Oh look, I’ve got one thing I can use on my PS3 without being told that I need to deactivate another console. That would be Life With PlayStation 1.0, otherwise known as “Folding@Home 2.0 with some news and weather stuff thrown in”.
My impressions, after the jump.
As you might have guessed already, Life With PlayStation is an extension of the Folding@Home distributed computing application on PS3. While your PS3’s Cell chip works away tirelessly at simulating protein folding (and what happens when it doesn’t work properly, ie: cancer, Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s) you were formerly restricted to listen to some music, or look at your current statistics.
Realizing this was boring, Sony has worked away in cooperation with Google and the Weather Channel to produce Life With PlayStation. Now, instead of simply watching a simulation of protein for hours on end (or alternatively, doing something else completely) you can pan around a Google Earth-esque virtual representation of the world, checking out what the weather looks set to be and reading up on the news using Google’s news service. As before with F@H, you can stick your own music on too.
For some people, this will simply prove a five minute distraction and nothing more, and that’s fine; it’s hardly a hardcore application for you to amuse yourself for more than a few minutes at a time. However, I’m the type to read up on news and such so I’m quite happy at being able to do so while helping with whatever medical research Folding@Home is doing today.
As you scroll across the planet key place names light up such as state capitals in the US and capital cities of other countries such as London, Paris and Tokyo. Unfortunately, you can’t zoom in and get other ‘localized’ cities such as my very own city of Glasgow. However, unlike the (inevitably compared) Wii News Channel, it doesn’t take 10 minutes to display the news and what’s more, clicking on a place name simply brings up a Google News search on the place in question, so you can simply change the search term and get news for your area. Easy peasy!
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5 responses so far ↓
1 Sean "Rothbart" Workman // Sep 22, 2008 at 3:36 pm
I actually checked my Gmail from withing LWP the other day… if you click on “More News…” on a city, it takes you to a Google News page with the familiar “Sign In” option on the top right of the screen, sign in and you can click the Gmail tab and read your email.
Listening to your own music while checking your mail AND helping Alzheimer’s/Cancer research… you can certainly find worse things to do.
2 cell989 // Sep 22, 2008 at 7:27 pm
Well so long as Im helping the fight against cancer I wont mind using this free service, quite helpful too, as I dont have to go through many procedures to check the weather.
LWPS is a nice incentive to get people donate some bandwidth for the good of us all.
3 trk // Sep 22, 2008 at 10:25 pm
anybody notices their ps3 crashing using “life”? Mine has always been rock solid otherwise but it’s crashed not once but twice using “life”, and the XMB performance absolutely crawls when i bring it up to message friends or whatever. it’s put me off using the service, which is a shame because it’s pretty smart looking and makes a killer interactive screensaver when i’m playing tunes from the hard disk. hopefully they’ll patch it or something…
4 trk // Sep 22, 2008 at 10:39 pm
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
(am using 40gb model, original HD replaced w/ internal 250 gig HD. Like I said, never had any problems before, nothing dodgy about the HD as I have warhawk, GT prologue and a million other games on it that I play all the time with no problems)
5 redkilt // Sep 23, 2008 at 4:08 am
if u live in glasgow surely you dont need to check the weather..it’s always raining:D
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