ON COMPUTERS

Xbox One great for games; Gold extras fall short

While a number of critics have been saying the Xbox One isn’t worth getting because some of the most popular games won’t play on it, that’s not the only reason.

We got one because our favorite game, Peggle, is out in a new version that only plays on Xbox One. The other reason we got it was just to keep up to date on what’s happening out there.

It’s a good thing we’re having a blast playing that game because everything else about the Xbox One seems overpriced and underwhelming.

Want to use Skype for phone calls? Or Amazon Instant Video? Or Internet Explorer? Or even the popular Netflix and Hulu networks? Forget about it. Nearly everything you might want to do, except free games, requires an extra $60-a-year membership in Xbox Gold.

We think that, once again, Microsoft is behind the curve.

The features that Xbox Gold adds already are available on most televisions purchased within the last few years, and if not on yours, you can plug a laptop into the TV and even get Skype, Amazon video and other services at no extra charge. Even ou rbudget laptop (for less than $400) bought a few years ago connects to our TV.

What gets most critics excited about the Xbox One is the quality of the graphics, and features like picture-in-picture - so you can watch TV while playing a game. Some TVs can do this as well. Actually, Bob recalls that you could do this about 20 years ago if you bought a special graphics card for your PC.

The Xbox One comes with what they call a Kinect player, which lets users control the device with gestures and body movements. Most of those gestures worked OK, but some, like “zoom out,” took many tries to get right. If you want to feel like an idiot, keep thrusting your hands in and out in a frantic effort to zoom. Voice commands worked better.

Another possible deal breaker: poor video playback on the Web. We went to 60 Minutes Overtime at CBS.com, for example, and it just hung there and never did load the video. Pausing a movie in Amazon Instant Video was tough to do, but easy to do on our Google TV and smart Sony TV.

So what it all boils down to is that the Xbox One is still a game machine. The touted extra features cost extra and aren’t that extra. But if playing video games is your passion, you’ll probably love this machine. The Xbox senses your moves and can critique them, whether you’re dancing, exercising or sliding down a hill in a video game.

NICE PICTURES AND A BIT MORE

Here’s a trick many people don’t seem to know about: You can have a new, beautiful background picture on your computer every day, and it’s free for Windows users.

The pictures are as dazzling as any we’ve seen from the National Geographic and range from animals to exotic landscapes. The free download, from Bing.com, also puts a search box on your screen. Along the bottom of the box are icons for weather, news and Facebook. The first time you click weather, click “options” to change the default city, Seattle, to your own home city (unless you’re really keen on seeing Seattle weather). Type in a ZIP code, then click the plus sign to add it. The search box also has links to trending searches, pictures and videos. When we first looked at it, a popular search was for “Mike Ditka falls asleep.” BITCOIN BUZZ

In case you missed it, Overstock.com, an online retailer, announced it would accept Bitcoins as payment. Bitcoins are a virtual currency that can be earned in several ways, including by using computing time to solve complex problems. The founder says he hedges the risk of holding virtual currency by exchanging Bitcoins for dollars each night.

AMAZON STUDIOS

We’ve been watching Alpha House, Amazon’s new political comedy series, created by Gary Trudeau, who does the Doonesbury cartoon. If you want to vote for what their next series might be, go to AmazonPreview.com to get an invitation. We thought For Sale by Superhero looked pretty good.

If you want to write your own movie or TV script, Amazon has a free tool called Amazon Storybuilder. Find it at Studios.Amazon.com and click “Turn your script into a storyboard.” INTERNUTS

Healthline.com/health/ online-medical-fundraising allows patients to solicit funds to help with their medical expenses. The site is operated by Healthline Networks, a website featured in Yahoo Health, The Huffington Post and some newspapers. One of the families featured on the site raised $16,000 for their young child’s leukemia treatment.

3D PRINTING IN METAL

Unless you’re making models of body parts, most of the plastic things that come out of 3-D printers look like junk. So how about printing in metal? Now we’re talkin’.

Joshua Pearce, at Michigan Technical University, is working on a 3-D metal printer, which costs less than $1,200. It uses parts from a commercial welder and puts together thin pieces of steel. There are other ways to print with metal, like fusing metal particles in a solution, using lasers for the fusion.

If you want to build your own 3-D metal printer, Pearce has shared instructions at appropedia.org/Open-source_ metal_3-D_printer.

If you want someone else to do most of the work, and you have an Xbox 360 with a Kinect player, head over to Shapify.me. They’ll make a 3-D model of you if you stand in front of the camera and scan yourself. To have the 3-D figurine sent to your door costs $59. It’s either white or multicolored plastic and you can paint it.

THE NUMBERS REPORT

According to IPG Media Lab, TV viewers in the 18-to-24 age group are trending toward watching shows on something else. About 20 percent mainly watch TV on their smartphone, 15 percent watch it on a tablet, and just 10 percent watch an actual TV. The remainder watch TV on a computer.

Bob and Joy can be contacted by email at bobschwab@gmail.com and joy.schwabach@gmail.com.

Business, Pages 24 on 01/13/2014

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