So I’m working on another web site. You see, the 400 monthly page-views I get here are just too much for this one site to handle. I need something to fork off my immense readership. A readership that could comfortably fit in my apartment. My apartment is quite small, for the record.

No, this other site is for a very specific purpose, contrasted with this site which exists as a hose from which I spew blather endlessly yet irregularly.

Regarding this other site, every week I think, “Next week, it’ll go online.” It’s not being delayed because the site itself needs work, it’s pretty much sitting there waiting for me to finish a completely different bit of work. Once this other bit of work is done, then the site will go up. When that will be, well, my best guess was Wednesday March 3rd, 2010. Weeks ago.

A couple of interesting things have been announced recently. Two separate announcements, both pretty cool. Steam is coming out for the Mac, and Crysis 2 is coming out in Q4 2010.

These things in and of themselves aren’t big deals, and in fact have been known or at least suspected for some time. The news riding along is what holds the greatness.

So I just downloaded and played the Just Cause 2 demo on PC via Steam. I’ve got some thoughts. You can read them if you’d like.

Valve has made a handful of legendary games. They have an awesome digital distribution system, with DRM that people actually seem to like (compared to it’s alternatives). They have a great reputation, mostly from making great games but also because they have do things like regularly updating Team Fortress 2 with new items and weapons (and bots!!!) at no added cost.

But that’s not why I’m jealous of Valve at this particular moment. I’m jealous because all Valve has to do is post an update like this for Portal:

Changed radio transmission frequency to comply with federal and state spectrum management regulations

And they get a response like this. 64 pages of posts in 4 hours. Posts full of people scouring Portal for clues of how to use the radios recently scattered across the game, as well as trying to decipher the beeps they emit (morse code, some are thinking).

I’m a simple man with simple needs. The Nokia N900 is awesome. There is a huge body of people developing cool applications for Maemo 5, the N900′s operating system. In fact, I only have a few problems, none of them very large problems.

For instance, there’s no Shazam app for the N900. I used that program all the time on my old phone to identify music in restaurants and on the radio.

You can’t have multiple ringtones on the N900, for instance giving each contact a custom ringtone. Not a big deal, but still odd that the N900 doesn’t allow it. In fact, that feature is so common in all phones now, it’s not even anything I thought to investigate when researching the N900.

The biggest problem for me was reading RSS feeds in Google Reader. I love Google Reader. On my pc. The interface is a little hard to use on the tiny N900 screen, and using the iPhone’s mobile Google Reader interrface doesn’t sort feeds by web site, nor does it act at all like I want it to.

This was a problem, and I have even been evaluating other web-based feed readers for a better mobile interface, when I read about Grr.

Some UMPC Portal commenter with great detective skills has done some digging and found the prices for the whole line of Viliv S10 Blades. Slashgear reports it as such:

So it looks like the Viliv S10′s pricing is going to start at $699. That’s according to Dynamism, anyway. I like the WXVGA display and the 7-10 hour battery life, but $699, and that’s for a model with Windows XP and a 60GB hard drive. Yeah, right.

I have, in the past, taken forum talk as “confirmation” of DRM-based restrictions. For instance, I thought Bioshock 2 wouldn’t allow you to save games if you weren’t connected to the internet. This turned out to be an exaggeration, as you are able to create an “offline” Games For Windows Live profile once you’ve activated the game. With the offline profile you can save games even if you’re not connected to the internet (though, I repeat, you have to connect to the internet at least once to activate the G4WL DRM).

Ubisoft has put some ridiculous DRM into effect that I’m comfortable calling ‘confirmed’, as the source is the magazine PC Gamer.

The game in question? The PC version of Assassin’s Creed 2. The ridiculous restriction? Even though it’s a single-player game, you can’t play the game unless you’re connected to the internet. Yes, that’s right.

If you’re playing the game and your internet connection fails, you will be kicked out of the game.

Guess what? If their servers go down, that’ll kick you out of the game too.

Way to alienate your fan base. Of course, the terrible sales will be chalked up to PC games being a dying market, having nothing to do with increasingly awful DRM.

Fuck that, and fuck Ubisoft.

The story has changed a bit, though Ubisoft seems to be contradicting themselves. Rock, Paper, Shotgun has a really good writeup on the whole situ.

Lark

Just bought the Motorola S9-HD, stereo bluetooth headphones. Thought I’d throw up some first impressions and notes.

I occasionally take it upon myself to ramble about how great Blender is. As soon as the 2.5 release is finished I’m sure I’ll have a lot more to talk about, though production-wise I’m locked into using 2.49 for a few more months, for safety and compatibility’s sake.

I’ve toyed around with Blender’s Video Sequence Editor (aka video editor) previously, but not much. I used it for a slide show once, I used it to put a watermark on a video, but nothing more complicated than that.

It wasn’t until this week that I actually used it to do some heavy-duty editing. An 11 minute video, broken up by scenes, and I used Blender’s VSE to stitch it all together and tweak the timing.