Unlock your laptop with a webcam and more fun apps!

Adam Pash over at Lifehacker just shared an amazing amount of things you can do with your webcam which range from useful to entertaining and just amusing. My favorite has to be software which lets you unlock your computer using only your face! The software doesn’t work for Vista right now but I may have to take my Xbox Live Vision camera into the office and use it for facial unlocking on my work computer. Another cool application is the photo booth apps which come in a variety of names for many flavors of operating systems. Come to think of it, Microsoft should intro a photo booth style application for the 360 which you could set up to do cool affects and post the results to Flickr! That would really make the 360 the life of the party, especially if it could work while you were playing Rock Band.

Xbox Live Hits 10 Million 6 mo. Ahead of Schedule

image via Major Nelson’s Flickr stream

Robbie Bach just announced that the Xbox Live service hit over 10 Million users connected!  He noted that this was 6 months ahead of the scheduled time!  I wonder if this success had/has anything to do with the continuing Xbox Live service issues.  Thankfully all Gold members will be getting a free Xbox Arcade game in the near future.  I’ll settle for that and working matchmaking in Halo 3!  I am hoping that some other cool news comes out at CES over the next few days.

You can tune in to the Bill Gates Keynote live right now.

Christmas Killed Xbox Live

I figure in 3 weeks Microsoft will announce a press release extolling the number of 360s sold over the holidays and the number of new Xbox Live members who signed up within the last week of December. Right now however I am disappointed that it takes 15 minutes for my home page on the dashboard to load and at least 5 minutes to get into a game of Halo 3 on Live.

Currently Live is up and running, with a 2 paragraph caveat shown below.

Thanks for the apology, can you borrow a few servers from Google for the weekend or get some overnighted? I’d love to get a few more games in before I return to 40 hour work weeks and MBA classes, kthnxBia.

Current Xbox Live Status

Featured in Electronic Gaming Monthly

The Halo 2 Profanity Study that I completed in January of 2006 was published in the May issue of Electronic Gaming Monthly on Page 24.

Check out a scan:

More on the Halo 2 Profanity Study

If you need anyone to rant about violence in videogames being the scapegoat for violence in society contact me smithj AT gmail.com

Hilarious Comic RE: Profanity Study

While checking out some incoming links from my Halo 2 Profanty Study I found Dimitri Tcaciuc’s weblog and comic drawings.

He has a great comic up for which the study was an inspiration.

GO check it out here

Hold up Profanity Update

Reading through various linking sites regarding my Halo 2 Profanity Study, coming in from Fark.com, joystiq.com amongst others, it seems many people think I am uptight or want the government to crack down on the gaming industry.

You couldn’t be more wrong

If you re read the article please notice I do not want the government to do anything about this. We are adults the game is meant for adults and adults curse, hell I do it. I don’t want you to stop cursing. Cursing does not bother me if it did I would simply stop playing Halo. The only people who may want to do somthing about this should be Parents. My thinking is that if parents will take more responsibility then fewer will complain to the government and cause shackles to be put on the gmaing industry.

I wanted to know what the amount was since I play Halo so much. So I decided to do something semi productive and record the results.

Some people have also pointed out the survey size was too small and not spread out enough, True it could have been done better, if you don’t have a 40 hr a week job or if your job is studying stuff like this please by all means do better.

To sum it up, I want the government to get involved in the gaming industry as much as Gamers love Jack Thompson, aka not at all.

Past rants about the government and gaming

BBC article Parents don’t care about game ratings: imjosh

Response to CNN blaming video games for Violence: imjosh

Have fun and remember “Damn the man, Save the empire” Empire Records

Frequency of Profanity in Halo 2

Thanks for visiting, please realize that I’m not writing this to advocate censoring or that I’m surprised by swearing or don’t like it, I was just curious to see what the frequency was.

When you logon to Xbox live more often then not you will be greeted by a 14 year old that learned a new word on the playground that day, or maybe it’s the drunken 24 year old who hates black people, gays and anyone who isn’t in his frat. individuals afflicted with IAS (Internet A-hole Syndrome). No matter who you are if you have played on live you have run into cursing and lewdness. If you look at the rating for the game you can see that it is intended for ages 17+ but parents don’t care/understand/listen so lots of underage kids have this game. Another important thing to note is that the rating includes a warning that the game experience changes with use of online features. Please do not confuse this with a plea for the government to crack down and tighten control on the gaming industry. If anything this information should be used by parents to educate themselves about what their child is involved with and then make an educated decision to let them play or not.

Last December I started recording the frequency of profanity that I was able to hear while playing Halo 2. The results of the study which lasted 33.9 hours were surprising.

Disclaimers:

1. The curse words were those which I could hear, more may have occurred and other players in a given game may not have heard the same number of curse words I did. The ability to hear other players depends on your proximity to them.

2. The times recorded are the times I was signed into Xbox live and either engaged in a game or in the process of joining a game or viewing the results and listening to the discourse of other players. The times do not reflect solely “in game” time. You can view my games at bungie.net with the gamertag Ca1vin. note the ONE in the gamertag.

3. Do not proceed if you do not want to view words which may offend some.

More after the Jump
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