All entries for Tuesday 19 December 2006

December 19, 2006

Word of the Day

Follow-up to Word of the Day from The randomness of tomorrow, today!

Compos Mentis, n, insane fertiliser.

: 19 Dec 2006 17:16 | Tags: Compos Mentis Randomness Word Of The Day | Comments (4) | Close comments | Report a problem

Wii Forecast Channel

I woke up this morning (well, this afternoon technically…) to find my Wii pulsing blue with a message from Nintendo announcing the launch of the Forecast Channel.

The update worked fine, and the Forecast Channel itself is brilliant. I haven’t read much about it, but I assume it uses the Wii’s 24-hour Internet access to download details as they become available, rather than the Shop which downloads them as you request them.

I’ve just spent a few minutes playing around and it’s a brilliant interface; nice clear layouts and other such factors you’d expect from a Wii Channel. The globe is a lot of fun; it’s surprisingly smooth; you grab it and drag, and it just glides beautifully – no jerks and no thinking.

One minor annoyance is the menus at the top and bottom; you hover over them to stop them being transparent and get them in a state where you can use them (although many of the features can be performed with Wiimote buttons (zooming, for example, using the obvious buttons). This can get a little annoying if you’re wildly dragging the globe around, enjoying just how damn well it works, and accidentally clicking on things….
This wouldn’t be that much of a problem with gentle, measured use, but since I don’t recall the B trigger being used, holding it to bring up the menus would solve this.

One thing I was really impressed with is that I can actually set my location to Durham. Durham very rarely seems to appear of wider-area maps despite being both a County and it’s “capital”, which is annoying, and it’s great that it’s available here.

Finally, I think I’ve been doing physics for too long, because I was looking in the settings and I was disappointed that the temperature doesn’t have an option for Kelvin; although, to be fair the them, Kelvin rarely seems to appear in weather forecasts, so I think I can let them off…

: 19 Dec 2006 17:12 | Tags: Forecast Channel Randomness Review Wii | Comments (0) | Close comments | Report a problem