Seeking Nerdvana

Even Intel releases if wants to pump all those ads into our lounge rooms on its new VIIV platform it's got a long way to go before your average punter will let their computer escape from the study. Thus Intel has thrown out the challenge for computer builders to design lounge room friendly PCs;

Looking to evolve the “big, beige box” and help bring to market more stylish, small, quiet and cool-running PCs perfect for any room in the home, Intel announced the Intel® Core™ Processor Challenge. The contest will award up to US$1 million in prizes to the PC designer and manufacturer that designs and builds the smallest and most stylish home PCs powered by Intel® Viiv™ technology... Systems will be evaluated on attributes of style, acoustics, functionality and features.

You can find more details at http://www.intel.com/idf/corechallenge.htm Magazine

Zalman's freaky looking CPU heat sinks are a great way to tame a noisy computer

Of course people have been doing this for years, back when while Intel and AMD where still churning out red hot processors that required an array of screaming fans to stop them from going into melt down. The backlash to these boxes that wailed like banshees is what kick-started the quiet PC market and companies such as Zalman. You can see a few examples of the current batch of lounge room friendly cases at PC Case Gear and QuietPC.com has a long feature on silencing your PC.

Now that companies like Intel and Microsoft are ready to play in the lounge room space, and think they know how to make money out of it, they're finally addressing the practical needs of those who want a computer that can live inconspicuously in their lounge room. You can bet when Intel finds someone to build this dream machine it will parade around Apple-style as if it has just invented some amazing new technology out of thin air.

I've only been playing around with blogs for a short time, but on Tuesday I got a taste of the nature of the blogosphere. I spoke to Microsoft Australia's Frank Arrigo on the phone Tuesday afternoon for a story I'm writing on Windows Vista. A few hours later I was checking the hits on this blog and I followed one back to Frank's blog, where he had written about our conversation just a few hours after we got off the phone - listing a few things he forgot to mention. Looking back I discovered that last week he had mentioned on his blog that we had an interview lined up.

The blogosphere can become overwhelming - here's a blog cloud of Seeking Nerdvana from www.snapshirts.com/custom.php

The interesting thing is that he didn't send me an email after the interview with these extra points, so it was only luck that I found them. Some might argue that I should have assumed Frank had a blog and looked it up before I spoke to him and then check it again afterwards, but where do you draw the line when it comes to information overload? Perhaps he was testing to see if I look at blogs. Perhaps I'm overthinking this one ;-) Anyway, now that I'm a blogger I'm payng more attention to them.

Just from running this blog I've discovered that things show up on blog searches, such as Technorati or Google Blog Search, that don't show up on normal Google search. Google Blog Search is still in beta but it would be good to have a link on the front page of Google and a way to incorporate blog searches into Google searches. I was about to say it useful if you could add it to the Google Toolbar, but with the new version you can add buttons from the Toolbar Button Gallery which has lots of interesting buttons such as for Google Blog Search, Wikipedia, Whois and Technorati. Turning data overload into useful information is more important than ever and, as usually, the nerds in the lab at Google are building some really cool and useful tools.

Just in case you were under the foolish impression that the digital lounge room would put you in charge of what you're watching, Intel and Omnicom Media Group have announced a collaboration to bring internet-delivered ads to TVs through Intel's VIIV platform for lounge room computers.

According to the announcement; "The effort will connect content owners and advertisers to advance how interactive, broadband-delivered advertising is best tailored to specific programming and audiences, and best presented on large screen sizes in TV-like "10 foot" viewing environments... The enabling of ad-supported interactive viewing in the "10 foot" environment will help fuel more compelling and premium entertainment experiences."

The next bit is also interesting; "Testing will be conducted by recognised market research firms to define the easiest and most effective ways to reach consumers. The advertising models or templates will provide consumers with more flexibility to personalise the content they want to watch by linking it to relevant advertising."

You can read the full release at http://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/releases/20060925comp.htm

This sounds a bit like tailored Google Ads for your television, which could even turn into a Tivo-like system which might even eventually grasp the concept that people don't want to watching ads for feminine hygiene products at dinner time. One thing you can be fairly sure of is that you won't able to skip them - they'll be rammed down your throat when it suits advertisers not when it suits you (might would be never). Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the lounge room, advertising strikes back.

This week's Upgrade column has been dictated directly into our computer using Nuance's new Dragon NaturallySpeaking 9 speech recognition software, fresh out of the box.

Well, it would have been, had the previous sentence not come out as: "This week's upgrade toll has been dictated directly into a computer using nuances new Dragon NaturallySpeaking speech recognition software press out-of-the-box".

Read the full review at http://www.theage.com.au/news/upgrade/the-tip-of-your-tongue/2006/09/25/1159036469033.html

This week, Seeking Nerdvana's TechVidReview looks Philips' new hard drive/DVD recorder, the Cineos DVDR9000H.

Two weeks ago I talked about the troubles over at Voice over IP provider Broad IP, which had announced to the Australian Stock Exchange that it was "scaling down or suspending" some of its telephony services. That seems to be a bit of an understatement, with MyNetFone acquiring BroadIP’s "entire VoIP customer base" accordingly to an email MyNetFone is sending former BroadIP customers. The existing contracts have transferred to MyNetFone and users allocated a MyNetFone login and password for the billing portal.

This works out well, as BroadIP and MyNetFone use the same NetComm VoIP equipment. Of the VoIP services we've test, MyNetFone has been the most reliable, so those people left in the lurch by BroadIP would seem to be in good hands.

Sometimes there just isn't enough room on the page of a newspaper or magazine to convey exactly how bad a terrible product really is. That's the beauty of a blog, if something really sucks you can just keep going and going and going until you've got it all out of your system.

LG Fusic is made out of the cheapest kind of gray plastic, the same material you find on a $3 toy... this phone seriously looks like a Fisher Price toy, not a top-of-the-line cell phone - joelonsoftware.com tells it how he sees it.

Over at CNET's Alpha blog, Molly Wood picked up on an awesome posting on the US blog Joel on Software where Joel writes about the free phone he and many other bloggers where given by telco Sprint to encourage them to write about Sprint's new service for downloading music and movies. The problem for Sprint is Joel found both the phone and the service were woeful and he doesn't hold back. Since he's writing on a blog he doesn't have to worry about annoying things like word counts so he dissects their awfulness in exquisite detail. Here's another taste;

This service is literally as much of a scam as those X-Ray glasses they used to advertise in comic books to steal a few bucks from some little kids... the LG Fusic user interface could basically serve as an almost complete textbook for a semester-long course in user interface design, teaching students of usability exactly what NOT to do.

It's pure gold and certainly worth a read.