As I posted on Monday, my Codex podcast is back because I’ve finally found a way to record it live, using music from Spotify and mixing in my talking bits, thanks to Nicecast. As I wrote in the show post on the Codex site, I’d pretty much given up on doing the show because I couldn’t find a satisfying way to record the whole thing live, which is something important to me. I had tried Nicecast back at the end of August, but at the time it didn’t properly support Mac OS X Lion, and so there were issues getting the songs to properly play from Spotify. But since then they upgraded the app — I only realized it the other day because someone tweeted it to me — and I was glad to see that it now works without a hitch (well, mostly, as there is one little glitch in the show I recorded, episode 40, at the start of one of the tracks).

It’s good to be doing these again, and one other interesting thing about using Nicecast is that as I record, I’m actually streaming the session to the web. So in the future I’ll probably share that link, for those who would like to listen in live as I record the podcast — that has the added bonus of making it feel that much more like a radio show, which is really what I try to do with Codex (hence the reason I don’t want to just edit a show together in Garageband, or similar software).

Also, since the music is coming from Spotify (for the most part), I can share the playlist that way too — so if my voice annoys you (and that’s completely understandable), you can still enjoy the music.

Since the show was on hiatus for about 3 months, I’ve got a lot of catching up to do, so you can expect quite a few episodes this month. Also, let me remind you that last year I did a Christmas episode (10), so if you’re looking for some more tunes to put you in the holiday mood, do give it a try.

I’ve always liked how Craig Mod writes “satellite” articles to his main essays, and after my post on cars was up, I realized there were a few things I forgot to add, and it didn’t feel right to just shoehorn them in. So consider this an addendum.

Senna
After I tweeted a remark about watching the Senna documentary last night, my friend Jairo Neto (@jaironeto) — who is also organizer of the PechaKucha Night series in Sao Paulo — replied with a few remarks that I’d like to share.

man, did I cry with this documentary
the most important thing that he did was that he showed that you could be a winner with discipline and focus..
and that was something unique at the time. Brazil was just coming out of a military dictatorship, people were stunned by Senna
yes, and by that time, he was investing in his Institution for children, so there was a comic book character called “Senninha”
so for young kids (like me) he was a real living hero

Arcade Racers
I think that what I wrote makes it sound like I no longer play arcade racers, but that’s not true at all. One of my favorite games of recent years is Split/Second — I loved it so much I played through it twice — and I’m a huge fan of the Burnout series. I also quite enjoyed last year’s Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit — it was a blast alternating between the speedsters and the cops, and also trying to beat the times of my friends (which usually ends up being CheapyD, who’s my only friend who likes racing games as much as I do). And after playing the demo for Need for Speed: The Run, in which avalanches are happening all over the place as you speed through a mountainous road, I’m looking forward that too. It reminded me of Speed Devils, which was my favorite racing game on the Dreamcast.

Forza + Top Gear
One of my favorite things to do these days is to take the cars that I see featured on Top Gear for a drive in Forza 4 — even better, I can actually try them out on the Top Gear test track, just like The Stig does, since it’s one of the tracks included in the game.

Pagani Zonda Cinque
My favorite car to drive in Forza tends to evolve the more I play — especially as I discover new cars to drive — and my current fave is the Pagani Zonda Cinque. It drives suprisingly well (tight controls) for a car that has that much power.

I’ve never really considered myself to be a car guy. Sure, when I was a kid there was a time when I had a few car posters in my room (I recall a Porsche 911 and a Ferrari Testarossa, and I think one more, but can’t remember what), and I do love the act of driving, but I’ve never really cared much about owning one (I briefly had a Toyota Corolla, when we moved back to Canada for a year) or lusted over any. But these days, because of a game called Forza and three British dudes, I find myself with cars on the mind quite a lot.

It’s no secret that over the past few years I’ve come to accept the fact that racing is one of my favorite gaming genres. It’s funny, because I never particularly was attached to any racing game growing up — I think my favorites though would be F-Zero and Wave Racer — but since this latest generation of consoles, I really have come to love the act of driving in a game. Truth be told, this goes even beyond racing games — I actually love the driving parts in non-racing games too. While playing L.A. Noire, I actively drove to every single area, even though I could have fast-tracked instead, because I absolutely loved moving through that city in the different vehicles I would find in the game. It’s also one of the reasons I dislike the Halo series so much — what at first sounds great, riding around in a Warthog, becomes an exercise in frustration because of the silly driving controls.

I also always disliked sim racing games. My motto used to be, “if you have to use the brakes, then it’s not for me.” What I liked were arcade racers, and I just couldn’t understand what the fun was in driving around “carefully” on boring race tracks. But the first game that “evolved” my taste in racing games was Project Gotham Racing 3. Although not fully a sim, it was a nice sim-like game to get you started, and the realism of the cities — racing around in Shinjuku — was an absolute blast. I loved Project Gotham Racing 4 too, and became quite attached to the in-cockpit view.

Then came Forza. I remember getting Forza 2 (which I bought used), and not really liking it. I played maybe 20 minutes or so, and just felt that it was too realistic (and the track was boring). Then Forza 3 came out. I tried the demo, and the in-cockpit view (which wasn’t in Forza 2) completely sucked me in. It was enough to get me excited about the Forza world, and while waiting for the release of the game (which was only coming out a few weeks later), I put in Forza 2 and ended up playing 20-30 hours. Another aspect of modern sim racing games that appealed to me was the racing line — I want to feel like a pro racer when I’m playing, and this gave me a chance to properly learn how “racing lines” work, and when I need to start braking. The Forza “rewind” feature also assured that I wouldn’t get frustrated with the game if I did a stupid move late in a race.

And that brings us to now, with Forza 4, which I’ve been obsessing over ever since I got my copy. The big revelation for me this time is the “Autovista” mode, which not only lets you explore every aspect of some of the cars included in the game, but more importantly, includes reviews by Jeremy Clarkson of Top Gear. I ended up enjoying these so much that it made me check out the show for the first time — never in my life had I been interested in checking out a “car show” — and I’ve been absolutely hooked, and am going back through the series, season by season. As most fans of the show know, what makes it so great is not just that they cover exotic cars, but it’s the humor in how they do it, and the fun personalities of the three hosts.

So am I a car guy now? I don’t know, I don’t think so, but I sure love playing Forza 4, I really love watching Top Gear, and recently I’ve been getting a kick out of spotting some of the cars I’ve been driving in-game out in the real world — like that Audi R8 pictured above, which I spotted last night as I was leaving the office in Ebisu. In a city like Tokyo, you can see a lot of luxury and sports cars on the road — even seeing a Ferrari drive by is not that strange (I even spotted one this afternoon, while walking my dog).

I’ll finish this by adding that last night I watched the Ayrton Senna documentary, Senna, which I thought was fantastic. The only time in my life that I ever followed racing was Formula 1 during the Senna era, and it was something that I stopped after his death. So watching the documentary was not only interesting because of the amazing story that was his life and accomplishments, but it also provided a nostalgic trip to my youth.

Update: Here’s an addendum to this post.

I’ve taken quite a liking to writing in iA Writer for Mac. Although the app has been out for quite a while — and despite the fact that I was a big fan of the iPad version — I never picked it up because I really didn’t think I had a use for it. I’ve been an enthusiastic user of Google Docs for years now, and there are many aspects of using that service that I quite like that iA Writer doesn’t do (sharing documents, having a good search engine for all my archived documents, etc.)

But with the recent sale on the iA Writer app — in preparation for the upcoming update that will add iCloud support (the sale may be over as you read this) — I decided to give it a try just for kicks, and I must say I’ve really fallen in love with it.

The reason for this love affair is a mix of a few things, including simplicity (functionality is barebone, just what you need), focusing (both because of the a full-screen view that hides everything else, and the app’s “focus mode”), and strangely enough, its support of Markdown.

I must say I’ve never used Markdown in the past, but I’ve taken quite a liking to the way iA Writer formats the text when I use the various elements. As an added bonus, the app I use to write blog posts (the ScribeFire extension on Chrome) supports it, so I’ve taken to writing new posts in iA Writer, in Markdown, and then copy/pasting it in ScribeFire.

Now, it’s not necessarily for everyone, especially if you need to format text for printing, but all I’ve ever needed in a text editor is a blank slate and a word count, and so it works for me. I would like it to support some sort of auto-syncing with Google Docs though, so that I can easily save all of my documents there, especially if it’s something that I need to share with others (for now, I copy/paste it in Google Docs, once I’m finished writing it in Writer).

I have this other little site called The Magaziner where I obsess over magazines. For the past few months I took a break from writing up any new reviews (sticking mostly to news items and covering the occasional new releases), but I’ve found a way to make the review process a bit easier (by adopting a template, based on something my friend Andrew Losowsky had been developing for a site that never launched). The first one up is for what I’d say is my favorite iPad magazine, SPIN Play.

I’m glad that we have a digital antenna, but I don’t think we’ll be able to use it, since the outlet is not in our living room, and I don’t think I want a long cable going through two rooms so it can reach our TV. But the option is there I guess.

Also, I’m rather impressed with Apple’s new Thunderbolt Display, and not only would I like to get one to use with my laptop — my trusty MacBook Pro 17″, which has been my workhorse for over two years now — but maybe also to plug in my consoles when the TV is otherwise occupied. Is this something I can do? I’m not even sure if I can use it with my Thunderbolt-less MBP. 

It’s a digital world, and I like it.

So here then is my highly unscientific, truly subjective list of favorite media obsessions of 2010. Each category includes five items in alphabetical order (I think it’s silly to rank them in order), and I’ve occasionally included a few honorable mentions, things that I really wanted to have in those favorite fives.

FAVORITE GAMES
As you’ll see, my favorite genre tends to be RPGs (with a strong emphasis on action RPGs), and then racing games too. I could probably have done a separate downloadable game category as well, but decided to just put them all together.

• Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood
• Fallout: New Vegas
• Mass Effect 2
• Need for Speed: Hot Pursuit
  
• Red Dead Redemption
• Honorable Mentions: Costume Quest, Fable III, Limbo, Heavy Rain, Split/Second
  

FAVORITE IPAD APPS
There are many more apps that I really like, but these are the ones that I use the most, that I have in my dock. I decided to only list iPad apps and not iPhone apps (same for games), since I do really spend a lot more time on my iPad, and my iPhone is just something I pull out when I’m bored waiting somewhere (most used apps on that would be Twitter, Instapaper, Camera, and listening to podcasts).

• Cloudreaders
• Instapaper
• NYTimes
• Reeder
• Twitter
• Honorable Mentions: Air Video

FAVORITE IPAD GAMES
I’ve kept this to real iPad versions of games only — I did play a hell of a lot of DoDonPachi Resurrection on my iPad, but it’s really just an iPhone release.

• Carcassonne
• Infinity Blade
• Plants vs. Zombies HD
• Robot Unicorn Attack HD
• Word with Friends
• Honorable Mentions: Highborn HD, Small Worlds, Space Invaders Infinity Gene, Canabalt, Puzzle Agent HD
  

FAVORITE TV SHOWS
This year was absolutely amazing for TV, and you’ll see that my tastes are definitely on the cable series side of things (Community is the only network show to be included) — that fact that you can be truly mature is one thing, and the shorter seasons (and so more focused storylines) is another.

• Eastbound & Down
• Dexter
• Mad Men
• Sons of Anarchy
• True Blood
• Honorable Mentions: Community, Treme, The Walking Dead, Louie, How to Make It in America, Bored to Death
  

FAVORITE MOVIES
This was difficult because I obviously haven’t seen a ton of movies that came out in theaters in recent months in North America, so my list could honestly have included movies that came out towards the end of 2009 as well. I know the two Mesrine films originally came out in France in 2008, but I felt like I could include them since they came out in North America this year.

• Cyrus
• Inception
• Mesrine: Killer Instinct/Mesrine: Public Enemy #1
• The American
• The Ghost Writer
• Honorable Mentions: Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, Kick-Ass, The Social Network, Exit Through the Exit Shop
  

FAVORITE ALBUMS
Music is also very difficult, since I listen to so much of it, and to such a variety — which is one of the reasons I started Codex — but I think I was still able to come up with a list of favorites, in part based on the “most played” count in iTunes.

• Record Collection (Mark Ronson & The Business Intl)
• Swim (Caribou)
• There Is Love in You (Four Tet)
• The Suburbs (The Arcade Fire)
• The Way Out (The Books)
• Honorable Mentions: The Social Network Soundtrack (Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross), King of the Beach (Wavves), Not Music (Stereolab)

FAVORITE TRACKS
Again, these are mostly based on the “most played” count in iTunes.

• “A Cold Freezin’ Night” (The Books)
• “Bang Bang Bang (feat. Q-Tip and MNDR)” (Mark Ronson & The Business Intl)
• “Happy Up Here” (Royksopp)
• “Threshold Apprehension” (Black Francis)
• “Odessa” (Caribou)
• Honorable Mentions: “King of the Beach” (Wavves), “Rococo” (The Arcade Fire)

FAVORITE COMICS
This was the hardest category for me, because I read A LOT of comics, and so it was hard to narrow it down to just five — and these five are basically the things that I could remember really liking — and the reason I don’t even include any honorable mentions is because it would be ridiculously long.

• Justice League: Generation Lost
• Richard Stark’s Parker: The Outfit
• Scott Pilgrim
• Sweet Tooth
• The Unwritten

I gotta say I’m getting a kick out of this: In the past 24 hours I conceived of a site, a name, bought the domain, got it working, installed WordPress, imported posts from this site, found a theme that I modded to my liking, and have now launched my latest project, something I’m calling The Magaziner. What’s a magaziner you ask? Here’s my made-up answer:

We hereby define a new term, that of the magaziner, described as a person who exerts an unhealthy amount of love for all things magazine. The Magaziner is a site that mostly focuses on the intersection between magazines and the digital frontier, and what it means for the medium. This does not preclude the inclusion of a healthy amount of print love.

It all started last night when I was reading a comment on Facebook by Craig Mod, who suggested that all of the magazine-related coverage I’ve been doing over the past couple of months is getting lost within the rest of what I post here. I think he made a good point — and god knows I have a lot of respect and admiration for what he’s accomplished over the past year or so — and so I decided to launch a new site that would be exclusively for all of the magazine stuff. Expect the same kind of coverage you’ve been seeing here — commentary, news, new release announcements, reviews — that weighs heavily on the emerging digital side of the magazine publishing industry, something I’m quite passionate about (although I do still love my lovely print publications, thank you very much).

So this site returns to being a hub for news on me and all of my various projects, which on top of The Magaziner includes Codex, my new weekly music podcast, Radio OK Fred, SNOW Magazine, PauseTalk, and other fun stuff. Hope you’ll continue to follow what I’m up to here, and if you really enjoyed the magazine coverage, then please head on over to The Magaziner — and you can of course subscribe to an RSS feed. There’s a Twitter account too (@the_magaziner) that I’ll be using to post magazine-related news as well.

Oh, and one more thing about The Magaziner, please consider this a beta version of the site. As I said at the top of this post, it all came together rather fast, so over the coming weeks I’m sure I’ll be changing things here and there, fixing things I missed, and maybe coming up with new features or sections to add.

The question of bandwidth could be an issue, but really, is there actually an alternative to releasing magazines for the iPad than through the iTunes App Store? The article gives Zinio as an example, suggesting that all magazines sold through that device are doing it through its own servers. Is Apple really not getting any cut from sales that are done through the iPad app though? If so, then I guess we can expect to see the release of a Conde Nast (or Time, Inc., etc.) app, that will house all of its magazines.

Update: A reader suggests that the point about the photos is not so ridiculous, considering that most photographers are paid for each photo published. I assumed they were paid for the shoots.

Bonnier’s Mag+ — a concept for a magazine on tablet — was all the rage when it came out earlier this year, and now Bonnier follows that up with another new concept, News+, this time presenting what a daily newspaper could look like on iPad. Again, some really interesting ideas here, and I’m wondering how closely the upcoming Daily digital newspaper from Apple and Rupert Murdoch will come to looking like this. (via Cédric Riveau)

Well this is disappointing. One of the things I was most looking forward to with the 4.2 iOS firmware update for iPad was the addition of multitasking, and therefore the ability to download stuff — like gigantic issues of Wired — in the background. Sorry folks, switching to another app after you start the download simply pauses it, waiting for you to return. Come on Wired, fix this. And if you’re wondering, this month’s issue clocks in at 351MB, so we’re on a downward trend in terms of size at least.

Comics Alliance posts a comprehensive look at the current state of digital comics, or as they better describe it, “seven points of conversation we need to be having about digital comics.”

Jeremy attended — and participated in — last week’s “Edit 2010” magazine publishing event in Warsaw, and includes a nice round-up of what was covered, especially on the Adobe digital tools front.

Pictured, an earlier issue of Gym Class Magazine that was on display as part of a magazine exhibition. Make sure to pick up the latest issue!

Remember the problems Esquire encountered this month in releasing its latest issue on iPad? Looks like as long as your content involves topless women that you can spin around 360 degrees, then Apple is A-OK with it — as seen in the amazing new feature included in The Sun‘s iPad app. (via Grids)