I had not heard this was in the works. I am finding more and more reasons to use my XBOX for arcade games as opposed to the big retail games. This will certainly help. I already play TTR on the Days of Wonder site, hopefully this implementation will be just as good. Don’t see a link on the arcade site yet.
Ticket to Ride comes to XBox Live Arcade
I don’t know if I would really be tempted to purchase this, but it does seem to be a good price point for the device, especially considering that it has all of the required digital connections.
How does it work? You buy the box for $99 and connect it to your TV via HDMI, composite, or component. You connect the stereo outs to your receiver or run out digital optical. You must have a Netflix account to make it work, but then you simply connect the box to the Internet via Wi-Fi or Ethernet, send a request to Netflix, and then type in a code in your Netflix account. The box is paired and you’re ready to add digital movies to the box.
The movies are mostly oldies but goodies. There were very few first-run titles in the mix but there were older seasons of some popular television shows like Weeds and The Office. Right now there are about 10,000 titles in the mix, enough to keep most die-hard movie fans occupied.
I spent sometime this weekend researching ebooks, ebook readers, and in general reading more thinks in a digital way. I have been reading a few magazines on Zinio recently, and decided I wanted to branch out to books. Rather than make an order for some new paper based books, I decided to order myself a Kindle. It will be here on Tuesday…is it Tuesday yet?
So why a Kindle and not a Sony or other option? There are two major reasons I went the Kindle route.
- Trust - I tend to trust Amazon. I spend quite a bit of money there already, and I think they are moving in the right direction with the services they offer. I think that if ebook sellers move to a DRM free model, Amazon will be leading that move. Regardless, I perceive Amazon to be more trust worthy than other options so they get my money.
- Wireless - I just think this is an amazingly cool feature of the Kindle. I don’t know how much I will use it, but I can see myself using it on occasion. If nothing else I might browse for books I see, just to get an idea of wether or not the Kindle option is available. The online wikipedia access is very cool, especially since I plan to read a lot of books about history. I am sure that I will encounter plenty of references I do not know the details of.
It does not hurt that it can play Audible books either. My biggest concern right now is that the Kindle won’t fit in my bag with the EEE PC very well.
I am starting to collect ebook links for use on the Kindle. What should I be reading blogwise? What sites do I need to have bookmarked if I am going to be an ebook reader? Here is my short list thus far.
Mobipocket
Baen Books
Amazon Kindle
Project Gutenberg
I read a lot of news feeds. I currently have 217 feeds in Google Reader, the reader I am using today, and I would say that I grow the list by one or two a week. I saw that Lifehacker was polling readers on the best news reader, and I realized I just wasn’t sure how I would vote.
I have been using FeedDemon quite happily for a little over a year now, but my thoughts on that changed when I got my EEE PC (running XP). The EEE is really best used to access the Internet, running as little software locally as possible. The user interface for the Newsgator web tool is kinda crappy, and just does not work nicely on the small 7″ screen. I have Google Reader set to open with the feed list hidden, so it actually works very, very well on the EEE PC.
While I can get FeedDemon to run on the EEE PC fine, it just seems easier to use Google Reader. I say that, but FeedDemon has a lot of power that Google Reader does not have. The built in popular topics meme tracker is cool, as is the easy integration with other web services (and Windows Live Writer). The synchronization with the online service means that feeds are always marked as read across multiple computers. The addition or the watches and the clippings folder round out a great set of features. I do wish that FeedDemon had a true River of News function, something I am enjoying with Google Reader.
What is a geek to do? Should I stick with the all web interface of Google, or stick with the functional superiority of FeedDemon.
Live Mesh is a new preview service from Microsoft that allows you to synchronize files between all of your computer devices and the Internet. I have been using the FolderShare beta service from Microsoft Live, and I think it works great, so I was hoping to see something even better from Mesh.
Unfortunately, I really don’t see any reason to stop using FolderShare. What I like about FolderShare is that just keeps the computers I run the client on in Synch. It does not worry about also keeping some online storage place in synch (although synching with S3 would be cool). I thought Live Mesh could do this as well, but I have not been able to make it work. It always tries to synch to the Live Desktop. I am not sure why I would want to keep all these files in the cloud, I really want them on my computer. FolderShare lets me browse directories on other computers in my network, if they are on, and grab files I need. It works really well.
Mesh does have the ability to actually remote control a computer, which might be kind of nice. It would allow me to keep MS Office on my desktop and keep my laptop software load a little leaner. I am just not sure about the way it synchs yet. I will keep it on a couple of machines and see how it works. I am a bit hesitant to install it on the EEE PC.
More Later.
Sean BradyPearland, TX 77584