Tech Blog

You know the drill, I do these from time to time: random game news that has fallen into my inbox over the past week or so, assemble! This week was the Tokyo Game Show, so we've got Castlevania, Bob Marley, Mickey Mouse, Tronne Bonne and Radiant Silvergun.

Despite Hollywood dumping out flick after flick after flick in 3D, there has been resistance to adoption of the home version.

The reason?

Not the cost of the sets. Not the slim avaialability of content. Not the size of the screens.

It's the glasses.

But unless we change the way the human eye interacts with the world around us, the glasses aren't going anywhere.  Here's the argument why 3DTV is here to stay - and so are the glasses.

One of the key problems with creating 3D content is the expense involved. For regular movies the rigs can run close to $500,000 each and because the rigs take significant time to set up, adjust, and even change lenses (an hour!) often productions need two rigs to make shooting feasible. Oh, did I mention that the rigs are fussy? Yeah a dust fleck, bump, whatever and the 3D content is trash. So a lot of 3D stuff is limited to shooting indoors where things can be tightly controlled.

Panasonic Canada has been on a roadshow of sorts with their new lineup of 3D TVs, Blu-ray players, and video cameras (including a consumer focused one!). Before I get into posts about the TVs (wow, just, wow) and the video cameras (file under: you had me at "uses SD cards"), thought I'd give you my feelings about 3D TVs and what Panasonic is doing with them.

Part two of my interview with Kevin Durand and Alan Doyle, stars of Robin Hood.

In anticipation of the DVD/Blu-ray release of Universal Studios' spring blockbuster Robin Hood I had the exclusive opportunity to meet two of film's Merry Men, Kevin Durand and Alan Doyle.  No strangers to the spotlight, both of these talented Canadian superstars have had incredible careers, with Durand starring in movies such as Mystery, Alaska and Xmen Origins: Wolverine , and also ABC's hit TV show Lost , while Doyle is the lead singer of the award winning Celtic rock band Great Big Sea.

It has just been revealed at the Tokyo Game Show Sony media briefing press conference that PlayStation 3 will support 3D Blu-ray 3D Disc playback starting September 21.

So you want some decent sound to replace the garbage coming from those tiny speakers built into your flat panel? Don't jump to buying a huge surround sound system you won't use because you live in a tiny apartment. Instead, consider this...

Rogers and Bell announced today that they will be carrying the new Samsung tablet, now called the Galaxy Tab, sometime this fall. No pricing or exact availability date was revealed, but there was some talk about what the specs will look like, and what the device should be able to do out of the box.

Saturday September 18th is first International Observe the Moon Night , falling conveniently before International Talk like a Pirate Day , but I digress matey, arrr.

International Observe the Moon Night is about getting outside in the cool evening air and taking a look at the biggest celestial object within a few million miles: The Moon. And to support that activity, Moon Night was created -- along with a host of downloadable materials and ideas to help you host your own Moon Night event.

I briefly tested the new Internet Explorer 9 Beta and I'm impressed.  To start, you should note that I use Internet Explorer 8 as my regular browser and only use FireFox if absolutely needed (e.g. on other people's computers).  One of my biggest complaints with IE8 is that it can be slow to load pages.  But with IE9, that's all changed.  Here are some of my initial impressions and thoughts.

Thinking about picking up an Xbox 360 and a copy of Halo: Reach? Careful which model of console you pick up. There are numerous reports online that the new 4GB Xbox 360 Slim consoles aren't able to play online co-op Halo: Reach.

Gamers who are trying to play online co-op on the newer slim consoles are posting comments online, reporting an error when they try to play with their pals:

It seems like there’s a fierce battle going on in every category of tech these days. Smartphones, media players, television, gaming, and on and on. But web browsers have also been battling for eyeballs for the last few years in a big way. The stumbling king, Internet Explorer, is trying hard to keep its market share from tumbling anymore than it already has. Hence, why Internet Explorer 9 is now in public beta.

A brand new bird is on the way! After rapidly gaining popularity over the past year, the folks at Twitter have decided to relaunch the website making it much more user friendly. The timing couldn't be better. With more than 160 million users worldwide, and 370,000 new users added each day, the service has never been more popular. So what changes can we look forward to?

When you're shopping for a new wireless router, what do you do? Are you the shopper who looks for the cheapest router out there? Or do you like to make sure you have more than enough for your purposes and thus get the top of the line router? How do you decide what is the best option for you?

Yep, it’s out today (at 00:00 hrs technically), and no, I don’t have a copy, yet.

My wife and I have been big fans of the Halo franchise since we started playing it co-op on the original Xbox years ago when it came out. Multi-player was never our thing, but co-op, now there’s fun.

So yes, I’ll be picking it up soon, and yes, there will be many evenings when we’re ensconced in our basement, a nice romantic fire, and the gentle sound of gunfire and grenades -- good times.

And here’s four reasons why:

What was once a novelty has now become the norm. Streaming media players seem to be a dime a dozen these days. Western Digital has TV Live, Seagate has GoFlex TV, and Apple of course has Apple TV. But soon you'll have yet another brand to choose from. The Boxee Box will hit Canadian homes this November, giving you "freedom to watch what you want".

Today, Canon announced the launch of their latest model of the infamous G-series premium compact, the G12. The update is not revolutionary as much as it is evolutionary, but addresses some of the feature requests made by previous generation G-series users.

If you haven’t heard of Boxee, it’s been around for a couple of years now as a software app that aggregated your own media from your computer, while also opening up the door to content from the Web as well. An actual Boxee hardware set top box made by D-Link has been in the works for a while, and it’s about to hit Future Shop stores nationwide on November 21.

Google Android’s assault on the smartphone market share has been relentless this year, and along with HTC, the battle has been spearheaded by Motorola.

The latest Android phones available in Canada from Motorola are two entry level models that bring unique form factors to the wide variety of phones available, and they both run Android 2.1 with an update of Motorola’s Motoblur UI.

It was a great night to be out at the Lansdowne Future Shop in Richmond BC, with the Xbox Street Team on-hand to introduce Halo Reach to a dedicated fan base. Halo players showed up with covenant energy swords in-hand, seeking challengers, cool swag, and a chance to win some sick prizes. They found all of the above.

Early in the days of wireless security, we "experts" suggested that setting your wireless router to not broadcast the network's name (SSID) was a good security measure. Now, if you had stopped listening at that point you would have missed the part about turning on WEP or WPA passwords (WEP from the time before WPA existed). The idea was the "hiding in plain sight" idea that if often used to have sites in progress up without passwords and such (sometimes you just have to do it for testing and sanity). If you are there, but not telling people you're there, then they won't find your network, won't try to connect to it, and therefore won't get in.

Too bad we were pretty much way off the mark on that one.

Pretty much everybody as heard by now that scores of gamers are lining up at Future Shop stores across the country for the release of Halo: Reach, it's pretty hard not to notice considering how much hype the game has received all year.  But there's another game that came out on store shelves this week that also deserves some attention, and that game is Level 5's latest adventure/puzzler Professor Layton and the Unwound Future for the Nintendo DS.

Like a lot of people out there, I grew up playing the Super Mario Bros. games on the NES and Super NES. Amazing how a short mustachioed plumber could become the icon he is today — even if a live action movie based on him was the definition of abysmal. Nintendo is honouring Mario and the world around him 25 years to the day of the first game’s launch in Japan.

I think this holiday season is going to become a tablet battle royale and frankly Apple has a two-front battle on its hands. We have the Samsung Galaxy Tab on the tablet side, which running Android will give Apple a run for its money. On the ereader side we have the Kindle, and (competitor) is hitting Apple on one front where it doesn't really have much to say: glare.

Forget Prince of Persia . Resident Evil is still chugging along as the premiere game franchise in Hollywood. Resident Evil: Afterlife , the fourth installment in the series, raked in $73.2 million at the global box office over the weekend, leading a lackluster pack of other films and setting the wheels in motion for another inevitable sequel.

I love startup developers that try to create applications that enable us to do cool things with the stuff we already have. Sharing media files or accessing them remotely is always a great feature for those who want to snack on it themselves, or share it with friends and family with plenty of privacy. And best of all? It can be done for free.

Busy busy week! Cool new innovation both from Google and from a guy that hacked a Google-like thing together in 3 hours. Also some shady dealings in FarmVille, and some new dates from Microsoft and Apple...

Tuesday can't come soon enough for millions of gamers around the world anxiously awaiting the release of Bungie's next big project, Halo: Reach.

Facebook may have been under fire for its confusing policies on privacy, but the elephant in the room might actually be Google. While Facebook may have botched the way it handles content you post onto its site, the rest of your web browsing habits probably have a lot to do with Google and how the company collects information on you.

I just wrote another "vs." article -- between Bell and Rogers -- and so I'm in the mood to do another. In particular, as I recently took the perhaps unusual step of picking up both a PS3 Slim and an Xbox 360 S. Not on the same day or anything, but within a couple of weeks of each other. I couldn't help but wonder how the experience would feel to someone completely unfamiliar with either console, so I decided to put them against each other in a face off to see which one is most welcoming out of the box.