It’s been a busy December, so it’s been a bit quiet around here and by the time you read this I’ll be on the slopes somewhere around Arinsal, so here’s my final post for the year. Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Saturnalia or Yule or whatever it is you do or don’t celebrate at this time of year.

I’m going to leave you with this little gem from Garfield minus Garfield, it made me chuckle…

Santa Claus is watching you is post from stealthpuppy.com. Except as noted otherwise, this work is ©2005-2010 Aaron Parker and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

Because I haven’t been posting much I thought it might be time for a Friday funny instead. Dugie e-mailed me this one last night and it made be chuckle:

If these guys are the main act, I’m sure Bill and Ted must have been support.

Friday Funny is post from stealthpuppy.com. Except as noted otherwise, this work is ©2005-2010 Aaron Parker and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

OK, off topic time. We attended the Mighty Boosh Festival over the weekend, which was a heap of fun. The Boosh themselves were on form, and I enjoyed the Charlatans and Gary Numan immensely. However, the highlight of the support acts for me had to be Har Mar Superstar. This guy is the true heir to Michael Jackson, well if you close your eyes and imagine..

If the Mighty Boosh is not your thing, or if you don’t just get Har Mar Superstar, then perhaps these kittens might make you giggle.

Har Mar Superstar is post from stealthpuppy.com. Except as noted otherwise, this work is ©2005-2010 Aaron Parker and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

I came across these couple of videos last night that tickled my fancy, so I had to share. First up is  Dr. Quest and Race Bannon:

If you’re wondering why the Dr. and Race sleep in the same room, I’ve got no answers, but I suggest checking out the ‘Bannon Custody Battle’ episode of Harvey Birdman. Funny stuff.

And then there’s  Batman and Robin in Ancient Rome..

Making Hanna Barbera Safe For The Kids is post from stealthpuppy.com. Except as noted otherwise, this work is ©2005-2010 Aaron Parker and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

Any review of a touch screen digital audio player or phone is going to inevitably compare to the iPhone/iPod touch, but touch interfaces are the way forward because they just make sense. So here’s my quick and dirty review of the Samsung P2 which turned up this morning.

First up – why go with the P2? I must confess it’s got a lot to do with the touch screen. I’ve previously used the Rio Karma and the Creative Zen V Plus which have both been good players. The Rio Karma was an awesome DAP with excellent sound and features but it was butt ugly and the interface left something to be desired. The Creative Zen V Plus has served me well too, but it’s starting to fall apart with the navigation button on the front having split and is currently somewhere inside the player. While I’m really impressed with the iPhone and iPod touch, I don’t feel like transcoding 40GB worth of Windows Media files into AAC to play on the iPod and I’m just not a fan of iTunes. If I was to move to a Mac, the iPod would be a no brainer, but right now, Windows is my platform of choice.

Before I purchased this player I had considered the Creative Zen which has had some good reviews but after checking out the iPhone and a couple of months with my TyTN II I’ve found a touch interface to a device is just too good pass up. I ordered the 8 GB version of the P2 from Amazon way back in late September so it’s been a long wait for this device to turn up.

My first impression of the P2 is that it’s well built. It’s all plastic but it feels solid, even the buttons on the side feel nice too. Another great but simple feature is that the headphone socket is on the bottom of the player. This is actually much better than it sounds – when pulling the player out of my pocket, which is usually headphone socket up, I don’t have to spin the player around and the cable doesn’t get in the way.

A power pack is not supplied with the player so charging must be done by plugging the player into your computer. It also does not have a standard USB interface but uses a propriety connector, which turns out to be the same connector used on Samsung’s mobile phones. I can only presume that this interface will provide connection for peripherals but at the moment I can’t find any evidence of that.

Overall though navigation is pretty good, the interface looks good and works well, however I’d like an easier way to get back to the Now Playing screen. I have noticed that on occasion hitting a menu option isn’t as precise as it should be and I end up hitting a different option. If it’s not my passion fingers, I would expect a firmware update will fix this up.

The default interface for the menu doesn’t respond as I would have expected. When you move your finger across the screen to scroll through the options, the menu moves after you’ve made the finger movement – it doesn’t move with the finger movement. Because of this it doesn’t feel as responsive as the iPhone/iPod touch but perhaps that’s not what Samsung was going for. You can change the menu to just display a list of options which ends up being a faster way of moving around the system.

When I first transferred music to the player it wouldn’t play my WMA files even though it could read the song titles from the files. It seems that the P2 (and I presume other players) won’t play file encoded higher than 160 Kbps. As I’ve been encoding to 192 Kbps from CD, I’ve had to configure WMP to convert the files to 160 when transferring to the player. Not a big issue, but I would prefer if it could play the files just as I recorded them.

Sound quality is excellent – the bass sounds full and the higher tones are nice and clear. I haven’t used the included headphones, instead I’m using my Sennheiser in-ear headphones and I’m able to hear sounds within some songs that I just wasn’t hearing on the Zen. Unfortunately it appears that the P2 does not support gapless playback. Samsung, if you’re listening, gapless playback is not optional; please fix this and soon.

I’m not sure yet how much use I’ll get out of watching videos on the player, however the screen quality is great and videos look good, but I’m finding myself holding the player about 30 cm from my face when watching them. One feature that does look interesting is the ability to read text files. You can drop a plain text file on the player and, well, read it. Not much more to say about that one really.

I was able to team the player with my phone and my laptop over Bluetooth, but it currently doesn’t offer any services to those devices. I’ll have to wait for a future firmware update to get integration with my phone – music should stop playing when the phone rings. Useful because I’ve often missed calls when while listening to music even though I’ve got vibrate turned on, on the phone.

Overall I pretty impressed with the player and would recommend it to anyone looking at purchasing a new DAP especially if you’re not in the market for an iPod touch. There are a few things I’d like to change and I’m counting on Samsung being proactive with their firmware updates, but only time will tell.

There’s already a few reviews of the Samsung P2 around the place that are worth checking out too: Engadget’s got hand’s on and unboxing so I don’t need to post any photos; CNET has a review here and you can find a video of the player’s interface on YouTube.

And lastly, the inevitability of comparisons can be summed up in something my wife said as an iPhone advertisement was playing on TV: “Hey honey, that’s your MP3 player.”

My Samsung P2 Review: great device with room for improvement is post from stealthpuppy.com. Except as noted otherwise, this work is ©2005-2010 Aaron Parker and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

No doubt you’ve seen lots of news recently about the attempted crackdown on the release of the HD-DVD encryption key (Google lists about 731000 sites listing the key so far.

I’ve got nothing new to add to this myself, but it was timely that this week I watched a talk by Cory Doctorow gave to Microsoft Research a few years ago on why DRM is a bad thing. He also talks about these types of protection schemes whereby the user has both the protected content and the key to decrypt the content (i.e. what did the AACS think was going to happen?). If you are interested this talk you can check it out here:

• Cory Doctorow’s Microsoft Research DRM talk: Text

• Cory Doctorow’s Microsoft Research DRM talk: Video

Cory Doctorow’s DRM talk to Microsoft is post from stealthpuppy.com. Except as noted otherwise, this work is ©2005-2010 Aaron Parker and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

I do enjoy Zach Braff’s work and I found this video very funny:

I Love Zach Braff is post from stealthpuppy.com. Except as noted otherwise, this work is ©2005-2010 Aaron Parker and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

Continuing my posts of hilarious videos, I was sent Glen and Gary & Glen and Ross, from the guys who brought you 10 Things I Hate About Commandments and Must Love Jaws. This one is not tech related at all, but these series of movie trailers are just too good not to share. This one comes with a language warning:

Glen and Gary & Glen and Ross is post from stealthpuppy.com. Except as noted otherwise, this work is ©2005-2010 Aaron Parker and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

UPDATE: Unfortunately the video has been pulled. Hopefully someone can track down another link.

UPDATE 2: Thanks to Bill, you can find the video over at DevilDucky.

Via Boing Boing and Engadget comes an hilarious video about tech support for books in the Middle Ages:

It’s from a show called Øystein & Meg (Øystein & I) produced by the Norwegian Broadcasting television channel (NRK) in 2001. The spoken language is Norwegian, the subs in Danish. It’s written by Knut Nærum and performed by Øystein Bache and Rune Gokstad.

That’s when a desktop was a desktop, and if you put wallpaper on it, you might get some wierd looks.

Tech Support in the Middle Ages is post from stealthpuppy.com. Except as noted otherwise, this work is ©2005-2010 Aaron Parker and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

This tickled my fancy too much so I had to post it: Bomberman Evolved

Students at the University of Aalborg in Copenhagen are mid-way through creating a virtual Bomberman game called Bomberman Evolved. As shown in today’s GameTrailers video, a camera mounted in the ceiling tracks the movement of two colored hats, steering on-screen Bomberman characters based on the two players’ positions in the room.

After checking out the action on the Nintendo Wii I’d love to give this a go, until then I’ll have to make do with Bomberman on the Xbox 360 (hopefully soon).

Bomberman Evolved is post from stealthpuppy.com. Except as noted otherwise, this work is ©2005-2010 Aaron Parker and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

I’m currently on a project for a client that has an elevator that goes to a non-existant floor. I was kinda hoping that it would be made of glass and be able to shoot out through the roof, but unfortunately they’ve disabled that button.

The Elevator To Nowhere is post from stealthpuppy.com. Except as noted otherwise, this work is ©2005-2010 Aaron Parker and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

Best. Video. Ever.. (work safe)

Chicks on Decks is post from stealthpuppy.com. Except as noted otherwise, this work is ©2005-2010 Aaron Parker and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

I won’t say where I took this photo, but it was certaintly interesting visiting an IT department across the hall from the mortuary – it’s the door on the right, not the left. There’s alot of things I could say about IT departments and dead people, but I’ll refrain.

I See IT People.. is post from stealthpuppy.com. Except as noted otherwise, this work is ©2005-2010 Aaron Parker and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.

Interesting idea for changing the desktop metaphor, try displaying this over a Terminal Server session..

YouTube video: Bumptop 3D Desktop Prototype

BumpTop 3D Desktop Prototype is post from stealthpuppy.com. Except as noted otherwise, this work is ©2005-2010 Aaron Parker and is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported License.