Buy a Wii and cute, giggling (French|Japanese|American) girls will flail around your generic apartment.

Nintendo’s Wii promotional site is brilliant. Cute giggling girls aside, these videos are really fun to watch. And effective as marketing too, because we’re immediately curious about what unseen thing these people are looking and smiling at, they also using marketing online, by getting agencies as Melbourne SEO expert to make a good marketing campaign to reach more costumers using different websites exactly like https://factschronicle.com/ or even http://www.brandedimage.com/service-areas/.

Nintendo isn’t just marketing to non-gamers, they really did build this “with everyone in mind. My favorite videos were the kids in this family and this older couple, who go from stoic to ecstatic in about 5 milliseconds. Looks like fun, though I’d much rather being playing catch outside.

What can Sony and Microsoft possibly have to counter this? (Some aliens in a generic dark and smokey sci-fi world with big explosions and inexplicably ubiquitous crates everywhere?)

Another good thing about the Wii controllers is that they will force players to get up off the sofa or at very least hold their arms up. That means there will be fatigue and that mean it will be very difficult for kids to get as sucked in as the typical twitching thumbs console game. Which got me thinking:

In the near future, there will be a YouTube video showing how to play Wii without leaving the sofa. Players will demonstrate ways of using the controller with as little physical movement as possible.

Mark. My. Words.

Update Through a random stroke of luck I was able to play a pre-release Wii yesterday. Well, mostly Lila played but I got to work the menus. The Wii really is that good, this thing is going to own Christmas.

(continued from this previous post)

After more research, I’m switching my preference from the the Gaggia Classic to the Rancilio Silvia.

Finding Sweet Maria’s Rancilio Silvia page did a lot to sway me. They’ve got some very good close up pictures showing the parts, and as of July 2005, they have stopped selling the Gaggia Classic.

“We don’t stock the Classic model anymore, because I feel that the Rancilio Silvia is a better machine in the same price class. I am leaving the description for posterity sake.”

Even more exciting is the discovery that there is a Rancilio Sylvia modding community.

A modding community for an espresso machine.

That takes a minute to sink in. But there are people hot-rodding these machines all over the place: Precision digital thermostats. More digital thermostats, Add-on spare parts. Faster warmup tutorials. Collected tips and mods. Extreme mods from Taiwan.

And then there’s Randy Glass’ opus, Espresso! My Espresso!

The decision is mostly settled in my mind, but I’m going to give it a few more days before buying. I’d wait longer, but I’d like to be familiar with the machine before relatives arrive for Thanksgiving later this month.

Update: I bought the Sylvia, it should be here sometime Thursday.

Two-months later: Two months of great coffee

After six or seven years of hard, dedicated service, my espresso machine is finally giving up the ghost. It’s a Starbucks Barista and made gallons of fantastic coffee over the years. I’d buy this exact machine again, but I’m feeling ready to move up to a commercial portafilter instead of the pressurized one this uses.

I make coffee at home because I drink a lot of it and I’d go broke if I had to buy it all. While writing this, I finished my third double-shot espresso of the day. So far. At a conservative average that’s $10 a day in coffee, and most days would be more. Saving $300-400 a month on coffee pretty much justifies any price for an espresso machine. A $500 machine will have absolutely paid for itself in just 6 weeks.

Super Automatic machines don’t interest me much, not just because they’re a fortune, but because they have too many moving parts to maintain and postpone maintenance. Additionally, we occasionally have roaches in our building, and NYC roaches love coffee. Having a reservoir of spent grounds on the counter would be inviting an infestation. Besides, I don’t like the idea of putting off cleanup for days: I make coffee, I clean up, I’m done.

I’m leaning towards a Gaggia Classic, because the reviews are universally excellent, it uses a commercial portafilter, isn’t too big, has a powerful pump and heats up quickly. I have a few reservations and I’ve been trying to find one to look at in person, but I’ve had no luck at stores near me, and I kind of hate shopping anyway. My three main questions:

• What is the vertical clearance between the portafilter and the drip tray? (ie. will my preferred 3 inch tall cups fit underneath? My guess from pictures is about 2 5/8 inches — WLL lists the clearance as 3.25 inches, see note below)
• Can the steaming wand be replaced with a bare metal tip?
• How well sealed are the internals? (roach concern again)

I’m going to call Whole Latte Love when I get a minute and find out the answers. If you are shopping for coffee products, their site together with CoffeeGeek are incredible resources.

Update: I haven’t yet called Whole Latte Love, but I did find that they list cup height in their “Compare-o-matic” page. That lists the Gaggia as having a cup clearance fo 3.25 inches, though I’m not certain that measures the new spouted portafilter, which extends lower.

Apple upgraded the MacBook Pros this morning. (I had mentioned to several friends that I thought today would be the day FWIW) There are a lot of nice incremental improvements, especially the increased RAM capacity and the return of the FireWire800 port.

But, as is always the case with Apple’s revisions, people are finding something to complain about. The one I noticed first was the complaining about removal of 7200rpm drive options — the only HD choices are 4200 and 5400 rpms. (MacUser deleted a whiny post before I could comment on it)

This is silly and clinging to past paradigms. As drives get bigger, their data density increases. As there is more data per platter, that data can be read faster without moving the disk as far.
Furthermore, the MBP’s SATA interface is SATA-150. Since 4200rpm drives can mechanically transfer better than that, there’s basically no difference between rpms. Seek times look to be comparable with competing 7200rpm drives as well. These drives spin slower, but they are just as fast as the competition. This is pure engineering efficiency.

So let’s see some benchmarks before shedding any tears for the 7200rpm option. That these slower spinning drives use less power is also a positive. I’ve been looking for months to upgrade my MBP to 200GB but have yet to see the drives for sale at any stores I trust.

Back to the MacBook Pro, what does seem weird to me is the RAM configuration. Why 2GB+1Gb, and more importantly, why not 2GB+2GB? What breaks with 4GB? (I’m sure we’ll know soon enough after someone tries it out and posts what happened)

Update: Here’s the answer to the 3gb question, via John Gruber, who still owes me a shirt. Also see Ross Brown’s comment below for what happens when 4gb is installed.

I stumbled across this little parable last week and it’s been bouncing around my head ever since:

A voyaging ship was wrecked during a storm at sea and only two of the men on it were able to swim to a small, desert like island. The two survivors, not knowing what else to do, agree that they had no other recourse but to pray to God.

However, to find out whose prayer was more powerful, they agreed to divide the territory between them and stay on opposite sides of the island.

The first man was hungry and prayed for food.* The next morning, the first man saw a fruit-bearing tree on his side of the land, and he was able to eat its fruit. The other man’s parcel of land remained barren.

After a week, the first man was lonely and he decided to pray for a wife. The next day, another ship was wrecked, and the only survivor was a woman who swam to his side of the land. On the other side of the island, there was nothing. Soon the first man prayed for a house, clothes, more food. The next day, like magic, all of these were given to him. However, the second man still had nothing.

Finally, the first man prayed for a ship, so that he and his wife could leave the island. In the morning, he found a ship docked at his side of the island. The first man boarded the ship with his wife and decided to leave the second man on the island. He considered the other man unworthy to receive God’s blessings, since none of his prayers had been answered.

As the ship was about to leave, the first man heard a voice from heaven booming, “Why are you leaving your companion on the island?”

“My blessings are mine alone, since I was the one who prayed for them,” the first man answered. “His prayers were all unanswered and so he does not deserve anything.”

“You are mistaken!” the voice rebuked him. “He had only one prayer, which answered. If not for that, you would not have received any of my blessings.”

“Tell me,” the first man asked the voice, “what did he pray for that I should owe him anything?”

“He prayed that all your prayers be answered.”

I like this, but I suspect it exists somewhere in another, more internally consistent form.

My major concern is that praying for someone else’s prayers to come true requires an impossible amount of faith in the other person. Otherwise you could be complicit in bad prayers. Or maybe, faith isn’t meant for the other person, but rather in the divine wisdom that would sort the good and bad prayers. But still, it introduces a sort of logical feedback loop where the worthy may be praying for the fulfillment of prayers to the unworthy. And if so, wouldn’t the worthy person then be challenging the judgement of God?

I haven’t done much specific reading of theological discussions around unexpected consequences of various prayers, but I’d be curious to read another take as to why the first man prayer for a wife is granted through the death of everyone else on his wife’s boat. And of how that prayer is then reflected onto the second man’s prayer.
Anyway, interesting thought experiment.
* This line originally read “The first thing they prayed for was food.” Since the second man is revealed to have only had one prayer, he couldn’t have prayed for food. I changed this for consistency.

A great idea, USBCELL rechargable batteries with integrated USB charger:

So far only available in the UK, costing about $24.50 US for two (ouch). Fully charged in about 5 hours. These are NiMH and not the occasionally flammable LiIon flavor.

If I had more stuff that used AA batteries, I’d buy these.

Every once in a while, probably twice this month, my GUI locks up after pressing Command-Tab to bring up the Application Switcher. Everything on screen is stuck behind the switcher display, the mouse still works but nothing can be clicked.

Most infuriating is that the guts of the machine are working normally, I can SSH in and run any non-GUI app I want and everything works fine. I’ve tried working up the ladder of apps to kill (via SSH), but nothing I’ve found manages to restore the computer to working order. Except restarting by holding the power button (or the shutdown command via SSH).

Today the screen froze while iTunes was playing, iTunes finished the song it was playing then stopped. No Apple Events work (ie. osacript -e’tell application “Finder” to quit’)

At least two, maybe three other people are having this problem too; Matthew Conway, poster lazydog on MacRumors and Rich Collins (who’s having it much worse and is willing to pay $125 for a fix.)

The machine is in otherwise excellent health. Disks are regularly checked and permissions repaired (FWIW). Nothing unusual seems to be appearing in the logs and there isn’t anything particularly funky running on the machine. Since it’s so irregular, trying to recreate this in a second user account isn’t a realistic option.

This has happened a few times and I’m totally at a loss as to why. That people are seeing it on non-Intel hardware is reassuring that it’s not a hardware failure. Any ideas about how to fix/prevent this are welcomed. If you’re having this problem, please leave a comment.

More from Apple Discussions: Command-Tab freezes system (sporadically)

I deleted the com.apple.dock.plist file, here’s hoping that works.

Update: I seem to have a partially failing stick of RAM, which may or may not be related. It passes Apple’s Hardware Test, but the computer won’t boot if that chip is installed by itself, or in the lower slot (where it was before I discovered this?!), it boots and seems to run fine in the top slot. I installed a new chip this morning (Sept 21), no issues so far.