Technophile Monkey

Because curiosity is the slaughterer of felines, I couldn’t keep my hands off the Wii Virtual Console over Christmas. I rather painlessly bought 3000 Wii Points, pointed at Legend of Zelda and a few minutes later I was twenty years younger.

Super Mario Bros., Zelda, Metroid and Kid Icarus are the first games I have truly vivid memories of. But Zelda will always be a special case even among those jewels of the 80s. Perhaps because of the save function (no other NES game had that at the time), perhaps because of its then monumental size and variety, perhaps because of all the secrets to discover or the surprisingly fresh arcade/adventure hybrid gameplay. Maybe it’s the combination that does it, but even after twenty years, Zelda can still make me grin (and whistle the theme song, but that’s a detail you don’t want to know).

If you show the game to kids nowadays, I’m sure you’ll reap yawns and/or blank stares. It’s not even easy to figure out where to go in the beginning, unless you have the map and booklet that were included with the original. Something your EUR 5 can’t buy you on Virtual Console. Although Nintendo do offer a digital manual booklet with every VC release, the rest of the new game experience can’t be replaced. Where’s the smell of new plastic? Where’s the feeling of despair as you discover cocoa stains on your lovingly sticky-tape-armored map of Hyrule? Sniffing Game Cube game boxes and printing pixel-perfect screenshot maps from the Web just isn’t the same.

One question remains, of course. Why is playing Zelda on VC better than playing Zelda on your NES emulator of choice? I don’t think I can make up an answer to this one. For me the most important point is that VC plays the games exactly like they were on the original consoles, down to the actual video signal. If I still had the TV I used in 1987, I probably wouldn’t see any difference at all. PAL territories even have the same ugly black borders, wrong aspect ratio and slowdown they were already treated to in the 80s.

Is this worth paying EUR 5 for? I doubt it. But as it does so often, nostalgia easily fogs the mind, poisons the spirit and makes you buy things at unreasonable prices. Your non-gamer friends will never understand why you’ve paid actual money to battle spitting octopuses as a pointy-eared green-clad elf child. Only your heart will.

And by the way, there’s only one proper way to play these games.

Image © Nintendo

I sat down the newly released Wii browser (free trial) this morning and did a bit of fiddling. I wouldn’t feel so confident writing a mini-review after only an hour, but the browser is so simple and feature-limited that I will be so bold to say that I’ve seen most of its functionality.

Here are some keywords:

* **View modes:** You can switch to single-column display of web pages by pressing the 2 button. This is similar to what Opera Mini does on mobile phones, it compresses wide pages so that you end up with one narrow, long column of content that you can scroll. The net result is much more readable text, especially on text-heavy websites, but of course broken layouts on pages that are using heavily table-based designs.
* **Page scrolling:** Hold the B button and move the pointer around. Woo, it’s basic mouse pointer functionality. This does the job, but why not take advantage of the tilt sensors in the Wiimote or (see below) the nunchuk for this?
* **No Nunchuk support?** No matter what I do on the nunchuk, I get no response from the browser. Page scrolling could be put there, so both of your hands could do some of the heavy couch nerding work.
* **Zoom:** Use + and – to zoom in and out on pages. No big surprises here. Perhaps Nunchuk-controlled variable zoom levels for the next version?
* **No proper fullscreen mode?** The navigation bar with “back”, “forward”, “stop/reload” and “home” seems to always be present in the lower part of your screen, taking up pixels, which are a scarce resource on a TV. How about auto-hide or a hide button? Watching YouTube movies in fullscreen would be much prettier that way.
* **Flash bugs?**: Many of the YouTube videos I tried failed to load fully. The Flash player would skip to the “Share/Play Again” screen at the end of the clip, after only seconds of loading. I will have to see if this is due to my connection or due to the browser itself. Other pages and a lot of Flash content loaded fine, though.

But all in all, the thing is fast, functional and free (for now). With web-based RSS readers that have special layouts for mobile devices, you can even read news comfortably, no squinting necessary. Same goes for webmail services. The rest of the web, well, it’ll just have to deal with the fact that it’s either squeezed or zoomed.

Wii Internet Browser? Mission accomplished.

Are you looking for screenshots? Chris McElligott has posted some on flickr. You can see the unreasonably huge and low-contrast navigation bar there, too.

I sat on my comfy, warm sofa countless times, feeling the urge to read news feeds or e-mail, but woefully unable to move my arse off the couch due to a severe attack of laziness. Even digging up the laptop from this or that cushion fold would not please me in such moments, as it requires monumental shifting of my own body weight.

But this Friday, Opera for the Wii will be available as free trial. Those moments will be but a fleeting memory. From that day on, Wii-owning couch-dwellers will be able to clix0r around the webz0r without any immediate arse-movement requirements. Joy!

In the second half of 07, the full version of Opera for the Wii can be bought for EUR 5. Or 500 points, whichever currency you fancy.

Via Gamekult and with more details at Kotaku.

You win.

Do you feel bloated often, especially after a creamy dessert? Do you spend your days silently placing innocent little farts into your office chair, your sofa, your car seat? And do you like to eat milk products, drink milk or eat chocolate? Don’t be embarrassed, then. You might just have lactose intolerance.

Lactose intolerance is a condition where your intestine no longer produces lactase, the enzyme needed to digest lactose (milk sugar). Instead, you just get gas. A lot of it. In bad cases, and if you don’t stop consuming milk, you get diarrhea and an inflamed intestine.

Actually, you as a human being should not be able to digest milk as an adult in the first place! But in their rather colorful past, northern Europeans and subsequently Americans have developed a genetic mutation that allows them to drink milk even as adults. By far most of the world’s population, however, is lactose intolerant. Entire peoples are. The Chinese, most nations of Africa, the entire country of Thailand and a whopping 75% of African Americans are just a few examples.

What makes things worse is that lactose is used in many non-dairy products, such as sausages or spice mixes, or as a taste amplifier. Lactose intolerant people should be extra careful when shopping. Examine those labels!

Next time you feel uneasy after that chocolate pudding, don’t run to the pill closet and try to battle the symptoms like a fool. Instead, take a break from products containing lactose for two weeks:

* Stop drinking milk
* No more cream in your coffee
* No chocolate
* No cheese (sufficiently aged hard cheeses are an exception)
* Stop using cream for cooking or desserts
* No more candy bars, no Mars, no Twix, no Snickers (real black chocolate is okay, but check label)
* No sausages (Kosher products labeled “pareve” are okay)
* No dried meat (same as above)
* No frozen dishes, TV dinners etc. (check packaging, some contain lactose, some don’t)

If you feel a lot better and more relaxed, if you have less problems with diarrhea and no longer suffer from wave after wave of odorless flatulence: Welcome aboard, you might be lactose intolerant. Perhaps in a later article, I can give you some shopping and cooking hints.

Do check with your doctor to be sure. I take no responsibility for your actions.

Dornenreich’s Durch den Traum ("through the dream") took my breath away. It is a dark amalgamation of all that is Dornenreich. It takes the powerful grief and despair from Her von welken Nächten and sharpens it to a fine, pricking point. Then it adds the lazy melancholy, the slow sorrow found on Hexenwind, smashes both into tiny bits and mashes it all together again. Plus, there’s traditional black metal elements that you’ve known since (at least) Burzum. Who could resist?

The emotions in these sounds are silvery, fleeting and foglike, they once taste moist like the moss of the forest but at the next lick bitter as chalk. The reverberating electric guitars run shivers up your spine, then die off abruptly to let the whispered lyrics chase the shivers back down again.

Often these soundscapes are evoked at the same time, in layers one above the other. At other times one flowing into the next. Acoustic guitars here, electric ones there, but never clashing, always complementing each other in their dissonance or trivially harmonizing. It’s all masterfully woven and arranged, no sound dares to be heard at the wrong time, no whisper or scream has an unfitting intonation and yet the whole construction is lightweight, does not feel artificial or unwieldy, creates pressure only when pressure was meant.

If you have the slightest love for black or doom metal, you owe it to yourself to listen to this album. I can’t place it square in either category, but it deeply satisfies me in both. If I had to rate this on a scale of 10, it would be a 10. If you want to know whether it’s worth to get the limited edition digipak for the bonus track: Yes, it is

At least this one time, Switzerland gets to be first. The Wii is available in stores since yesterday night. Specialized games stores like World of Games have sold out even before the launch event, but more general retailers such as Inter Discount still carry some stock. More information about the launch event in that forum thread over there (German). Normally, Nintendo’s marketing in Switzerland is exactly zero, but this time they arrived with a Wii-labeled truck containing two booth babes (truck babes?) and a Santa Claus, next to piles of Wiis and games. It looks like some of those marketing dollars made it here

I will mosey over to the Inter Discount XXL in Zürich city during lunch break to see if they still have a console or two, and whether there are any playable demos.

Update: I just returned from the Inter Discount XXL at Zürich’s Sihlstrasse. As you can see in the picture to the right, there are still a couple of Wiis left

The sales dude said they’ve sold through several hundred consoles during the midnight sale yesterday, but that there’s still some stock and more is expected soon. He also said that 1. They didn’t get any component cables. and 2. They didn’t get any RGB cables.

So if you buy a Wii in Switzerland today, you have to be happy with the horrible composite video signal. Granted, most people don’t see the difference anyway.

A picture gallery of what it looks like in the Wii aisles of Inter Discount XXL and Multimedia Factory.

Update 2: Someone else’s gallery where you can see the Wii truck, the Santa and the Wii girls. Not brainless broad-bosomed bimbos after all, which is good to see.

First Photo in this article © Nintendo

Alex Antener yesterday managed to wrap up this year’s stage of his Free Software project in Malawi, Africa with the official handover of the two complete thin client networks donated by the University of Applied Sciences and Arts, Zürich (my dear employer).

In the picture you see Martin Thawani, librarian of the Polytechnic Library, accepting the symbolical gift “Free as in Freedom“. That book “interweaves biographical snapshots of GNU project founder Richard Stallman with the political, social and economic history of the free software movement”. The GNU project is what makes GNU/Linux and the GNU tools possible in the way we know them today.

Alex Antener’s approach to helping the African nation cross the digital divide is different than that of many other organizations and individuals. Instead of dumping northern computer trash on poor schools that certainly won’t ask for something better, he flew across the continents with 70 kilograms of the latest geek toys in his hand baggage. Highly modern servers based on the Intel Core 2 Duo CPU as well as state of the art thin clients by Fujitsu-Siemens — machines newer than what is used in most European organizations! That’s what we use here, why should we cover Malawi in our outdated tech trash? That’s just a convenient way for northern nations to lighten their consciousness and their recycling budget.

Instead, Alex set up the thin client network based entirely on Free Software, then made it transparent how the whole thing works, how it’s maintained, what the nuts and bolts are and where to find help to help yourself. These things would be impossible or severely limited had he used proprietary software. Additionally, the servers he installed make sure that the Polytechnic gets the most out of its prohibitively expensive Internet connection. Firstly they offer proxy caching services, meaning that things downloaded from the Internet are downloaded only once, later the locally stored copy is served and the Internet connection is not taxed anymore. Secondly, the machines are immune to viruses, spyware, trojans and other malware, so the plague of bandwidth-swallowing infected machines is over.

I also took part in the project with some consulting, because I believe the way large western and northern corporations treat African nations of Malawi’s rank is appalling. Africa is often merely abused by private institutions and NGOs to siphon development aid money out of their own (or foreign) governments. Then there is the cultural pollution that comes from large companies like Microsoft and Cisco. They try to impose their proprietary technology, then teach their proprietary thoughts. It’s apparently easy to take a network engineering course in Malawi, but try to learn any other technology than Cisco’s and you will soon run full-speed into a concrete wall. Africa is not supposed to learn about its possibilities. Africa should be thankful! Thankful that we lower ourselves to its ridiculous level and teach it about our wonderful American products. Only Cisco routers shall they know, only Microsoft operating systems shall they use. Operating systems that African companies can gladly buy from us. Oh, don’t worry about payment, my friend, development aid has you covered.

Alex has demonstrated that there are other ways to bridge the gap, to give access to knowledge that is useful in any context, not just inside one single company’s little sandbox. Free Software was nothing new at the time. GNU/Linux and open standards like the ISO standard OpenDocument format were nothing new either. But the average Malawian computer user does not know about these things, even though it’s a Linux distribution by an African man’s company that is the most popular in the world at this moment.

The Polytechnic now has all this information, and it stands as an inspiring example of what is possible. A few hundred people have learned about their possibilities in these last two months, and thousands and ten thousands more still have the opportunity in the coming years.

Photo © 2006 Nathalie Bissig

Here we go, a new theme. I’m not an expert at CSS, but I think it more or less works. Due to a severe lack of imagination, I’ve called it “Technophile Monkey”. If you want to use the theme too (or tweak it), you can get it at svn://svn.snm-hgkz.ch/schnipsel/themes/wordpress/techmonkey.

The theme is quite liquid, uses em units instead of pixels for almost all elements and should scale very well for small and large screens as well as any font adjustments you might have made in your browser.

Let me know what you think, even if you think it’s horrid