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- Konami's first 3D game is for mobile phones
- Google delays launch of TV sets
- Tutorial: Slow PC? How to find out why and fix it
- Opinion: Why I don't want a Kinect for Christmas
- In Depth: 20 OS X networking problems and fixes
| Konami's first 3D game is for mobile phones Posted: 20 Dec 2010 12:50 AM PST  Gaming giant Konami has announced its first 3D game, but instead of waiting for Nintendo's 3DS to launch it is pushing out Mobile Powerful Pro Baseball 3D for phones. It will be some time until we see the 3D phones arrive in this country, but electronics giant Sharp is releasing Galapagos 3D Android handsets in Japan, and Konami are keen to cater for the screen.
Sharp actually make the autostereoscopic screen used by Nintendo's 3DS, so Konami may well view this as a fine way to practice the technology ahead of the launch of the next-gen handheld console. Pre-installed And in the meantime, those who are prepared to bring a third dimension to their mobile phone screen will be getting the snappily named Mobile Powerful Pro Baseball 3D pre-installed. The Sharp 3D phones are packing a 1GHz Snapdragon processor, Android 2.2 and a 3.8 inch 800x480 resolution screen. With a PSP phone, also running Android, set to make its appearance, it is certainly an interesting time for mobile gaming – and the line between traditional video gaming and mobile phone gaming is now thinner than your wallet after all that Christmas spending. Via CVG 
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| Google delays launch of TV sets Posted: 20 Dec 2010 12:33 AM PST  Google is set to delay manufacturing of TV sets based on Google TV, having requested that its production partners not announce products. The delay is in order for Google to improve its Google TV software before TV hardware based around the internet TV service hits the market. Samsung still set to unveil web TVs The delays were initially reported in the Wall Street Journal reported, citing unnamed sources familiar with the company's TV plans. Samsung Electronics is still set to go ahead with a launch of Google TV products at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas early next month, according to the WSJ. Google has yet to officially comment on the reasons for the requested delays. Gina Weakley, a Google spokeswoman only reiterated that: "Our long-term goal is to collaborate with a broad community of consumer electronics manufacturers to help drive the next-generation TV-watching experience, and we look forward to working with other partners to bring more devices to market in the coming years." TVs with Google TV allow viewers to easily surf the web from their TV. Google TV devices are already available from Sony and Logitech International. Delays from Toshiba, LG, Sharp However, Toshiba, LG Electronics and Sharp are now no longer expected to unveil their own televisions based around Google TV at the forthcoming CES in Vegas. "We will not be announcing a Toshiba TV or Blu-ray player or demonstrating the products at C.E.S.," said Jeff Barney, the vice president of Toshiba's digital products division. "We have an understanding with Google about the future product roadmap and will bring the right product out at the right timeframe." Google is also set to release its own ChromeOS-branded netbook in 2011. Industry analysts have criticised Google's business culture and its ability to manage relationships with consumer tech manufacturing partners. "Google as a company is not a particularly partner-friendly or partner-focused company," said James L. McQuivey, an analyst at Forrester, claiming that it could be well into late 2011 before Google TV really takes off. "You can give me the recipe for the absolute best chocolate chip cookies in the world, but until I put the ingredients together and bake them at exactly the right temperature for the right time, they're not cookies, and that's where Google TV is." Brits can expect to see Google TVs arriving on the market in the second half of 2011. Expect lots more on Google TV and web TV from CES 2011 in Las Vegas early next month. 
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| Tutorial: Slow PC? How to find out why and fix it Posted: 19 Dec 2010 04:00 AM PST  From extended boot times to lengthy application launches and slow shutdowns, Windows is prone to all kinds of performance issues. If you're an experienced PC user then you'll know that the Task Manager and Event Viewer can offer help in diagnosing the problem, but that's about it. Anything more complicated and you're on your own. It doesn't have to be that way – not if you install Microsoft's free Windows Performance Toolkit. This troubleshooting utility can record exactly what's happening on your PC, then produce detailed reports revealing the resource hogs that are holding it back – the key information you need to get your system running optimally. The Windows Performance Toolkit is very useful, but for some reason Microsoft doesn't seem to want you to know about it. And while it was once available as a separate download, now it's only accessible as part of the Windows 7 Software Development Kit. Still, once you know the secret, it's not difficult to find and install. Despite its name, the tool installs and runs happily on Vista as well. Head to the download page and grab the web installer. Launch this and you should get a choice of the components you'd like to install. Check 'Windows Performance Toolkit' in the 'Common Utilities' section (if you don't see that, check 'Win32 Development Tools') and allow the program to download and install your selected files. If you selected the Windows Performance Toolkit directly during the setup process, it should now be available as a folder on the 'Start | All Programs' menu. If not, locate and execute either 'wpt_x86.msi' on a 32-bit system, or 'wpt_x64.msi' on 64-bit Windows (normally in a folder like 'Program Files/Microsoft SDKs/Windows/v7.1/Redist/Windows Performance Toolkit'). That will install the performance kit for you, and you'll be ready to get started in a minute or two. Getting started You start by using one of the WPK suite's command line tools to initiate a 'trace' – a recording of your PC's activities. The toolkit then tracks CPU use, RAM consumption, hard drive reads and writes, and whatever else you've specified, writing the details to a file. When the trace has finished, you can view all these statistics in detailed graphs, zooming in and out, overlaying graphs on top of each other and analysing them in various ways.
To see this in action, click 'Start', type cmd, right-click 'cmd.exe' and select 'Run as administrator'. Click inside the window, type xperf -on DiagEasy and press [Enter]. The Toolkit starts monitoring your PC immediately, so do something that needs a lot of resources, such as load a game, then close it again. When you've finished, switch back to the command window, type xperf -d trace.etl and press [Enter]. Once the file has been written to disk, you're ready to analyse the results. Analysis Type xperf trace.etl and press [Enter], or double-click the 'trace. etl' file in Explorer to see what it contains. (It'll be saved in the current command line folder – probably 'Windows\System32'). You'll find a window containing many graphs, each detailing some aspect of what was happening during the monitoring process. The 'Process lifetimes' graph, for instance, shows you which processes were running and active. The 'Disk I/O' and 'Disk utilisation' graphs describe aspects of your hard drive usage, and there's a host of charts showing how your CPU was used during the monitoring period. Click 'Graphs', select 'Disk utilisation by process' and a new graph will appear. Choose the 'Processes' box within the graph, clear 'All processes' and the graph will clear. Now check one or more individual processes and you'll see their hard drive use plotted on the graph. This is very useful if you want to pick out one resource hog from amid everything else.
Selecting 'Graphs | CPU usage by process' does much the same thing for processor use. In just a few clicks you can identify which processes were making regular demands on your CPU during the monitoring period. If these include background apps you don't need, close them down to improve your PC's performance. It's even possible to overlay one chart over another. The 'Process lifetimes' chart, for instance, only shows you running programs, but if you right-click within the chart and select 'Overlay graph | Disk utilisation | All', for example, the 'Process lifetimes' data will appear on top of the 'Disk utilisation' spikes so you can see how hard drive use changes as programs are launched.
If this is too vague for your liking, right-click within any chart and choose one of its 'Summary table' options. You'll then be shown a table containing the raw data within the graph. Startup and shutdown If your PC seems slow, monitoring it with the Windows Performance Toolkit may show what's grabbing your resources. The toolkit isn't just for occasional use, though. It also has day-to-day applications, such as monitoring your PC's startup and shutdown process, and again pointing the finger at what might be slowing it down. To try this, you need to launch a separate utility, but remember that this will have to reboot your PC to launch its tests. Having too many apps open will distort the analysis it produces, so close everything with a button on the taskbar, but not background tasks with icons in the system tray. Open an elevated command line, type xbootmgr.exe -trace boot and press [Enter]. Your PC will shut down and reboot twice. You may see status messages from xbootmgr, such as 'waiting for prefetcher'. Eventually, xbootmgr will display a 'Delay' message with a countdown timer. This is because the program doesn't know exactly when you want the boot analysis to finish. Wait for any bulky background programs to launch, then click 'Finish' when you're happy and allow xbootmgr to reboot again if it asks. When the process is over, look in 'Windows\System32' for new '.etl' files (or search your PC for boot*.ETL and shutdown*.etl files if you have trouble finding them; ours were called 'boot_ BASE+CSWITCH_1.etl' and 'shutdown_BASE+CSWITCH_1. etl'). Double-click whatever you find to take a closer look at the startup and shutdown process. What you take from the boot and shutdown traces will depend on your individual system, but there are some techniques that will be useful generally. If you think Windows services might be extending your boot times, take a look at the 'Services' chart in the 'boot_BASE+CSWITCH_1.etl' file. The services with the longest bars are most likely to be slowing your PC down; if there are any that you can disable safely, do so.
Look at your boot 'Process lifetimes' graph – does it contain programs you don't need? If so, uninstall them or prevent them loading by default to reduce the load when your PC starts. Open the Graphs menu and check the 'CPU usage by process' and 'Disk utilisation by process' options. Explore these charts to see which processes make the greatest demands on your system. This told us that 'WMPNETWK. EXE' was responsible for up to 40 per cent of disk use for several seconds of the boot time on our test PC. A Microsoft add-on called 'SeaPort.exe' was also generating lots of hard drive traffic. With a little exploration, you'll soon be looking at improved shutdown and startup times. Life isn't always so simple though, and you may have intermittent problems. For example, one day boot and shutdown times are fine, the next they seem to take forever. But the Windows Performance Toolkit can still come in useful. Take a trace once a week and save your trace files. Then, if you capture a slow boot or startup in the future, you can compare it to the trace for an ordinary boot and find out what's changed. Going further We've looked at how the toolkit can help you monitor simple PC information, but you can look at much more with different XPerf commands. Are you worried that you may have some driver issues? Fire up XPerf with xperf -on drivers to record driver activity. If you're curious about Registry accesses, try xperf -on registry. There are also commands to tell you about power management (xperf -on power), file-related hard drive activity (xperf on filename), process and thread creation and deletion (xperf -on proc_thread), and a lot more.
Enter xperf -providers kf at the command line to see the other options on your PC. Keep in mind that you can combine multiple flags in the same tracing session, so xperf -on power+registry+drivers monitors power, Registry and driver-related events. All that really matters is that you experiment. Among all the technicalities, there will also be valuable clues about your PC's performance problems that you can't get anywhere else, and that's worth more than the hour or so you'll spend learning the Windows Performance Toolkit basics. 
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| Opinion: Why I don't want a Kinect for Christmas Posted: 19 Dec 2010 02:00 AM PST  Trust me, it's not cynicism. I'd love to be excited about the new Xbox Kinect, and if you'd told me about it a couple of years ago, I'm sure I'd have been eagerly pre-ordering it just like I did the Wii. Unfortunately for this year's big toy, there's a small problem keeping me from being excited: I've played with one for more than five minutes. For the moment, that's all the Kinect I feel the need in my life. Progress is a funny thing. We need the small steps so that the big ones can happen, and we need people to spend money on them so that there's a reason for companies to keep working. To that end, I actually hope Kinect does well. The ideas behind it are definitely impressive. Your body is the controller. Wave at the screen and magic happens. Interact without the need for extra devices. Burned before Unfortunately, we've been burned like this before – virtual reality, augmented reality, Nintendo Wii, Sony EyeToy. Somewhere between premise and product, the magic has a tendency to slip away, or at least be crushed under the weight of reality. We keep spending our money on the next big thing, hoping that this time it'll be different, but secretly knowing that no matter how good it is, or how close it gets to perfection, it'll be gathering dust soon enough. The problem with Kinect isn't that the technology isn't interesting, it's that it doesn't really gel with modern gaming. That could be a good thing if it leads to brand new ideas, but I suspect that we're more likely to see what happened to the Wii – lots of party games and standard designs, only with the Kinect equivalent of waggling the controller. Purely in terms of wish fulfilment, it's difficult to see how most of the obvious game interactions could be done well without some kind of tool. Not only is gripping a steering wheel peripheral more efficient than holding your hands out like one, it feels better. You can't feel like a master swordsman just by clenching one fist and waving it. As for guns, we've yet to see how Kinect plans to handle them, but what can it ultimately offer beyond pointing two fingers at the screen and yelling 'bang'? If anything, Kinect's open controls feel more limited than a primitive controller. Something like a DualShock may be more of an abstraction of the action than making the right moves, but it quickly becomes invisible. When you press B, you press B – the console doesn't have to work out whether you really meant to press X, or bring up the menu, or were just picking your nose. Playing via a console also removes the subconscious expectation of haptic feedback. Hitting an enemy with a force feedback rumble effect can feel weighty, but swinging your fist through empty air in exchange for a mere sound effect has no, well, punch. Appealing technology All this said, despite my lack of interest in the initial selection of games – most of which seem to be variants of old stuff like Wii Sports, Nintendogs and dancing titles – the technology does appeal. As a multimedia control system, Kinect definitely has merits (even though I suspect that a traditional remote control would be faster and less prone to error), and there'll certainly be some interesting games and projects that make good use of it in the near future. The irony is that, right now, the best use for Kinect wouldn't be replacing existing control systems, but supplementing them instead. Head-tracking to control vague camera movements. Leaning around corners in-game by actually leaning. On a wider level, maybe detecting the number of people in the room and adjusting a few settings automatically. Think along the lines of force feedback – the sort of things you don't really notice until you don't have them any more. Kinect with the PC Transplant that to the PC, and software developers could finally live the dream of writing an application that really does watch out for the worst possible moment to crash and delete all your hard work. The trouble is that such subconscious improvements aren't the kind of things that sell £130 worth of hardware, or warrant claims of extending a console's life by several years. Just ask Nintendo, which has yet to get much other than laughter for its Wii Vitality Sensor (a pulse monitor) despite its possibilities for action, horror and fitness games. Still, there's time. The real benefit of Microsoft's Kinect push isn't that it'll take over the world, but that a technology with definite potential will spread. If and when we see some great games that use it, I'll consider picking one up. Until then, my mouse, keyboard and standard Xbox controller are all I need to control my digital life. 
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| In Depth: 20 OS X networking problems and fixes Posted: 19 Dec 2010 12:00 AM PST  If you've got problems with your Mac and your network, you've come to the right place. We've gathered together the 20 most common OS X networking annoyances and solved them on the spot. Q. When my MacBook is right next to the wireless router, it connects, but if I move to another room, it then asks for the password, even though other computers can connect just fine. A. This is a hardware fault with your MacBook's AirPort card or the antenna. The AirPort icon still reports a good signal because it is measuring the signal received from the router and the problem doesn't affect the receiver. But the transmitter's signal isn't strong enough to reach the router unless the range is virtually zero. It's time to get the AirPort card replaced – you can do so at an authorised Mac service centre. Q. I connect wirelessly to the internet with a BT Home Hub 2. Recently, Safari has started opening at btopenzone.com instead of my home page. What's going on?
A. If your ISP is BT, your router will create two networks – the password-protected one and an open one called BT FON that can be accessed by anyone with a BT broadband account If your router isn't available when your Mac starts for whatever reason, you can sometimes find yourself connected to a neighbour's FON network instead. Rightclick the AirPort icon and select the correct network to reconnect. Q. My iMac used to be able to create computer-to-computer networks with my Windows laptop. Since upgrading to Snow Leopard, I can't do this. Why? A. If you use the Mac as a Wi-Fi base station, then Windows PCs at least, won't be able to connect to your network unless you untick the Require Password box. Alternatively, use a separate wireless router and connect both computers to that. Q. How can I configure my AirPort Extreme to run both the 2.4GHz and 5GHz bands simultaneously, to give me two independent networks? A. It already uses both frequencies by default. The newer wireless n models automatically pick whichever band offers the best reception. Separate your network traffic at the IP address level, using a router – not by using different radio frequencies. Q. When I'm using MS Office, I frequently get asked whether I want the application to accept incoming network connections. Is there any particular reason why I might click 'allow'? A. Incoming connections are network packets that were not specifically solicited by the application. MS Office applications listen on certain ports to receive notification of updates, for example. If you have your firewall set to block all incoming connections, it won't be able to do this and that's why it pops up the message, asking if you want to let this one through. If you trust the application, it's safe; probably safer than leaving MS Office unpatched, in fact. Q. How can I use my home Mac to access my Windows XP computer at work?
A. You could use the Remote Desktop Host included with Windows XP Professional, but it's probably easier to use a web service like GoToMyPC.com, which enables you to access your Mac or PC from anywhere (for a price). Q. I use an Orange Internet Livebox, with Wi-Fi turned off, connected using Ethernet to a Time Capsule in Bridge Mode. This provides my wireless network. However, I'm restricted by the five-connection limit of the Livebox, even though I'm using the Time Capsule. How can I get round this?
A. In bridge mode, the AirPort Extreme and Time Capsule don't provide any network address translation. They just rebroadcast the network packets wirelessly, so you're still restricted to the five-address limit imposed by the Livebox. Fortunately, however, the solution isn't a convoluted one. All you need to do is put the Time Capsule into NAT mode. This will take one of the five IP addresses handed out by the Livebox and split it into as many wireless addresses as you need. Q. My hard drive is only 80GB and is almost full. I am thinking of getting a 1TB Time Capsule to fix this and also provide a wireless network. Is this the best solution? A. The Time Capsule won't back itself up, so whatever files you migrate to the 1TB disk will be unprotected. Also, your files will only be accessible over a Wi-Fi connection, which is much slower than USB or FireWire. Use an external disk directly connected to your Mac for your overflow storage. Then let the Time Capsule back up both this and the internal disk. Q. I have added a Time Capsule by connecting it directly to my broadband modem with an Ethernet cable. But my Mac now frequently selects the wrong network and AirPort Utility can't see the Time Capsule at all. A. Instead of connecting to the Wi-Fi network from the modem and reaching the Time Capsule through that, reconfigure the Time Capsule to create its own Wi-Fi network and turn off Wi-Fi on the modem. Having two wireless networks just increases interference. Q. I recently changed broadband provider. My networked printer, which used to work perfectly, now causes me to lose my network connection every time I turn it on. A. Your printer probably has a static IP address assigned which now conflicts with the IP address range used for DHCP on the new router. Change the printer to use DHCP as well, or move the static address to an unused number. Q. After reinstalling OS X, my iBook won't accept the network password, even though all the other computers in the house connect perfectly well… A. Assuming that you're definitely using the right password for the router (and not confusing the router admin password with the AirPort password, say) the most likely problem is a corrupted plist and deleting this file should fix it. You'll find it in the folder Macintosh HD\Library\Preferences\ System Preferences. Q. I sometimes get an error message that comes up and says 'IP Configuration'. Nothing else seems wrong. Should I worry? A. This message occurs when another device tries to connect with the same IP address as you. You were there first, so the other device is locked out, but OS X is warning you about the conflict. Check all your network devices are using DHCP, or static IP addresses that don't overlap the DHCP range or conflict with each other. Q. I have an Apple TV that I would like to set up with my Buffalo LinkStation. Can I use this drive as my location for iTunes on my iMac and then play music and films on my Apple TV? A. Using NAS disks for iTunes is probably still more trouble than it's worth. iTunes has a habit of reverting to a local library if the NAS is in sleep mode when iTunes starts. You could enable the iTunes server on the LinkStation itself, but Apple TV won't connect directly to that. Alternatively, connect the LinkStation directly to your Mac as an ordinary external disk. Your Mac would need to be on whenever you wanted to stream media to the Apple TV, though. Q. What is the best way to add really old Macs (G4 and G3 iMacs) to my wireless network? A. Use a wireless bridge. It plugs into the Ethernet port on your Mac and lets the G4 ignore the wireless aspect. The bridge will relay all the traffic from the G4 to the router without the Mac ever being any the wiser. The Airport Express will do this, but Belkin and Linksys also have compatible bridges. Q. I have moved my iTunes and iPhoto libraries to a networked hard drive. Unfortunately, I can no longer use Front Row to watch or listen to my media. Is there anything I can do to point Front Row at an external drive? A. Front Row won't access networked drives directly, but you can easily create an alias to one and drop that into your Movies or Music folder. Provided that the network drive is accessible and mounted, Front Row should display this perfectly well, though there might be a short delay for Front Row to buffer the stream before it begins playing. Q. I'm trying to connect a PC and a Mac. In System Preferences, under Sharing-Services, I've ticked Personal Web Sharing and under Sharing-Internet I've turned on Internet Sharing. But if my Mac has access to the internet, the PC can't get onto the web at the same time.
A. Personal web sharing is just so that you can have web pages on your local hard disk that others on your network can view as if they were published on the internet; it has nothing to do with sharing an internet connection. And the Internet Sharing preferences setting is designed to allow your Mac to share its own internet connection with one or more computers on that network. This is what your router is already doing, and by enabling it on the Mac as well you are just tangling everything up. Turn off Internet Sharing on the Mac (and the PC too if it is enabled there) and just let the router handle the NAT. Q. What is MAC access control and will enabling it improve my Wi-Fi security at all? A. The Media Access Control, or MAC, address is hard-coded into every network device at manufacture and is unique to each one. You'll find it by selecting About This Mac from the Apple menu and then clicking the More Info… button. Then select Network from the list on the left and scroll the right-hand pane all the way down to the bottom, where you should see the MAC address in question presented as six, two-digit, hexadecimal numbers. 
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