Category: Services & Products

In-flight entertainment

As far as I can tell, the best in-flight entertainment of any domestic flight within USA is not the movie / TV shows / Games (as there is none for shorter flights), not the food / drink (as you need to buy your own drinks) and certainly not the flight attendants (you probably know why). Instead, it is the shopping catalog. Not the usual Duty Free catalog, but the one that only available in USA – Sky Mall catalog.

You will find hundreds of strange / bizarre products in this catalog and most important of all, those are products you don’t need and you don’t know why other people need. Granted, some products are innovative products, but some are really strange. So strange that I think it is a very good proof of consumerism.

For example, the following product help you to cut your pizza in a perfect shape. And it cost only US$ 37.00. Sorry, I just don’t get it …

Another example, a sound amplifier for seniors … you know in our city we try to hide the amplifier / hearing-aid, but this product just do it in a different way. So, in future if you bump into a senior who’s yelling “Hello !!”, s/he may not yelling to the bluetooth headset, but s/he is yelling at you.

WordPress for iPhone

With nothing to do in the conference, I browsed the iPhone application store with the phone (must be an expensive way) and found the new WordPress for iPhone was released …

The installation was easy and finished on the fly. The first problem … It created a dummy post in my blog with placeholders like !$titles$! in it. And I could not remove it thru the tool but had to go back to the online full version.

WTF … Did they test the software at all ?

Google Lively

Other than the Apple iPhone 3G, the launch of Google Lively is indeed one of the hottest news this week. So just three days after the launch of the beta version, how is it doing ? Here are some good and bad things I found so far.

  • I managed to download the Lively plug-in, installed it, set up my avatar, designed my first “room” and got hanging around the room within an hour. It’s better than my Secondlife experience on this.
  • The plug-in runs pretty fast in Firefox 3.0 and Internet Explorer 7, and feels faster than Secondlife.
  • I can set up “gadgets” easily to feed my own photos and a video feed from Youtube.
  • You can embed the room into your own website, blog or Facebook account (yet to be tested, but the application is here).
  • The chat messages and avatar expressions appear in rooms you visiting almost instantly.
  • I can easily embedded to my WordPress blog.

Here is a screen shot of the room I created – 80 Days Cafe.

google-lively-2.jpg

As you can see, I added …

  • An avatar with new hairstyle, t-shirt and jean …
  • Two red colored sofas, a coffee table, a standing lamp and one potted plant.
  • A wall mounted picture frame that gets a feed from my photo album and a click to the picture will link to a website selling my photo album (neat !!)
  • A LCD TV on top of a bench, with a feed from a selected video (Wicked Game guitar solo by Greg Reiter) from YouTube (neat neat !!). The sound is great as well …

And the problems I encountered are …

  • Whenever I click the objects (avatar or furniture), a dialogue box pop up to let me edit the properties. However, the dialogue box keep “flashing” and I have to drag the box outside the room estate to stop the flashing. Interestingly, it happens only on my XP computer, but works perfectly in a Vista computer.
  • One of my rooms disappeared after login, but reappeared later on. I suspected it is caused by the fact that I ran Lively sometimes in Firefox, and sometimes in IE.
  • I don’t think there is enough items to dress up the avatar and not enough styles of furnitures.  However, I believe the situation will improve later.
  • There was one time the avatar “locked in” with other objects in the room, I have to use another view (toggles in the upper left corner of the room) and move the avatar away from the object.
  • There is no way to stop, adjust the volume, and mute the video feed in the LCD TV gadget.
  • There is no way to resize the photo frame gadget, and in fact other furnitures as well.
  • [Update] Google disabled the gadget function …

All in all, not bad for a beta version. And just in case you wanna know more about the application, here is a video trailer …