PSP 3000 - My Mobile Media Center

One of the main reasons I went ahead and upgraded to a PSP 3000 (had an original PSP for a couple years) was that it supports Interlace as well as Progressive Video out. That may not sound that important, but by adding Interlace, it could now be used with any TV in the house. So, rather than try to pump video over my wireless network to my Wii or Xbox, and then degrade the signal a little more to get it from the console to the TV, I now just carry the PSP to where I want to play a show, and connect it to the cable I've attached to each TV (at $20/cable, it's simple just to hook up and leave for when I need it), and then play the show(s).

Kind of surprised that Sony hasn't made more noise about this feature. Suppose they're worried it would impact PS3 sales even further. Still, it's nice to now have a way to take any show I have on my computer, copy it to the PSP, and then show it on any of the TVs in the house. Yes, you do have to do a conversion of the file for that - but that means its always ready for me to watch portably as well.

Integrating Pandora with my own Music

It has been ages since I've listened to any of the CDs I so meticulously ripped a few years ago so I could go completely digital. The reason is that I much prefer to listen to Pandora.com than my own collection. Not that I don't hear some of the same music, but that I hear it mixed in with new stuff and recommendations of other stuff, and so rarely hit one song and know what the next one will be. On shuffle mode in WMP and many other players, you still run into streaks of songs, and you are also likely to hit music that "jars" the ear when played right after something else.

All that said, Pandora doesn't cover the entire musical spectrum, and so there are some albums (such as The Black Decameron - great classical guitar work) that aren't on Pandora and that I WOULD like to hear occasionally. But I want it mixed in using the same flow I'm used to. So it would be nice if Pandora offered an option to scan my music library, and mix in stuff I own to the playlist. In fact it wouldn't hurt if it would also be willing to do that and create some playlists based just on music I own that I could take with me if I'm not able to access the net.

So, anyone know who to contact at Pandora to get this done?

Diabolical Packaging

Received an early Christmas present today - Dilbert 2.0 which is a collection in a HEAVY bound book of all the Dilbert comics, and a DVD to make searching for a particular Dilbert easier. At least, I think it's supposed to be easier because so far I haven't figured out any way to get the #@!& plastic DVD cover open. It's one of those that holds the DVD to the book, and has a scored flap you're supposed to open to slide the DVD out. Except that while this one has the marks on the flap, it evidently wasn't cut deep enough to actually allow the flap to be pulled open.

So my choices are to rip the whole thing from the book (permanently marring the inner back jacket), try to get a knife or scissors to cut the flap open (and possibly damage the DVD), or decide that this is Scott Adams idea of a sick joke (as a reader of his blog, I wouldn't put it past him).

Of course this is hardly the first or only example of bad packaging I've ever run into - just one of the more infuriating ones :-)

Problem with Torino Scale - Doesn't Consider Moon

As the lack of entires implies, I've been rather busy with the game programming, and in fact have been doing most general posting on Twitter - since I figure most folks only want to read stuff here they can't find elsewhere, and preferably more than just how my day is going. Not that I'm opposed to doing that either :-)

Anyway, one of the interesting things with doing the Android and the Flash games has been playing around with math and physics in a way I haven't done since college. Which turns out to be a dangerous thing when you start to play with concepts like "trying" to hit the Earth as an alien for a game idea. In messing around, I have come to the realization that the REAL danger with most asteroid/comet impacts isn't if they hit the Earth directly. Not that a direct hit would be a picnic, but in "most" cases it would be a regional catastrophe and not a global one. The REAL danger is if something of a fair size hits the moon.

That may seem counter-intuitive. But consider that any asteroid that passes inside the Moon's orbit (Mainly 2007 VK184 and 99942 Apophis, but there may be otehrs) will actually cross the Moon's path twice during a near Earth pass. Which makes it almost twice as likely to hit the Moon since there are more places around the path that a collision can occur (not quite twice since the Moon is smaller). In addition to that, because of the Moon's lower gravity, it is more likely that such an impact would generate a large amount of debris that would escape the moon's pull, and put that debris into orbit.

You now have a ring of debris that might look rather pretty from Earth, but that isn't going to be stable. The interaction of gravity means stuff is going to be either kicked out of the way, or because of Earth's greater size and pull, sucked down to us. So instead of one big impact to recover from, you now have months or maybe even years of impacts that keep screwing things up just as things are recovering.

To me, that seems more likely as an extinction event - because there are multiple chances to kill things off rather than relying on a single kill.

Think I'll go back to working on my VN - at least until we get closer to 2036...