Goal:
5.1 output from my PS3 through my computer.
Why? I don’t have any other way to output to 5.1 from it without spending money (receiver + different speakers).

What I have:
First gen PS3, HDMI and TOSLINK cables.

Monitor has HDMI -> analog stereo output
Problems: Constant low hum (monitor has bad quality output) and only 2.0 sound. This requires the monitor to be on HDMI output to passthrough audio as well.

This motherboard. It has a Realtek ALC888 chip. I also have the separate bracket for TOSLINK in.
Problems: This can do stereo but no DTS/Dolby, but it fixes the buzzing problem. It can also play when the monitor is on different output.

And a Creative X-Fi Extreme Audio card.
This has S/PDIF in, but I am not spending $100+ on the options they have to actually use it. Instead I am trying repin the gigabyte bracket and have it connect to this card. It does have DTS/Dolby decoding

So, the gigabyte manual says that the bracket has three pins.
1. red – Power
2. yellow – SPDIF_I
3. black – GND

So I switched black and yellow to match up with this pinout diagram of the creative card (top left, +5V, GRN, SPDIF0 IN)

Plugged that in and… nothing. I can hear feint popping when I switch audio output devices on the PS3, but the Creative card never shows a signal (“Unknown or invalid signal”, just like when disconnected).

Any help or insight would be appreciated, thanks.

P.S. I think I may have destroyed any input on my sound card by fooling around with this. My microphone no longer works on that sound card

So I looked back at why I switched away from Chrome the last time I was using it.

• Too much RAM usage on my netbook with Windows 7
• No bookmark syncing, Xmarks wasn’t working  at the time
• Missing many add-ons I loved in Firefox

And effectively all these problems have been solved. My netbook is now running Ubuntu, Xmarks works and google has their own built in syncing with google docs and there are many more add-ons (like ad-blocker) so I’m not missing any functionality. Not to mention that Chrome feels like a faster browser and uses less vertical space by default.

So I’m back with Chrome. I might look like a google fanboy but I think of it as the same as I think of Logitech. I didn’t decide to buy a Logitech mouse (or three), keyboard, speakers and headset because I’m in love with the company. I chose it because those were the best products at the time. Google makes some really nice products, so I will embrace them.

Removal of Consumer Rights

I absolutely understand not wanting to lose this control. If I want a friend to borrow a a game all I have to do is lend them the cd, they play, give it back when they are done.

Instead, if I want someone to play my game I’d have to give them access to my entire account and I won’t be able to play these game myself at the time. Not to mention I don’t think steam would take this nicely.

However, on used game sales, I have sold maybe two PC games over the last 10 or so years I’ve been playing them for. It is not a big loss to me at all.

Publisher Are In Control

Totally in control. I have never, ever seen a sale on a Call of Duty game because Activision likes their money so much. However, I disagree that I can get games for a better deal in a local store. Left4Dead 2 has been as low as $33 USD, I bought it at $37 USD, the pre-order price was $45 USD and it is currently $50 USD. By comparison, it is $60 CAD at Futureshop and that price will never go down.

But that is a Valve made game, how about Red Faction Guerrilla which was released about 4 months ago for PC. $10 USD, on sale during the holidays, $20 USD standard, or $40 CAD at Futureshop.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen a game cheaper in a store than on Steam, but that might be a local issue.

The other side of this is that you don’t necessarily need a publisher apart from Steam. Osmos is done by Hemisphere Games which self-published the game. The link is then Hemisphere Games, Valve, then the customer where Valve replaces the normal publisher and retailer and the developer no doubt gets more money and easier access to the customer base.

DRM

DRM ontop of steam I find unacceptable. That would be games like Sacred 2 which list “3rd-party DRM: SecuROM™”. Absolutely unnecessary but not Steam’s fault.

One thing that is missed in the analysis is that steam is more than just DRM for games. It is an entire social network for gamers. I currently have 20 friends in-game with another 20 friends online. I want it to run in the background just like I want MSN and IRC to run in the background even if I’m not using them.

As for automatic patching, I greatly prefer this to the situation with Battlefield 1942. The game kept on being patched by DICE but several parts of the community split off at points. That means that in order to play with people X I had to have patch X and in order to play with people Y I had to have patch Y. The worst part? you can’t go down in order for patches so you have to completely uninstall and reinstall all these (hundreds of megs sometimes) patches to play with said lower version.

I do agree though that Valve shouldn’t have the problem of “we’re too popular” and servers start dying because they update something or put something on sale.

The other tiny bit in here is games that aren’t patched on Steam even though they are patched in retail. This is the fault mostly of publishers or archaic games. In the case of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. – Shadow of Chernobyl, the publisher and developer have a terrible relationship so the publisher won’t push the patch to Steam. Developers usually aren’t hindered by publishers in this regard but Valve talks to the publisher here. Many of the unpatched games are out of date. Developers might not even be able to support it if they wanted to simply because of how old they are.

Ignorance & Inflation

Sucks, but they need to show support with their wallet. I’m pretty sure it’s a similar situation on the PS3 as well. That’s not an excuse, just another example.

No Live Support? Really?

Google is having the same problem with the Android phone. It’s terrible if you’re used to calling someone up for tech support.

Summary

The problem I have relating to many of these issues is that I haven’t had any. The worst thing I’ve had is waiting 20 minutes to play TF2 after an update. I’ve never needed support. I’ve never found a game cheaper in store than on steam (and several times have bought something in a store and then there was a steam sale the next week). I don’t frequently lend out PC games. I have never been affected by Steam DRM.

I also love steam when compared to things like Futureshop and EB Games because the primary purpose of Steam is to sell PC games whereas the primary purpose of those places is no such thing. EB Games is for used console game sales and new release console games with XYZ premium content. They have the worst PC game displays I’ve seen with tattered old boxes filing up a shelf so you can’t see anything . Futureshop sells many things and still forces PC games to the “other” section.

And it’s because of that behavior that developers and publishers like Steam.

Why do people do this? Protection. So that their gadget still looks good after a few months of use.

But what ends up happening is the case starts to look horrible. It scratches easier than what it is protecting in the first place. I’ve seen cell phones and ipods with screens you can’t even see anymore. So you end up with a terrible looking unusable device.

The only thing worse than this is leaving the plastic covers on that devices are shipped. This is most evident on HP Laptops. These are generally dirtier than the device because they’ve been through the factory. They have bubbles under them. They sometimes are half off and people still try to keep it on… Next time I see one of those I’m ripping it off.

Update Dec 2009: There are many new computers at work with that plastic film that I have been able to take off. It feels great!

I got my own name though, and that’s very nice. Favourites so far are facebook.com/Default.aspx and www.facebook.com/index.aspx. Many that I expected to be gone are still not taken, like facebook.com/Satan but I have a feeling those are disallowed somehow.

I also know a bunch of people who have yet to jump on this at all, get on that internet friends!

ARG *HEADDESK*

Second chat? He started with “Electric boobs and fallopian tubes” and just went downhill from there. I won’t get into the details but I had to tell him to see a doctor… and then a vet. -1 for Omegle.

My third chat started with him saying “cyber?” and ended with me saying “notnx” rather quickly. -1 for Omegle.

And my last chat? It went absolutely nowhere, neither of us had anything to talk about. No points either way.

Should you try it out? sure, it’s worth 5 minutes. Just don’t expect to gain anything at all from it.

I also brought my server into my room and have started using it for TV and such. I realized that it was being used almost exclusively for storage and since it had a lot more power than that I wanted to use it for something else. That combined with my problem with a few games not liking dual-monitors made me recommission it as a Debian box which is sitting in my room now. Whenever I’m playing games or other things on my desktop I use that box for TV. Apart from that it still serves the exact same purpose as before, but it’s also easier to maintain with Debian.

But because I only had one cable coming into my room my desktop had get connectivity through my server. This was a real pain in the ass because it meant that nothing on the rest of the network (wireless, which means my laptop) could connect to my desktop anymore and I had to move everything through the server if I needed it. I also needed to have the server on if I wanted a connection on my desktop. This really wasn’t working for me so I dropped some cash earlier this week for a nice gigabit 8 port switch, couple of cat6 and I hooked everything up faster than before.

At first it was just fading out and I could compensate for it but a few hours later I was totally deaf in that ear. It was probably the biggest loss of body control I’ve ever had. And these guys on the bus were a very horrible reminder of that.

So what do I do in a normal day now that orientation is over?

Usually I get a bunch of emails telling me to moves files from one place to another. Renew a few domain names once a week. Renew some SSL certificates as well.

And when there is nothing like that to do? I get to mess around with ASP.NET and try and make a nice WAN map for our company network. With the power of SQL and a whole lot of googling I’ve gotten decently far. I still wouldn’t say that I know much about it but it’s better than just sitting on IRC all day. Which I might be doing anyway…

Oh, and it’s an all Windows environment which makes me a little bit frustrated at times. It’s nice in relation to how things work very nicely across the network when they work. It’s not so nice when things don’t work and you have no idea what is going wrong.

The video card is a vast improvement on my current video card, an Asus Radeon X1950 Pro. First, it supports DirectX 10 which means I can use all sorts of cool new effect in games to make it look just a tiny bit more realistic. Secondly, there have been great architecture improvements in the past 3 generations of video cards. The main one I can think of is the change from separate vertex/pixel shaders to one unified shader model. The X1950 had 36 pixel pipes and 8 vertex shaders which means at best it can use 44. The 4850 has 800 which it can split any way it needs to.

There are some problems attached to the 4850 though. With the stock cooling they have reached temperatures of over 90 degrees Celsius. While this is very hot, and the card is meant to handle it, I opted for HIS’s revision with their ICEQ4 cooler which is a dual slot cooler. This means the heat is moved entirely outside of my case and it’s a much larger fan. The extra overclocking freedom might come in handy and it will probably preserve the life of my card.

After I bought those I started looking at monitors a few days later. I wasn’t going to buy one at first but at just over $400 for a 24″ monitor with what I wanted, great dark levels and 1920×1200, I couldn’t not buy the V2400W. I was going to go for widescreen with my current monitor but at the time I didn’t want to lose backwards compatibility with some older games. Now that I’ve gone for 64bit Vista, a DX10 video card and 4GB of RAM (impossible for 32bit normally) I think widescreen will be the least of my worries. Besides, it handles 1:1 pixel mapping of standard resolutions anyway.

So with the new hardware on its way you can expect that I will be much more productive and be able to use my time much better.

Yeah right, time to replay some games with higher resolution and better textures and effects!

Other good bookmarklets I’ve come across are:

• BugMeNot for getting past registration quickly on large sites.
• is.gd for making urls smaller, similar to tinyurl except an even smaller url.
• You can also download videos from youtube and other places with this link (not a bookmarklet)

for x in $(ls -1 .); do
mount -t iso9660 -o loop $x temp/;
cp -r temp/* .;
umount temp/;
done;

Which did the job but was horribly messing on doing it more than once with tons of errors and stuff.

When I came home I decided to make it much better. I even included how long it takes to do the whole process, which was harder than the process itself.

So right now it looks like:

before=$(date +%s);
mkdir temp/;#tempdir
for x in $(ls -1 ./*.iso); do
echo Currently unpacking $x | sed -e ‘s/.\///; s/.iso//’; #remove extra output
mount -t iso9660 -o loop $x temp/; #mounts iso
cp -ru temp/* .;
umount temp/;
done;
rmdir temp/; #cleanup
after=$(date +%s);
elapsed=$(expr $after – $before); #time calculations
((hour=$elapsed/60/60));
((min=$elapsed/60-hour*60));
((sec=$elapsed-hour*60*60-$min*60));
echo “Elapsed time: “`printf “%02d” $hour`”:”`printf “%02d” $min`”:”`printf “%02d” $sec`;

Which does everything I want it too, even the pain in the ass zero-padding of the times. Remember to chmod +x <filename> if you want to use it .

Edit: Well, I messed up a few things, I only tested in under one minute times and the shell on that server only contains sh and ash. Here is the revised edition:

#! /bin/sh
before=$(date +%s);
mkdir temp/;#tempdir
for x in $(ls -1 ./*.iso); do
echo Currently unpacking $x | sed -e ‘s/.\///; s/.iso//’; #remove extra output
mount -t iso9660 -o loop $x temp/; #mounts iso
cp -ru temp/* .;
umount temp/;
done;
rmdir temp/; #cleanup
after=$(date +%s);
elapsed=$(expr $after – $before); #time calculations
hour=”$(expr “$elapsed” ‘/’ ’60′ ‘/’ ’60′)”
min=”$(expr “$elapsed” ‘/’ ’60′ ‘-’ ‘$hour’ ‘*’ ’60′)”
sec=”$(expr “$elapsed” ‘-’ ‘$hour’ ‘*’ ’60′ ‘*’ ’60′ ‘-’ ‘$min’ ‘*’ ’60′)”
echo “Elapsed time: “`printf “%02d” $hour`”:”`printf “%02d” $min`”:”`printf “%02d” $sec`;

And now I know that sh is *really* annoying to do math in.

For those of us really into the whole internet thing, we need our RSS feeds so we can get our information as fast as possible. You should have this blag on your RSS feed already! *shakes fist*

Let’s take a look at two big web based feed readers: Netvibes and Google Reader.

The Layout
Netvibes allows you to see the top 1-40 of any feed you have on a page at a time. As many feeds as you want on each page, pages being organized by tabs. 1-4 columns, variable width. It’s very nice to move everything around with AJAX. Click on a feed and it changes to have all the titles of that feed on the left side and as I click on them they come up.

Google Reader has all your feeds laid out on the left side, organized by category. You can then view each feed as a full page view or as a large list. It allows for as much backtracking as you need, grabbing older items the farther you scroll back.

The Customization
Netvibes allows various tweaks to each widget such as the inclusion of extra details, arrows to flip through elements, post date. Also you can change titles, keyboard shortcuts, themes, wallpapers and hide the search box. Enough stuff to make anyone satisfied.

Google Reader allows you to choose which page to start on, easy removal of the navigation pane and… well that’s about it.

The Extras
Netvibes has many extra widgets outside of the realm of RSS. From simple games to being able to check your email, gmail to hotmail to anything pop3. Facebook, myspace, notes, todo lists, embedding websites within netvibes. It also has ‘universes’ which allows any user to see whatever another user decided to make public from his/her universe.

Google Reader is inevitably tied in with everything google. Gmail, google calendar, google docs,  etc. It also has one nice button to refresh all of your feeds at once. You can share feeds with friends on google as well, easily found with google contacts.

Other Mentionables
Netvibes goes down. Recently it has done so a lot. It also sometimes marks all items of a feed unread. I usually know the last on I’ve read anyway but this can get annoying.

Google Reader is slow. You have to wait easily over a second to see the items in a feed after clicking on it. This might be acceptable except Netvibes is much faster on this.

Which one should you choose?
Play around with both. Find out what you like. One might be better for your specific needs.

I use Netvibes because I’m constantly getting updates throughout the day. The ability to see specifically what these are is very helpful for me. Take a look at my universe if you want.

I assume the setup of Google Reader allows for someone to accumulate a lot of news items and then read them all at once much faster which is better if you want to splurge feeds for a while then get back to whatever you were doing.