Get fit with Wii Fit

Finally I've got this device (I bought it at Best Buy when it had it in stock, I guess not very long would dissapear again). The package is similar to MacBook Pro package with stylist elegant white color and minimalist (not to much graphics but yet still informative to consumers).

The board is quite large, enough to seat my big feet. It's quite heavy (they put some weight for stability, not because of its electronics). I had to add extension (included in the package) to their pegs because carpet in my house is thick enough to make the balance being inaccurate. There is only a single button with a blue color LED at the back for power on switch. As other Wii remotes, it uses Bluetooth to connect hence require synchronization with Wii Console for the first time before use.

The software (called "Wii Fit") has two parts: "Body Test" and "Training". Body Test is all stuff related to measure our weight, BMI, balance and Wii Age. It's really good. It is able to track our daily weight measures and set target to reach our target BMI.

The training section contains 4 sections: Yoga, Strength, Aerobic, and Balance. For yoga, we are guided by an virtual instructor (with preference is set during setup. We can choose to use male or female instructor). It's very easy to follow, although not that easy to do what it is said (I sometimes fidget or wiggle a little and these all are detected with its very sensitive accelerometer in the Wii surve board).

My favorite game is Hulla-hoop, dance (forgot the exact name) and boxing. Similar to other Wii games, some of the games/activities are locked and can only be unlocked by doing more work-out (collecting more minutes over time).

Atom Processor

It's well known, Intel is one of the greatest chip maker in the world. While other companies might have developed mind-bogling processor or SoC architecture, Intel is still on the top of all in the term of fabrication process technologies.

The recent Intel System-on-Chip (SoC) processor called Atom processor reveals the use all new hafnium-infused 45nm high-k silicon technology while packs an astounding 47 million transistors on a single chip measuring less than 25mm².

The power consumption is astounding. While idling, it sucks up only milliwatts of power. In full throttle, it may go up to 2.5 W, which is still far away from the most power-efficient other processors made by Intel. Although a recent news reveals that VIA also is making a competitive processor, yet it is uncomparable to Atom in term of clock and CMOS size (they still use 65nm process).

The family of this processors is named Z5xx series (previously called Silverthorne). With clock frequencies spand from 800 MHz to 1.83 GHz and 533 MHz FSB, this processor is definitely going to compete heavily with it's own elder brother, Pentium4 Centrino.

Te following features are copied-pasted from Intel website:

• Fastest performance in a sub 3 watt thermal power envelope based on industry leading benchmarks (EEMBC) and web page rendering performance
• Greater energy efficiency enabled by incredibly low average power (160-220 mW) and idle power (80-100 mW) and scaling performance from 800MHz to 1.86GHz
• Power-optimized front side bus of up to 533MHz for faster data transfer on demanding mobile applications†
• Scalable performance and increased power efficiency with multi-threading support²
• Improved performance on multimedia and gaming applications with support for Streaming SIMD Extensions 3 (SSE3)
• Improved power management with new Deep Power Down (C6) technology state, non-grid clock distribution, clock gating, CMOS bus mode, and other power saving architectural features
• 10x lower thermal power level enabled by improved power management technologies delivering high performance to run the real Internet and a broad range of software applications³

I'm eager to see a device using this processor. Perhaps next generation iPhone or googlePhone? Who knows.

My Broadband speed is optimum now!

Finally, after more than a year my DSL suffered slowliness due to lack of AT&T responsibility to fix it, now they've fixed it. I subscribe to their DSL Elite, so I am suppose d to get at least 4.5 Mbps download and 600 kbps upload. The recent test I performed gave a very close result:

Wii Transformation

While most games nowadays, either on PC, PS3 or XBox 360 tend to make people become coach-potatoes, Wii (and its new Wii Fit board) could make people being active. You may argue, there are some games (and require extra controllers) that try to imitate the innovation made by Nintendo, yes but they're not the same.

A few weeks ago I bought this Wii because I was trying to buy Wii Fit and it requires Wii Console. At the time of this writing, all Wii Fit boards are sold out in many brick-and-mortar stores. I saw some were available on the Net, but the price tag was scarying me (double or even 5 times more expensive that its MRP).

Although I paid overprice for the console ($340'ish instead of $250), I was satisfied with it. It comes with one remote motion-sensor controller (it uses Bluetooth and IR for connection) and a Nunchuck (some games require it) that can be connected at the end of the controller. The game that comes in the box is WiiSports consisting of Tennis, Baseball, Bowling, Golf and Boxing.
My favorite sport is Tennis, Bowling and Boxing. Playing tennis is almost like playing a real tennis game. The boxing requires nunchuck so your both hands can do jab (not many variations like overcut), but still it is fun. Unfortunately, the console comes with only one set of controller, so I had to spend money to buy second controller (and another sports game for kids).

After playing those games a few days, I've lost 3 pounds of weight and got sore in my arms. My daughter lost 2 lbs and more (wow!). After seeing how fun it is to play with, I bought another two games (Table Tennis and something, I forgot the name). Yes, they mostly require using arms and not much body or leg movements required, but somehow when we played them, we tend to to simulate the real games, like catching the ball, swing etc.

We then bought another one for our daughter. It is Hannah Montana dancing game. Yet it uses mostly hands to play, it looks so fun and our daughter was so excited and addicted to it (in a good way, because she now moves her body more. It's a good work out for her and even me!).

If you want to see a bleeding-edge graphic quality, Wii is not the thing you can compare against PC, XBox 360 or PS3. For PC (which currently is the highest quality graphic among them if we use the top NVidia card and the most expensive one), it is even far better than any consoles (with the downside ofcourse its price tag).

I cannot wait to get the Wii Fit. I saw the ads, it looks more fun. It comes with a CD for playing surfboard, yoga, dancing (now it requires our legs to do steps), hulla-hop, balancing and soccer goalie (and use our head to block ball coming to our goal gate). The official price tag is $89.99 (at least when I checked at Best Buy, Game Stop, Target even they didn't have in stock yet).

Email Flow Diagram

Burn CD with wodim

#!/bin/bash

function getkey()
{
read yourentry
}
DEV=/dev/scd0
TMP_FILE=/tmp/cd_data.raw

wodim dev=${DEV} -setdropts driveropts=singlesession
wodim dev=${DEV} -v -sao -dummy -data speed=18 $1
wodim dev=${DEV} -eject
wodim dev=${DEV} -load