Working at home is the bomb. But working at home outside, on the deck, all the time … that would be exactly what the doctor ordered.

Voila – your prescription just got filled: The Do-It-Yourself Backyard Office Kit. And it’s made in Canada, eh? Beauty!

Previously, in These Very Pages, there was a “thumbs down” given to iLane based on the fact that somewhere in the service chain either a machine or a person scanned your mail to create the audio summary. However, if you still want to hear your mail – or any other text you care to think of – on the road and don’t want to have your stuff parsed by someone else, then maybe you should give iSpeak-it a try. It uses the built-in OSX text-to-speech routines (which acutally work) to encode any text you feed it – mail, news feeds, whatever – into audio files that are then automatically synced to your iPod so you can listen to them on the go. It might not be real-time, but there are privacy and flexibility advantages here that make it work a look.

If you needed any more proof as to the general bogosity of Microsoft software, then be sure to check out this live product demonstration of one of the “killer” features in Windows 2004 2005 2006 Vista. Are you sure you want to be downloading beta crap from these fenderheads?

The best part is that the only media outlet who was invited to see the event was Microsoft’s lapdogs over at MSNBC … a fairly transparent attempt to be able to control any bad press that might come from an embarrassing bugs or glitches. Now this would seem to be some clever forethought … normally, that bastion of journalistic integrity only reports on tech news that Microsoft wants the world to see. Unfortunately for the trolls in Redmond, this particular glitch was so laughable that even the trained seals at MSNBC felt obligated to put it on the air.

No matter what their other faults, there is one thing you have to say for the gang at Microsoft: They have some serious balls. Need proof? Starting this Wednesday they are going to charge people a $1.50 a shot to download a fucking beta of Microsoft Office 2007. Beta software is free for a reason – it’s not 100% ready for prime time, and there is a significant chance that it will screw your ‘puter, your data, your head, or all of the above. Companies release betas so that you can finish off the quality testing on their behalf – you are essentially working as a software consultant for free in these cases. In Microsoft’s case, however, they now want you to pay for this privilege. Give us a buck-fifty, they say, so we can screw up your machine. Nice.

If you feel like you really do want a beta of the next Office (ignoring, I suppose, what happened to mopes who fell for the Office 2000 beta offering) then you had best grab it within the next 4 days. After that, downloading the “for pay” version will be sure to brand you a bona fide, world-class chump.

588,000: The amount of tea (in tonnes) produced annually in India.

This is quite possibly the coolest thing you could possibly to to your driveway or garage. The burning question left would be … do you spin your car into “launch” position by slapping the switch as you walk into the house, or do you do the deed as you walk out to it in the morning, having it rotate into place just as you step up to it and grab the door handle?

Time for a silly Friday timewaster: Mudcraft. The game itself is simple – gather enough dirt and water with your existing mudpeople to create enough new mudpeople to meet each level’s goals. But rain is more or less (okay, more) fatal to mudpeople, so you need to divert enough of your resources into making huts for them to hide in during the inevitable showers and storms.

The “craft” part of the Mudcraft name is no coincidence – the gameplay here is taken from the basics of the classic Blizzard Starcraft and Warcraft games: Gather, prioritize, create. But the graphics here are grin-inducing cute, and the little voices and phrases are completely engaging. You might have to invest 15 or 20 minutes working through the tutorial levels before you get the hang of things, but it is time well spent. Both downloadable and browser versions are available. Have fun.

NOTE: If you have a Core Duo machine, the Shockwave browser necessary will barf out. – Adobe has been a bit tardy on the universal port. Take the downloadable version instead.

Matt (who is truly King Of Guys) dropped a note to point out that the BBC’s reporting correctly and completely laid out the facts of the Floyd Landis incident, managing to include the facts about the two samples procedure and a discussion of the actual ratio results in the test triggered a warning. They even mentioned the sort-of-crucial information that his testosterone level was not high (despite what the headlines scream here), but the epitestosterone level was low – which then put the ratio out of whack.

Because of this, I see that I have to eat crow and amend my original thought. It is North American media that is inept and sensational and caters to the lowest common denominator. Media outlets elsewhere appear to still have some semblance of both intelligent editing and journalistic integrity.

NOTE: On their follow-up coverage, the BBC also noted two interesting things. One, that virtually every T/E ratio case has been overturned by the Court of Arbitration for Sport because, quite frankly, the test doesn’t really mean anything. However, the decisions and investigations of the CAS usually take from eight to twelve months, and by they time they overturn the incriminating tests, the story has gone away and the “good” news is never reported with anywhere near the same enthusiasm as the “bad” news. The upshot being that even if Landis is exonerated tomorrow, the general public will still hang on to the “cheater” label that the media first tarred the guy with. Two, that the lab involved is the same one that leaked the less-than-truthful Lance Armstrong EPO “results” two years ago. Coincidence? You decide.

Everything that is wrong with our society is summed up in this story. No charges laid? She should have been charged and then run over with her own car. Twice.

“Sidetracked”, my ass. Stupid dumb fuck.

Microsoft is making the upgrade to Internet Explorer 7 a mandatory thing. Apparently Windows users are not able to determine on their own whether or not they actually want to use a proper browser. Microsoft – they know what’s good for you!

The next time you are at an all-you-can-eat sushi place and you wonder just how they can offer all that fish for such a low price, you might want to take a look at the brand of the soy sauce they offer …

Big ups to Sockmonkey for the tip.

401,000: The amount of tea (in tonnes) produced annually in China.

For those of you that were set to bouts of wailing and gnashing by the list of DS release dates … get a grip. That list was Nintendo’s own titles – it doesn’t include releases from third-party publishers. The new Castlevania is coming this year. So hush.

Gene sent along the ridiculously awesome news that Guitar Hero 2 has a “practice mode” which is just about the best news since … well, forever, really.

This is a bit outside of the realm of the blatherings normally found here, but I am a major cycling geek and it never hurts to point out how superficial and vapid the mainstream media outlets are. So – the big news in the cycling world today is that Floyd Landis had a “adverse analytical finding” in one of his samples taken during this year’s Tour de France. What this means is that one of his two samples taken that day has an unusual ratio of Testosterone to Epitestosteron. The other 21 days worth of samples are clean, and there is no actual steroid residue or precursors in the sample … the only anomaly is that one of those two hormones is either higher or lower than normal when compared to the other. Until they test the second sample, no one really knows anything for sure. Additionally, because he was in the top 5 in general classification (that’s overall time to you non-cycling mopes) he would have also given a blood sample that day, which allows for another level of double-checking.

But – you wont hear any of this from the talking heads on the idiot box or in the “In Brief” items in the back of the sports pages. What you will hear and read is “Tour de France champion tests positive for steroids” or some other equally sensational variant on the non-facts. Why? Because the media is full of stupid people who tailor a product to an audience who is even stupider.

If Landis is on the juice or is in some other way doing a Barry Bonds here, then he should be properly vilified. And I am sure that it will be trumpeted all over the shop. But if he isn’t, and this is just a natural thing or a goofy sample, you can almost guarantee that the follow-up stories that would exonerate him will never see the light of day. Guys who turn out to be innocent just don’t seem to sell papers.

317.5: The amount of wood in kilograms that a woodchuck could chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood.

If you haven’t played the Phoenix Wright series of videogames, you are not alone. Being more about “thought” and “insight” than about “fucking a cartoon chick while getting ‘hot coffee’” means that the series didn’t get a lot of traction among North American gamers. However, the series is huge in Japan and the first installment actually did get a limited distribution over here.

What this all boils down to is that some gamers on this side of the Pacific pond do know the joys of Phoenix’s courtroom antics … the best of all being when he stands up and bellows “OBJECTION!” Which leads to this totally silly link where you can have Phoenix voice your own “objection” and then send the resulting URL to your friends. Fun for the whole family.

NOTE: The most popular entry in the series thus far is Phoenix Wright 3 – the version where his faithful assistant Mia Fey gets her legal wings and starts to try cases on her own. Sadly, that popularity is in Japan, and Mia’s “objection” has not been localized into english … meaning that the website has an opening for a sexy-yet-authoratiative female voice. Do you have what it takes. Could you be the aural avatar of Mia? Why not click here and find out?

Nintendo of America sent along a press release that lists the release dates for all of their DS games up to the end of 2006. The official lineup and dates thereof are:

Oct. 9: Clubhouse Games
Oct. 16: Nintendogs Dalmatian
Oct. 23: Magical Starsign
Oct. 30: Pokemon Ranger
Oct. 30: Children of Mana
Nov. 6: Elite Beat Agents
Nov. 13: Yoshi’s Island 2
Dec. 4: Custom Robo Arena
Dec. 4: Kirby Squeak Squad

The good news? The dancing crimefighters of Elite Beat Agents now have an official date, and you can start marking off the days to that blessed event on your calendars now.

The bad news? The Legend Of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass is nowhere to be seen, making it a done deal that we have to wait until 2007 for a title that most of us were counting on for Christmas fun. Fuck.

The curious part? There is a nice progression of week-by-week releases until the odd gap in the last 2 weeks of November. No DS releases in the hottest 2 weeks of the retail year? That makes it 100% certain that the Wii will launch right there. Mark my words.

The much-discussed and long-rumoured new video iPods – assumed to be hitting the market this year in a pre-emptive strike against the Zune – may now be delayed into 2007 to meet some performance and technology goals. A report in the <i>International Business Times</i> offers the following intriguing quote:

Apple is aiming to increase both the screen size and improve the battery life – two conflicting attributes that are difficult to improve simultaneously and require significant engineering … we previously believed that new nanos and the widescreen video iPod could ship in Q3 and Q4, respectively, however we now believe that both could be delayed by a quarter or two.”

This comes from an independent researcher, and not from anyone actually connected to Apple, so take it with as many grains of salt as you deem necessary. However, there is also a host of information in the article about the assumed and suspected hardware specs and the capabilities therein, so the whole mess is worth a read.

Of course, one could always say that a delay to 2007 is just another way to stay compatable with Vista, but that would hardly be fair. Funny, yes. Fair, no.

The most ridiculously awesome way that you can waste part, most, or all of your Tuesday is with Zwok.

Zwok?

What the hell is Zwok?

Zwok (I’ll never get tired of typing that) is a crazy little multi-player “fire bombs at the other guys” game much the same as Worms or (if you are a little older) Scorched Earth or (if you are a lot older) Artillery. Like those games, you and the other players inhabit a geologically-impossible chunk of landscape and toss projectiles at each other based on trajectory and velocity.

Unlike those games is the fact that all of the action happens simultaneously – you have 10 seconds to move your little avatar, pick a weapon, and select your aiming parameters. At then end of the 10-second countdown, all of the bombs are launched at once and much mayhem ensues. It sounds frantic, and it is, but the craziness is made a little more manageable by the fact that you move with your arrow keys and aim with your mouse – you can multi-task the whole thing if you have enough dexterity to do both things at once. AIming is dead easy, you just use the mouse to draw an arrow that represents your direction and launch velocity.

Better yet, signing up (yes, it’s free) lets you customize your avatar and save your scores – the more you score, the better weapons you get. If you don’t want to sign up, you can pick the “lazy” option and participate as a generic player. Either way, you will be tossed into a battle with 3 players on each team … last team with someone left standing wins. One of the coolest little touches is the ability to hang around and watch the resolution of a game even if your particular character has been borfed.

The avatars are totally cool in a strange mutant post-apocalypic way, the backgrounds are delightful, and the sounds are pretty much perfect. Many, many thumbs up.

NOTE 1: If you are a laptop player, you might want to use an external mouse – the combination of trackpadding and arrow-keying is one that is rarely easy to navigate.

NOTE 2: You can choose alternate weapons (from the drop down menu beside your score) after the 10-second moving cycle is complete. This can buy you a couple of crucial seconds when things get hot and heavy.

NOTE 3: The “playstation.com” references that you see here and there are remnants of the fact that this was first developed as an attraction for the Sony’s website. In case you wondered.

A quick look at a pair of baubles for your web ‘n’ java enabled mobile device:

Google Maps Mobile: This is the latest iteration of the Google Map / Google Local framework for mobile phones. Like the previous iteration (Google Local Mobile) this offers searchable maps and locations from the big database, but now includes some additional niceties like real-time traffic reports. You would be well advised to remember that every time you move the map you are loading data across your wireless connection, and for the average mope that means you are paying your service provider for pretty much every one of those bytes. It isn’t that hard to run up a $1000 cellular bill in just a few days. Hopefully you won’t even have to ask if it’s a beta.

MidpSSH: Midp is an exceptionally slick little SSH client for your handheld. It handles SSH1, SSH2, and telnet sessions with aplomb, saves your session profiles automatically, and (best of all) has macro definition for commonly-typed commands. Everything you need to manage your server anyplace that you can get a cell signal. It’s rock solid and it’s free – just about the best thing since sliced pizza.

For those who asked, the “Wii” reference on the Opera/Nintendo page refers to the fact that the big N’s new console will have a web browser built in – all of your interaction with the internet (either for new content or for multiplayer gaming or whatever) will happen through a web interface driven by the Opera browser. Unlike the DS, it won’t be an extra that you buy.

For those others who asked, every Nintnedo DS has built-in 802.11 wireless networking – that is how you play multiplayer games of Mario Kart, visit other Animal Crossing villages, etc, etc. Apparently this fact isn’t common knowledge – Nintendo needs to get on the ball there and pimp this fact a little more effectively.

And for more info on the way that the Opera browser works (especially as to how the dual screens are used and how input functions work) a friendly gajin in Japan has posted a very nice little video of the ins and outs. The video presentation is quite professional, but Josh’s commentary hovers somewhere between “vapid” and “banal”. You’ve been warned.

Anyone who blogs will have probably seen a sudden increase in “comment spam” over the past couple of weeks. People and/or bots are filing totally generic and innocuous comments to blog postings … stuff like “Interesting piece!” or “Great site you have here.” The payoff (in the spammer’s eyes, anyway) is that they get to post or embed an URL to whatever company it is they are spamming for.

You have to wonder what these people hope to accomplish – I don’t personally know anyone who blogs that doesn’t have the brains to moderate or approve their comments, so all of these attempts at spamination just go by the wayside and get tossed into the junk queues. What is slightly interesting, however, is while most of the companies shilled in these spam-posts are of the dubious sort (online gambling, hair restoration, whatever) some are actual legit concerns like Microsoft and Verizon.

ADDENDUM 1: When you see those stupid ads on late-night TV for work-at-home schemes that promise to pay a six-figure income, with just a “couple of hours a day and a home computer”, this is what they are shilling. The job is to sit home and cruise blogs and post this shit and hope like hell some of it gets through – the morons who fall for this sort of scam don’t get paid unless the URLs get posted and “clicked through”.

ADDENDUM 2: While most people just turf these, I have decided that it is far more entertaining to write a script to identify these comments (they do have some common features that make them easy to pick out) and strip the URLs and links while leaving the comment intact. Bring it on …

The wacky Japanese titles for the Nintendo DS just keep coming. Hard on the heels of crime-fighting cheerleaders and dateless teenagers comes the latest hit for the dual-screened portable: Shaberu! DS Oryouri Navi.

This translates to … well, actually, it doesn’t translate that well at all, but “Let’s Cook With DS Instructions” comes as close as you’re going to get.

So instead of a game, this cartridge is a cookbook of 200 recipes, each illustrated with full-motion video and complete with helpful tips from professional chefs that pop up at crucial points in each creation. Some of the cooler features are the ability to tell the DS how many people you are cooking for (the ingredient amounts are automatically modified to suit) and voice control. Not only can you tell the DS to turn the page to the next step (thus avoiding the dreaded fish-sauce-on-the-DS syndrome) but you can also shout out a command to get the DS to read the recipes out loud, freeing you from having to look at the thing during tricky food manipulation routines.

Weird? Yes? Will it ever come to North America? Who knows … six months ago I would have bet cold hard cash that we would never see an English version of the dancing secret agents in Osu! Tatakae! Ouendan, and I would have been totally and utterly wrong. At this point, I wouldn’t put anything past Nintendo in their quest to be the weird kids on the videogaming block.

There has been much blathering in the mainstream media over the past couple of days regarding “iLane”, the shiny new service that lets you hear your email read to you in a “natural human voice” while you are driving. All you need is a bluetooth-enabled handheld or portable device and a subscription to the iLane service, and suddenly you are navigating your email with “easy to use” voice commands and staying in touch with the office or loved ones in a completely hands-free and eyes-on-the-road environment.

What the talking heads and typists in the mainstream media have completely failed to mention, however, is that the service runs under a “scanning and summarizing” system, which means your emails are first read by the iLane service, and then translated into an audio summary. The mopes at iLane aren’t overly forthcoming as to whether the “pre-read” is done by a human or a machine, but the choice between the two options doesn’t seem like much of a choice at all.

Thumbs down for this one.

The long-awaited and much-discussed release of the Opera web browser for a Nintendo game console has seen the light of day. The Nintendo DS Browser runs on the (big surprise here ) Nintendo DS and hit the retail shelves in Japan on Monday. While you could conceivably order an import copy of this and run it here (the DS doesn’t have any sort of regional lockout) it might not be the most seamless thing you have ever done – unless you are fluent in Kanji you probably will have more than a rough time of it working through the menus, and the character-recognition software for stylus input only parses Hirigana and Kanji in this particular release.

An english-language version is coming, however, probably in the first quarter of 2007. I am hesitant to think that it would be as useful on this side of the pond, though … Japanese towns and cities are rife with free hot-spots, and you can sit virtually anywhere in any commercial area and get a free WiFi signal. That makes the concept of a wildly-affordable portable ‘net device an awesome thing – whip it out, unfold it, and check your Gmail (beta!) anywhere, anytime. Over here, well, having to toss 4 or 5 bucks into some ISP’s coffers just to get online down at Ye Olde Java Emporium to browse in a somewhat-restricted screen-and-input setup just wouldn’t seem to be worth it.

However, if you are interested, there is already a “tips and tricks” screen up on the English-language area of the site, and if this is the sort of thing that whets your appetite, then go crazy.

If you use Safari or the latest and greatest version of Firefox for your browsing, it may come as a surprise to you that there are still web sites that try to infest your precious visual real estate with (ugh) pop-ups. Shocking , yes, but also tragically true. Those poor souls who still use Internet Explorer face reams of pop-ups every day, and must continually bolster their on-line defenses with an array of add-on blockers.

However, before you get too smug, you should be aware that the pop-up wars rage unabated, and there are new and tricky kinds of the little bastards being developed everyday. The give and take between the forces of evil and the forces of good means that there can be gaps in your coverage as the browser people race to catch up with the sneaky little pricks who write the pop-up scripts.

So – to make sure that your browser is still up to snuff (of, of you are one of those poor IE mopes, to make sure that you don’t need to download yet another blocker add-on) head on over to PopupTest.com, where a series of tests will put your browser through a veritable gauntlet of the latest pop-up techniques. If your browser makes it there them, by gum, your browser will make it anywhere!

Regular readers of These Very Pages will recall the blurb earlier this month about the upcoming “portable media device” from Microsoft. The original thought was that we would all have to wait until July 27th to get any concrete details on this, but the cat is now officially out of the corporate bag – Microsoft’s attempt to re-invent the iPod wheel is going to be called the “Zune”, and it now conspicuously lacks any mention at all of portable gaming. This may or may not mean that the Redmond cabal has come to their senses in trying to take on Nintendo in that particular market … a cynic might say that this obviously-doomed device is now sundered from their valuable Xbox franchise simply to avoid tarnishing that part of the business with a dismal and laughable failure.

It is probably just a coincidence that this is going to be the only entertainment hardware on the market with a stupider name that “Wii”.

A quickie: To kick off the “Free Download Week” the folks at Nintendo are giving out fire flowers today to everyone who connects up to the WiFi Connection with their copy of Animal Crossing. Just open your gate or go visiting any time today between 8:00 am and 11:00 pm local time.

Next week your local Toys ‘r Us will be handing out free and incredibly rare digital swag for Animal Crossing : Wild World. Just put your copy of AC:WW into “tag mode” and head on down to any TrU in North America – from the 23rd to the 29th of July they are hosting “Free Download Week” and will be offering up one-of-a-kind Mario-themed furnishings (which have some serious feng mojo and will earn you beaucoup des points with the Happy Academy) for your automated downloading pleasure. Tag mode is completely seamless … just step into the store, hang around for a bit, and suddenly it’s Christmas in July! Have fun!