Author: alex

Categories
Blog News Hardware PSP

Firmware, PSP games & Recharging

Firmware :
For the moment I’m staying with my psp 2.0 firmware.
The only reason to downgrade to 1.5 would seem to be the UMD loaders that allow you to play pirated games. I’m not going to go that way.
The only reason to upgrade would be the new RSS capability and some new codecs and download capability to memory stick. I’ll wait, thank you. It works fine as it is.

Games :
Meanwhile I’ve bought several games, here’s a quick overview and a personal score :

  • XMen II Apocalypse : quite a good game, sorta RPG, topdown view, lots of stuff to do (3/5)
  • Ridge Racer : I bought this second hand, as I wanted to at least own one driving game, but it’s so darn good that I keep coming back to it time and time again for a quick fix ! I understand better now how people could become slaves to racing games like this… (4/5)
  • King Kong : some white lines mar the game, and the controls are not all they could be (but you can try different layouts). I’ve only progressed a little bit, need to play some more, but so far it’s scary. (TBD)
  • Lord of the Rings Tactics : bought, but still haven’t played it. I almost regret buying this. (TBD)

I still need a good rpg : Popolocrois for psp seems to fit the bill, if it ever gets released here in Europe. Meanwhile I’ve installed a SNES emulator (via a bootloader for firmware 2.0) and ChronoTrigger. Amazing what Square could cram into 3 Mbyte !!

All these games should be more than enough to keep me occupied !

I think, once I’ve finished a few games like King Kong or Tactics, that I will sell these secondhand and pick up a new one from there. Prices for psp games are extremely expensive, they should really, really lower the price, and this is coming from a working guy, not a young guy with a chronic shortage of pocket money !

Recharging :
I am amazed : It seems as if Sony has done a major job of keeping the power consumption extremely low when you put your machine on standby. Keeping your psp on ‘standby’ (instead of really switching it off where you need to keep the off position pressed for 5 to 10 seconds) seems almost not to use any power at all. Reactivation is (almost) instantaneous.

I continue to be amazed : I thought my battery would run flat in less than a day, but I can comfortably play my game mornings or evenings in the train (both morning and evening seldom happens – when there are friends on the train they take precedence) and not even get to two bars down (ie the battery still reports as full). However, if you play an hour or 3 the battery does suddenly drop a bar down. Maybe it is the game I play : XMen does not use the UMD disc all the time, which seems to consume the most power.

Categories
Blog News

Sometimes things go 'click'.

A look is an invitation.

Sometimes things go ‘click’ in my head, like last thursday, when by accident I looked into the blue-grey eyes of a goodlooking woman and felt a sort of connection spring over. She looked. I looked.

And then we continued our separate ways. Neither of us gave any indication something had happened, except for that look.

That’s when I realised that a look, any look, is a doorway, an invitation to further communication. They don’t even have to be inviting. Angry looks, despairing looks or even looking away are means of communication that you can use if you want to.

Strange that it took me all this time to realise this.

Categories
Blog News Hardware

Pressure… Crack !

PSP

I have transformed my impulse buying into a higher level !

After months of not looking at it, after weeks of remarking regretfully to myself that I would have loved to have this when I was a kid, I succumbed to dreaming about it.

It took me a week of talking myself out of it multiple times (and back in again). After actually standing in the aisle with the gear in hands and then putting it back and walking away, a day later I finally cracked : I caved in, and bought a Playstation Portable (PSP). As you probably guessed from the picture with this piece.

It’s such a cool piece of kit that I could no longer resist it. Even though I have dozens of reasons why I don’t need it (for one, I’m too freakin’ old!) I said ‘Damnation to all reasons’ and bought it.

This is no longer impulse buying we’re talking about, this is crazed lemmings behaviour ! No, you don’t have to let me know what you think about that – I’ve probably already said it to myself…

I’ll post a bit more about using it (and what games I’m playing) later on, once I can spend some more time with the beast.

First impressions though :
– it looks and is extremely cool.
– you need a screen protector from day one – seriously.
– you need a good screen protector – the bad ones seriously degrade the screen quality !
– I can live with the battery charge – I don’t get to use it anyways longer than an hour or so per session… snif.
– An option to install a real hard drive in there (or otherwise : using a 4 or 8 GB memory card) will seriously let you expand your options what to do with it (play multiple games without changing discs, store more content).

Also, with regards to the last item above, Sony should be a bit more ‘open’ in letting people run unsigned code from their memory sticks : for now, if you want to run MAME, UAE or SCUMM emulators (there are dozens more) you need to have firmware 1.5, which you can only downgrade to if you have firmware 2.0 (Sony is at version 2.60 now).
Of course, it also allows you to run UMD-rips stored on your memory stick…

My psp (hmmmm ! that has a nice ring to it, my psp) has firmware 2.0. I’m still mulling about what to do : upgrading to the latest version (which more and more games require) or downgrading or just keeping it like that. I’ll probably be upgrading though, it’s not like I have time to do much more than play the occasional game on it.

Categories
Blog News

Taking the train is waiting…

Winter is coming. And every year it is the same problem – the trains break down – or rather, the junction boxes or the powerlines.

Yesterday there was a broken power line in Brussels South.
Today there was (again) a broken power line in Halle.

There was only one train leaving, and I think we could (almost) simulate a Japanese train, what with all the people pressed together in it.

Pfffrt.

Categories
Blog News

A train is always a bit travelling and meeting strangers

Thursday had a special ending to it. While boarding the train home, the intercom came alive to tell us that there was a problem with the mains in Halle station. We would be delayed ‘for an undetermined amount of time’…. after which the train left anyway.

We continued our trip until just before Halle – where we stopped, and the train conductor told us that we would have to wait between 30 to 60 minutes for the six trains before us to clear. Apparently there was only one track that was still working, and trains had to take turns going forward.

Kudos to the train conductor, who the whole time was upfront with us and shared with us the news when he got it himself. We were not too happy though to hear about these delays, especially those people who had to travel normally for another hour or two . I asked if we could not go back to the last station, so those who would wish to could get picked up there , take the bus, or even go on foot from there. He told us that this was not at the moment possible, but would look into it.

After another half hour, he had permission, and we finally went in reverse and traveled 200 meters or so back to the last station (Buizingen), where most of us got of the train. Most people had somebody waiting to pick them up, it seems, as only a few of us walked home.

Together with another lady I started talking to, we walked the 40 minutes home in the pouring rain. At least it wasn’t freezing ! After a while, we hardly noticed the rain or the dark night, as we discovered what each of us had experienced. Turns out she had been an ex-Sabena air stewardess, so we started comparing planes, trips and air traffic and feeling scared or not during flights.

In the end, it was that experience that made it all worthwhile. I did not think of the long walk home or the long boring wait in the train – I had nice, good long talk with a total stranger !

Categories
Apple Blog News

Dantz Retrospect disc has arrived

The Dantz Retrospect disc (that was supposed to come with the Iomega minimax) was in the mail yesterday morning. It took some time to solve this missing disc problem, but I got it. In a big part thanks to Harriett, the Apple After Sales support person.

Categories
Blog News

The (Sony) plot thickens

vnunet.be – DN – Sony rootkit accused of licence violation

Seems like the XCP program developed by First4Internet and distributed by Sony as theu XCP copy protection program re-used parts of open-source programs like mpeg123, which is mostly GPL’ed.

Thus Sony would be, if this is true, in license violation by not including a copy of the GPL license and including the source code.

Of course, all of this is moot – since the DCMA law prevents people from reverse-compiling it to see if this is actually so or not…

Categories
Blog News TechScience Future

The 11-Year Quest to Create Disappearing Colored Bubbles – Popular Science

The 11-Year Quest to Create Disappearing Colored Bubbles – Popular Science

This article recounts the amazing discovery of coloured bubbles and how hard it is to make them.

In the end, it seems that they may only be a side-effect of the new dyes that were created : instead of colours that persist, they have invented colours that disappear (intentionally).

Categories
Hardware

Update on the minimax

I’ve been very happy using the Iomega minimax drive, but I did not find anywhere the Dantz Retrospect backup software that was promised to come with it, as was mentioned in the Apple page (and on the Iomega page) when I ordered it. I looked on the Minimax drive itself, I double-checked the box and the included Solutions CD, but nowhere was there any trace of the software.

Since then, I’ve contacted Apple After Sales support, and I am happy to say that I have gotten a very helpful After Sales Support person by the name of Harriett. She has contacted Iomega and they will send me the Dantz software on disk.

On the (slightly) minus side, I noticed that while my Firewire connections worked, my USB connections on the Minimax were not working. I thought that there was a chip inside that rerouted the usb connections via the Firewire cable (or vice versa, depending on which connection you made).

After reading the manual a bit more (yes I know, I should read it more thoroughly), I’ve discovered that there is no technical wizardry involved in having an extra USB and Firewire hub on the minimax drive. You have to connect both a Firewire link and a USB cable for both hubs to function, which means that you gain 2 Firewire ports instead of 3. The USB uplink is provided seperately, so you gain 3 USB ports.

I’ve used them all ! USB Webcam, small USB hub, USB mouse, FW DVD drive, FW camera link, oops full already ! Luckely I’ve got enough connections for now…

Categories
Blog News Hardware

Iomega Minimax 200 Gig : first looks

2005/minimax_drive

I bit the bullet and ordered last Tuesday an Iomega minimax from the Apple Belgium store. They have a special discount running till the end of this year where you buy the 200GB for the same price (199 €) as the 160 GB.

As a strange aside, the Iomega Europe site does not sell the 200GB anymore, only the 250 GB so my guess this is one or other Apple deal with them to get rid of some overstock ?

It arrived the Friday morning, and I have since installed it after reorganising my desk. It fits very nicely under my Mac Mini and is fast enough. It connects via an ultra-short firewire cable that is delivered with it. However, the fan generates more noise (when it activates, which does not take long when you use it) than the Mac Mini itself.

At first I was going to boot from it using the firewire link between them, but I’ve come to enormously appreciate the (almost) silence from the Mac Mini, so I am going to try to keep on using the Mac Mini as initial boot drive and put all my backups and large files (like Garageband, iPhoto and iDVD projects) on the Minimax drive.