Monthly Archive for April, 2008

Walkin, Talkin, TBird!

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Gizmo
on April 11, 2008
in Entertainment and Family
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Trey is absolutely astonishing me lately…  I can actually lead him to talk in a conversation… He’s like my ventriloquism puppet! lol…  He’s gotten really good at spewing words out and he will ultimately try to say anything you ask him to say.

So here we are, 1am… I pick him up, set him on my lap… Sam’s on her DS, so she’s not paying attention… So I whisper to Trey, “Say, Mommy”; and he’s all “Mommy”… “Say happy”, “a-ppppy”…  “Anniversery”… “aaveeeerrrrr sss ry”…

I did sooo not think he’d be able to spew out anniversary…  But it was close enough to hear, we all got a decent laugh ;).. hehe

The DVR Mission, PT2 - The future and beyond!

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Gizmo
on April 11, 2008
in Rants and Tech
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Ok, so with my DVR I have the Hauppauge 350 card; it’s not a dual tuner card like the 500, but I specifically wanted the radio, a hardware decoder, and the IR remote receiver (Even though I also bought the “White Box” Firefly remote from BeyondTV)…

So, what do you ask are my plans?  Well, I’m still deciding…  I want to be able to stream the radio, but at this point it doesn’t look like there is a upnp option for that, so I’m probably going to install BeyondTV again once I get a decent SVideo/Composite switch… Ideally I’d like one that I can use a remote with (I have an 8 device learning remote, EVERYTHING is in it, including the wall fan… scary).

I also plan to buy a media extender for my Hauppauge 350, it has headers for it, which means the one card can read in two streams… Which means I can have both my VCR and Satelite dish streaming into the DVR…

Also, my mom said she’d buy me the IR Blaster for my birthday, but it hasn’t gotten here yet…  Which will be nice as I will be able to have the computer capable of turning the satelite dish’s channels…  Which will be smoothe ;)…

Other than that?  Not entirely sure… Definately open to sugguestions though ;)

WMC for WXP, the mission that finally was…

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Gizmo
on April 11, 2008
in Rants and Tech
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Ok, so on my previous posting I talked about getting Windows Media Connect working on my Windows Media Center PC (DVR), but I also wanted to get the same software running on my desktop that I had been using as a media dump for the last 2 years…

Well, I did a simple google search, “Windows Media Connect” and wham, instantly found the Microsoft page… This was too easy…  I go to the page, and what?  Yeh, it was too easy… “This package is no longer availalbe for download, instead, upgrade to Windows Media Player 11 and share from there!”, well, that’s all fine and dandy, and I do have WMP11 on all of my computers… But I like this utility, and its UI is perfect… And I don’t want WMP running ALL the time just becuase I want to share some files…

So I search around, and around, and around, and FINALLY find an install package for WMC2 for WXP, I download it as fast as I can and go to install it…  It bogs, it dies, the install just dies!  I go to the directory and look, and it did create several files, but the important ones are 0byte…

So I look and find an article on the XBox360 site talking about the method of manual install for WMC! YEY!…  So I follow the instructions and FINALLY get it installed… And it works flawlessly…

I wrote up a small batch file to do the install process, and I have the files… All of which will be published to UGN Security within a few days… (what can I say, I have a lot to write up, and it’ll be a busy weekend…)

The DVR Mission, PT1

Published
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Gizmo
on April 11, 2008
in Entertainment, Rants and Tech
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Ok, so a while ago I bought all of the equipment for a DVR, and I got fed up with it… I took everything apart and put the disk on Sam’s desktop and just said the hell with it and left everything in a big pile of expensive parts…

Well, since the XBox360 now supports DIVX and I can stream media through UPNP I decided that I need to get back on track and work to make things how I initially wanted… You know, being able to stream movies, music, and my favorite tv shows to my tv through the xbox, screw the svideo problems i was having before…

So, I piece everything back together, ensuring I have the best secondary hardware in the house in the machine (yes, I was a jackass and compared my mom’s hardware in her desktop to that of what is in my DVR, but I already had the good stuff…). After failing that mission (well, I think I passed since it was mother superior!) I got to work…

I decided that I had wanted to go with Windows XP Media Center Edition 2005, so I got to work and got to patching, moving things around, and after getting pissed at a black screen on windows setup and referring to google, I got windows installed and MCE running…

A quick “what was” for those wondering, when you run the Windows Installer when you’re installing from running a Linux distribution (CentOS/RHEL in my case) you’ll want to use a disk fix utility to just blindly format the drive to NTFS, I used the Ultimate Boot CD. What happens is that the Windows Installer cannot read the Ext2 partition and dies, leaving you with 0 information on what happened…

So, now that I had WXP MCE installed, I decided to work on hardware and see what I could get to work with my Hauppauge 350 multimedia card (hardware decoding baby!)… So I get all my drivers installed, and I load up MCE… It doesn’t like the radio function of my Hauppauge… Moreover, it doesn’t even recignise that it’s plugged into a media source… Nor does it utilize either through the media center connection to the XBox… Such a let down… (I will write another entry on setting up the XBox360 to a media center, so be patient for a next entry)

So, here I am just waiting for an answer, so I visit the xbox360 website and look for more options… Well, one option was to use Windows Media Connect (WMC) to connect my XBox to my PC… Well, this uses uPNP to make a connection… What have I been using before? Same crap, different program… BUT, this one doesn’t keep a library, it seeks all data live, when you look for it… So no need to make updates every time I add a new file…

So I get it all installed, set my media folders (Digital Camera, Digital Camera Corder dump directory, etc) and I go to the XBox and look for new devices… WHAM, “DVR - 1″ is a new device on the network… So I connect looking for video, and what do I find? All of my video! 0 problems!

So, I have a working DVR now, so I can ease off of Sam’s computer… Well, not really, I have a lot of stuff there too… Next posting? WMC for XP a pain to find…

Halo3 Legendary Map Pack, April 15th…

Published
by
Gizmo
on April 11, 2008
in Entertainment, Gaming and Rants
. 0 Comments

So, Bungie is releasing their Legendary Map Pack for Halo3 on April 15th…  I can’t wait, in fact, this weekend I’ll be going and buying some Marketplace Points for the XBox360 so I can be sure I’m one of the first Halo addicts with the new maps…

However, I’m not one of those hardcore nerds who wants them to be the first few players playing them…  I want to be one of the first few nerds attempting to find all of the glitches in the maps, then be the top archetect editing the maps…

In fact, I had the Heroic Map Pack in December when it first came out and I rarely even played the stock maps until they begun to be in the standard rotation this week when they became free…

Which brings up another point…  When the next map pack comes out, the previous will be made available for free.  So since the Legendary Map Pack will be out 4/15, this month the predicessor (Heroic Map Pack) was issued out free.  So, where I could wait ~4 months and get them for free in August/September, I’d really rather have the edge on hacking at the maps (I work on so many maps that I’ve reached my editing quota several times and had maps overwritten and gotten the editing warning that so few rarely see).

One thing that I don’t like however is the price…  The maps cost 800 Marketplace Points, which amounts roughly to $12.95…  Well, I bought Halo3 for $60 when it came out, and it came out with 11 maps…  So for a fifth of the cost I’d expect more than 3 maps when I got a game and 11 maps for a bit more…  I’d expect say 5 maps per map pack… Yes, that’d make a happy Gizmo…

I think I may type up a couple of little tidbits about the new maps and what I like about them and expect to do with them through observations of what I’ve seen on them a bit later…  Two of them look pretty beefy, but the one looks rather small, so I’ll get back on my plans when I have a bit more time to rant and lookup images for detail…

Well, that’s my nice little halo3 map pack rant…  now that you’re all asleep…  I cut the cheese.

WholesaleSubscriptions.com is a scam…

Published
by
Gizmo
on April 11, 2008
in Rants and Reviews
. 0 Comments

I ordered 3 years of Maxim from this company as the price could not be met elsewhere… Turns out that the statement “if it sounds too good to be true, chances are, it’s not” comes to be true… Never recieved a single thing.

Sent several queries to the “sales department” since I ordered, they used to respond with “we’re looking into it”, and even talked to someone claiming to be the “new owner” who was fixing issues with previous owners… Was promised things would be made right… Well, here I am almost a year later, with no issues…

Turns out, when I took the time to write Maxim to inquire about if an order had been received, and forwarded the information to WholeSaleSubscriptions.com that they decided I was no longer worth lying to…

After I had realized I had been scammed, I took and googled the company… Good grief there are a lot of people who also got scammed…  Too bad it’s past my providers “maximum return” timeframe (which it would have been reguardless as it generally takes 3+ months to start a new subscription with any company… unless you deal with them directly), or I’d file a complaint to get my money back…