Google Maps is finally available for iOS. Which is nice, because Apple Maps is kind of horrible. Not as bad as some people would say, but definitely deficient in several key areas.

When I open my Windows 8 Start screen, right click, and select All Apps, the shell crashes. (I get a few entries in the Application Event Log, including "[t]he shell stopped unexpectedly and explorer.exe was restarted.") Note that the "shell" includes the Start screen, all open File Explorer windows, and the desktop itself. Kind of annoying, especially because it meant I couldn't access everything installed on my computer.

My brother clued me in that the problem was probably caused by existing entries in the Start Menu.

He was right.

Half Minute Hero: Super Mega Neo Climax Ultimate Boy is out on Steam now. It - well, it runs on PC. Apparently it contains all the original PSP content too. (I haven't played far enough to verify that.)

But the PC port has some... issues. Here's my brief list of them.

Apparently I didn't manage to miss out the joy of PAX Pox, despite not going to the 2009 PAX Prime. I still got a terrible cold after returning home from PAX Prime this year. Although I think I most likely got it from the flight home and not PAX itself.

Oh, right, I did say I was going to try and create a CherryPy-based webapp front end. So here is a very quick and dirty implementation that provides some very basic control over the TV. Specifically, basic volume control (up and down), and the various input controls. Which is what I wanted out of it.

I recently noticed that my Sharp AQUOS TV had a section in the owner's manual describing "IP Control." Now you might think that this would be something about DRM, but it actually describes commands you can send the TV via TCP/IP in order to remote control it. Nifty!

The manual seems to suggest using telnet to do this, but I've found that it doesn't work. But sending the commands via Python does work.

So let's get to some basic code!

I've only been playing around with iOS 5 for a few hours, since the update took forever thanks to the infamous "Error 3200," so this is just some first impressions.

What I Like

Android's Notification Center

Notifications now appear at the top of the phone, and you can swipe down to view them (and various widgets) at any time. So that's nice. And exactly the same way it works in Android.

I know I'm not the only one this is happening to, but it's still amusing:

Update: Just to be clear, this happened immediately after the iPhone 4S was announced (October 4th, 2011), but before Steve Jobs's death (October 5th, 2011). Note the time stamp.

It turns out that ZSNES has a video dumping facility. Unfortunately, all of its presets are crap and it wants to dump the video out as YUV, which looks horrible. And you need to download MEncoder, which can be hard to find.