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

From left to right:

1. Cryptonomicon – Neal Stephenson
2. Anathem – Neal Stephenson
3. Foundation – Isaac Asimov
4. Nineteen Eighty-Four – George Orwell
5. Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? – Philip K. Dick
6. The Name of the Wind – Patrick Rothfuss
7. American Gods – Neil Gaiman
8. The War of the Worlds – H. G. Wells
9. Virtual Light – William Gibson
10. A Game of Thrones – George R.R. Martin
11. The Lies of Locke Lamora – Scott Lynch
12. Neverwhere – Neil Gaiman
13. Snow Crash – Neal Stephenson
14. The Diamond Age – Neal Stephenson
15. The Forever War – Joe Haldeman
16. Singularity 7 – Ben Templesmith
17. The Mortal Instruments Trilogy – Cassandra Clare
    • City of Bones
    • City of Ashes
    • City of Glass
18. The Wheel of Time, first three books – Robert Jordan
    • The Eye of the World
    • The Great Hunt
    • The Dragon Reborn

I’m going to be reading these for the next few years…

I’d like to thank The Sword and Laser, Mark Miltenburg and a few other people for these fine suggestions.

Why does this matter? Well if you don’t want to run automatic updates you can make a note of the second Tuesday of every and just run Windows Update then instead of always having a background process.

Looks wonderful, I can’t wait until this comes out. Finally an MMO where taking on more than one NPC is normal and won’t get your ass handed to you.

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.

The first season had a very nice overall plot, wrapped up at the end with a nice slightly unexpected ending. The overall arc completed and it wrapped up in the first few episodes of the next season.

The second season was a bit worse. They threw a large event in at the very beginning. And then they didn’t touch it for a while. And then they brought it up again. And then it disappeared. They used it for a few random smaller arcs within the season and then in the end it was someone who wasn’t even remotely related at the beginning. Before the end he was mostly a minor character. Not the even close to the best season of a TV show I’ve seen.

Season three? The ending was very abrupt and poorly done. They wrapped up in the last 10 minutes what should have been  done in another two or three episodes. I liked the season as a whole a bit better but the conclusion was simply terrible.

One thing that did get better throughout the show? Smart, cute, blonde girls really grow on me.

It was strange though, the clerk thought it was a gift for someone else (I bought it on the 23rd of December). So either I don’t look like the kind of guy who would buy WoW or I look like the kind of guy who already has WoW.

And so I’ve been playing with a friend for the past few weeks, on and off, mostly off so far. Triple experience bonus is nice so I hit level 57 tonight. Only 23 more until I get to play the real game!

Apart from that I’ve played and beat Mirror’s Edge now that it finally came out for PC. 6 hours was all it took and although it was fun, not worth $50. Unless you’re going to be doing speed runs or waiting for some fantastic DLC ($10 at the end of this month) I would not buy it.

In the past two nights I’ve also gone to a bit of Counter Strike: Source to sharpen up on my headshot skills. I seem to have lost it with all of these MMORPGs and tactics based FPSs that don’t check for headshots. And if I lose my ability to shoot people in the head in games on my computer, what am I then?

See you at level 80!

What do you do when a single, drunk girl walks into your room? I continue playing Guitar Hero.

And what do you do when a single, drunk girl walks into your room and sits on your lap? I continue playing Guitar Hero.

And what do you do when a single, drunk girl walks into your room, sits on your lap and tries to kiss you? I continue playing Guitar Hero.

Eventually she got fed up and left saying my favourite line of first year, “And that’s why you’re still a virgin, Mike.”

You see, I don’t do drunk chicks.

And thanks to this little incident conversation has been akward with her ever since. She keep trying to talk to me on MSN which I kind of brush off. It’s not like I have anything to be afraid of from stalkers, I’m a 6’6″ guy.

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)

It’s from the maker of Firefly, Joss Whedon. and has Neil Patrick Harris from How I Met Your Mother among other things, Felicia Day who I know from The Guild, and Nathan Fillion from Firefly.

And no, musicals are still bad.

How often has x been googled over the years? Good for at least a half hour of fun! As a CS major, part of the math department, it is amazingly entertaining to look at trends of things, especially internet memes. Want to know when lolcats started? Rickrolling? It’s right there.

You can see when large historical events happened, who is more popular in the results (Obama). Compare HD-DVD to Blu-ray searches, see how things get more (emo) and less (My Chemical Romance) popular over the years. Porn searches vs. free porn? The possibilities are endless.

It’s like googlefight but over time as well. Extra dimension means it’s infinitely better. Go spend a good half hour at least amusing yourself.

You can thank Mark Miltenburg for this blog, he made me write it.