Accord­ing to Eric Lem­pel, direc­tor of PlaySta­tion Net­work Oper­a­tions, the new PS3 firmware update will be made avail­able very soon. Ver­sion 2.30 will include the revamped PLAYSTATION Store which – I have to say – looks really nice. There a video avail­able fea­tur­ing Grace Chen, Senior Man­ager of the PLAYSTATION Store, who will walk the viewer through the new store. The most impor­tant news here is that the new store won’t be web-​​based any­more. This will make it more fluid and eas­ier to nav­i­gate, accord­ing to Chen. Well, have a look for yourself.

If you don’t want to watch a video or if you just don’t have time right now, here are a few screen­shots depict­ing the inter­face of the new PLAYSTATION Store.

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Brows­ing the web, I stum­bled upon a site that claims to have new infor­ma­tion on what appears to be a new adver­tise­ment cam­paign for the Playsta­tion 3. Appar­ently, the two pic­tures in ques­tion are some­what dif­fer­ent from the usual ads. Both pic­tures por­tray highly styl­ized scenes which cre­ate an awe­some and mon­u­men­tal impres­sion. The ads focus on a statue of one chil­dren on each of the posters – one male and one female – that stands in the midst of what seems to be a dull scenery. Cer­tainly skill­fully and art­fully done, I like it a lot. But you should take a look for yourself:

I have to admit, I def­i­nitely love this style. It is quite rem­i­nis­cent of one of the very first PS3 games that ever was: Resis­tance: Fall of Man.

Not too long ago I wrote about the 15 coolest geek-​​themed home the­aters. I espe­cially liked the Bat­cave because of its sim­ple design that doesn’t com­pro­mise a cer­tain style. Today I dis­cov­ered quite a dis­tinc­tive home the­ater. It has no spe­cial theme – at least I can’t rec­og­nize one – to speak of but it looks really pleas­ant to me. What sets this one apart is the func­tion­al­ity – it sports a rotat­ing floor! At the press of a but­ton the front row of seats rotates 180 degrees to face the sec­ond row, ulti­mately trans­form­ing the home the­ater into some­thing more closely resem­bling a living/​party/​entertainment room.

The front row of seats is installed on a round steel frame 16 feet in diam­e­ter. This cir­cle of floor­ing rotates to avoid hav­ing one row behind another – which is a seri­ous party killer – cre­at­ing a more inti­mate atmos­phere. But that’s not enough. There’s a 35-​​foot walk­way to the home the­ater fea­tur­ing a car­pet with a starfield. And there’s the fanned entry­way that only adds to the style. The doors and the whole the­ater is con­trolled by one remote, ulti­mately plac­ing vis­i­tors under the whim of the wielder of the RTI T2-​​C remote.

A full report on this the­ater can be found at Elec­tronic House with full specs and a com­plete gallery. They even have a video I haven’t watched. One thing is sure though: I’d like to own some­thing like that. That’s a great idea and it’s cer­tainly enter­tain­ing and use­ful at the same time.

I may seem far-​​fetched, espe­cially when you think of Global Warm­ing (the lat­ter one being one of last year’s catch phrases). But then, I may not. Recent obser­va­tions indi­cate that the solar activ­ity is dimin­ish­ing. To be pre­cise: Solar activ­ity comes in reg­u­lar cycles and the lat­est one is refus­ing to start. The fore­sighted reader will prob­a­bly won­der how that will affect us. The answer is plain and sim­ple: A fairly cold spell will set in by 2012 and the real cold will come by 2041.

There’s prob­a­bly noth­ing to fear. The last time this hap­pened was about 400 years ago where it started the Lit­tle Ice Age. That means way more snow and ice and that sounds pretty cold to me. Accord­ing to obser­va­tional data these pre­dic­tions may well come true. I think I’ll start stock­pil­ing food, cloth­ing, and wood in late 2010 to get a head start. And, what’s more impor­tant: if it all comes true, I absolutely have to hone my snowman-​​building skills. Thus, I will be able to impress the ladies in a cold world (Sun­shine, any­one?) and that’s where Dar­win will aid me, I hope.

Seems like the Church of Eng­land doesn’t take fic­ti­tious depic­tions of its “prop­erty” lightly. With Resis­tance: Fall of Man Sony has released one of the bet­ter launch titles of the PS3. Now the Bishop of Man­ches­ter com­plained that Sony’s deci­sion to recre­ate one of the great cathe­drals with photo-​​realistic qual­ity just to encour­age peo­ple to have gun bat­tles in this build­ing is “beyond belief and highly irre­spon­si­ble”. Head over to Ars Tech­nica to see what this is all about.

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Sony claimed in a pre­pared state­ment that they believed they had sought all the nec­es­sary per­mis­sions for the inclu­sion of the cathe­dral in the game and also noted that the title is “a fan­tasy sci­ence fic­tion game and is not based on real­ity.” This response isn’t sit­ting well with the Church of England’s employ­ees in Man­ches­ter, who believe they are fac­ing a very real gun prob­lem and feel that the use of their holy space for such a vio­lent scene in the gam­ing under­cuts their work with the community.

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The last time I wrote about the Church med­dling with fic­ti­tious con­tent a Vat­i­can offi­cial called for a boy­cott of Dan Brown’s The Da Vinci Code. What I don’t get is that they really go ahead with some­thing like this. What’s the prob­lem? Nei­ther book nor game claimed to depict the truth. I always believed in free­dom of expres­sion but it seems like that doesn’t work any­more. What­ever you say or write you should be pre­pared to get sued. That’s ridicu­lous. Hard work­ing peo­ple who believe in hon­esty should sup­port Evil Spock’s attempt of world dom­i­na­tion. He may be able to set some things right.

I have to con­fess, I don’t care much about art, espe­cially paint­ings. There are some kind of paint­ings I really like, though. Since I don’t know what I’m talk­ing about I’ll call it con­tem­po­rary art but I’m gonna hang one of these pic­tures on my bed­room wall, that’s for sure. I like the look of most of them. Just because of that I’d like to intro­duce a project to you, a very good friend of mine has been work­ing on for some time now. It’s almost fin­ished and it it – as you may have guessed – about art. Obvi­ously, ART WORLD PROJECT is going to be a full suc­cess if you can believe the news posted there.

Usu­ally, I’m not one to write about stuff I don’t under­stand well enough. In this case, I’ll make an excep­tion since there is more to it than meets the eye. There’s a char­ity project going on in the back­ground with the goal of donat­ing all net prof­its to child aid pro­grams around the world. Strong argu­ments claim that Glob­al­iza­tion ben­e­fits those with more finan­cial lever­age at the expense of the poor. It’s the usual prob­lem – the rich get richer while the poor get ever poorer. With this char­ity project they will con­tribute to bet­ter liv­ing con­di­tions and bet­ter edu­ca­tion for poor chil­dren. I wish them all the best.