PS3 Blog


Tip: Installing <em>Life with PlayStation</em>
Created: 24-09-2008 05:35 Edited: 24-09-2008 05:36

Installing "Life with PlayStation" (UK)

You may have seen a news story about the launch of the new 'Life with PlayStation' service for the PS3 recently. No? Well, you can be forgiven because its not been widely publicised. It is available but there seems to be very little information on how to download and install it. Its pretty neat and worth it if you want to know the temperature, weather conditions and news stories from all over the world. As with most things run through the PS3, its free too. At the moment there are only two 'channels', one is called 'Live' and the other is 'Folding at Home' (which gives you a clue on how to install it). Currently it only provides info from big/capital cities by the looks of it, but with any luck they will expand this and add more channels in the future.

To install it you need to choose the 'Folding at Home' icon from the menu bar. If you haven't installed this already it downloads a 7MB application which then checks for updates. It will find the 'Life with PlayStation' update which is 126MB in size. Sadly you can't download these updates in the background so I recommend doing this at a time when you don't want to use your PS3 for a while.
Once its installed it replaces the 'Folding at Home' icon with a new 'Life with PlayStation' icon and is ready to roll. You will recognise the main 'globe' navigation from the 'Gaia' visualization based on NASA's 'Blue Marble' project images. Its quite stunning to look at.

Zoom in and out of the globe using the right analogue stick and rotate it in all directions with the left analogue stick. You can jump straight to the closest cities it knows about using the d-pad if you prefer. A list of top news stories (provided by Google News) is shown for the current selected city and you get a snapshot from a Webcam in that location - nice. You also get shown the temperature and current weather conditions. You can change channel by holding the square button and clicking up and down on the d-pad. From here you can choose the 'Folding at Home' channel to continue folding proteins and helping the researchers at Stanford University (more info on that here).

All in all its a nice add-on which could be expanded to include pretty much any information from around the globe. I am really hoping they add some very cool channels to it in the future.

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