Talk to your Wii

What? Yes. Apparently, there is a chip inside the Wiimote that translates speech into data, meaning that either with an addon peripheral or (possible, but doubtful) with the Wiimote itself, you could actually talk to other people, sing in karaoke type games or use speech in applications/games.

The question is though, when will we be seeing this chip start to be utilized? One possible use would be a Wii version of Dr. Kawashima’s Brain Training: How Old Is Your Brain? in which there is a part where you need to speak into the mic (of the DS version by the way) in the ‘Stroop test’. The test requires you to say the colour of the word into the mic, if a Wii version of this was released and there’s a distinct possibility due to Big Brain Academy due out soon, then tests that require you to actually speak out loud (besides the reading out loud ‘test’) would be possible on the Wii.

To be specific, it’s an ‘Audio translator’ chip, but what it is capable of is translating human/analogue voice into digital data that can be read by software and I’m quite looking forward as to what it will be used for, there must be something planned or there wouldn’t be any point installing the chip in the first place…

Paint.NET updated to 3.08

One of the things I like to do, is look around for free software and pass on that info to other people so that they can benefit from programs that only costs bandwidth and can do almost as much as a commercial program.

Paint.NET is what is geekily known as an ‘image manipulation’ program or as I would call it, ‘a paint prog’ which is jolly good at creating images as well as a fair bit of photo processing. In fact, every image I create or tinker with has been through Paint.NET and so, if you too would like to check the program out for yourself, you will need the following:

1. 
2. Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 x86 version (32bit) x64 version (64bit)

Changes in Paint.NET 3.08 are:

• Fixed: Pasting an image from Office 2003 applications now works (e.g. Excel 2003 graphs).
• Fixed: Some dialogs were not indicating which command button was the default. These buttons now have a highlight to indicate which one will be activated if the user presses Enter or Space.
• Fixed: Some minor keyboard navigation issues with task dialogs
• Fixed: Performance issue with the File->Acquire submenu taking a long time to appear
• Fixed: Window activation issue when the Print wizard was finished / closed
• Fixed: Crash when there was 1 image open and the user pressed Ctrl+Q and then Ctrl+W
• Fixed: Minor performance issue if the user had 1 modified image open and then canceled the “Save changes?” dialog
• Fixed: Misbehaving filetype factory implementations (plugins) will no longer cause a crash