PicLens is a visualization extension for Firefox…

Piclens for Firefox

It’s also one of the coolest looking things this side of a Mac. Once you’ve installed it, you can click the Piclens icon in the top right hand corner of the browser at any time and search for images on Google, Flickr or Photobucket. You can also search Youtube for video.

The end result is an instant 3D swooshy-swirly picture/video viewer interface. It’s as easy to use as any professionally-produced alternative and looks as good as, if not better than Vista’s built-in picture viewer. And it’s free of course.

There are a few sites which support Piclens; as well as the aforementioned Google Image Search, Youtube, Flickr and Photobucket, you’ll find support on Facebook and WordPress, among others. Browsing Facebook photos in Piclens is much more convenient and useful than Facebook’s own clunky photo album system.

No, this isn’t about me stumbling upon an Audiosurf-killer. It’s about the game emailing you whenever someone beats your score! Check this out (via Google Mail):

Now, I don’t know who this Disco8X might be, but he’s going down! No one’s beating my Casual score for “Let Me Drown” by Soundgarden.

*Ten minutes and several attempts later…*

Okay, well it seems Disco8X ain’t no fool. Part of the problem is that it’s going to be difficult - if not impossible - to score any higher than I already have done on my favourite game mode (Mono). Whereas he (or she) has been using the more complicated, but potentially much higher scoring Pointman character.

Denied!

But still, it’s neat that Audiosurf mails you to let you know when you’ve been beaten and humiliated. At least, I think that’s neat…

I blogged here about tumblelogs a long time ago.

Now I’ve finally signed up for one. Here’s mine: Lost and Found

I plan to use it for shorter, more frequent posts, pictures, songs and links which deserve a little more comment than you can give on del.icio.us. This blog will remain of course, but I’ll try to post longer, more in-depth articles, reviews and comments.

Of course, if you’ve been reading this blog recently you’ll know that I’m into web 2.0 services which aggregate all your content in one place, so you may never need to visit my Tumblr blog at all. But please feel free to catch up with me on Friendfeed and Swurl.

Ah, the endless search for that perfect web 2.0 application which will aggregate all my online content once and for all and let me get on with my bleeding life for a change instead of searching endlessly for that perfect web 2.0 app… etc.

Where was I?

Oh yeah, Swurl!

It says it’s in beta at the top of the page, so it’s clear we’re firmly in web 2.0 territory before we even start. Swurl claims to make your life easier by bringing together all your online stuff in one place, kind of like Friendfeed.

In fact, there’s really not a lot of difference between the two that I can discern after a brief play-around with Swurl over the last half hour. Swurl does appear slicker, particularly when it comes to adding friends: it automagically finds all the friends from the services you add (e.g. twitter, youtube, del.icio.us) and sticks their updates in a separate tab. Whereas on Friendfeed you have to find and follow friends using that service.

Bizarrely, Swurl even accepts Friendfeed as a source for your consolidated online presence, which probably makes it some kind of meta-meta-mashup. My head’s hurting…

Anyway, here’s my Swurl profile if you want to check me out or whatever it is you kids do these days.

Today sees the release of Firefox 3 final, but as of this posting the official download site as well as Mozilla’s site are both out of action. Not a great start for their world record attempt!

According to a ZDnet posting you can get the final Firefox 3 release from Softpedia, though I’m not sure whether that will count towards the world record.

** UPDATE ** More alternative download sites just posted on reddit: Mozilla.org mirrors

** UPDATE 2 ** And more alternative links here. None of these will count towards the (now slightly laughable) world record.

** UPDATE 3 ** 3 hours later… It’s finally working! Yay! Download is now proceeding at snail’s pace.

You’ve all heard the remixes of “Nude” by Radiohead, right? Well here’s one you might not have heard earlier:

James Houston is a final year student on Glasgow University’s Visual Communication course, and the video above is his end of year project. You’ll have to wait until 1:10 for the “performance” to begin, but it’s so worth it…

And “awesome” is the operative word, as Mike Beltzner explains:

Overview of Firefox 3 (via Reddit)

This presentation, one of many to have appeared online over the past months, showcases Firefox 3’s impressive multi-tasking address bar. Though now it’s so much more than an address bar, hence the “awesome bar” moniker.

I particularly like the one-click add to favourites button and ability to sort through and tag anything you think is worth keeping. I imagine there’ll be a del.icio.us extension soon (if there isn’t already) which will integrate sharing features and allow you to keep all your bookmarks in one place.

Foxmarks currently does something similar, but I would appreciate an add-on which allows you to import your current del.icio.us bookmarks into Firefox (and vice versa).

We won’t have long to wait: the final release is scheduled for mid-June or you could grab release candidate 3 now.

A couple of nights ago I ventured back to Steam - Valve’s online digital content delivery system - for the first time since I completed Half Life 2: Episode One a year or two ago. At first, I was shocked at the range of titles you can buy - anything from Bioshock to Warhammer 40K; RPGs to insane psychedelic puzzle-action games.

And in that last category I found a gem: Audiosurf.

The idea is simple: hover along a track with three lanes and collect coloured blocks by flying into them. Collect three or more blocks of the same colour and you’ll score points.

Hotter colours (red and yellow) score more than cold colours (blue and purple). And there are powerups scattered along the route which have various helpful effects, from painting all of your accumulated blocks one colour (thus bagging you a larger bonus), to sorting your colours out into neat stacks.

The harder the difficulty setting, the faster blocks fly at you and the trickier it is to make stacks. At some of the harder levels it gets to the point where it’s as much about your reaction speed as planning ahead. But it’s still ludicrously colourful fun.

So where does the “audio” come in?

Audiosurf’s tracks and environment are generated from any digital music file you’ve got on your system. Essentially, it reacts to whatever song you throw at it. The tempo and feel of the song you select determines how the game plays out.

At it’s most basic level, this means a fast, upbeat song will beget a frantic downhill track, with loads of colours and hazards, while a mellow, acoustic number produces a correspondingly chilled uphill track, with fewer blocks.

Of course, there’s a range of characters to choose from, all of which have different abilities. But that - in a nutshell - is what £6.50 ($9.99 + VAT) of your hard-earned crust will buy you: a virtually limitless supply of lo-fi puzzling-action goodness accompanied by great music (assuming you actually like the stuff you’ve got on your hard drive). And it’s maddeningly addictive.

Even better: the latest update incorporates Last.fm scrobbling of all tracks played, so you can share your music while gaming. Perfect!

There’s a taster below if you’re not sure. Some lunatic attempts a run through of DragonForce: Through the Fire and Flames (remember them?) using the Mono game mode. Rock symbols at the ready: \m/

Okay, comparison time: A New Hope vs. The Phantom Menace. The Empire Strikes Back vs. Attack of the Clones. Temple of Doom vs. Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. It’s not hard to see where I’m going with this, considering that a certain George Lucas was involved in both the revamped Star Wars mockeries as well as this latest endeavour, directed by Steven Spielberg, but produced by Lucas.

While this is nowhere near the level of preposterous travesty reached by the Star Wars prequels, it’s not exactly great. Though after I was moaning on to a friend about how this wasn’t a patch on any of the original trilogy earlier this week, I was challenged to remember the last time I’d actually watched one of the first three all the way through… I confess it may have been some time ago, and they may all be pretty lame now, but surely not *this* bad?!

This time round, Indy’s a few years older, and it’s the Soviets who play the role of bad guys rather than the Nazis. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, and indeed there are a few witty scenes early on - particularly when Jones is introduced to Mutt Williams (Shia LaBeouf) - which lead you to thinking this might not be so bad after all.

Sadly, it doesn’t keep up the pace and the whole thing ends up feeling like a weak idea spread far too thinly.

It’s difficult to pinpoint what’s so wrong about this. Individually the characters are great, but there’s too little chemistry between them. And the plot — well, it’s Indy; who needs a storyline which makes sense? But still: aliens and spaceships? Stop the press! Spielberg bravely steps into the 1980s with all guns blazing! Wait a second: hasn’t he been here before?

Perhaps it’s just the fact that there are very few memorable scenes (no, the Tarzan moment does not count!), or maybe that it drags in the mid-section, or the lack of consistently good jokes, or… Well, you get the idea. I was not impressed with this.

Lots of people have been talking up Far Cry 2, with many previews effectively saying that it defecates over Crysis from a great height. Well, from what I’ve seen so far I’m not so sure if it’s going to be a hands down win, but check out this recently released tech demo…

Wow! Fire propagation looks like heaps of fun, and could potentially be a useful gameplay tactic: don’t want to rush a compound head on? Why not start a fire with your flamethrower and flush ‘em out?!