The Plus Fours Route Finder is exactly such a gadget to meet these needs. Originally released in 1920 it is meant to be worn on the wrist and a scroll with 2 rollers is attached to the strap. Then while driving along, simply wind the map on to show the current part of your journey! Brilliant. Of course you need to own the correct route map to get where you’re going, but that’s just a small matter.

The Plus Fours is on display in the British Library as part of their Weird and Wonderful Gadgets and Inventions display. This is a small display which comprises some other fantastic inventions that never quite made it (self-lighting matches and a finger exerciser for piano players are 2 that stick in the mind!).

The display is open until November 10th in the Business & IP Centre of the library on Euston Road in London and is definitely worth a look. Also on September 16th, Maurice Collins will be speaking about his inventions (book online here). More details of the display itself are available on the British Library website here.

All 15 of the birds were taken as chicks from nests in Norway, and were raised with the intention of re-introducing them into the wild. This release follows on from last years successful release program, and it is hoped that some of the new birds will meet up with last years releases, some of which travelled as far as the Argyll islands, and the island of Mull. Up to 20 new birds a year will be released for the next 3 years.

This really is fantastic news for the survival for these iconic birds (affectionately known as “flying barn doors”). Having been one of a very few privileged people to handle one of these birds I was absolutely amazed at the size of the juvenile that I handled (with a wingspan approaching 6 feet) and certainly knew what was going on when it clocked me on the back of the head with its wing! Handling one of these birds is one thing, but I’d love to see one of these birds in the wild, so I’ll be watching with interest for any more news from the East Scotland Sea Eagles project.

Great news indeed, and another success story for the continuing work of the RSPB with birds of prey.

Only an absolute fool would argue against the fact that Sony won the last generation with the complete dominance of the PlayStation 2. Hand-in-hand with that was the fact that most platform-exclusives were only available on Sony’s console. Move forward to the current day and the picture is very, very different. With the headstart that Microsoft had on the current generation, the majority of exclusives are now available on the XBox 360 (and a lot of them with releases under the Games for Windows banner show Microsoft’s ongoing commitment to gaming). And franchises that were once the domain of PlayStation owners only, are now either on multiple platforms or, in the case of Beautiful Katamari for example, have completely switched and are now only on the XBox 360. But what has lead to this switch, and what is the effect for gamers like you and I?

Gaming is a big-bucks industry
The cost of games production is now far higher than ever before, and whilst not quite at the level of movie production costs, producing a triple-A title is now a multi-million pound project. Because of this, development studios and publishers want to maximise their return in terms of potential audience numbers, and the easiest way to do this is to launch on multiple platforms. This is something that is indicative of how “new” the current generation of consoles still is. In the last generation, the dominance of PlayStation 2, and the fact that the console now has an installed base of well over 120 million units, meant that launching a platform exclusive for the PS2 wasn’t really an issue or a risk. Even if only 10% of the owners bought the game, you were still selling 12 million copies, which is a massive hit in terms of games sales. However, with the current generation there are nowhere near the number of consoles in the market, and certainly no single console that is dominating the figures quite so heavily, and so multi-platform is the only viable way forward for the vast majority of games (there are some exceptions which we’ll come to soon).

Can an exclusive sell a platform?
Now this is a tricky one. If you consider game genres, then there is no single console that has a genre exclusive to it. You always get driving games on all the consoles. The same with shooters, puzzle games, sports simulations and platformers. Sure there will always be a different slant on the genres for each platform. The 360 has Halo 3 whilst the PS3 has WarHawk. The Project Gotham franchise will always be exclusive to Microsoft, while Gran Turismo will be the same for Sony. And while there are subtle differences between the games, they all boil down to the same thing within their genre. So do people really go out of their way to buy a platform just for a specific game? I guess there are some people who always will (and be labelled as fanboys for doing just that), but for the vast majority, they will pick the best game in the genre for the console that they own, and they’ll get hours of fun out of that game.

Even if we introduce the good old PC, this argument is still true. With the runaway success in the MMORPG genre that is World of Warcraft, one can’t deny that this has led many people to upgrade their PCs, but how many people have gone out and bought their very first PC just to play WoW? I’d wager that the figure isn’t that high.

Cross-platform gaming
With the expansion of XBox Live to include PC-gaming, there is now the possibility of sharing online games irrespective of whether you play on a 360 or a PC. Shadowrun is a good example of this. Players can use either the PC or 360 to play the game, and when they connect to a game lobby they may be the only player in there on that platform, but they won’t know any different. This does involve extra work in terms of balancing each platform version so that one doesn’t have an advantage over the other based on the platform, but the thought of being able to have the same experience across different platforms is an exciting one. Unfortunately take-up on this has been slow to date, with no major titles following in Shadowrun’s footsteps, but the ground-work is there and the emphasis now is back with the developers and publishers to utilise this, but Microsoft are the only manufacturer to be able to offer this due to the dominance of Windows on PC, and you can expect take-up on this cross-platform gaming to ramp up over the next 18 months.

Fanboyism
Unfortunately when you start to talk about platform exclusives, you’ll always awaken the fanboy in us all. I personally prefer Project Gotham to Gran Turismo, and am happy to tell anyone this. My opinion has come from playing games in both franchises and selecting the one that feels best to me. That’s all it is, an opinion. But there are some people that will take it beyond this. A little while ago Capcom announced that the now-released Devil May Cry 4 would be available for both the PS3 and 360. And what a hornets nest that kicked up. Previous titles in the franchise had been PlayStation exclusive, and Capcom suddenly found themselves on the bitter end of the fanboy’s abuse. Being accused of “betraying” the community that had stuck with them through the franchise, there were even calls for people to boycott the franchise unless it was released only on Sony’s platform. Fortunately Capcom stuck to their guns and released for both platforms, and unsurprisingly for such a well known franchise, sales were healthy.

A shift in focus
So with the current generation of platforms, it seems there is little to choose between them in terms of games. So how do the new breed of consoles manage to differentiate themselves? It seems that each of the manufacturer’s have decided that this generations platform-exclusive should be something other than the games. For Sony, it’s the inclusion of a Blu-Ray player. With Nintendo it’s the new way of actually playing the games with the motion sensing technology. And for Microsoft it’s the inclusion of the pervasive online presence, achievements and the video marketplace. But does this really move people towards a particular platform? Blu-Ray won the High Definition format war thanks, in no small part, to the number of PS3s that hit the market. The Wii is considered to be a “party games” console and is regarded as being most fun when there are a lot of people in one room. Microsoft will tell you that being able to chat to friends no matter what game they are playing, and having a persistent online presence, is the way forward. And for these three reasons, each of the manufacturers attracts a slightly different audience.

So what next?
So where does this leave the platform-exclusive title? Well it’s far from dead and buried. I doubt Microsoft would swap the Halo franchise for anything that either Sony or Nintendo have in their stable for the current generation. But we’re now seeing 2 new breeds of exclusivity emerging. There is the timed-exclusive. With this, a title will appear exclusively on a particular platform for a limited period of time, before it appears on any other platforms. Against this there is the platform-exclusive downloadable content. Microsoft have ensured that the only place that you can play the “full” Grand Theft Auto 4 experience is on the 360. With multiple chapters of downloadable content coming exclusively to the 360 in 2008 and 2009, Microsoft are using the launch of GTA4, once a Sony exclusive of course, to increase it’s lead over the PS3. They have had to pay the price for that exclusivity ($60 million according to most sources), but as I said at the start, the budgets for producing games are into the multi-millions now.

So what about you? Has a particular title taken you to a particular platform? Do you look for the best version of a particular game, or just the best one in the genre on the platform that you own? And what platform exclusive title do you think could win this round of the console war?

The 2 aircraft are being built by Burt Rutan’s Scaled Composite company at Mojave airfield, now named Mojave Spaceport, California. Having been there myself and seen the aircraft that Scaled Composites build I can safely say that they are truly unique. The odd shaped, coupled with the materials that are used reflect Rutan’s truly innovative style and designs.

More details and some video footage from the unveiling can be seen at the BBC News website here.

I have to say that as someone who has only really scratched the surface of Bioshock (yes I know!) it’s re-ignited my desire to get back to the game and give it a good play through. I remember the first time I picked up the demo and had a play and was absolutely gobsmacked by how well it played, and the feeling as you walked into Rapture for the first time that you had found a deserted city. It actually felt like a city. One that used to be living and breathing (albeit underwater) but was now eerily silent. I also fell into the trap that I’ve read so many others fall into in that you get to the end of the opening cinematic and you wait for something to happen, the switch is that seamless!

But enough of my reminisces! Go and give the article a read, and if you still own it, go back to Bioshock and marvel at the beauty of the game with the knowledge that everything you see is there for a reason, and probably caused one or two arguments along the way…

So for example you might want to have your homepages to be set to Psychotic Monkey and Google.co.uk and this would mean entering http://www.psychoticmonkey.co.uk/|http://www.google.co.uk/ in the homepage box on the settings screen.

Very useful indeed….

Now fast-forward to the present day. Concorde is nothing more than a museum piece now. Retired before its time was up, and resigned to gathering dust in various places around the world. Only 20 were built and so there are very few places around the world when you can now see them, one of these places being New York. Originally bound for the USS Intrepid floating aviation museum, Concorde “Alpha Delta” (G-BOAD) is currently sat in a yard in Brooklyn while the Intrepid and its home pier undergo repair works. Now you’d assume that anywhere that such a prized asset is stored would take care of it and make sure nothing could happen to it. Apparently not…

One of AD’s side windscreens is now showing signs of cracking, the nose has been knocked off when the aircraft was hit by a truck, and birds have taken to nesting in several areas of the fuselage. A sorry state for the once magnificent supersonic jet.

So why does The Sun (not something I normally read!) have to make such a pigs ear of reporting this (see article here). In the article they claim that “its windscreen cracked by footballs and its engines are full of birds’ nests”. I mean come on. You seriously expect people to believe that a jet that used to travel faster than the speed of sound had windscreens that weren’t even tough enough to withstand a football? Please. And if birds are nesting in it’s engines then someone should be quite worried as the only aircraft flying with Olympus engines nowadays is the Avro Vulcan (which has just returned to the airshow display scene). Now I know the reputation of this particular paper and so you can take it all with a pinch of salt. Just makes you wonder whether the story is there to report the demise of a once glorious airliner, or drum up more bad feeling towards America amongst the knuckle-dragging (allegedly) readership that it prides itself on having…

You see he also has a One Classic yet he can search against full postcodes. Very strange, thought I. And from a quick Google of the problem it appears that I’m not alone! There are quite a lot of people reporting the same problem. However help is at hand.

If you suffer from the same problem as I did then the solution can be found at http://www.tomtom.com/updates/great_britainpostal_all.zip. All you need to do is download the file and unzip it. Remove the SD card from your TomTom and insert it into a card reader, then run the setup.exe file that you’ve just unzipped. Follow the instructions on-screen and tell the program to update the memory card. Once the installation is done, pop the memory card back into your TomTom and you’re away. Full postcode searching goodness is now your to enjoy. Now you’ve got no excuse when you end up on the wrong street…

Of course, there is a healthy dose of skepticism here as it’s a Microsoft tool talking to WordPress so if you see anything going weird then let me know in the comments. Now if only Live Writer would hassle me to write more then my blogging needs would be complete!

Update: Ok so one thing i can’t work out is how to get the tags that I add in Live Writer to be added as tags within Wordpress. If anyone can help then leave me a comment…