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Posted By: Erik | Dec 1st, 2006 @ 2:50 PM

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I don't know how many of you have played Viva Pinata yet, but my wife and I absolutely love it. It may be kid oriented, but this kid hasn't played anything so entertaining since the first Halo game came out. Gears of War is a great game, but even it can't keep me away from playing Viva Pinata! It plays into my lack of self control so well. Just one more thing I need to do and then I'm done. Oh wait, a new Pinata is visiting. What do I need to do to get it? Oh, that's easy, let me do that quick. On and on...hour after hour of building my garden!

To the point of this post. If you ever get stuck or want to learn more about all the other cool stuff you can do with your plants, pinatas, workers, etc, check out the Pinata Island Wiki. It has so much info. It's a wiki, so you can of course add stuff that you find that isn't posted yet.

Tags: gaming, tips, Viva Pinata, xbox 360

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To Video Blog in HD or Not?

Posted By: Erik | Oct 27th, 2006 @ 3:47 PM

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That IS the question at the Blog Business Summit. Ok, they're talking about a lot of other things there too, but that one seems very interesting to me.

HD is something we've been talking about for quite a while, but haven't been working on it aggressively for some of the reasons mentioned in the blog entry I linked to. It's still too early in my opinion. One of the main reasons we want to do HD is to get some of our content up on Xbox Live Marketplace, where only HD video lives. Here on the internet, bandwidth still seems to be the limiting factor.

How entries are edited is also mentioned in the article. Our sister site, Channel 9, does pretty much no editing at all. Here on 10, we do edit our videos to help with the presentation, but even here, we DON'T do a TON of editing. The focus on both sites is the content and the people, not the video style.

It was really interesting reading that article as it went very much against the presenters and I tend to agree. What do you all think? What are the advantages of HD content at this point? What about how much videos are edited or not?

Tag: HD

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Lego Mindstorm NXT (Teaser)

Posted By: Erik | Jul 25th, 2006 @ 10:00 AM

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Yesterday, Laura and I headed over with a video camera and smartphones armed and loaded. Lego was coming in to show off their new robot the Lego Mindstorm NXT. I've been getting into some robot building of my own lately (I'm still an extreme beginner) and had seen some buzz around the NXT. I figured it would be neat, but thought to myself, "it's a toy...how cool could it really be"? Let me tell you my friends, it is VERY cool! So cool that a 10 year old can build something awesome with it pretty easily, yet a 35 year old adult (or however old) could customize the open source firmware, write a program to receive blue tooth signals that would command the 3 rotating motors while reading from the different sensors (touch, sound, light & ultra-sonic) to build an extremely cool robot to do who knows what?!?! To make a long story short...er...shorter...Laura snagged some people to talk to, we video'd them (sorry if the camera was shakey, my programmer arms are made of jelly) and we're working on getting a video ready as I type this. Expect to see it very soon. I was so excited after seeing some of the possibilities that I went and ordered one for myself when I got back to my desk. This is going to be fun!

Note: Lego did NOT pay us to say this

The team that builds Microsoft Robotics Studio (MSRS) was also there to show off MSRS, what it could do and how you could easily write code against the NXT to do some really neat stuff. One of the demos was a guy who had built an NXT robot that connected to his PC through blue tooth so he could control it remotely as well as having his cameraphone that was mounted on top of it that would send video back to the PC through the NXT while driving it around. Sick!

Check out the photos I snapped with my smartphone while we were there (apologies for the low quality).

Again, there will be a video coming soon. Watch for it!

Tags: behind the scenes, DIY, robotics

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Microsoft 10 Shoot (5-26-06) Part II

Posted By: Erik | Jul 5th, 2006 @ 6:07 PM

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So finally we posted up the Meet the 10 Team video, so I can finally put up the behind the scenes photos for that shoot.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/erikporter/sets/72157594188704780/

Enjoy!

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Microsoft 10 Shoot (5-26-06)

Posted By: Erik | May 31st, 2006 @ 4:25 PM

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You've probably already seen Major Nelson go through the upcoming XBox 360 dashboard update, but here are some behind the scenes photos taken before the shoot for anyone interested. My amateurish photography still needs some work, but hopefully there are still some neat things for you to see. Enjoy!

Behind the Scenes Photos

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New 10 Shirt

Posted By: Erik | May 22nd, 2006 @ 5:07 PM

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The new 10 shirts are in! "How do I get one?", you say?!?! Right now we give them to people who make appearances on the show or win one of our contests. You can also score a shirt if you see us at a conference!

We have other styles of the shirt, but decided two pictures with me modeling was enough for one day. Wink

10 Shirt (Front)
10 Shirt (Back)

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Laura & Tina @ E3

Posted By: Erik | May 12th, 2006 @ 6:43 PM

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Busted! I found a video on the xbox website of Laura and Tina hanging out with Major Nelson at E3.

Check it out here or all the E3 videos here.

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Microsoft 10 Shoot (4-21-06)

Posted By: Erik | May 5th, 2006 @ 1:00 PM

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This was actually my first attempt at taking some photos at Microsoft Studios. I used the camera we acquired in this video. Unfortunately, I was trying to not use the flash and most of the shots came out blurry, but some were salvageable. These were taken for the video that is airing today.

Behind the Scenes Photos

I'm off on vacation...enjoy! Smiley

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Microsoft 10 Shoot (4-28-06)

Posted By: Erik | Apr 28th, 2006 @ 6:44 PM

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Today I had the opportunity to go down to Microsoft Studios where 10 is shot and edited. Laura, Tina and the crew were doing their thing shooting next weeks videos and let me hang out for a while. I brought along my camera and got you all some behind the scenes shots. Enjoy! Smiley

Behind the Scenes Photos

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Tags, Tags, We Love to Tag

Posted By: Erik | Apr 7th, 2006 @ 1:42 PM

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Today we added a minor feature to the tagging feature in 10. We integrated a few of the major tagging sites out there. If you now click on a tag, for example "XBox", you will see the list of entries on the site tagged as XBox, but now at the top you'll see a More section. We currently link to Technorati, Del.icio.us & Flickr so you can easily jump over to see other related tagged content. Also, per tag, you can jump right over to related content on our other sites, Channel 9 & MicrosoftGadgets. In the case of the XBox tag, you'll be taken to other videos we've done on XBox on Channel 9 or some XBox Gadgets you can use on your Live.com homepage over at MicrosoftGadgets.

Erik Porter's Blog