I was really looking forward to the inclusion of automatic captioning from Youtube, it seemed like a really easy way of providing information to deaf people and really giving more of a sense of completion to my videos. However, the whole system hinges on the accuracy of Youtube/Google’s voice recognition software. A few of my videos have been transcribed and by god they are terrible!

Not a single video transcribed is anywhere near accurate, I think there was one sentence in all of the videos I have checked that were slightly correct. Most of the text is complete gibberish and seemingly completely unrelated to the audio on the video. I assumed that as they are introducing this system to millions and millions of videos it would at least be half competent but I don’t even think that you could refer to it as speech “recognition” it’s more like a complete guess.

It’s and F to Google, please try harder.

Rasta monkey is a game about a monkey… What kind of monkey? A rasta monkey of course. This game is based on the Unity engine, which is a free downloadable plugin for your browser, letting you play 3D and more involving games through your Firefox… What other browsers? Haha don’t make me laugh.

Anyway Rasta monkey is a pretty simple affair, you guide your monkey around a bunch of trees by either tumbling around like some kind of spidermonkey (a cross between a spider and a monkey, not the well known Spider Monkey) or you can hold the spacebar and spin, spin, spin until you hurl yourself up to another branch. The physics in this game seem eerily good however that did not help me excel at the game, infact I’m pretty crap. It is however an enjoyable experience, so give it a go.

I learned of this game from adverts on TV, they were sponsoring all the shows I watched apparently, the adverts made the game look really nice and so I got it on rental. The first thing needed to be said about Darksiders is that the game’s title floats entirely on it’s own, no reference is made in game to “Darksiders” and it really doesn’t describe any part of the game. Secondly this game is not really a God of War copy, a lot of people seem to think that because the fighting is similar the rest of the game is the same, but it’s not, if I had to liken Darksiders to another game it would be Zelda. Same kind of dungeon/room setup where you have to work your way through puzzle type rooms and fight the bad guys until you get to the boss and kill it, but the similarities end there, read on for more Darksider crap.

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I had a bit of a UFO Enemy Unknown binge the other week after I bought the whole series on steam for £2, I played it for hours and hours. It reminded me of the old UFOpedia site I made a few years ago which replicated the interface within the game. So I decided to make it again, however, the way I coded it back then was extremely time consuming and not very adaptable. I had to go through 115+ HTML files and put all the right links in the right place. These days knowing how easy PHP is I decided to use PHP to do it all. You can check it out here: X-COM UFOpedia

Having coded every link to parse the URL parameters I only had to code one page, sure it may have taken close to the same time but it was a lot less tedious and a much better learning experience. It also means that I can update the page to fit into any design I wish with the minimal of effort. I think I will code up a Terror From the Deep USOpedia, should be pretty easy now I’ve basically got all the code.

Edit: USOpedia is now online too: Terror from the Deep UFOpedia, I also added an index page which displays all the images on one page like so. Maybe someone will find it useful, probably not.

Came up with this after playing around with some other notifying tools, it’s simple but for me gets the job done perfectly, this script shows you when you have new mail in your gmail inbox, all you have to do is have your gmail open in a tab in firefox and the style does the rest. I think it looks best using app tabs, it looks and acts just like an app 🙂

Userstyles/stylish links:
NOTE: Depending on whether your mail is entitled “Google Mail”, “Gmail” or just “inbox” you will have to install a different style.

Gmail:
http://userstyles.org/styles/25543 – Alternating Envelope
http://userstyles.org/styles/25542 – Flashing Envelope
http://userstyles.org/styles/25558 – Static Envelope

Google Mail:
http://userstyles.org/styles/25544 – Alternating Envelope
http://userstyles.org/styles/25541 – Flashing Envelope
http://userstyles.org/styles/25557 – Static Envelope

If your tab title says only “inbox”:
http://userstyles.org/styles/25560 – Alternating Envelope
http://userstyles.org/styles/25552 – Flashing Envelope
http://userstyles.org/styles/25559 – Static Envelope

If you don’t know what you need download stylish first and click on “install with stylish”, make sure you get app tabs too and right click on the tab and select “app tab” which will make it auto load with firefox too.

LittleBigPlanet is a game I never really understood on the PS3, I thought it seemed a little too simplistic for a full on home console game. The game is very basically a platformer, there are some nice fun elements but at it’s heart it is a run of the mill platformer. The main selling point of the game though is the ability to create and share your own levels, create your own puzzles and generally be all round creative. When I saw it was coming to the PSP I was impressed by the graphics and thought that LBP would be the perfect game to be ported to the PSP. A bright, colourful and creative platformer is just what I could see myself enjoying, I had no idea…

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I like the artwork from Bad Company 2 but there aren’t any good wallpapers out, so I used the fan kit from DICE to create a few of my own, not the most creative but I think they worked out pretty well, currently adorning my laptop desktop 😀 Please enjoy and feel free to share, if anyone wants any custom resolutions or aspect ratios let me know and I’ll make it up for you, alternatively download the fan kit yourself and have a go 🙂

I made a quick gameplay montage of what you’ll be seeing in LBP PSP!

I have been rather hooked on Battlefield Bad Company, when I saw the title in reviews and videos it just seemed like another BF2 and I wasn’t interested, but recently my brother in law was playing it and I was like “oooooh”. The game is great, it seems to have a good selection of weapons and that Battlefield feel to it, the same quality that made me love BF2 and BF2142. However after a while you start to get annoyed that certain aspects of the game are truly frustrating those aspects need to be fixed for Bad company 2, full low-down after the break…

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I’ve heard a lot about netstumbler and the neat things it can show you about the wifi in your area, it always seemed pretty useful to me but it never worked with any of the wifi cards I have ever had so it’s useless. In comes Inssider, which does basically the same thing as netstumber but should work with most wifi cards/chips rather than a select few as it uses the wireless API in windows.

As you can see it lists the wifi access points in range with the signal strength and handy things like the time it was last seen and most importantly the channel the network is operating on. The most useful parts for me though are the graphs at the bottom, the left one shows the signal strength over time, which is useful if you want to track what may be interfering with your signal. The right graphs just shows a visual representation of where the different channels are and where the networks around you are broadcasting, this is very useful in determining which channel you should be broadcasting on to get the least interference from other networks.

All in all it’s a small and useful package and you can download it here.