LITTLE ROCK — We gave away our Wii because you had to hold a controller in your hand while you used it. Sometimes it would fly out of your hand during vigorous games. It also kept telling us how badly we were doing.
It’s a relief to find that the new Microsoft Xbox Kinect is kinder and more forgiving. When we flubbed a move on the Kinect game Dance Central, it said, “Let’s move on.” And then another time: “I saw a guy yesterday who was worse than you.”
One of the main selling points of the Wii (pronounced wee) was that it provided a way to exercise while playing a game. The Kinect does the same thing, but much better. Well, that’s to be expected really: Both time and technology have marched on.
The Kinect is pretty wild. You wave your arms, feet and body and the device follows your motions - without holding a controller. Some games come with the set, and we’ve been river rafting, flying through obstacles and plugging leaks in a fish tank menaced by giant hammerheads. A built-in camera took pictures of some of our best moves and these show up on the TV as a series of still shots.
If you already have an Xbox, you can add the Kinect motion sensor for $150. A new four-gigabyte Xbox with the sensor and Kinect Adventures is $300. Additional games are expensive, about $50 each, and there are only 15 available right now. (Twenty six more have been announced.) We tend to buy things like this through Amazon, because you can return them within 30 days if you don’t like them.
On the down side: The menus are confusing, and you need a Windows Live ID, an Xbox Live Profile and a Kinect ID just to get started. The first time we played Kinect Adventures, the builtin game, we were asked to download an update, but the machine didn’t recognize our “OK.” Forty minutes onthe phone with tech support didn’t solve it. We just kept trying things and the update finally came in.
Our other game, Dance Central, did the same thing, freezing on the download screen. We had to cancel the update to get back to the game. Playing a game takes up too much space for a dormitory room, but it’s fine in most homes if you can move furniture out of the way.
INTERNUTS
TekTrak.com has a $5 application that lets you track the location of an iPhone from the website by entering the iPhone’s ID. The application will tell you where the phone is and where it’s been recently. Let’s hope your phone doesn’t run out of battery life first. A free version lets you try it twice.
KhanAcademy.org has 1,800 mini videos on science, banking, math, and history, all narrated by Sal Khan, a former hedge-fund manager. Bill Gates is a fan. It’s focus is math and science, but we watched a good video on the U.S. Treasury bailout.
AirportParking.org has the inside scoop on where to find cheap parking, with shuttles to the airport. We saw great deals at Chicago’s busy O’Hare Airport. Instead of $50 a day at the airport for valet parking, you could pay $7 a day and the lot provides a free shuttle to the airport. The site only includes U.S. airports, but it seems to us that someone could make a business by providing this same kind of mapping service for airport parking in other countries.
BRIDGE URL
There are many ways to shorten a URL, which is an Internet address. Some of those addresses can be outrageously long - we’ve seen them as long as a hundred characters - and the longer they are, the greater the chance of a typing error. Indeed, many malware websites are set up with addresses that are close to frequently used addresses just so they can take advantage of typing mistakes; make a mistake and you’re zipped awayto somewhere bad.
We’ve used Bit.ly, TinyURL.com and Goo.gl to create shortened addresses for use in our column. But BridgeURL.com is the handiest if you have several things you want to share at once. AtBridge URL, you can assign them all to one Web address. When someone goes to that address, the whole group becomes available as a series of websites one after the other.
Possible uses: Well, off the top of our head, a photographer might want to show off his best photos from several Web locations but under one link. We just used BridgeURL to paste together 10 links to recent columns. They’re at BridgeURL.com/Archive.
BILL SHRINK
We were shocked to learn that the average Windows Mobile cell phone user pays $205.33 a month. The average Android phone user pays $196.94 per month. The average Blackberry user pays $194.35 and the average iPhone user pays $164.91. So cell phone users are paying $2,000 or more a year for phone service.
BillShrink.com is a site for comparing rates. For us, it suggested cell-phone plans starting at just $500 a year. Since this was considerably more than the $120 a year we were already paying, however, we weren’t impressed. Of course, our low-cost TracFone phone doesn’t have a camera,can’t send or receive e-mail or surf the Web, but it does have a calendar, games, a calculator and an alarm clock. And if you want, you can keep your old phone number and have it transferred to the TracFone.
MOVIE CLIPS
MovieClips.com has more than 14,000 movie clips. You can e-mail them or put them on your own website. The latest feature is “related videos.” Find something you like, and you’ll be shown a wall of 100 similar clips, by actor, action, mood, setting, theme, director, prop, cinematographer, etc.
It also has what they call “MovieClips Mashups.” These are brief clips that share a common theme, like the best wedding scenes. We watched a Mashup of comedy clips that included one of the funnier scenes from the movie Airplane. Other sample Mashup categories include “Babes,” “Aliens,” and “Die Already.” NOTE: Readers can search several years' worth of On Computers columns at oncomp.com. Bob and Joy can be contacted by e-mail at bobschwab@gmail.com and joydee@oncomp.com.
Business, Pages 22 on 11/22/2010