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:

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.

As I said in a really old post, I’m going to start putting videos on a site like blip.tv someday soon. Naturally, I’ve been paying extra attention to how other sites have been implementing video ads. In that last post I just talked about some video streaming sites. Now we get to the meat of my current interest, online video with ads.

This isn’t meant to be seen as a comprehensive guide of all sites and different types of online ads, just a few notes and thoughts regarding the way I’ve seen some sites display ads. For extra fun, picture me saying it in the whiny, meandering voice of Andy Rooney.

One of the reasons I bought an N900 was so I could put a 16GB microSD card in it and use it as an mp3 player. The N900 has 32GB of storage–about 26GB of that are available due to the N900 needing about 6GB for system files. Adding a 16GB SD card makes 40GB total available for files such as mp3s.

I don’t even have 40GB of mp3s on this device, because I need to save space for downloaded files, photos, etc. Right now I have maybe 35GB of music on my N900, split between the internal storage and the microSD card. This, by the way, from someone who nearly ran out of space on a 120GB Zune. 110GB – all music, no videos (the Zune Pass subscription service was primarily to blame).

Right now the device has 8,465 songs on it, according to the N900′s default media player.

How a tablet PC “inks,” or how it handles handwriting with a stylus is one of my primary concerns when looking at a new device. There are a lot of considerate individuals out there helping people who care about inking by posting videos of inking on various devices.

In fact, type the model of a tablet PC along with the term “inking” into Google and there’s a pretty good chance it’ll find a video for you. I don’t want to demean or insult anyone who helps people out by making such videos. However, a lot of the videos are lacking a few things. I’ve made a list of requests, okay, rules, for making inking videos more helpful to people like myself:

I’ve been working pretty hard on a few projects as of late, and that generally results in my taking mini-breaks by wandering around my room and tidying things up. It’s started to seem pretty ridiculous to me that I have so many papers. When writing, it’s just easier to brainstorm and work out outlines with a notepad and a piece of paper. It might not be as fast and the result is quite a bit harder to read, but it’s just easier for some reason.

If you have or want an N900, then I’m sure it has something to do with it’s amazing web capabilities.

Here’s a quick run down of my experiences with the 2 main browsers you’ll play with, the default ‘microB’ and Firefox.