With the recent release of iTunes 7.7 some users noted that South Africa has now appeared as one of the countries in the options dialogue when selecting a regional iTunes store. For years local users have been clamouring for their own version of the ever popular online music store. So to see that Apple is finally rolling it out comes as a huge relief to a large number of computer users. Unfortunately its not all good news though. Apple is only releasing the applications store version of iTunes for iTouch and iPhone users and is not offering any music for sale in South Africa just yet. Rumours are that Apple could almost immediately offer music once they manage to work out the legal issues surrounding licences and so on. At least they now have the infrastructure necessary to offer music once they get the go ahead. Couple the iTunes store opening with the announcement that the iPhone 3G will also be available locally for R1 600 in a few weeks time and Apple’s future in South Africa is looking bright. 
A bit of good news for South African motorists who are struggling to cope with a sharp increase in petrol costs is that Mercedes Benz is planning to phase out the use of petroleum in their models by the year 2015. They’re planning to focus their efforts on electric, fuel cell, and biofuels as alternatives. With the recent upsurge in the price of crude oil there has been a direct correlation with the decrease in car sales. There were even reports that many South African motorists were opting to trade in their larger, more expensive cars for small, more fuel efficient vehicles. As such its become all the more important for the larger car manufacturers to find ways of appealing to prospective buyers by highlighting their use of alternatives to petrol.
When or even whether we’ll see these more green models available locally is anyone’s guess but hopefully this move by Mercedes Benz is an indication of what we can expect from other manufacturers as well. If not then unfortunately car sales will continue to fall with many motorists opting for public transport or other forms of transportation.
This past Monday, the 7th day of the 7th month was decreed to be Bungie Day on Xbox Live. Bungie decided to celebrate the day by releasing exclusive free gamerpics and dashboard themes for that day only and also made a surprise announcement in that they would release their new Halo 3 map, Cold Storage, for free.
Bungie have garnered themselves a reputation as being a very community driven company who always go out of their way to please their fans with changes to the online components of their games as well as some fun extras they add in as well. With the release of Cold Storage they also released a one day playlist know as Icy Treats that focussed solely on the new map and consisted of some fun free-for-all game modes to celebrate the new map’s release. One mode, Fiesta Slayer, was a lot of fun and consisted of random starting weapons on each respawn leading to some funny one sided stand offs when one player got the plasma pistol and another the energy sword
One sad thing that emerged this week for me in terms of online Halo 3 is that it now appears that players have started exploiting a cheat in the online ranking system to gain skill levels extremely fast. Apparently the method involves quitting out of ranked matches consistently adter which a few victories gains you levels incredibly fast. Its really spoilt the matching system as most of my matches now consist of other players quitting out in almost every game. Hopefully Bungie will step in and act againt exploits such as this in a timely manner.
Japan’s reputation as a country of the weird, wonderful and just plain wacky was cemented earlier this week when it was announced that a Japanese company is now offering weddings in space for the small sum of $2.3 million. For your money you and your significant other will be blasted up to 100km in the air where you will take your vows as you reach zero gravity. To make sure that you also get time to admire the view the ceremony will be performed primarily on the ground before launch with only the final few steps being performed at the end of the flight. You also can take a long several guests to witness your wedding bliss begin in space. Well at least you’ll get a lot of bang for your buck and its the perfect way to launch a marriage. 
Now just to figure out how to save up enough money and pop the question 
Wow! Of late I seem to have hit a large number of busy weekends in a row. For me that’s something strange as I’ve usually got a predilection for nice quiet weekends filled with games, movies and copious amounts of reading. The last few weekends though have proven to be a break from tradition with me being out of the house almost the full 48 hours the last few weeks.
I’ve been partaking of some serious co op of late with Stu and managed to finish the heinously difficult Ikaruha schmup after sever hours of swearing and cursing all old school Japanese shooters
Added to that we also managed to catch some movie such as Forbidden Kingdom, Kung Fu Panda and The Incredible Hulk to offset all the frustration from Ikaruga.
Next up was several Saturdays spent working my way through Gears of War with Chantal starting on the hardcore difficulty. Somehow we even managed to get ourselves up at 5am one Saturday morning to battle our way through the final few acts of this tremendously fun game. Of course with her birthday approaching a wekk ago we all had to celebrate and so it was off to Dragon Lake to chow down on some tasty Chinese cuisine. (This of course was preceded by a bout of Mario Party 8.)
Through in amongst these gaming weekends was several visits to Craig in Gordon’s Bay where we partook of Indiana Jones’ latest escapades and Will Smith in Hancock. Seeing as Craig stays a good 50km away from me now we had to make sure that the visit was the length of the entire day. So add in some Ooskus fish and chips (the best in the world!) and some Black Lagoon and the day wasa made. though now my trips are in jeopardy with the fact that Chantelle and craig now have two damn cute kittens that would seem to make me sneeze more than I can breath
Of course I’ve also had to try and cram in as much game time at home as I can so there’s been plenty of Halo 3 online sessions as well as some concerted efforts to improbve my game completion rate and get a sizeable increase. I’m proud to say that I managed to get almost 2000 points of late. So miracles do happen
Already my next weekend is planned with a visit to Stu’s place for Assault Heroes on Live and a viewing of Pixar’s latest, Wall-E. So it would seem there is going to be no let up for me in the coming few weeks. So I’ll just have to be a bit more productive during the week with my blog entries to make up for lost time over the weekends
As a heavy user of instant messaging I’ve come to regard many of the foibles of the different networks with a special kind of hatred. Especially MSN. MSN to me is a bloated piece of software that is almost as bad as MySpace in giving users too much freedom to mess up a very simplistic thing. Nudges, custom emoticons, file sharing, web cam support and gigantic ads are all complaints I have against MSN as a protocol. At the end of the day IM is made to facilitate quicker communication, not to act as a dirt wall of graffiti to all and sundry. That’s why I was glad to read the following blog entry by John:
Today, we have a disaster area of IM features that everyone demands of every client, even the ones without the resources to develop and provide such features.
And MSN as a whole. What a wonderful disaster area. When MSNP2 was around, I suppose I could excuse the lack of a status message–after all, ICQ didn’t have them for a good many years either. But I won’t excuse it–AIM had user-definable away messages from the beginning of my recollection, although available messages and invisibility are relatively recent additions by comparison. To me this negates any valid reason for MSN not to have supported some sort of status message. Then we have the friendly name, which I swear was invented solely to give users something not to use, but to abuse in ways unimaginable to those who implemented it. The ability to have graphical emoticons render in the friendly name comes to mind. So does the use of the friendly name to compensate for the lack of status messages. By this point, the protocol’s usage had devolved into a cesspool anyway, so who really cared about the addition of custom emoticons, winks, and nudges, right? Apparently someone thought so, because now we have all that crap on top of it.
Now it’s too late in the game, but MSN decided to implement another new feature–Personal Status Messages. Wow, now MSN joins the ranks of sane IM protocols, right? Not quite. The PSM now gets abused almost as badly as the friendly name is. I submit that it’s called a “personal status message” for a reason, and that the reason is not to provide another field for users to abuse. But, as I said, it’s too late in the game now. Users don’t change unless you force them to, and this feature-too-late-to-really-matter certainly doesn’t give us any evidence with which to claim that users change.
Read the rest of John’s blog entry here. It makes for some thoughtful reading. With the web moving ever forward its becoming all too common to lose the point when it comes to the simpler reasons for using some of its more sueful attributes. Hopefully developers like the guys at Pidgin can bring a bit more common sense to the field of IM.
Well its now been a couple of weeks since the big launch of Firefox 3 where Mozilla encouraged users to download it as much as possible to go for the world record for the most downloads of a piece of software in 24 hours. Things got off to a shaky start with Mozilla’s servers buckling under the initial load. Thankfully things went smoothly from there and after a day it appears that 8,5 million people downloaded Firefox 3.
So precisely why is Firefox 3 such a remarkable browser? Well first off the address bar has become known as the awesome bar amongst Mozilla staff. The address bar now functions as a search bar for the internet, your bookmarks and your web history. Its as easy as pie to find a site that you can’t remember the precise url of. Add in the remarkable speed of the browser with its new Gecko 1.9 engine which helps to display web pages faster than the speed of light and you have a damn useful browser. Speed tests have shown that Firefox 3 is nearly 10 times faster in displaying pages than Internet Explorer 7 and ranks as one of the fastest browsers on the market. The Add-Ons that the community provides cover a wide selection of useful additions.
It has also been recently confirmed that Firefox 3 has set the record for the most downloads in a 24 hour period for a piece of software. I really cannot see myself using another browser as long as the developers at Mozilla keep Firefox a lean, mean browsing machine. Firefox 3 has really managed to become speedier, more useful and an all round better product with the new version and is well worth checking out. You can download it from here.
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