Do you remember that innocent time when the internet was this wonderful thing that knew no boundaries? That ignored political and physical borders? That brought people together and allowed ideas and content to be shared across the world? How did we manage to start stepping backwards and unravelling all this wonderful progress? No - I’m not talking about China, I’m talking about these (apparerently) wonderful sites offering great services which you get all excited about then find - sigh - are only available if you live in America. I’m encountering this more and more these days and it really makes me feel sad inside. Here’s just a few of the shamed:
Pandora
Hulu
Lala
MTV
And it’s always the same story, they need to negotiate distribution rights with the various publishers and distributors for all other countries outside of the US which I can sort of understand but ultimately the choice you’re giving me is:
Watch Family Guy on your website and you’ll get a little money from advertisting
or
Download Family Guy illegally and nobody gets any money
(PS You’re not America so you’re allowed to do the first one)
These sites need to take a good look at the BBC iPlayer - doesn’t matter where you are in the world, it doesn’t matter if you pay the UK TV Licence Fee or not, you can access the iPlayer no problem.
I recently discovered (to my horror) that in Firefox, it’s impossible to focus on embedded Flash movies using only the keyboard (IE manages this fine) which is no good for making accessible content. I usually have nothing but praise for Firefox but Mozilla have really dropped the ball on this one. After a bit of online investigation and code tinkering I’ve come up with the following code (using the magic of JQuery) to fix this problem:
$(document).ready(function() {
$(“embed”).wrap(“<a href=’#’ class=’flashlink’></a>”);
$(“.flashlink”).focus(function() {
$(this).find(“embed”).focus();
return false;
});
$(document).keydown(function(event) {
if (event.keyCode == 27) $(document.activeElement).blur(); // Escape key pressed
}
});
All it does is wrap an anchor link around all Flash movies on the page and when that link is focused, it shifts focus to the actual Flash movie making it appear seamless to the user. The next problem is that once the user has focus on a Flash movie it’s impossible to shift focus out of it again without reverting to the mouse so I’ve added a function so that when the ‘Esc’ key is hit, the current element will lose focus allowing the user to continue down the page again. This second part obviously isn’t an ideal solution but I reckon it’s the best way until Mozilla implements a proper fix.
If you manage to stick with it past the first few episodes it’s a really good show but the one thing that really confuses me - sure everyone’s busy investigating exploding heads, bald men in suits and ghost networks but why has no one noticed the giant letters hovering all over Boston?
An idea came to me the other day - currently as far as digital TV recorders go you have three choices:
- Get locked down with a Sky Plus box
- Get locked down with a V+ box
- Wing it one of the various Freeview recorders, none of which seem to be very reliable or offer great value for money
Now what if the BBC were to launch their own version of the digital TV recorder box? They’re the ones responsible for Freeview so it makes sense that they offer a definitive piece of kit to view it on. They could get a large manufacturer like Samsung, etc to build it with the BBC logo on the front and develop a really decent software front end so it feels like you’re getting a rich, quality experience. Plus with it being a well known brand like the BBC, people are going to trust it - plus they could build in a Wi-Fi connection and have the BBC iPlayer running off it as well, which let’s face it is where the iPlayer really needs to be. I’d pay for something like that.
Update: I’m forgetting BT Vision already does pretty much this except again you’re getting tied down to a monthly contract.
Finally got my beta access to the rather promising gog.com - selling slightly older pc games for a bargain price but with full support and guaranteed XP and Vista compatibility. Fair enough you can just for Abandonware but most of these aren’t available on Abandonware sites and there are some real crackers in there and with the games priced at either $10 or $6 it’s not exactly breaking the bank. Here’s the list of what games available so far:
1nsane
Colin McRae Rally 2005
Conquest of the New World
Descent + Descent 2
Descent 3 + Expansions
Die by the Sword + Expansion
Earthworm Jim 3D
Evolva
F/A-18E Super Hornet
Fallout
Fallout 2
Fallout Tactics
Freespace + Expansion
Freespace 2
Giants: Citizen Kabuto
Hostile Waters: Antaeus Rising
Invictus: In the Shadow of Olympus
Jagged Alliance 2: Unfinished Businesss
Kingpin: Life of Crime
Lionheart: Legacy of the Crusader
M.A.X. + M.A.X. 2
MDK
MDK 2
Messiah
Operation Flashpoint GOTY
Original War
Perimeter
Redneck Rampage Collection
Sacrifice
Shattered Steel
Shogo: Mobile Armor Division
Soldiers: Heroes of World War II
Stonekeep
Toca Race Driver 3
The site itself looks real modern and slick and looks like it’s going to have a good community and technical support service. I reckon I’m going to go for Lionheart and Perimeter first, both games that I missed at the time. If you’re signed up for the service and looking for a recommendation, I strongly suggest Soldiers: Heroes of World War 2, that’s an absolute cracker if you like you’re strategy games.
Off to the
European eLearning Summit down in Nottingham next week. Technically this is a brand new conference but it’s being run by most of the same people that did EuroTAAC (The Alternative Authoring Conference) so should be pretty good. Bit of a worrying slant with about 50% of the seminars being devoted to Toolbook but there’s also going to be quite a bit about Xerte which is a very cool, a now very open-source, eLearning development engine.