Archive for the 'Entertainment' Category

Tips to extend your cellular battery life…

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by
Gizmo
on May 17, 2008
in Entertainment, Rants and Tech
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Ok, so I spent several days going through reviews on the Nokia 6555 cellphone, listening to people whine and whine about how the battery only lasts a day when they don’t run anything special…  Well, news to you, you are…

Cellphones are delivered to you with every feature enabled…  All of them…  And all these nifty features kill your battery life, so unless you charge your battery every night, you need to disable some things…

First, turn packet data to “as needed” instead of “always on”; this will only connect to the network when it’s needed (like when you want to use the internet with your phone); otherwise you have a constantly connected connection to the internet with your phone, which just zaps your battery.

Second, if you’re not using it, consider turning off bluetooth…  Bluetooth is the wireless utility hwich lets you use a wireless headset with your phone… And it uses a LOT of your battery to have on.  Consider this, only enable bluetooth when you need it…  You can enable it during a call on most phones as well.

Third, turn off your screen saver!  Just let your phone standby the screen when it’s not in use; your nifty looking analog clock screensaver will just be using the screen at all times instead of turning it off when it’s not in use.  I highly doubt you can even see the analog clock while it’s in your pocket ;)…

My last tip of the evening…  Which isn’t even power related…  Set your own PIN on your phone, for crying out loud, your tech support at your cellphone company doesn’t want to hear about your kids locking you out of your phone ;)…

Walkin, Talkin, TBird!

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by
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, 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
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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.

Trey, the Rescue Bully ;)…

Published
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Gizmo
on March 30, 2008
in Entertainment, Family and Out and About
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So, we brought the boy’s (Trey, Sam and my son (2 and a half), and Adam, Walter and Kellie’s son (4)) to the mall last night… We did some walking around and decided to let the kids burn off energy in the little kids area as Walter and I went to Game Stop to see if they had the elusive wii that he’s been looking for…

Well, it turns out that two 4-5 year old Mexican boy’s where bullying Adam, so Trey (my 2.5 year old) goes to his rescue, tears the bigger kids down, and puts Adam in a head lock and walks away…

Yeh, that’s right… My 2 year old kicked two 5 year old’s butts because he was bullying his wench (Adam) then reassured Adam that he was his wench by hauling him to the other end of the play equipment in a head lock… That’s my boy ;)…

Plain White T’s…

Published
by
Gizmo
on March 26, 2008
in Entertainment
. 0 Comments

So, for anyone who’s had the misfortune of being at my house and listening to my utterly random music collection; you’ll know I love music of every Genera… Especially the feel of Early 90’s Alternative music… Well, I came accross a band which kindles my interest…

Plain White T’s has a nice smoothe sound and actually have words you can understand! If you’ve had the chance to watch the ABC Family show “Greek”, they’re the band that does the intro and (from what I can tell) a lot of the music for the show…

So, I’d like to invite you all to go and preview one of their CD’s on Amazon, it won’t disappoint…

Disc’s:
Plain White T’s - Hey There Delilah
Plain White T’s - Every Second Counts
Plain White T’s - All That We Needed
Plain White T’s - Stop

XBox Memory Issues…

Published
by
Gizmo
on December 2, 2007
in Entertainment, Gaming, Rants and Tech
. 0 Comments

Well, I bought the Sandisk Cruzer 1gb drive which matches the stock feel of the XBox Core/Premium system, and I have a standard key (which I didn’t think was working) for my XBox360… Turns out, ANY USB device cannot access saved games or
XBL data…

So, what’s the problem? Well, I bought them so I could copy my XBL account to Walter’s XBox (and vice versa) so that he doesn’t have to bring his over all the time so we ca link systems to play together on our respective accounts…

So, now I have to buy the XBox Memory Card to do this… I found several of the 512mb’s on EBay though for under $20 (after shipping); and I can supposedly use them as storage devices (vs media devices) in the xbox. So I should be able to store downloads on there, such as game downloads, like Halo1 should I choose to blow 800 points on it ($10~).

So, a word to the wise:
USB Devices - Media Devices, music, pictures, video.
Memory Devices - Game Saves, Downloads, Storage.

The hunt for the XBox… A Black Friday story…

Published
by
Gizmo
on December 2, 2007
in Entertainment, Gaming, Out and About and Whining
. 0 Comments

Soooo, we get the bright idea on Black Friday that we want an XBox360… We have money, why not… Eventhough it’s rent and food money ;)…

So, Walter gets down here (From Vancouver, WA (Approx 30-35mi)) at about 10pm… We go to Walmart, they’re out. We go to Fred Meyers as we await sam to return a game (we bought the wrong version of it, which cost twice as much), they’re out… We go to toys r us, they’re closed… All in all, we hit every store on 82nd that was open in about 20 minutes… All out…

Long story short… We ended up in Camas, WA (Approx 30-35mi or 25mi from Walter’s house in the opposite direction)… The Walmart there had 2, core machines… the old ones… Old as in no HDMI, no “new chips”, no “additional heatsync’s”… So lets just hope we don’t burn out or I’ll have ot send it in for service…

Well, I have the XBox now… Halo is much more fun when I don’t have to wait for Walter to have to come over with his XBox lol… Made loads of new acquaintances :).

XBox 360 - Recovering Canceled Accounts

Published
by
Gizmo
on December 2, 2007
in Entertainment, Gaming and Rants
. 0 Comments

Well, a fine slap in the face from Microsoft… Turns out that when you cancel your gamertag for the XBox Live service, you cannot recover it in the future… Most people wouldn’t care here, but I do for two reasons…

1. Moguai is mine on their service, i’d have preferred to keep it…
2. If you port your old gamertag up to XBL for the 360, you get a free copy of Halo3…

As I can’t port up, I can’t do the deal :(…

Why did I cancel my XBL you ask? Well, in 2003 they overcharged us, and refused to refund us as their systems “didn’t allow” for it; so I had my creditcard company do it on their behalf and told them where they could put it…

So, now I’m on XBL as Gremelin, but still wanting to take part in the XBL thing to get a (second) copy of halo3…

House, oh how I love thee…

Published
by
Gizmo
on September 25, 2007
in Entertainment
. 0 Comments

Theres just something to be said about a pill popping cocky doctor that is as arrogant as I am that makes me chuckle to watch him as he works… Of all of my shows that I watch, I’m sure this is in my top 5 of the absolute best shows on television…