I saw this in the mall the other day and I thought it was one of the most ridiculous things I've seen in a long time.  Yes, it is an iPod vending machine.  You swipe your credit card and punch in the number of the item you want. I really don't have much to say about it, but I wanted to share it with everyone.

[See Picture Below]

It didn't take long for me to mod the Wii. The day after I bought my Wii, I bought the modchip online. The mod chip didn't make it until a week after I received the actual console, but as soon as I got the chip I set out to install it. The installation of the chip is extremely simple and straightforward, but taking apart the console and putting it back together may be a bit tricky for some. I bought a black full-replacement case so that my Wii would match the rest of my equipment and that part of the installation was the most tricky.

I am trying to find a simple solution that will allow me to upload and play videos on my website in a format similar to google video or YouTube, but it doesn't look like there's really anything good out right now that does that.  The closest thing I've found is to convert the video to flash (flv) on a local computer, then upload the file to my webserver, then play that back with an FLV player.

I've attached a sample video below so you can see how Riva's encoder performs.  It's really crappy in my opinion, so I may just go back to using Google Video / YouTube.  The original video was taken with my Cell Phone at 640 x 480 resolution in 3G2 format. It was approximately 250kb in size.  I had the Riva encode shrink it down to 320 x 240 and somehow the video quality got worse (blockiness) and the size of the file went up to nearly 1 MB.

My nephew, Braden, was going to be coming in town this past weekend and I really wanted to get a Nintendo Wii so we could have something fun to play.  At least that's what I've been telling everyone else.  I think the other half of it is Laura said it is a gaming system she would actually be interested in playing. I spent a couple hours on Friday calling places and trying to find one.  I searched high and low, but couldn’t find anywhere that had them.  It seems like every time a store got them in stock they would sell out within a matter of hours.