to to rocket scientists and tour the facilities.

A personal highlight for me was being less than 50 feet away from actual Mars rover hardware that will be traveling to the Red Planet in 2011. The line to get into the spacecraft assembly facility was an hour long, but worth it, as we got to see the still unnamed Mars Science Lab in its semi-assembled state.

Pics below.

Side note: I’ve started a Twitter account to revive Martian Soil, a Mars blog I used to run some years back. Follow @martiansoil for your daily dose of Red Planet news.

A few of the latest online gaming related stories in the news:

• Roughly 88% of Peak Hour Demigod Users Pirates – Out of 140,000 connected users at peak, only 12% were legitimate.
• PlaceVine Wraping Around In-Game Ads – A partnership between PlaceVine and Double Fusion will help connect advertisers to the appropriate video games.
• The Sims 3 Gets Microtransactions and Day One DLC – $10 will get you 1000 SimPoints to spend on outfits and furniture and a new town will be available at launch for free.

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A few of the latest online gaming related stories in the news:

• EA: Online Has Transformed The Gaming Landscape – 500 million EA Sports online games have been played since last June, Electronic Arts said today.
• IGA Worldwide lands exclusive Cross Fire in-game advertising contract – G4Box and Wicked Interactive will use IGA's Radial 4.0 SDK to display, update and geo-target their ads to a holy grail: the 18-34, tech savvy, male demographic in their free-to-play FPS.

  The counterstrike-esque multiplayer first person shooter allows fo

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A few of the latest online gaming related stories in the news:

• PlaySpan Picks Up Spare Change – The growing online payment solution provider gains micro-transaction expertise in the social networking space with the acquisition
• Nintendo in major drive to prompt Wii console gamers to play online – Multiplayer titles Super Smash Bros. Brawl, Pro Evolution Soccer 2009 and Mario Kart Wii feature heavily in the campaign, reports New Media Age.

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A few of the latest online gaming related stories in the news:

• fatfoogoo announces partnership with Digital River – The partnership will provide for 'global payments and inventory management, as well as the use of virtual goods and currencies, electronic wallets (gwallet technology), secondary (peer-to-peer) marketplaces and auction functionality'.

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A few of the latest online gaming related stories in the news:

• OnLive games service ‘will work’ – Founder Steve Perlman defends the service against an onslaught of recent criticism, citing a revolutionary video compression algorithm and a large lineup of publisher partners that have performed their due diligence.

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A few of the latest online gaming related stories in the news:

• GDC Notes: Advanced Data Mining and Intelligence from Large-Scale Game Data – Orbus Gamework's Darius Kazemi kept notes during Bruce Ferguson (SOE) and Dmitri Williams of (USC) session.
• Stardock’s Impulse Exceeds One Million Customers – It took Stardock onlu 9 months to reach a million users.
• Sony Doubts OnLive Approach – Sony wonders how multiple users in the same household will be able to play games on average home broadband connections.
• Sony trademarks ‘PS Cloud’ – My take is it has nothing to do with competing with OnLive's streaming gaming service. It's merely a cloud data storage repository.
• EA Rebels Against its own DRM – EA's new de-authorization management tool lets users remove a license from a specific machine, so they can use one on another machine without uninstalling the whole game.

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A few of the latest online gaming related stories in the news:

• Bigfoot Networks launches second-generation gaming network card – Is lag still really an issue for a lot of gamers these days?
• Solid State Launches Current Publishers’ Edition For Windows – Their Solid Axis Current Publisher Edition is a stand-alone plug-and-play patching solution for Windows games aimed at reducing the cost of delivering updates without implementing any custom coding or programming.
• New OnLive service could turn the video game world upside down – Steve Perlan’s new service allows you to offset your entire game logic onto a centralized set of online servers, effectively making the connecting system a thin client just in charge of rendering the output.
• XI Has Begun! – Sony launches an Alternate Reality Game from within PlayStation Home.
• GDC 2009: World of Goo creators call DRM a ‘waste of time’ – Ron Carmel recommending ditching digital rigjts management completely, stating especially indie developers don’t need DRM to stay afloat.
• Digital River And Playxpert Sign Joint Marketing Agreement – Their agreement allows both to “offer game publishers, resellers and studios a way to engage players of PC-based games in a branded in-game experience that integrates e-commerce with their online communities”.
• Microtransactions, Not Ads, To Have Highest Impact On Game Industry – 66% of respondents at the Venture Beat GamesBeat ‘09 event expect microtransactions to have a high impact on the games industry’s future.

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A few of the latest online gaming related stories in the news:

• GameSpy Technology on Twitter – The middleware tools and services group for connected gaming where I work now has a dedicated Twitter account.
• It’s personal: many gamers prefer local multiplayer to online – According to a dozen of their ‘fellow insiders and enthusiast gamers’ Ars Technica thinks gaming with your friends in the same room together is the ideal way to enjoy multiplayer.
• Sparkle: The iPhone Gets Its First Virtual World – Tokyo-based Genkii’s Sparkle is a virtual 3D world with its own economy, customizable personal spaces and avatars, social networking functions and virtual goods.
• ngmoco discusses DLC plans for LiveFire, Touch Pets – “With In-app Commerce, it’s important to point out that although it will be possible to purchase content and/or features directly within a game, ngmoco will always give the highest priority to game balance and the integrity of the core experiences of our games.” says ngmoco’s Chris Plummer.
• Ubisoft signs deal with Quazal – The ‘enterprise license’ adds long-term services and a consulting agreement to their standard online middleware tech.
• 30 percent of online gamers reportedly buy gold – It’s an anonymous, second hand figure though. Visit the Eurogamer story linked for further analysis on gold trading.

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