It may have escaped your attention, but the games world has been buzzing since the launch of Grand Theft Auto IV 2 weeks ago. I’m staggered at how much money it has raked in – $500 million in the first week. There was a time when I’d have been out there on the day of release of a new game and heading back home as quick as I could to play it. Now, I just look on with a certain amount of fascination at the hype surrounding it.

Something similar happened when Halo was launched back in October. No MacGyver this time around, but still lots of hype all the same – maybe the game itself justifies it all. I’m half tempted to buy an Xbox to give it a go myself!

If you have even a vague interest in GTA IV, have a look at this Flickr set which has a side by side comparison of locations in the game and the same place in New York.

Looks like you might be a new visitor to le craic. If you like what you see here and fancy some daily diversions delivered to your favourite feed reader, why not click to join Club le craic. Go raibh maith agat! Thanks a thousand!

Prediction : expect to see these weird looking symbols in magazines and websites soon. They are “barcodes” which are readable by your mobile phone once you install a really cool application called Kaywa QR-Code on your phone.

The “barcode” above is the url of www.lecraic.com. In order for me to read the barcode, all I have to do is fire up the Kaywa application on my mobile, take a snap of the barcode and the content (in this case a url) is delivered to my phone.

Content providers can deliver wallpapers or ringtones this way as well as text, urls, phone numbers etc.

Check it out and download the app to your phone and give it a whirl. It will be interesting to see what uses will be made of this technology in mobile phone obsessed Ireland!

Le Craic is suffering from Photoshop envy this morning after seeing this stunning advert for Olympus memory cards called Sophie’s Memories.  Oh to be involved in a project like that and see it in print and be able to say “I made that”.

Anywho,  it brings home a very important point that a memory card is more than just a bit of electronic wizardry. It sounds very basic to say that, but every day I get people bringing me memory cards stuffed with precious images that they haven’t backed up onto cd or hard drive.

The only copy they have are on the memory card. If the card gets lost, bang go those photographs of the 21st Birthday, Christening or whatever. I always try to impress on them the need to do this, but I know they walk away and don’t really take it on board.

So take Le Craic’s advice and always backup, backup, backup. Memories in the mind are all very well, but there’s nothing like having a photo tell a story.

Helloiamageekandmynameisaj…. I laughed at this. Is there any hope for me?

Don’t know about you, but I’m terrible when it comes to passwords. Although I know I should be more creative when it comes to thinking one up, I always revert back to some combination of one I’ve had before.

Would you believe there is a site for creating passwords for you? Yeah, I’m not surprised either and this is but one of probably a dozen or more out there but dagnabbit, show me a smiling green bird and I fall in love with it.

Tweet on over to Password Bird - it’s lovely and shiny.

UPDATE : Just upgraded to Wordpress 2.5 and Zemanta doesn’t work with this version of Wordpress. WP 2.5 was only released yesterday though.

UPDATE 2: Zemanta have just left a comment that they are working on the 2.5 issue and they are looking at the image issue also. Very impressed with their taking time to reply to various blog posts all over d’interweb about their software.

UPDATE 3: Zemanta now works with Wordpress 2.5 - just a few little glitches to work out, but amazed that a rep from Zemanta again popped back to this post with an update. There’s dedication!

Zemanta – get to know this Firefox plugin, which is one of the most useful plugins for Firefox that I have come across. Only recently released, this add on will work:

“with whichever blogging platform you are using and as you write suggest contextually relevant pictures, links and articles that you can use to enhance your post with.”

The blogging platforms supported at the moment are Wordpress.com, Blogger.com, Typepad.com and self hosted Wordpress installs of Version 2.0 or greater.

Once you have installed the add on in Firefox just login to your blog admin panel and go to create a post. You will notice a new panel showing the Zemanta interface. Here is what it looks like on a self hosted Wordpress blog, like this one is.

As you type, Zemanta will automatically suggest photographs and links to other articles that you can add to your post. It also creates links to specific words in the post and as if that wasn’t enough, you get tag suggestions as well. All of these can be added to your post with a simple click.

The majority of the links you see in this post were added in about 10 seconds with a few clicks.

The Gallery is a bit restrictive though as it only returns 6 possible results. If Zemanta got together with Jazz Biscuit and integrated his excellent creative commons image search tool into Zemanta, then I think Zemanta would have it all.

Photo by Mike Defiant . Adapted under a Creative Commons License