Robot Claw – Page 813 – “Life In The So-Called Space Age”

Galactus

July 3, 2007

So apparently the recent Fantastic Four sequel did not include Galactus, which is kind of crap because that was one of the reasons I was interested in the film (which we ended up not seeing). Not that I have any interest in Galactus, or American comics as a whole, it’s just that I figured it would have been a spectacle.

No worries though, because I came upon this image of what he may have looked like, taken from the Marvel Ultimate Alliance game. As far as I am concerned, this shows truly outstanding character design:

< Galactus

Plus, it almost looks a bit like Andrew Eldritch don’t you think?

Coinstar

July 1, 2007

Our bank recently stopped taking rolled coin (and they stopped taking loose coin ages ago). Which left me in a quandry, for what was I to do with all that pocket change collecting in jars in the kitchen?

There’s a machine called Coinstar, which is an electronic coin-counter redemption device at our local grocery store. I had dismissed it for years due to the outrageous 8.9% coin counting fee, but recently they started waiving the fee if you redeem your change for gift certificates at a number of online retailers.

One of these is amazon.com, so today I carried a plastic jug full of loose coin down to Price Chopper and dumped it into the Coinstar machine, selecting the amazon.com gift certificate option. It was a strangely entertaining process…

For starters, the machine is loud. For seconders, it is slow. So after I had finished dumping the change and the last coin had disappeared into the bowels of the machine, the updating display on the screen read only a measly $24 dollars or so. It took a good few minutes for it to finish counting, updating the display with each coin, until a grand total of $62.92 was displayed. It even has a nifty summary:

1 Half Dollar
122 Quarters
221 Dimes
111 Nickels
377 Pennies

In a slightly sneaky move, just before ‘checkout’, it is easy to unwittingly choose the ‘cash-out’ option and pay the 8.9% fee (even though when you start you choose gift certificate). But they didn’t fool me, and my receipt contained a code that I just used at amazon for $62.92 in credit.

Of course I immediately spent that credit. And what did I buy, you ask? The book Electronic Plastic and the DVD Yo-Yo Girl Cop (aka Sukeban Deka).

Summary: Coinstar is fun, and it works well. Never again will I roll my loose change 🙂

DS Browser

June 30, 2007

A few weeks back Nintendo released the DS Web Browser and I naturally had to pick it up.

The image on the right shows it in action, viewing this very blog. In the mode shown, the webpage appears on the bottom and a zoomed version appears on the top. You can move the page around via the stylus on the bottom screen. A touch of a bottom swaps the two screens (allowing you to click on a link, for instance). A second mode displays webpages in a very different manner which is optimized for the DS. This displays the page over both screens, and omits most graphics and background material. For sites you are familiar with this is the best mode as they load faster and are quicker to navigate.

The broswer comes with a memory expansion cartridge (fits in the GBA slot of the DS) but even so suffers from memory limitations. It’s not as fast as it could be, and struggles with large or graphically-intensive webpages. It also offers no Java/Flash support.

That said, I actually prefer the DS browser to (for instance) the PSP browser because it’s much easier to navigate. Furthermore, if you restrict yourself to using mobile sites such as Google Mobile, then this is a perfectly acceptable product.

But, who would ever use this? Who brings their DS with them and intends to use it as a web device at a wi-fi hotspot? Not me, that’s for sure. In that respect this is little more than a toy, or even a tech demo.