The Nokia Ngage apparently is bombing with analysts and press. Too bad, I’d love better gaming on my phone. Tho maybe the phone is just a really good voice device and we shouldn’t try to screw it up with other purposes.

I received my new Harmony Remote last night.

This has real promise. Excepting my RCA Scenium DVD/PVR combo, the website knew all my devices. and it had a reasonable guess for the dvd. So getting a working config gen’ed up for my system was quite simple and painless.

The infrared emitter seems to have a nice wide field, I don’t have to be super exact on pointing it towards my stack of gear.

The activity based commands work great so far. When I tell the device I want to watch tv, it turns on my amp, monitor, and dss/tivo box automagically.

The on-remote channel listing and program guide doesn’t seem to be that valuable, i have to play with it more. And I haven’t yet played with all the tivo-specific scenarios – set up a recording, watch something from my hard disk, etc.

But so far I am liking it. And unlike the pronto, I can see my family using this control, they like hard buttons.

Cory Doctorow points to public comments on FCC discussions about some spectrum realloc. I like his description of the Cingular and ATT positions – I think that the contrast between Cingular and AT&T is especially striking here. AT&T is saying, yeah, we’re a telco, this is gonna gore our ox, so we’ve gone out and bought a different ox. Cingular is saying, dammit, that’s our ox, where do you get off goring it?

No time to read now but this paper looks interesting.

We’ve been getting into paintball a little. Just finding a field in the seattle area is tricky. There are a lot of really stale pointers to fields on the web. Splat Attack appears to be the place to play south of town. STP is the place north of town. A “paintball portal” for the northwest is PaintballNW.

For future Halloween consideration – looks like you’ll be able to run MIDI over IP – IEEE P1639 - Distributed MIDI – I’d assume 802.11 would work too. Would be a nice control protocol option, there is lots of MIDI-compatible prop control gear and lighting. And I’d love to be able to use a nice MIDI keyboard as my central control station for Halloween props.

Good site for economic term definitions – Gross National Product (GNP) - Definition. We were confused about the difference between GDP and GNP – now we know!

Looking for good reviews of aftermarket car stereo systems. Car Audio & Electronics Reviews has a lot of ratings (but make sure you have a popup stopper installed, it seems to try to pop a lot). Car Audio Heaven has links to lots of other sites. Car Stereo is kind of a portal with a lot of classifieds. None of the sites seem to have a great database of reviews.

I saw FileWatch 5 from Kevin Gearhart recommended as the way to watch for any changes on your system. Helpful for when you are installing games and downloaded software to see just what they are doing. I haven’t tried yet but intend to…

BTW I’m aware that my comments are semi-broken. If you try to leave one, you will receive an error message about not have permission. in fact the comment is captured, but i don’t currently allow the actions of anonymous users to cause a rebuild of my index pages. i am thinking about ways around this, need to look for other commenting packages that people have used.

Just found this in my referrers log – Seattle weblogs – interesting collection of Seattle blog content. I added trackback ping support for…

I wonder what happened to this product – announced in January but no sign of any followon press or releases – Linksys: Press Releases.

An interesting way to transport home movies maybe – USB 2.0 Portable Disk with Multimedia Playback Feature. A lot pricier than a firewire or usb2.0 disk, but has the player/decoders built in so you can watch the output on a tv instead of depending on a pc being available. 20G seems a little small tho.

Saving this for future reference – accomodations - commencement - Pomona College

HighMAT and Microsoft have just announced HighMAT CD Writing and Viewing software for Windows XP – 20030507 Lockergnome Digital Media. I agree with the Lockergnome analsys – I’ve read the HighMat site three times now and I still can’t figure out why I would want to be creating HighMAT media.