It has been roughly 36 episodes of the show now, and a fresh problem that was brewing has come to a head.
Storage.
Initially, when using my old webcam, it wasn’t so much of a problem… but then April came along and I switched to 1080p source and my storage pressures began to mount with every new episode.
You see, depending on how much I fluff my lines and amount of dialogue I spew out, an episode can devour between 10 and 30GB when you add the sources for each item. Despite my network capacity sitting at about 5TB, much of that is devoted to my rather large library of DVD rips and game ISO’s/maps/mods (all of which I own a paid for copy) - you see, I’m too lazy to compress them, and I now rue my penchant for “special editions”
Thankfully, I was forced to replace the 750GB HDD in my main rig due to bad sectors earlier this year and still had the buggered HDD to replace on warranty. So I raise the RMA and ship it off. Luckily, the store I purchased it from (since it was an OEM HDD) no longer stocked that model and was able to upgrade the 750GB into a 1TB for no extra cost - I really do love the pace of technology at times!
After a little pondering as to where this new drive was going to call home, I settled on plumbing it into my main windows rig - well, it can’t physically fit into my server (already sporting 2.75TB) and my NAS box is out of the question since it requires a pair of drives.
Drive in, formatted, shared and filled with the current archives with little trouble… until the 700GB is swallowed up at some point. Though, with any luck, I’ll have the cash to spend on a better and more long term solution. Think I need to start a Drobo fund >.<
Not so long ago families only had the one computer and housed little in the way of our lives outside of each other’s work.
The only real pressure on the storage of this humble home PC was exerted by video games, the family copy of Encarta (oh how the internet usurped thee) and any musical projects by aspiring artists.
But with the stellar rise of digital cameras, camcorders, DVR’s and mp3 players all plugging into multiple computers and devices around the home, the need for more space has developed into the requirement for shared storage.
This is where Network Attached Storage (NAS) is finally making some serious headway in the consumer market.
While many early adopters had been playing around creating their own using old computers stuffed to the brim with hard drives and packing an install of something like FreeNAS, the consumer products have been doing a little more evolving from these Frankenstein creations.
Slimming down from a PC crammed with hard drives; consumer NAS devices such as the Thecus N2100, Buffalo Terastation and Drobo with the network addition are embedded systems with a RAID array of hard drives connected to them, reducing energy consumption and granting smaller physical sizes. Some are merely small form factor PC’s such as HP’s MediaSmart server based on Windows Home Server, though WHS goes well beyond the features of most NAS boxes by providing extensive backup of windows PC’s, synchronisation of passwords etc.
Getting back to the point of shared storage, reducing their size isn’t the only improvement since many come packed with extras focused on media sharing.
A common feature is the web based gallery for sharing your photos across HTTP rather than browsing the folder, although I’ve never found myself using this functionality over simple folder browsing. This could change though, with the rise of RSS reading wifi picture frames, the family portrait wall could become extremely dynamic with something fresh to look at every day.
One feature that shows more usefulness would be music on the NAS appearing as a shared library in any computer running itunes. Where photos tend to be a once in a while viewing, a music collection will be hammered with use and it makes sense to keep it all in one place rather than fragmented across multiple computers.
The only downside is that Apple doesn’t support true network syncing of ipods from a central store, so it rapidly gets quite messy and is hardly suitable for the average home, definitely needs more work – hint, hint apple.
Then we have the truly killer feature, the ability to stream your music and video files to any device or application that supports the Universal Plug n Play or newer DLNA protocols. This allows the pickup and streaming of content from your NAS box onto any supporting device such as your PVR set top box, games console or HTPC.
Imagine having your entire DVD collection in a central library, accessible through a few clicks in a menu system on any device in the house.
No more hunting round for misplaced discs and get to claw back the self space you sacrificed to the almighty collection. It also means format wars like the HD-DVD and Blu-Ray one of the past couple of years can pass you by as a blip on the radar. Why bother with a physical disc when you have the digital file?
So far I have only mentioned use on a home network, the rise of the laptop means we might not even be in the house anymore.
Well, that hasn’t been ignored, much to the ire of ISP’s, since devices such as the MVixBox from MVi and LaCie’s Internet Space NAS box will make use of the much ignored upstream portion of your net connection by providing a web portal for remote users to log into.
Not only can they stream your media and access documents from anyone’s net connection but it even allows them to upload files. Because this is happening across the net, friends and family can be given logon accounts so they can check out your home movies and pictures too, maybe even let them upload their media to you - sharing memories and creations between each other.
With all of our memories becoming digitised, the safety of this data becomes paramount too. Most home PC’s and laptops tend to have a single hard drive, which means if it were to die so will those pictures and videos of Timmy giving Muffy the cat a shave. NAS boxes tend to be set up in what is called a RAID 1 or a RAID 5 configuration depending on the number of hard drives it can take. This means should one of the drives fail, your data is still there.
It doesn’t secure against data corruption and deletion though, but not to worry as this too has been licked by allowing the backup of data to an external USB hard drive connected directly to the NAS device. Which means if something were to become corrupt or deleted it can be restored from the backup. It also allows you to get into the habit of making regular backups and storing them off site should the worst happen to your home.
In the space of 10 short years, the home has exploded from our media sitting in a largely physical analogue world, excluded from our computers, to being connected with everyone we love whenever we want it regardless of where we are.
Home storage has taken a massive leap towards a converged central point. It’s not there yet in terms of syncing that data to portable devices, but once it has that cracked the days of worrying about a single computer failure taking your library with it will be a thing of the past. This leaves us to get on with making, sharing (within legal allowances, of course!) and using without the pain of figuring out the how.
It’s my girlfriends birthday soon and I was stuck for what to buy her. Well, that is until she bitched about my decrepid digicam which is dieing a slow and painful death.
The lamp went on in my head and I decided to have a look for a new digicam as this years pressie - it’ll help her immensely since she needs to take photos for her game concepts and textures.
Off I went, scouring the web for good deals.
For a while I flitted between a couple of Fujifilm, Sony and Cannon compacts and the price was steadily going up with every "It’s nice, but this one it just that little bit nicer" comment. By now I had climbed to £180 and thought "fuck it, why don’t I just get her an entry level DSLR instead" it was only £60 more.
And so off I went, onto more researching. The Sony A200 is very nice but I couldn’t push myself to meet the asking price, the Cannons have a far better range of lenses but this is just a starter unit and she’s not gonna need them for quite some time yet.
Which left me with only one logical choice…
A Nikon D40 . I could have bought the D40X, but I figured there wasn’t really that much of a need to spend the extra cash for not a massive difference when this will be perfect for what she needs right now.
It turned up last Friday, and I had a quick little play around with it to make sure nothing broke during transit/manufacture - honest! The result of which can be found on my flickr account here .
I was also nice and gave the camera to her early so she could have a play and get accustomed to it as quickly as possible. Seems I have definately picked a geeky girl to fall in love with, she was as giddy as I get when around new tech. "I’ve never owned a DSLR before in my life" she gasped with a massive grin lighting her face.
It wasn’t long before she was out snapping pics all over the place - I’ve had a quick play with it, so many options!
It seems that she has gotten the hang of it quite quickly, as you can see from a selection of pics below.
The performance of the camera is stunning - click the button and *snap* the picture is there. Low light conditions are great when you bump it up to ISO1600 and it’s ready to go within seconds of turning it on. The kit lense, while only 3x zoom still brings up a fantastic amount of detail.
Definately recommend it as a starter DSLR camera. We just need to get the hang of this manual focus malarky.
Also, keep your eyes open for random pics dropping onto my flickr account because of it. Think I’m gonna need to upgrade my account to Pro if this keeps up!
So, the scene is that I install XP within Virtual PC/server and all is fine.
I can see the outside world, the drivers are working but I need to install the VM additions pack to wrest control of the mouse from the caffeine addled monster that currently does as it pleases with it.
It goes ahead without problems and reboots. As soon as I’m back at the logon screen, something is very wrong. Checking out the graphics I’m apparently locked into 800 x 600 and 4 bit graphics.
Wha?!
VM additions is meant to fix this, not cause it! The solution that worked for me? Install SP 3.
Once I did that, the screen went back to normal! If you’ve had this problem too, I’d love to know so I can get an idea of any commonality.
To help out, here’s the model number of the physical host machine I was using:
HP Proliant DL360 G5, packing an ATI ES1000 integrated graphics.
OS: 32bit Windows server 2003 standard R2 with sp2 installed and all windows updates up to this date in time.
Much of what is going on in there has been imagined before - one notable example from my past was the Disney’s Epcot ride Horizons (48 seconds into the vid)
I also had my own ideas of what I wanted to build into my own home when I was all growed up. Things like LCD panels to access a home intranet crammed with recepies and stream audio and video to it while I cook and/or eat. PC’s with webcams on them so I had a home video calling system.. you know the insane things you believe are fantastic ideas.. but then realise they’ll just get ignored and never used.
One thing strikes me tho, what if you buy a non-samsung device thrown into the mix? I hope that room of the future(tm) makes good use of open protocols otherwise it could be entirely possible to catch yourself uttering “this damn washing machine isn’t compatable with the fridge!”..
A few years back, the PSP had been launched in Japan and I was drooling at the pictures that adorned nearly every gaming site I went to. I even got to play about on an import model at my local CEX store and was mesmerised for a while.
It was a mix of “must have shiny” and “it’s like the gamegear had been thru the slimfast diet!”.
The only thing that saved me from buying it then was the poor line-up of games and the dearth of support for its media capabilities.
Fast forward to today and, while the game catalogue still hasn’t improved much, the media abilities of the now even trimmer PSP slim are very tempting indeed. Yet, I still held out from buying one.. That is, until I got my hands on a single game…
A friend of mine brought over his Japanese copy of Final Fantasy 7: Crisis Core (why do they get all the cool stuff!?) and I had nothing but “I gotta get me one of them” in my head for weeks.
I finally caved in to the voices in my head and bought one and, well I thought I’d put my experiences with it down somewhere!
The first thing you’ll notice is the total lack of a carry case in the box, and the sudden paranoia of “but, I don’t want my shiny to get dirty!” whenever you think about having to carry it around in your bag. For the price they are charging for this thing (the UK is getting gouged for a scary £130!) you’d have thought they’d be willing to give you a few extras to show they cared
If you didn’t get your PSP Slim with a memory stick then it’s certainly advised that you get one otherwise every game you load will scream about it and you’ll never be able to save any games, also things such as favourites and RSS feeds don’t work unless you get a card.
The type you need is a least a memory stick duo (if you have one of the big arsed original memory sticks you’re shit out of luck, if you have one of the tiny m2’s you will need the adapter that makes it big enough to fit into this thing), make sure you don’t get drawn into paying over the odds for a “gaming class” card cause, frankly you’re pissing extra money up against the wall.
To give you an idea of how much you should be paying, a 1Gb memory stick duo card should be going for about £20 and cheaper on the net, don’t get sucker punched by retail shops.
Once you have a memory card in your PSP, the full functions are available to you and allow you to get down to the whole point of it - enjoying yourself.
Having owned a DS for over a year the biggest problem is with the accept and reject buttons - they’re the opposite way around to the DS so I found myself accepting things I didn’t want and cancelling out of things I wanted to do, frustrating for a while but you soon get your fingers reprogrammed.
The extra memory onboard has improved load times of games and the various apps, but I still notice a rather sizable load time when the PSP has to read from its UMD, which does leave you feeling a bit let down - after all, it’s the whizziest and shiniest portable around, which makes you wish this thing would move a bit quicker when loading your game!
Beyond that, when you do get your game going you certainly notice just how much more grunt under the hood the thing has compared to the DS, even though you’ve prolly grown accustomed to better graphics on your consoles and/or PC you still catch yourself being blow away by just what the small thing can do.. You also begin to wonder how the DS is kicking it’s arse in terms of sales until you remember about the choice of games you have and you quickly remember why, even without homebrew titles the DS seemingly has a better selection of games that are fun to pick up and play (you remember fun right?).
I’ve not had a chance to try out the wireless play, partly because I don’t know anyone else with a PSP and partly because I’ve found its wifi to be quite dodgy at times – randomly telling you that it can’t find your access point, telling you the security settings are wrong and then randomly actually getting onto your wifi network – not very helpful in the slightest but something that I chalk up to the intrinsic problems of wifi, tho I did get it complain to me about my dedicated DS wireless network that the key I’m using isn’t a valid WEP key… I think sony have some problems with their wireless comms modules!
Also, with the power of a wifi enabled device that has a web browser on it, I have to say that I quite often caught myself doing a bit of naughty war walking and it not only scares me but makes me concerned just how many unsecured wireless networks there out in the wild.
This leads me quite neatly onto the web browser functionality (funny that ).
The browser powering the PSP’s access is known as NetFront and is quite lacking in features – it has a basic support for flash but not enough for the likes of youtube, revver, break or your other fav flash video sites.
It has problems with displaying other sites (CSS issues etc) and you can often fall foul of the poor space for caching, which can lead to you having to close the browser and open it back up again.
Many of your fav “web 2.0” (I hate that buzz word) sites won’t work if they’re running stuff like AJAX and ruby-on-rails.
That’s not to say that you can’t browse anything, but be prepared for many things to not work at all or to not be fully supported by your PSP.
The way in which you navigate makes good use of the limited interface, you can either use the D-pad to hop from one link to the other or you can flip to a bigger screen and use the analogue stick to move the mouse pointer around freely, hold down the square button to scroll from left to right and up n down.
The text entry is quite tedious, but with some handy quick choices to reduce the number of buttons you have to mash in order to get down the address you want.
Possibly the single biggest letdown is just how painful it is to browse the net using the very small resolution that the PSP’s screen runs at.
When you take the performance, it shows that the PSP is crying out for some opera muscle to power it rather than the limp NetFront. The interface is as good as it’s gonna get on your PSP tho and the lack of a touch interface (I occasionally found myself tapping the screen if I had been messing about with my DS prior to whipping out the PSP) does quite knock back the experience.
With the browser out of the way, we’re left with the movie, music and photo side of the device.
Starting off with the music abilities, it’s pretty simple and easy to use. I did notice with mine it created an MP3 folder on my memory card but it helpfully doesn’t pull the data from there creating a folder called “MUSIC” in the root of the card did the job.
It picked up the album art and displayed it and there is pretty much nothing else to go wrong, it took my test mp3 and played it without a glitch.
For video you have 2 choices, you can use the UMD slot and buy videos – sadly they can’t be used anywhere else and while they have dropped in price quite a lot (many titles are now £4.99), there are still too many with a price tag of £10 and higher that just will never shift.
Your other choice is to go with the memory card by loading up your memory stick with either mp4 or H.264 encoded videos – just make sure to dump them into a folder called “VIDEO” otherwise you’ll be told that there’s no video on your card, chances are you’ll have to guess that it needs this folder and create it yourself… To a not very savvy member of the public, this could prove to be a difficult task and lead to them only ever using UMD’s for their videos (I wonder if this was the plan all along).
I do think that UMD’s are due to die a horrible death anyway, especially with the news from the 2008 CES event that you can use a PS3 to transfer a copy of a bluray movie to the memory card of your PSP by simply inserting the disc, connecting up your PSP and hitting transfer. This is a master stroke and is certainly putting their machines to good use as well as catching onto the fact that we consumers want to be able to take and use our media when, where and how we like!
If only they had figured this out with DVD’s too!
The photo section is pretty much self explanatory really; if you have any pictures in the DCIM folder it’ll simply display them. This is the part of the PSP that I haven’t really used and seriously doubt I ever will too.. some people might find it useful, most people I reckon won’t bother with it either!
My final point on the PSP Slim is with the charging, you have the choice of using the supplied charger or using USB to charge the device. As anyone who has seen my youtube video can attest, I love the ability to charge devices using their built in USB ports. It reduces clutter and pointless unplugging and plugging in of items into and out of my power strips.
Yet, as ever with sony, it’s never as easy as plugging in the USB port and leaving it to work its magic on the battery. Oh no, sony forces you to first enable the setting for USB charging and then you have to activate USB communications before it actually begins to charge the device, breaking the number one rule – keep it simple stupid!
Why they thought it would be necessary to have the device on (so if it runs completely flat you’re in trouble) and to begin talking to your host device (quite blissfully ignoring the potential to simply use a plug with a USB jack on the end of it) is totally beyond me and just smacks of a half hearted effort at what should be a pretty standard feature.
I never bothered to buy the webcam as I don’t really see much of a use for it (plus it’s a bit of a rip off for what it is too).
I have, of course, not even mentioned the promised features that are to be coming in the future – the addition of Skype (tho you need to buy and use a sony headset in order to communicate) and the launch in Japan of a digital TV tuner, which I can only hope makes an appearance over here in the west (stop keeping all of the cool toys!).
Sadly, even tho the PSP has great media features and a handy browsing feature, it still remains quite ignored compared to my very loved DS and this is purely because I’m struggling to find any games other than the Mega Drive collection that actually gets my attention…
Until the time comes for crisis core to be released in the UK, my poor PSP will no doubt gather yet more dust until it gets to show how bright it can shine.
Well, my pandoras battery finally turned up and I had a 1gb memory stick kicking around.. time to show how easy it is to hack your PSP to run a custom firmware and open up its capabilities.
Blast Processing has a fantastic step by step guide, I used it get my flashing card set up and to find plenty of little apps for use with your newly hacked PSP.
Drop your comments, creations and whatnot into here:
Ever thought about hacking it so that you can play around with all those homebrew titles and use the flash memory to store your games on rather than the clunky UMD disks?
Do you have no fucking clue where to begin?
Well, blast processing have come up with the best PSP hacking guide that I have ever seen.
Browse on over to their site and have a read and breathe a bit of life into your dusty and attention starved PSP!
Back in november/december time, a friend of mine came over from japan to see us and brought his copy of crisis core with him. Being the FF7 freak that I am, I began drooling and pining for a PSP and a copy of said game.
Christmas Eve came around and I finally caved in and bought myself a PSP, but with practically no games to grab my attention, it has been spurned in favour for my DS. Just waiting for an english version of crisis core to be released.
This Wed I noticed that one of the game stores in Leeds (called PlayTime.. recommend them for you Leeds based people) had an american copy - as it had been released late last month - on their shelves; which lead to £35 flying out of my wallet before I knew what had happened >.< There goes the money I was going to use for a meal out with the GF!
I began sneaking little plays of the game at work and have to admit that the game has its hooks into me already - and pretty damn deep too. The only niggle being the whiney nature of Zack, he was so cool in the Japanese version. Instead we get this irritating kid who, by the sound of it, is yet to begin the path down puberty road.
However, late wed night I began to notice a strange effect happening on the right hand side of my PSP screen - it was almost like a hi-fi equaliser, bouncing up and down the side of the screen in a single column. This slowly developed into a solid block of grey running the height of my poor screen. No amount of pressing down on the chassis changed anything and it has since spread into 3 columns of this grey distortion. Not a happy puppy
As you can see from the blurry picture (come on, this is the net.. nothing is meant to be in focus! well, that’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it - unless you’re willing to donate a decent digicam my way!).
My guess is that this is to do with the data ribbon connecting the tft panel to the system, but I am hesitant to crack the thing open in order to fix it myself considering Sony’s fickle warranty nature.
So, I called up Sony UK and spelled out my alarming problem. A swift hold break later and I now have an RMA on my hands… This seems like a known problem with the way that they didn’t question anything and offered to swap it straight out.
I’m left wondering how common this is, I haven’t seen anything similar to it on the net. Any of you guys had this problem?
If you do have this problem then I recommend giving sony a quick bell and demand a replacement - just make sure you have the original battery and charger for the swap out.
Update - 11/04/08
The courier sent out by Sony turned up with a brand new PSP and happily swapped over. Problem now theirs. Have to compliment Sony on how speedy they sorted this out for me, big thumbs up… I can now continue my crisis core addiction!
One juicy bit of info I was given tho is that quite a few PS3’s are being returned to Sony in order to fix various problems. So, any of you guys having issues with your PS3?
