Monthly Archives: November 2009

The Everyman, Day One

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Pulling an all-nighter into a sleep experiment probably wasn’t the best idea, and may be why I failed completely at nap #3.

From what I’ve read, the Everyman is a form of Polyphasic sleep that, in total, lets you sleep 4 hours of the day. One core sleep of 3 hours, with 3 20-minute naps thrown about during the day. Since my sleep has felt pretty crappy in the past couple of months, I decided to give it a whirl.

After waking up at around noon the day before yesterday and pushing through until 9:20 AM yesterday, I took my first nap. Felt refreshed, as I would with any 20 minute naps I’ve taken in the past. Then, I took my nap #2 at 1:40 PM.

Then, nap #3. Since it’s Thanksgiving, there was quite the turkey feast that occurred just before it. That, and the fact that I was sleep deprived for a day probably added onto the inevitability of fail to follow.

I ended up with around 6 hours of total sleep time, which isn’t bad, but isn’t great either. I guess I’ll just be easing into this whole process.

I will be keeping a sleep log, just like I log almost everything else. Still need to finish programming that online log, though…

Six Months on Everyman was a very nice post on the subject, if you want to get started.

Dear Vimeo: Please Let Me Skip Ahead

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Attached is the trailer for Dr. Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog, first from YouTube and the second from Vimeo.

With YouTube’s Flash player, you can jump ahead before the video is fully loaded. Vimeo? You cannot.

Teaser from Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog on Vimeo.

Another plus for the YouTube player: once the video is fully loaded, it stays cached. Vimeo’s does not.

Oh, and I’m sure there are some people who have fancy Pipes being able to download this so fast that my little experiment fails. I hate/love you.

Why This Is Ridiculously Annoying

These are 1 minute long videos, so it’s not that big of a deal to not be able to jump around. (And who’d want to, these trailers are still awesome.)

But think how annoying it would be for an hour long screencast, interview, or presentation. If I find a lengthy piece of video on Vimeo, I try to find it somewhere else online.

Let’s assume that Flash crashed. (I know, hard to believe.) This forces me to restart the download from the beginning and makes me wait until the stream catches up to where I left off. YouTube? Just jump to where you left off. (It would be cool if it somehow saved where I left off, like Hulu in some cases.)

Also, this is mildly annoying if I’m going up to HD or dropping down to lower quality, since the video has to restart downloading. YouTube handles this a lot more gracefully by upscaling or downscaling and continuing from when you left off.

Skipping Ahead

Please don’t take this the wrong way: Vimeo is a fine video sharing site. I’ve heard great things about the upload process from other developers using Vimeo for the aforementioned uses, and I like the design of their site.

But, come on. There was a time when jumping around a video was a whiz-bang futuristic feature. These days, Vimeo is the exception for not having this feature.

What surprises me is that I can scrub the video, meaning: I can click and hold on the progress bar (Vimeo: What progress bar?), and you’ll see the keyframes of the video. I don’t know much about Flash in general, but I feel like this feature is doable without too much reprocessing of old videos. I’d like to hear from Vimeo on this.

Bonus Rant

I absolutely abhor when I click on the video playing in the YouTube’s Flash player that it opens up to the YouTube page. I mildly dislike that Vimeo’s player doesn’t do anything, except I do like how double clicking the video makes it go into full screen.

I’m sure there’s a blog post somewhere out there, calling out for standard User Interfaces for flash players in general. Maybe native players will win? HTML5 <video> FTW?

IndieGamer.org

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So Begins: Indie Gamer

Until recently, I was sure that I would blog only here on joshkim.org. After all, why split up the small population of readers who frequent this lovely establishment?

But then again, I realized that I’ve thrown away video games as a plaything for far too long. I think finishing Braid at the tail end of summer last year started this “indie gamer” mindset within me. Finishing Psychonauts tonight really helped me make this decision to go through with starting the Indie Gamer blog.

To begin, who is an indie gamer? I’d like to think whoever games and thinks critically of a game is an indie gamer. I know it seems a bit hazy and pretentious at face value, but I intend to flesh this out fully as I keep blogging.

IndieGamer.org is specifically my views on games, as well as other people’s views if they choose to join in on the fun and submit posts. While IndieGamer.org is a blog for now, I have some plans to make a service for gamers.

Now, I picked IndieGamer.org and not IndieGames.org for a reason. While I have a huge craving for indie games ever since Braid hit me in the face with the awesome (and I’ve got a whole list of indie games and mods just waiting to be written on), I want to emphasize that any game is up for criticism (for example, Psychonauts, a game which I’d call pseudo-”indie”). Also, I don’t necessarily want to write on a per game basis only, but also write about general trends in games as well as in the gaming industry. (I have a doozy on Valve’s Steam cooking… I <3 puns.)

I’ll be posting all my game related posts on IndieGamer.org from now on. And a better definition of what I think an indie gamer is.

So welcome, yet another project. The important thing here is that I’ve started another project, and that now there’s an outlet for all this criticism I have towards games.

Psychonauts: A Random Picture

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In an effort to not ruin the experience as little as possible, and to kick off this blog, I’ve decided to put up this image from the game Psychonauts, a game I finished today.

READ.

That is indeed a “Read” poster. Remember those? And yes, that’s one of the camp counselors holding up a brain.

So much attention to detail… such a unique variety of style, and yet a very coherent theme that runs throughout the game.

4/4. Amazing. Go but it on Good Old Games or Steam. I bought it on Steam two days before GOG acquired the Majesco library.

The problem with the Steam version is that you’re going to need Steam to play (I tried launching the .exe, and it complained about the lack of Steam). But then again, I wonder if I would have bought it on GOG since most of my PC games are being bought on Steam anyway… this is another post for another day.

Filter Failure

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What if your entire social life came to you? Friends, family, work email, personal email, messages, updates, and feeds… everything, constantly updated and streamed together in one place, so you can keep track of whatever you want and focus on what matters most.

Disclaimer: NPH does not come included with the Motorola CLIQ with MOTOBLUR.

I hate you, Motorola, and your caps.

Talk about overpromising and underdelivering. Well, then again, I don’t know, maybe this is the god-device everyone needs. iHear the Droid is supposed to do things the iPhone doesn’t, or something. Eh.

We, the Internet users, have only begun to generate data. Currently, I feel like the filters don’t exist in the present to deal with that mountain of already existing data. When I sat down and thought about StatusFix (a possible solution to this mess) three years ago, I built it for me, someone who continues to this day drink straight from the data firehose.

But with this commercial, I realized that the day has come when any person with an Internet-enabled phone (WAP? What?) is going to have this issue of Filter Failure.

Clay Shirky has talked on Filter Failure before about a year ago, just in case you missed it.

I sure hope someone’s working on it.

Apple Magic Mouse: Quick Review

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Mighty Mouse

Note: I don’t own the mouse. Anymore. You can see where this is going.

A couple of quick thoughts on the Apple Magic Mouse.

For a pro-trackball user like myself (both meanings of the prefix “pro” ;-) ), I’m still waiting on Apple to create a multitouch trackpad as a separate USB or Bluetooth device. And no, we’re not going to talk about some rumored device servicing this need. We’ll get to that when it happens. Or not.

Looks? Looks great, and matches the aluminum/glass aesthetic that Apple has applied across multiple product lines. But are you seriously going to be looking at your mouse while using it? Maybe. Okay, I’ll give you that. Moving on.

Left and primary click. Feels satisfying, crisp. Nothing really new here.

Right click? Also seems to work as it should. From what I remember, the older Mighty Mouse required the left finger to be down for a right click to register. Thank goodness that got fixed.

<EDIT>

I remembered completely the opposite. From Wikipedia:

Although the Mighty Mouse can sense both right and left clicks it is not possible to press both sensors simultaneously. The user must learn to lift the left finger off the sensor surface before attempting a right-mouse click.[9]

From Marco.org:

It still has the inconvenient behavior of Apple’s recent mice that requires you to lift your left finger off of the mouse in order to right-click. This hasn’t been a huge problem for me, although I have accidentally sent a left-click event when I intended a right-click a few times.

I didn’t have this problem and it might be because I didn’t really play with the right click all that much. And off of this thought, one could write about having physical buttons to push being a good thing, but that’s another post.

Scrolling is smooth, and behaves much like the iPhone. Scrolling down with momentum feels amazing. Scrolling up is not as enjoyable. I always feel like I’m moving my finger in an unnatural way.

I feel the same way with the two-finger horizontal swipe and the horizontal scrolling. These motions would feel natural if I let go of the mouse, and use the vertically positioned mouse as I would use a trackpad. But the mouse tends to slide around a bit too much. I had to peg the mouse down with my thumb and ring/pinky fingers, but where do I grip the thing? The slim profile and the large click surface leaves only a small area to hold the mouse.

</EDIT>

One very specific annoyance I had was with dragging and dropping across large distances. Click, hold, then adjust by lifting the mouse. First time I had to do this, I had to contort my hand to stay clicking, all the while cup the mouse into the air.

Sidenote: Trackball users don’t have to deal with this. Huzzah.

Maybe it’s just not having enough time with it… Maybe it’s because I haven’t used a mouse as my main pointing device in a long while… But I didn’t feel like I clicked with this Apple product.

Rating: 2/4. I’ll use it if I have to. And maybe this will turn into a 3/4. Oh, and if someone can hack this mouse to work horizontally and respond to multiple clicks and make me doughnuts in the morning? Totally a 4/4.

Bonus: Apple Trackpad Vs Apple Magic Mouse

I’m not sure what to think about this, but there are some differences between the trackpads of the MacBook Pros and the Apple Magic Mouse. Some actions are just completely not replicated on the Magic Mouse, and some actions are requiring less fingers. I’ll let you chew on that, as will I.

Postscript

I really need to stop writing puns without actually writing them. I must have some evil process running in the background inserting them willy-nilly. Seriously, I completely overlooked that “clicked” business until my final read-through. Yeah, I even italicized it and didn’t even know what I had done.