So, what does the Dingoo have to offer? Well, it’s a nice and small portable gaming console that apart from games, it plays music, video and radio, and has a simple picture viewer and a basic plain text reader (with features like bookmarking). On the gaming side, it has its own game format (it comes loaded with around 30 games) and emulators for quite a bunch of different machines, so you can play games from NES, Super NES, Neo Geo, Mega Drive, Game Boy Advance, and the arcade machines CPS1 and CPS2. I don’t have words to say how awesome that is. The Dingoo has an internal memory of 4Gib and supports one external MiniSD card, so you have more than enough space for a lot of games, some music and even a couple of films.

In general, I have to say that both the emulation and the video playing works very well. A handful of games can’t be played (they crash or behave funny) and other games can be played but are too slow/annoying to play (e.g. Super Mario World for Super NES), but in general there aren’t any problems. I have a couple of minor complaints though:

• I find some of the button conventions confusing (e.g. for menu navigation). It doesn’t help that different consoles have different conventions on which buttons to use for which actions.
• The Mega Drive emulator doesn’t seem to support the .bin format, which is slightly annoying.
• There are a lot of video formats supported (the console comes with several sample videos), but the first video I tried to copy and watch wasn’t recognised :-( I hope that won’t happen often.

All in all, I think it’s a great console and it’s quite cheap, so I’m very happy I bought it. If you’re curious about how it looks and works, have a look at this video review:

Around one year ago, however, I found the first useful widget, a kind of simple “monitor” for the Continuous Integration server run for some project. It was really simple and actually useful (basically, a big window that is either green or red). Shortly after, someone pointed me at a “random lolcat” widget (best widget ever, I say; unfortunately is not public), so I started to wonder if I was wrong and widgets were maybe useful after all.

Since then, I have found another widget that I find very handy, the Twitter widget, and I even realised that the performance problems were something of the past, so I could consider trying a couple of games. And, alas, it turns out that there are at least two games worth trying: Bubbles and my favourite, Ninja Ropes Extreme.

So give them a try, you might be surprised :-)

And the experience, taking into account the limited interface, is pretty good. And they add features and improvements in every release (namely, they brought back “skins”, added notes to the list of supported Link data types, and probably other things I haven’t noticed). What else can I say?

The other day I wanted to go and buy some board game. I had gone to BoardGameGeek (awesome website BTW) and had made a list of the games that looked interesting. So I go to the shop, and of course most of them weren’t there… but there was some other game that looked interesting but I hadn’t seen before: Primordial Soup. Having Opera Mini in my phone, I could very easily check the rating and some basic information for that game, which helped me decide if I should buy it. Not only that, but thanks to Link I had the list of games I wanted to buy in my bookmarks (I had added them from my Desktop computer), so I could even compare the ratings for that game and the ones I wanted to buy to start with. How awesome is that?

Go Opera Mini team!

Just today and yesterday, three people added me, so I got kind of curious, and decided to login and have a look. I made a comment just today, about me finding it funny that so many people started “following” me, and someone replied. So I started “following” other people, and reading, and I have made a couple of more comments since. I’m not really sure I’m going to use it everyday, but now I have installed a really handy Opera widget for twitter, so this might be “the start of a beautiful friendship”.

Alas, not just twitter, but I also started using eBay (and, to a certain extent, PayPal) this week. Why? Because I have been trying to find one of the greatest PlayStation 2 games ever made, Ico. It’s quite hard to get in a shop nowadays, even second hand, because it’s an old game that wasn’t very successful when it was released. Now it’s a kind of cult game that you’re better off finding in eBay or similar, hence my sudden interest in using eBay:

Note that most of that is actually while being played, not videos. It looks like a film because it doesn’t have a HUD.

I have to say that the eBay experience was satisfactory: it was really easy to find what I wanted, it was easy to bid (special mention to the automatic bidding system, which I didn’t know, that renders the old bid monkeys kind of obsolete), and I won the item, yay! For the maximum money I wanted to pay, but still. I did have a couple of really weird problems with PayPal when paying for it, but it finally worked.

Another thing that just happened to me today is that I realised (stupid me) that Skandiabanken works like a charm in Opera. It was my fault for being so nazi with the cookies.

Finally, although not a website, I’m really amazed by the new Opera Mini 4.1 beta. These guys have managed to make a really awesome browser that works in any crappy mobile phone (and that means working around stupid limitations and bugs of tons of different models). Kudos to them!