Community sites where strangers come together to mutually admire each other seem to be all the rage at the moment, but I’d never gotten into them to any extent until I discovered Flickr. Maybe it was just the serendipitous fact that I’d started to cultivate a casual interest in digital photography at the time when I happened to stumble across it and the excellent WordPress plugin which powers my photo gallery, but it’s really a great way to spend some time online.

It’s basically a site to upload and host your photos, but unlike the dispassionate likes of Photobucket, home to endless joke message board images, Flickr is about a community of people sharing real photographs. You get a lot of shite that I mostly couldn’t care less about like people’s birthday parties, but the real stuff – landscapes, wildlife, cityscapes, etc – can be absolutely beautiful. It really shows how the digital revolution has taken photography from a somewhat niche hobby into being something that everyone enjoys, and I’ve spent hours browsing and commenting on some great images from fun stuff (take a look at mine) to more serious matters. All the more unusual that I’ve barely even looked through a book of photographs before.

Flickr’s going to be my outlet for the photos I take when I’m in Japan and I’m thinking of getting a pro account now just because I’m having so much fun playing around it. It’s a great example of how good a web application can be and should be a lesson on how to design a powerful but incredibly simple web interface without having to pander to proprietary browser features.

Well…almost.

I submitted a scan of the horrendous cover art of a horrendous pirated DVD of the horrendous Planet of the Apes remake that I bought back in 2001 (don’t jump on me – I own a proper copy now) to the Crappy Bootleg DVD Covers pool. I’ve just seen that it’s been directly linked to as the worst cover of the week on the venerable BoingBoing.

How ironic that I spend my life complaining about piracy but it’s a slip-up from four years ago which eventually brings me my infamy.

I have to admit to not being particularly enamoured with Nintendo’s Revolution, pretty much overshadowed by Sony and Microsoft’s unstoppable behemoths at E3. It was definitely the most aesthetically pleasing console next to the love-them-or-hate-them PS3 and Xbox 360, but it’s hard not to see Nintendo making similar mistakes to those made with the N64 and GameCube.

They were hurt by choosing cartridges over optical discs and again by completely missing the online boat with the GameCube, and now they’re forgoing the usual powerhouse route by making their new console only a couple of times more powerful than their current hardware.

Nintendo might have all but handed over any chance of regaining their home at the top of the heap, but current news might have ensured that it’s going to be very popular with the hardcore. Famitsu have published the full list of playable classic Nintendo titles that you’ll be able to download onto your Revolution.

It’s not known if the lineup will be the same in the rest of the world, but the prospect of over 220 Nintendo games on one machine with titles like Fire Emblem and the F-Zero X expansion making their first appearances outside Japan. Plus GoldenEye and Perfect Dark again? Drool…

A couple of days ago I got the chance to see and play around with the first generation of emulators running on the PSP. It was inevitable when they gave it removable storage that could be accessed from a PC and gave the PSP the ability to run software from it, but it’s finally started happening and actually has me more excited than any of the actual retail games that are on the way for the PSP. Well…maybe not GTA.

The PC Engine emulator has more appeal to some of my friends than it does to me but it was already running at pretty much full speed, so anyone who is a fan of that particular machine might want to start tracking down a v1.0 Japanese PSP because it’s the best portable option for it thus far. Yes, even better than the PC Engine GT because it doesn’t require a magnifying glass and a ton of batteries.

The real meat and potatoes of the emulation scene will definitely be the SNES, the one that everyone always wants on any new emulation system. The first version of the Snes9x port isn’t quite full speed (probably around 80%, and far less on Super FX-intensive games like Yoshi’s Island) but has full sound support and shows the potential of what a few months of development could bring. It’s true that some SNES games have been ported to the GBA already, but this gives access to the whole library and lets you recreate the SNES control layout exactly. The prospect of being able to play Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy VI on the move almost has me salivating and really hoping that the shops of Japan will still have some v1.0 machines when I visit in September.

What really did amaze me was the absolutely stunning picture quality of these games on the PSP. The screen of Sony’s baby has been praised before, but seeing these games that we’re used to seeing through crappy composite connections in their full glory shows off how vivid and beautiful some of this 2D artwork is. It’s a similar jump as taking a GBA game from an original GBA to a backlit DS.

For this to really take off they need to get it working on the current PSP firmware. The number of Japanese machines which haven’t been updated to v1.5 can’t be that high, and all US and European units ship with that version preinstalled. It’s surely a matter of time, but it can’t come soon enough.

This is the 100th post on this site since the switch to WordPress in February. It’s only been like this for a few months and it’s already made me more productive than in pretty much the whole time I was writing the code myself for every update.

Anyway, I just wanted to thank all the visitors new and old who have given me feedback on the new format which seems to have been declared a unanimous improvement, especially with the brand new theme. Here’s to another 100 things worth writing about and a lot more content over the coming months.

It’s been rumoured and debunked every so often for the last couple of months that Apple’s long-standing partnership with IBM and their PowerPC line was coming to and end and would be replaced with something from Intel, and at the WWDC Steve Jobs has confirmed that it’s going to happen starting next year. What’s really amazed me is something he said about how they were going to handle the wholesale conversion from one CPU architecture to another (quote from Macworld):

Mac OS X has been “leading a secret double life” for the past five years, said Jobs. “So today for the first time, I can confirm the rumors that every release of Mac OS X has been compiled for PowerPC and Intel. This has been going on for the last five years.”

Talk about a trojan horse. While everyone has been wondering how Apple would do it, the truth is that they’ve done it. Five years ago. Wow. I can’t remember anyone managing to pull off anything like that with barely a rumour escaping. I doubt that it will be x86 architecture because if OS X has been compatible with that for five years some enterprising meddler would have had it running and its 64-bit support is poor, so I’d guess that EM64T or IA-64 is likely.

This could have big implications for Apple’s hardware, not least because it should become more affordable. Intel architecture is familiar to PC developers so we could be seeing more Mac games which will be nice. Also, advancement of Apple laptops has stalled as the G5 has been too hot and power-hungry to be fitted into a viable portable. Intel have caught up with the G4 with their fast and efficient Pentium M line, so something similar in Apple’s camp could put the lead back into their hands and be even more powerful than existing G5s. Some might feel somehow betrayed by this news, but I’m very excited.