Category: Entertainment

According to a piece in NewScientist, a group of compscis at Helsinki University have developed a system to add a fitting soundtrack to your next air guitar solo. The system uses computer vision to monitor hand placement/movements and to play fitting guitar riffs to go with them (one would assume making adjustments for utter lack of talent — which would be why you’re playing air guitar in the first place). The piece has a link to a video demo. Oh, the humanity!

Thanks, Jay!

Sony has updated the firmware of the Play Station Portable, now up to version 2.6. The new version adds support for WMA audio files (though apparently not the “Plays For Sure” kind), and adds an RSS reader to the mix as well. Most telling though is the addition of support for encrypted video files.

Could this be the first step towards an iTunes-like /musicvideo store from Sony? They certainly have enough content of their own to push out to consumers, and they have started a digital video download service in Japan, though their ties with Japanese TV are a little closer than US TV. Keep in mind though that Sony produces huge amounts of TV shows on DVD, and probably has relationships with numerous insiders. Hopefully this firmware upgrade is a foreshadow to the launch of a US media store for PSPers that would allow downloading of content from anywhere there’s an open WiFi connection. I’d take that over video iPod any day.

*note that the new firmware upgrade, just like previous ones, will prevent you from runnning unauthorized software on the PSP, which really stinks.

The AP reported yesterday that TiVo will be releasing an update in early 2006 which will allow videos exported through their TiVo2Go service to be converted for import into iPods and PSPs. More information after the jump.

[via PVRblog and TiVo’s own blog]

SNL had a hysterical sketch last night where Steve Jobs (played by Chris Parnell) announces a series of iPods, each smaller and more powerful than the last, until he gets to the “invisia” (unseen in his hand) which can hold “eight million songs and every photo ever taken.”

You can see video of the skit here.

Now that I have pearlLyrics automating my lyric look-ups in iTunes, I was hoping for the same sort of thing for album art. My wish is some geek’s command. iTunesCool (is that caveman speak?) is an AppleScript that fetches cover art from Amazon, based on iTunes database info (the Album field, I’d imagine). iTunesCool cool! Unfortunately not cool is the fact that the server for the program has been hosed by all of the attention, so check back later, or look for it elsewhere.

[Via iPodHacks]

The popular Joy of Tech online comic strip has its way with MAKE magazine.

If you’re an avid gamer, you’ve probably asked yourself: Where are the fantasy first-person shooters? The guys behind Project Offset asked themselves the same question. And in the true spirit of DIY, they decided to take matters into their own hands and create the fantasy FPS that they’d like to play. The results, so far, are mind-boggling. This is not a mod, this is a ground-up game engine and epic fantasy world with graphics that put many other well-capitalized efforts to shame. This has all been accomplished by three volunteers working in a guy’s apartment! It’s hard to imagine that the sneak peak demos are real, in-game renderings, but they claim they are. There are still years of development left, and the team is looking for funding or being picked up by a commercial developer, but seeing what they have so far, we can’t imagine that’s not going to happen.

And you thought your life involved crazed levels of multitasking. This guy, Ravi Jain, is shooting a weekly video blog from the driver’s seat of his car during his daily commutes between Jamaica Plains and Allston, MA (a.k.a. “five hours of ‘studio time'”). He has guests on (who are bumming rides), and when his wife commutes with him, they do a “Regis and Kelly” type show (or at least that’s how Ravi fancies it), with some “marital banter to start the show” (oh joy!). He’s also thinking about doing things like a portable-grill cooking segment, if he gets snarled in traffic, and a game called “What’s in the Trunk?”

PSPGBA is a Game Boy Advanced emulator for the PlayStation Portable. The just-relaesed Version 1.1 adds a speed boost, a 240×160 screen mode, and some other features and fixes. You can download it here (altho the server appears to be hosed at the moment).

[Via PSPupdates]

Our comrades over at Engadget are running a Halloween Costume Contest. Be the biggest geek in your clan and you could win some awesome prizes, such as a 30GB video iPod, a Moto RAZR V3, or a Tokyo Flash watch.