Yet another bout of inactivity

There’s not been too much action at koffdrop.com in 2010.

I recently started a new job and there’s a lot to learn in the role. I don’t mind admitting that I’m rather brain-drained at the moment and not really up to doing anything cerebral in my free time – even something as undemanding as writing a blog post.

I am, as always, checking my RSS subscriptions and cherry-picking the stuff that catches my eye. You’ll see those reflected in the “Newsbites” area of the side-column. If you like, you can subscribe to the Newsbites as an RSS feed too.

Embracing the cloud

I’m fond of Google’s services, finding them well realised and powerful. I’ve a few different email accounts including a gmail one but I’d rarely bothered to use it. In fact, at home, I rarely used email at all.

By contrast I use Google Reader daily. I think RSS is a great way to collect information that interests me and had used a number of desktop and web-based clients until Google Reader came along and became my favourite. The most convenient aspect of it, for me, being the J and K next/previous article navigation.

I realised that I’ve used Google Reader for a long time and never felt a deficit of functionality or performance simply because it was a web-based application. It’s focus was on handling information delivered by the internet so it was a good fit anyway.

I’d recently installed Windows 7 on my aging PC and, being a new operating system, it was more demanding than my previous one. I considered how I might lighten the load of common tasks on my PC and decided that migrating my email from desktop client to a web-based app was worth investigating.

Searching the internet showed up little information about actually migrating existing and establised email accounts and message stores to GMail. I specifically wanted:

  • To transfer all my archived emails to the new client
  • To retain my email identities rather than change to a new address. The client should be transparent to anyone reading my emails.

The first was relatively simple to accomplish. My emails were organised in folders. In spite of having years and years worth of emails I tended to be fairly merciless with deleting stuff and archiving only the most important of old emails.

GMail uses labels rather than folders. Superficially, users can have labels behave like folders – with a list of labels on one side of the client. They click on a label title and the view changes to show all emails with that label assigned to them. The handy thing about labels is that a single email can have multiple labels. Sometimes categorising information can be tricky. Does it belong in “Personal” or “Important”? With a folder system you tend to have to choose one or the other – or, at worst, duplicate the email and put a copy in each folder. With labels the email can be both “Personal” and “Important” and will appear in each label view and yet still only exist as a single email.

Using GMail’s IMAP support I simply connected my desktop client to my GMail account and set about recreating the folder structure in my GMail account using labels. After that, it was simply a case of dragging and dropping the contents of one folder to its corresponding label in my GMail account and the emails were moved over to GMail.

So far, so good.

The fussier part of me wanted my original email address such as fred@123.com to stay as it was rather than change to fred@gmail.com and have to have all my email contacts know there’d been a change in my address. After all, I wasn’t changing email accounts, I was just changing email clients.

I actually over-complicated the process. I went to my mail server and set up some rules for auto-forwarding emails to my gmail account. My only concern with forwarding emails is that, as I’m sure you know, when you reply to a forwarded email you tend to reply to the person who forwarded the email, not the original author. I didn’t want to find myself replying to my email server that had forwarded each email to GMail.

Fortunately, this was taken care of automagically. Unfortunately not all my emails were getting forwarded and, in some cases, some were being forwarded and copies of the originals were left on the original mail server. Odd.

The simple solution was the most effective: leave my email server settings as they were and simply have GMail check those other email accounts from its own end, collect the mail and delete the originals. Or in other words ‘pull’ the emails to Gmail rather than have my email server ‘push’ them.  This worked a treat with the only drawback being that I couldn’t tell Gmail how frequently to check for new emails – although I can tell it to ‘check now’.

Gmail even catered for some other finicky stuff I wanted. I have a serious and a casual email address. When I reply using my serious account I use my proper name in the email address. When I reply using my casual account I use “Koffdrop” in the email address. You can tell GMail to automatically adopt the identity you want to reply as based on the account the original email came through. If I hit “reply” to an email on my serious account, my serious identity is used as a result. For maximum flexibility, GMail allows the user to change identities during email composition too.

About a month or so in to my GMail home and I have to say that all is good. I’d only had a couple of niggles I wanted addressed. One was the inability to use delivery receipts on emails. The other was setting up a default font style.

The latter has actually been addressed very recently. The former isn’t a major issue for domestic email use. I relied upon it heavily in some jobs when I’d need to cover my ass or know for certain that someone had got my message. It’s unlikely that email receipts will make it into GMail.

I’ve been really pleased with how GMail has met my requirements. Like Reader, I don’t feel I’m suffering a lack of functionality because I’m not using a ‘full’ desktop client. There’s the usual advantages of web-based email to be had and, on top of that, GMail’s spam handling and excellent email searching functions to be had too. In addition to that, my homepage now points to a customised iGoogle page rather than Google itself which offers me the ability to preview my inbox. These days I tend to feel I have a web-client open more than an email-client so now I have one program performing both functions for me.

It’s been a bit of a learning experience for me. I still don’t know why my email forwarding on my mail server was patchy and that irks me somewhat. All in all, I am very happy with how things have turned out. I’ve put my faith in Google – trusting that they won’t disappear overnight, lose my data or compromise it. Perhaps I’m biased in their favour but my experiences with their services have, so far, always been positive.

If you use a web-based email or migrated from computer to web-based email (or the other way around) do you have any tips or stories to tell. What, if anything, would reverse your decision?

Capcom VS SNK Card Fighters Clash – Pixel art

Sample
A sample of the “Action” card set

I’m a big fan of pixels. Of course, I enjoy today’s dynamic 3D visuals too, but there’s a simple charm that pixel-art and lo-res imagery offer that appeals to me. I suppose having spent much of my adolescence staring at a C64 and ZX Spectrum display has a lot to do with that.

A few years back I got hold of Capcom VS SNK – Card Fighters Clash (even the acronym is a mouthful) on Neo Geo Pocket Colour and was gobsmacked by the amount of character conveyed in the cardsets.

Capcom and SNK have, in my opinion, some of the most striking character design of nearly all videogames so it’s a treat to have a game reference so many of their characters in such a splendid fashion. The image at the start of this post gives you an indication of what I’m talking about.

The game, alas, wasn’t one that I ever saw a great deal of. I hit a bump in my life and sold much of my luxuries. Later on, I found a good emulator, a copy of the rom and and 100% save-state and spent some time doing screen-grabs of the entire set of cards. Until recently, I thought I’d lost the images I’d saved but, happily, it turns out I was wrong.

The game features 300 cards. 60 “Action” cards, 120 Capcom character cards and 120 SNK character cards. All the cards are drawn and coloured in a consistent style and look great!

I’ve shared the cardsets I produced from the game and emulator in five image files containing 60 cards in each.

Click on the image above or on this link to go to a public gallery to view and download the images.

Please note: The images are slightly re-sized in the web-album so lose some of their clarity. Use the “Download” on the site’s menu near the top of the screen to download the original, un-altered version of each image.

Enjoy this great art!

Whilst I’ve not bothered to check the legalities, the original art in the images I’ve shared are undoubtedly copyright and belong to both Capcom and SNK. I make no claim of ownership and will remove them should I be instructed to.

Some RSS favourites

Chatting with a friend today I found myself throwing a few site recommendations his way. These are all sites that I rarely visit but have subscribed to their RSS feed. If you’re someone who regularly checks a site or two for news updates then it’s very likely they publish their updates via RSS and instead of you doing the legwork and visiting their site you can let the site do the work and send their updates to your RSS reader of choice. I recommend Google Reader.

I’ve been a long-time fan of RSS and have amassed a worryingly large number of RSS feeds that Google Reader manages for me. Here’s a few:

Sexy People (site|rss)  
A photoblog of family portraits and studio photos. Showcasing some fashion disasters and very unsexy people. Ripped off by Awkward Family Photos.

Dilbert Daily Strip (site|rss)
A wry cartoon that anyone who has ever spent time in an office cubicle can relate to.

lolpedo.com (site|rss)
Featuring the ubiquitous mascot of the internet: Pedobear. Innocent images turned sinister and creepy and wrong with the addition of the aforementioned mammal. Images tend to be worksafe but the general tone is not safe for work.

Old Jews Telling Jokes (site|rss)
Does exactly what you expect it to. Updated infrequently but always worth the wait. A guranteed guffaw with every punchline. Latke-licious!

VGBargains (site|rss)
An unfussy UK-centric site reporting bargain prices on videogames. A great complement to GamesTracker.

And that’s all for now. When reading a flood of news or serious commentary it’s always welcome to have a silly or humourous item suddenly pop up as the next headline. What brightens up your news reading?

Retailer tantrums continue

Looks like my post from yesterday ended a little prematurely!

It looks like that same guy from the previous linked articles (here and here) is still running his mouth off crying about how PSPgo is bad for him and implying it is therefore bad for everybody.

I like how he implies that retailer-created hardware bundles are a real benefit to the consumer (when did you ever see these in-store bundles and NOT see them include some trash titles and/or some store-branded products forced onto you? When’s the last time you were able to buy a console ‘vanilla’ without any extras determined by the store?) and the inability for him to create such ‘beneficial’ bundles means he can’t discount the product. You can always discount the product. Don’t tell me you’re not making any margin on it Mr. Retailer.

You’re no victim, so stop acting like one.

Games retailers are two-faced crybabies

My first job was in an independent software retailer. This was back in the 8 and 16 bit days. I recall the mad rush for Xenon 2 on the day it came out. Yup, ancient history. I’m declaring this now to demonstrate that I’m perfectly able to empathise with retailers and am not adamantly standing on one side of an argument refusing to see another’s perspective.

I read with some interest the latest tantrum declared last week about FIFA ’10‘s pricing in supermarkets being roughly 50% off retail price at launch. Independent retailers were quick to vent their spleens about this ‘unfair’ practice and  added some melodramatic phrases such as ‘bully-boy tactics’ to spice things up.

Sure, supermarkets can exploit the loss-leader sales approach better than indies because they’ve more capital to work with and more varied stock to recoup those losses. Supermarkets are not competing with game retailers directly (once they do, you’ll be fucked and you’ll have even more to cry about). They’re going for the impulse purchase. Most of their customers are not visiting their store with the intent of buying games. Odds are they’re doing a grocery shop or are shopping for something that supermarkets devote 98% of their floor space to – not videogames. Whilst those customers are pushing that trolley around they may be tempted to grab a game too. They’re already in the store, that crucial battle has already been won. Now the supermarkets are there to eke out a little more revenue from the customer and also (and more significantly) bump up the importance of their market share in this area of trade.

So, indies, it’s not an attack on you specficially. It’s just capitalism and market forces. You know – the same stuff you exploit to turn a profit too. Supermarkets also tend to take a far stronger stand on 18-rated products such as videogames (to the point of refusing to stock them – hello Walmart) than indies. I’d like to see a survey of where adult games are purchased by minors and see the split between indies and supermarkets on that one. Maybe we should get a law in place to control some of that shit. Oh, wait. We already have. Still, there’s what’s legal and then there’s what’s profitable, right? Right.

Funnily enough, a little over a year ago there were reports of independent retailers (including the one quoted in that first article) merrily buying lots of their stock from off the shelves of the same supermarkets they now wish to regulate. Like with FIFA ’10, this was thanks to a supermarket price-war on high-profile games. The indies swooped in, bought as much stock as they could at cheaper prices than their own distributors were offering and then took that stock to their own store, marked up the price and put it onto their own shelves. Apparently, indies were favouring this practice by claiming they were ‘offering choice’ to the consumer. How much choice are you offering when you buy up all the cheap stock from one place to sell it at a higher price at another? It’s a questionable practice and an even more questionable motive than the one mentioned by the indies. Perhaps there should be a law against that too?

Seems to me that indies are more than happy for supermarkets to offer low prices when those indies can profit by them (with no consideration given to the consumer). But if they can’t profit then they go on a rampage and demand laws and regulations? How convenient.

These indies have had it good for a few years. They’ve exploited the market and, almost entirely through the sales of second hand games, stemmed the cash-flow so that less and less of it goes back up the chain to the people who actually make (and truly ‘own’) the games. Buying a box and paying for it once whilst selling it high, buying it low, reselling it high and buying it low again and again and again may sound like you’re doing punters a favour – but you’re fucking over the people that create the products that you sell. You’ve had it your way, but the industry knows full well what you’re up to in spite of your smirking pleas that you’re simply thinking of how best to serve the consumer.

Which is why the industry will devote more and more of its resources to eliminating the need for the retailer. The production costs and risks are too high to have a greedy, two-faced middle-man fiddle a way to exploit the process and prevent revenue from reaching all parties.

To some extent iTunes has laid the foundation for this. Digital distribution. Selling content without retailers. Yes, games are different from music but the methodology is what’s important here.

Publishers flock to services like Steam and GameTap and other digital distribution services. Digital Distribution means you don’t need to worry about the costs in manufacturing and distributing physical product. You can sell your product more cheaply as a result – making it more attractive to the consumer without necessarily affecting your profit margin. Furthermore, for the most part, piracy will be reduced significantly as the delivery system is tightly controlled. Of course, piracy still occurs but it will not be as rampant (or convenient) as the type that comes from traditional methods of distribution. A few middle-men are eliminated meaning the publisher sees more of the revenue from the sale return to them as they don’t have to pay a percentage to a retailer or others involved in managing the distribution and sale of the product. On top of that, digital distribution will offer rapid sales analysis – not exciting for a consumer but crucial if you’re trying to run a profitable business with products that cost millions to produce.

Consoles are drifting more and more towards digital delivery. The Wii has Virtual Console. The DSi has it’s own apps. You can purchase small games and additional content for your 360 and PS3. Both those consoles are also expanding their library of full ‘retail’ products you can now own digitally.

Which takes me to the PSPgo. A handheld that snubs the retailer by being a device that only supports digital distribution.

Predictably, retailers have had a sulk and some have refused to stock the product. Which is fair enough – if you’re not going to be able to profit from it then why give up profitable space stocking it (a similar principle can be applied as to why PS2 back compatibility won’t be coming to PS3 whilst the PS2 remains on the market). Retailers are doing this and, again, claiming that it’s in the interest of the consumer. The PSPgo’s retail price is notably high. Why? Well, the retailers want their chunk of revenue for selling it so the retail price has to accomodate that.

Retailers are not going to support the PSPgo. Not simply because they can’t sell games for it but, more importantly, they can’t sell second-hand games for it. They can’t run their profitable little practice and keep all the money to themselves with this product because the product doesn’t work that way. Coincidence? I think not.

Do Sony need to have as many PSPgo’s in consumer’s hands as earlier iterations of the PSP? No. But the methodology as far as software sales is different from those earlier machines. Every software sale on a PSPgo is significantly more profitable because there’s no middle-men for Sony to contend with. Sony will play with the consumer pricing of the software for a while until they find a level that balances consumer appeal with profit margins. Consumers are expecting the PSPgo digital software to be cheaper than boxed product and it will be. How much cheaper? I don’t know. I don’t know how much wiggle-room for pricing that Sony have.. ..but you’re not going to sell at your lowest price on day one are you?

So I’m expecting to hear a lot of flak from retailers on stuff like competitive pricing by supermarkets or on products that exclude them altogether like the PSPgo. Their rhetoric is designed to make them sound like a victim but that’s just melodrama. Those links higher up in this post show you just how quick retailers are to exploit a situation to suit them and just how quickly they’ll cry if they don’t get things their own way.

I’m looking forward to digital distribution taking off. It’s something that’s only going to gather more and more traction. It’s already seeping into people’s lives and becoming a ubiquitous part of them. Ring tones? Music? Movies on demand? Well and truly established. Steam? Virtual Console? Cloud Computing/Gaming? XBLA/PSN?

I think we’re going to be seeing a lot of upset retailers in the future. And, to some degree, it serves them right for biting the hand that fed them.

I smell movie potential in this one..

I took your purse and felt a connection – m4w
Date: 2009-05-14, 3:06AM EDT

Tuesday night around 11:30. On 53rd btw 1st and 2nd. You came out of the subway and I followed you. You looked over your shoulder, saw me and started walking faster. I ran up, grabbed your arm, took your purse and ran away. I heard you yelling for help but let’s be honest, this is New York. The only way people would come running is if you yelled “Free Weed!”

I’ve done many a snatch-and-grab but no one has ever stuck in my mind like you. There was a quick moment when our eyes met that I felt something strong. I think you felt it too. If I wasn’t so shy (or so committing a crime) I would have asked your name. I, of course, later got your name from your drivers license. So Jennifer if you’d like to get together for a drink sometime get back to me.

Oh, and I can give you back your purse. Your credit cards are still there but I spent the cash (sorry). And my room mate took your tampons. I don’t know what he does with them but he always takes the tampons. If it works out between us I’ll totally buy you some new ones 😉

  • it’s NOT ok to contact this poster with services or other commercial interests

Seriously, this is movie-pitch material if I ever saw it. The built-in Seth Rogen room-mate character looks like it’ll practically script itself!