So, I hadn’t upgraded to the 2.1 package yet, because I was chicken. Thought it would break this or that, thought it would make a Saturday of mine a pain in the a**, on and on. Then the 2.1.1 cracker thing came out the other day and I thought to myself, that with the speed that they issued the patch it was worth the effort on my part to make sure my site was safe, and I definitely wanted to check out the other stuff new in the release, since I was at 2.0.9 or whatever. My plugins are pretty limited, and the ones I do use were mentioned as being ok on some forums I read.

So, I took the plunge, and just like the original install it took 3 minutes or so. Tarred up my old directory, just to be safe. Uploaded the new gzip archive, untarred it and then moved the new files in after removing the old stuff…. I’ll admit, such operations like deleting all the files seems a bit risky to me being a little more knowledgeable than the average blogger on web design and development. It makes perfect sense to a couple of friends of mine that use WP, though and they don’t know HTML from the NFL.

Over a cup of coffee, with no gnashing of teeth or wailing in agony, I updated wordpress. Now, what should I do for the rest of the day? Play with PaperVision? Turn on some Zelda: Twilight Princess? Hmm… the possiblities boggle the mind.

An API at WiiCade has been released to map the WiiMote buttons to your keyboard equivalents… It seems to me a perfect time to start cracking some of those old games you made… yeah you! and start building in some Wii support. I can see it now, miniclips and newgrounds, on and on… Hundreds of Flash Classics ported to the Wii. Flash Arcade ports from the 80s… oh yeah! Who needs ROMs?
Pretty much all for the games I have ever created have some sort of licensed property on ‘em, so I won’t be posting them for use on any public sites soon, but I do think I will be building support into them going forward. With some simple testing of system capabilities / user agents, you could switch the commands on the fly, making the port pretty seamless to players on their TVs.

Granted, we are dealing with Flash 7 on the Wii, but it’s a start!

Can anyone can translate the Kanji? My Japanese is very limited (Hiragana and Katakana only)… This is fun and very weird.

Click to check it out.

EDIT: So apparently this is a well known and fairly old Flash game. I guess I just don’t play enough web games to know that.
Ha.

EDIT 2: So I found a few more links on this game, and a better version. I have now spent nearly two hours playing this. I have a high score of 3572.85…. must break 5000.

What will the decency police say to this? Makes the hot coffee mod look a little tame IMHO, this is a sanctioned/designed part of gameplay. I’m pretty open minded, so it doesn’t really bother me a bit, but I can’t imagine this game being released like this after all the flack that RockStar took last year from Congress. Is this real? A spoof? A machinima? Can anyone out there confirm or debunk this?

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I have an old Digital 8 Sony Handycam. It was a lot of fun when I got it in 1999 with my first iMac DV. It’s a fairly capable camera, but a bit bulky and I hate having to sit down and capture the video off of it. So much so, that the camera sits idle more often than I would like it to. What to do?

I’m thinking off getting a new toy with the addition of a new child next month. At least that is what I am telling myself… of course it will be great to shoot him and Sophia interacting and get all of the fun little times that we will share on video.

It will also be a great way to breathe some more creativity into my design and development efforts. When I first got my handy cam I would take footage, snip it up, filter it, vectorize it, turn it into swf and chopped up dissolves and other effects in Flash and After Effects ala Hillman Curtis. It was great fun. Of course all of this was ages before FLV files and even before Flix, etc. I think that getting a new little camera would be equally freeing, if not more so… but here lies the dilemna.

Tapes seem pretty well dead. DVD cameras look terrible (MiniDisc format, etc). The cheapy MPEG SD camera look like fun, but they can’t possibly have good quality video, can they? The Hard Disk cameras look promising, but in order to get any of them with a big enough CCD to get good images we’re talking about nearly a grand, aren’t we? Basically I want a few things:

1. It has to look decent when output on a TV, but even more importantly, the web. Grainy video isn’t cool, you know?
2. It has to be reasonably easy to edit in iMovie and eventually out to iDVD.
3. It has to be small enough to make me want to take it with me
4. HD is not truly important to me at this time. Sinc emost of the ways I will be sharing this will be on SD DVD and Flash Video/Quicktime, I doubt it would do me much good to shoot 720p+.
5. It can’t break the bank. I don’t have a real price limit set, but I’m sure I’ll know it when I see it.

So, anyone out there know what to get? I usually lean Sony on most stuff like this but if Sanyo, JVC, Panasonic, Canon, etc have something compelling out there, I’ll get it. If you have something, let me know, if you have clips shot with it online somewhere, give me the URL, I’d like to check it out.

This year has a lot of great things in store for us. Do you play video games? If so, check out all the cool games that are coming out for the Wii. Movies, got you covered, too.

1. Super Smash Brothers Brawl - Yowza! I love SSBM on the Cube so much. Unlocked just about everything. Hours and hours of time spent mashing buttons and drinking beer with buddies. SSBB looks to more of the same, with better graphics, more playable characters, more arenas… More More More! Will it be internet enabled? Maybe. Hope so! There are a few other games out there coming in 2007 that look great, too, but this is the biggie for me.
2. Visiting New York - Some time this year I will be going back to the big apple to visit my buddy Max. He’s a law student at Brooklyn Law and runs a student site there. Maybe after his and my finals, I will be on my way to go visit him. I already got the go ahead from Renee, so it looks like I’m golden there, so now, I just need to save my pennies.
3. Vacation (post baby) – The plan is that by the end of 2007, Renee and I will be taking a trip to somewhere nice and warm. We like Mexico, so that’s a likely candidate, but who knows. California would be cool, maybe Costa Rica, too. We’ll just see what kinda deals are out there, but I definitely want to get out of the Midwest a bit.
4. Summer Movies - Spideman 3, Transformers, woohoo! Can’t wait to see some “asplosions”. I’m honestly a bit mixed about the actual design of some of the characters in both of those movies, but there is only so much you can tell from sneak peeks and trailers.
5. Interpol’s Third Album – One of my favorite current bands… they’re due for a new album before the end of the year. Hurry up, I’m entirely not gloomy enough.
6. iPhone, iPhone, I want phone! – The gadget lust is thick and I’m really having problems waiting for June for this thing. Seriously.
7. Car? - Somehow, if I can swing it, I’m going to try and get a new car. My 2001 Hyundai Accent is over 76k miles and I’m really just tired of it. It’s been a good car, but man… 6 years is a long time to own something that you use pretty much everyday. What’ll I get? Hopefully something hybrid. I would love a Prius, Civic Hybrid or something similiar, but really I just need a four door with good fuel economy and a connection for my iPod. Priorities, you know.

So are you in my 365 class? Yeah? Well this is for you…

I don’t know where you can get this shirt from, but I would really like to know. Found the image on Flickr

So, I haven’t really played a Zelda games since LOZII:The Adventure of Link. Sure I have dabbled a bit with Ocarina of Time and Wind Waker. So a couple of weeks ago I gave in to temptation and bought The Twighlight Princess for my Wii. And like these glowing reviews, I’m in gaming heaven.

Aside from a couple annoying little platform-y segments where you have to jump like a madman, everything is just so cool. The combat, characters, the art, the controls. Just great. I feel like I might have been the last person on earth to buy this, but if you have a Wii and you don’t already have this. Go buy it. It’s fantastic.