yet more Wii stuff

I feel a little silly for posting so much Wii-related stuff over the last couple of weeks, but not silly enough to stop doing it, apparently.

  • It looks like getting a GameCube WaveBird controller is probably a better idea than buying the Wii Classic Controller. It’s wireless, and it should work with all GameCube games and (I think) all Virtual Console games. (And it’s not impossible to find.)
  • I started messing around with the Wii’s ability to send and receive e-mail today. It’s not a tremendously useful ability — I’ve already got at least a half-dozen e-mail addresses, and it’s really not a problem to check any of them from my living room. But it’s kind of neat to be able to send & receive e-mail on a game console.
  • Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess was in stock at Best Buy today. They had the strategy guide too, which I must say is the thickest game guide I’ve ever seen. (This may have been the “collector’s edition”, so that may explain the extra thickness.) I managed to resist buying them, by reminding myself that I haven’t finished Final Fantasy VIII, and I still have FF IX and X on the shelf. I just read a very positive review of Zelda, though, so I’m going to just have to keep reminding myself: I have no time for another gigantic fantasy RPG right now!

bookmarks

It’s been a while since I posted anything about online bookmark managers. I’d pretty much settled on posting bookmarks to Spurl, then letting Spurl post them to del.icio.us. This was working great for a while, but the del.icio.us integration in Spurl stopped working a week or two ago. A few people have posted about it in the forums, but nobody from Spurl has said anything about fixing it.
To get around having to either post everything twice, or give up either Spurl or del.icio.us, I’ve been looking for another way to post to them both at the same time. I found a site called OnlyWire. It looked legit, but I was initially wary of giving them the passwords to my Spurl and del.icio.us accounts. I gave it a shot, and it works OK. However, it turns out that their terms of service allow them to post sponsor links under your IDs. They say that they’ll only do that once, but that’s enough to make me want to avoid doing business with them. If you look at the “Hot Spurls” and “Just In” lists on the Spurl homepage, it looks like this service (and possibly others like it) have already polluted the bookmark pool, so to speak, to the extent that useful bookmarks are being pushed down the list in favor of sponsored links.
I’m starting to think now that maybe I can do something with Greasemonkey. I haven’t really looked into creating Greasemonkey scripts, though, so I’ll need to do some research first.

Avoid the loony Zune

Andy Ihnatko’s Zune review in the Chicago Sun-Times is a classic. You gotta love it when phrases like “colossal blunder” and “complete, humiliating failure” appear in a review. Admittedly, Ihnatko is a long-time Apple fan, but he has some serious points about the Zune. I kind of hope he’s right when he says “the Zune will be dead and gone within six months.” If this thing is a success, it’ll just encourage other companies to take the same approach to DRM and functionality.