Must be some destructive mutation...?

Albert imitating Jim Carrey:



From today's frolicking in the snow...

I Pity The Foolish King Arthur

We spent the New Year's Eve in scary cottage near the Austrian border and we visited a bizarre complex called Excalibur City.

Excalibur City is located exactly at the border of Austria and Czech Republic, the reason probably being that you can pay smaller taxes here, no duties or whatever.



It looks like some demented hellish post-apocalyptic nighmarish version of Disneyland / U.S. mega mall. See my photos and more photos on their homepage.



It's evident that whoever built this monstrosity had lots of money but zero taste. There is an airplane restaurant (boasting that Niki Lauda once visited it), imitation of Planet Hollywood globe (without any Planet Hollywood type restaurant nearby), medieval restaurant, lots of super discount shops and an Asian marketplace with Asian-styled wall around it. 10% of the shops are Duty Free type shops (as seen on airports), the remaining 90% are selling unbelievable crap (mostly Vietnamese knockoffs of Chinese knockoffs). There are also some "entertainment options" for kids and adults alike, most of which look very scary or don't work at all.

Amazing.

Mini-Review: Fun Beat EM270 MP3 Player

I recently bought this MP3 player which boasts "70 hours of battery life" and other interesting features for rather nice price (I bought 8 GB version). The reason was that I needed some player for my father to listen to classical music in his bed and I figured I could give him my older Sansa Clip and I'll keep EM270 for myself (because it seemed to be slightly more advanced).

Pluses: The packaging actually contains not only the player itself but also earbuds, wall charger, USB cable, holding strap and rubber cover! Also, the device looks quite stylish, although not as stylish as this CG render suggests:

(Image stolen from Alza.cz)

I'm afraid it's strictly downhill from here on.

When I copied about 6 GB of music to the device, the start-up took about 50 seconds! I thought this was because the device indexed my music and cached the song data somewhere but no such luck. The delay is the same for each and every start-up! EM270 also supports microSDHC cards up to 32GB for potentially 40 GB of total storage which could mean several minutes of start-up time each and every time (in theory - I haven't tried it).

All of my music contains ID3 v2.3 tags with artist, track number, genre, album and track names. EM270 allows to me to select music using these tags (meaning the songs actually are indexed using these data). However, when I actually start playing the tracks, only their filenames are displayed. Nothing else. Not even the playing time. This means that when I randomly skip between 500 music tracks, there is no way to see the album and composer details for currently playing song! If your files are named "01.mp3", "02.mp3" etc. then tough luck, you have no way of knowing which song is currently playing.

Setting play method to "Shuffle" means that tracks are played in random order, with no regard to what was already played during this session. That means you can shuffle through 20 track album and hear track #13 four times before you hear track #7 for the first time, for example.

The manual is godawful. It's in Czech and English. The Czech version is briefer and totally omits some menu items while the English version is almost incomprehensible and all screenshots are in Chinese! I was able to discover most of the functionality by trial and error. However, there is an item called "JumpSetting" with different time values in the Settings and I have no idea what it is supposed to be doing. The manual actually contains the following gem:

"This user manual can give you some useful information. Hope it will help you to operate the player well when you are using it. If there is any mistake on this manual, you are welcome to figure it out."

Obviously, I didn't try out all the functionality but from what I've seen it was quite clear to me I don't want to use EM270 for my music playing needs. Some UI choices were very bizarre, for example holding down the Play/Pause button started changing the dozen or so equalizer settings very quickly (i.e. 10 times a second), resulting in a game of roulette of sorts.

If I bought this player for myself, I'd be rather pissed off. However, it will be OK for my father and I'll keep my trusty Sansa Clip. Fun Beat actually seems to be Czech company but their firmware and documentation resembles the worst Chinese crap.

And remember: "Our company remained the final right how to explain for the manual, warranty and some related information."

P.S: This mini-review is based on latest available firmware.

Buzz! Quiz World - Czech Translation

I purchased Buzz! Quiz World game for PS3. This is a TV-Show style quiz game which has the distinction of being fully localized to Czech language. Not only translated, but there are also many questions about Czech TV shows, Czech sports etc! There are supposed to be over 5000 questions in total, some with audio and / or images.



I only played one game so far and it was excellent fun although I only found ONE online opponent (you are matched only with Czech players and the game is brand new over here) so we only played one-on-one instead of up to eight players which this game supports (online or locally).

I am rather sceptical about the quality of Czech game translations and I was nervous about this game because, in this case, bad translation could easily ruin the whole experience. Thankfully, the translation (and localization) is rather good, although not perfect.

For example, the announcer calls you by your name (provided you have some sort of "regular" Czech name). Unfortunately, instead of "Františku", the announcer called me "Františ..." the whole time, with abrupt fade-out on the last syllable. Perfect example of less-than-stellar localization quality control.

I won my first game because I was able to choose the category "Movie Quotes", where I trounced my opponent (he trounced me in "Current TV"). And out of the 10 questions in this category, two of them were not exactly right.

The first question was about the quote "Frankly, my dear, I don't give a damn". In Czech, this quote was written as "Vážený, to je mi jedno", which means "Dear SIR, I don't care", although this is said TO A WOMAN in "Gone with the Wind". Although the title of the movie was translated correctly as "Jih proti Severu" ("South vs. North") - yes, that's official Czech title. It's clear the translator didn't know the correct context for this scene and it's also quite clear most of the quotes were translated differently than in the the actual Czech versions of these movies.

The funniest "glitch" was the question about the quote "May the Force be with us" with "Armageddon" and "Star Wars" being offered as possible answers. Obviously, the correct answer is "Star Wars" but my opponent has chosen "Armageddon" and lost. The funny part is that in Czech versions of these movies, this phrase ("Ať nás provází Síla") actually appears in both "Armageddon" and "Star Wars"! And the funniest part is that it's because of me - I used "May the Force be with us" as a substitute for "Beam me up, Scotty" when I translated Armageddon many years ago (Star Trek - especially the original series - being virtually unknown in our country back then). This "error" is obviously almost impossible to discover and fix before the game's release but it certainly made my day.

As I already said, I had great fun playing the game and I cannot wait to try it with more people. And the Czech version does not suck. This is definitely perfect party game, even for non-geek people who usually wouldn't touch videogame controller.

P.S: Four "buzzers" (special controllers) are included with the game and I see no reason why I have to buy more buzzers for more players and why I cannot use standard PS3 controllers for players 5 and 6, for example...?

Panasonic Lumix GF1 Camera

This is Albert, the Zen master:



I bought myself Panasonic Lumix GF1 camera (with small pancake lens) which - at least to me - is a breakthrough piece of hardware. It shoots almost as well as DSLR, however it's very compact (slightly larger than Canon Powershot G series including the lens). That means I can carry it with me fairly easily in the belt pouch wherever I go and use it for guerrilla-style photography (i.e. "shoot lots of trash, pick 5% of interesting stuff from it"). I just have to find the right pouch, the current one is too big.

GF1 is fairly expensive but the quality of images is noticeably better than the best digital compacts (I had Canon Powershot G10 until now). For example the above photo is very small crop from large image, basically pixel-per-pixel resolution. And that's not even RAW, just plain old JPEG on full automatic. The level of detail is excellent and exposures are much shorter meaning there is less blur.

Windows 7 is here and it shows you who is the boss

Even the Japanese are powerless agains the mighty power of Windows 7. I guess I'll stay with Ubuntu, thank you...



Even after they get it to work, it feels definitely unresponsive and sluggish, considering this is carefully prepared one-time demo on "optimal hardware":

Probably the most wonderful ad campaign ever!

This sounds like some bizarre joke from Mike Judge or Sacha Baron Cohen but it's real.



Today, on the Wenceslas Square (the most frequented place in the center of Prague), I saw diggers working. If I was racist and elitist, I'd probably say they were "illiterate minimum wage Gypsy diggers". And most of them wore bright yellow shirt with the slogan "Měl jsem se líp učit", meaning "I should've been studying harder" and a link to www.skoly.cz - which seems to be some sort of private school portal run by British Company (International Education Society Ltd., 92 Belgrave Road, London).

I think there is no way to beat this.



(Click the images to see larger versions)

Kim Jong Il vs. Technoviking

Probably just a coincidence but...



Bonus video:

Oldskool Amusement

I always liked amusement park attractions and I had some rather disturbing memories of Budapest's "Vidam Park" which I visited when I was very small (about 10 years old).

Last week, I visited it again, and it was even more bizarre than I remembered it.

There are some rather recent rides, well known from European amusement parks. But let's forget about these and get nostalgic:

There is an operational wooden roller coaster built in the year 1922!!!



The cars look like something from children's railroad and the track itself is constructed from what looks like standard rails. There is no drive mechanism on the passenger platform (the train moves here because the track is slightly sloped) and passengers often embark and disembark without the train even stopping. There are no safety features, hydraulics or electronics at all.

The ride is very bumpy, of course, and the train has a driver who hand brakes during the whole ride, otherwise the train would go too fast and crash. I cannot decide if this is the best or the worst job in the world, riding on the roller coaster all day. It's certainly very important job, because if he got sick and lost consciousness, for example, everyone in the train would probably die. Now this is hardcore!



There are other ancient rides which look and operate like something from Fallout, but the most terrifying of them is an automated boat ride for kids.

You get in the boat and you ride it in a narrow canal, watching the scenes from popular fairy tales. Again, there is no motor or electronics, the boat moves simply because the water is flowing, and often crashes into the walls.

All of this takes place inside artificial cave, mostly in total darkness and total silence. The fairy tales are represented by scary plastic figurines (who don't move at all, of course) placed behind scary bars (probably to prevent kids from stealing them). The original idea probably was to create something like Disneyland's "It's a Small World After All" but the execution is creepy beyond belief. Watch the video:



No wonder I had nightmares about this for the last 30 years...

Custom Alert Sounds On HTC Hero Phone

I am posting this chiefly so that other people with the same problem can find the easy solution here:

HTC Hero mobile phone offers custom ringtones. It lets you use any MP3 file anywhere on your memory card as a ringtone (you don't have to install any special software).

However, this is not the case with alert tones (the sounds that sound when calendar alert is triggered). The phone only offers some short predefined wimpy sounds which definitely cannot wake me up.

I tried installing "Rings Extended" (an app which provides extended ringtone functionality for other Android phones) but it didn't work on HTC Hero.

However, the solution is really simple!

Just create a directory called /media/audio/notifications/ on your memory card and put your MP3s in it (and maybe restart the phone). After that, the sounds in this directory will be automatically offered to you when choosing notification sounds (I am using this one).