There will be spoilers. I'll start off by stating I think the game is fairly good. Great? No. Worth $60 (plus tax)? Err ... possibly. Game of the year? If EA and Bioware pony up more toys to game reviewers than Microsoft does when Halo: Reach comes out, probably. (GT5 would get 'game of the year' by default for finally releasing ... but it won't ... so, no worries there.) The bulk of my frustration is that I can see where this, could've been a truly great game instead of a mediocre game cloaked in a shroud of game reviewer hype declaring it a great game. It's the same frustration I've had with Bioware games since KOTOR (although I have fond memories of KOTOR that would likely be dashed if I played it now); they focus too much on the voice acting and leave the quest and level design to rot. I have to say though, for the NPC specific missions they did some work on level design. But once you're in it, just the same one-track corridor with random crates / barriers to hide behind. It feels, and is, forced. ...

[ Information in this post is completely outdated. The best thing to do is install Dharma from source or wait for next release. ] Update 2-12 See bottom of post for instructions on how to enabled gpu acceleration of thumbnails as well as fanart. Replication of this tutorial for having the gpu render fanart images on xmbc live/ubuntu just in case it goes away. This is experimental at the moment and has some drawbacks for every day use, but will show an improvement in scroll speed in the gui as its handing off loading fanart images to the gpu; very handy for low power atom/ion computers. To enable dds fanart in xbmc, create an advancedsettings.xml file in your userdata directory. If using XBMC Live, this will be ~/.xbmc/userdata. Edit advancedsettings.xml and add: <advancedsettings> <useddsfanart>true</useddsfanart> </advancedsettings> I believe you'll need to reboot/restart xbmc for this to take effect. Cons: The .dds images are much larger than the jpg compressed tbn files, e.g. 10MB vs 1.4MB a bit larger than the jpg. I went back and looked and most were only about 1/3 bigger than the original. So obviously this isn't going to work so hot Might be a deal breaker if you're running Live on a small-ish ...

[Note: There's currently a bug that has been fixed in svn (changeset) that causes Aeon to crash. I compiled and installed from svn and confirm that the bug is fixed; will create an idoits guide to installing from svn soon. Again, like most things XBMC, it wasn't hard but nobody wanted to give up concise, correct instructions.] Notes I'm filling in a lot of blanks from this guide on the XBMC.org forums here, or the Lifehacker guide here. Unfortunately a lot of this info is scattered around forum posts and these guides will only get you most of the way there. For instance, don't mess with adding the nvidia drivers to the iso ... I mean you could if you wanted to but why not just do them after install? Purpose I need to catalogue all of the changes I had to make so that, in the event I ever need to do it all over again, I don't spend the six - seven hours it took me the first time digging through random forum posts. For my purposes, I want to install XMBC directly to the revo's hdd but since it has no cd/dvd rom, and there's no way I'll go ...

Sony KDL-40XBR Review Bought a new TV. Another one. Cause our house got straight up robbed. And all they stole was our beloved 37xbr6. No Christmas presents, no jewelry, nothin'. They rifled through everything, and at first I thought they stole our camcorder (with tape that hadn't been transferred yet) and an old sentimental watch. Later it turned out they just moved them while digging through our crap. Sad that all we own worth stealing is our TV. Walked right by my iMac in the kitchen, didn't touch it. They even moved the Christams ornaments that were sitting in front of the TV and set those aside so as to not break them. Thoughtful criminals. Funny story: Logan was so upset that they'd stolen his shows until we explained that his shows were on the TiVo and it was still there. Which means, in about two-three years the natural evolution is that DVR will be built into the TV. His mind was absolutely blown that anybody would enter our house without our permission. He's still kind of stressed about that. Anyway, back to the new TV. It's not as good as our old ...

The PS3MS default icon bah-lows. I tried using all manner of exe resource editors to change the internally embedded icons but after the program wouldn't run. Finally I came across this post on the PS3MS forums. If PS3 Media Server is running, shut it down. In %program files%\PS3 Media Server\ find pms.jar. Rename pms.jar (make a copy just in case) to pms.zip and open with Windows Explorer. Find \resources\images\ Replace Play1Hot_256 (and probably Play1Hot_32 and Play1Hot_16 too). Close and let Windows Explorer recompress. Change name back to pms.jar and restart PS3 Media Server. The only thing I'd add is that the instructions only have you change out Play1Hot_256 but there are also resources for 16 and 32 that I changed out. I didn't leave those as default to see what happened, so if you still have the default small icons that'd be why. Also, the main XMB icon under Video doesn't preserve alpha. I'm currently using this icon I found on deviantart. black green purple yellow So far, I have to admit, I'm only using PS3 Media Server to stream .mkv (usually muxed with mkv2vob first. Sometimes .mkv transcodes can have audio sync issues. But next up I'll look into internet radio, the itunes library integration and web ...

Part 2 in my PS3 Media Server series, icons for movies and folders. This is should be covered extensively in the FAQ, and it may or may not be, I'm not going to bother checking. Primarily this a resource on where to find movie art and icon templates. The naming convention for assigning icons is %filename% (including extension).cover.png(or .jpg). E.g. Man On Fire 1080p BluRay DTS.m2ts.cover.png. Folders: create your folder and drop in a folder.png(or .jpg). Image dimensions are 320x240. [ Finding Artwork ] themoviedb.org Site is mainly for XBMC / Plex style media center apps but it's a good resource for good quality artwork. Look in the lower right corner for the movie poster. GetVideoArtwork (Beta) New one I just found a couple of weeks ago, geared toward iTunes artwork and sometimes slim pickings but really high quality. [ Creating Icons ] PSD Templates: I did not create these templates, I found them in a forum thread about PS3MS thumbnails. I believe it was this thread on avsforum. Click on the image to download the PSD. FullHD Template 1080p text, blue case and disc with blu-ray logo. I turn off the blue glow layer. Create a new layer in the ...

First in a series of three posts about PS3 Media Server. Install is a breeze, just run the installer (as admin) and if you don't have JRE it'll download and install it for you; if you need x64 you'll need to download it manually. The problem I encountered on Windows 2008R2 was that the provided, 'Install as a Windows Service' option didn't work correctly. It uses Java Service Wrapper and seems to install and start correctly. Netstat even shows it listening on the correct interface and correct port. The only thing I could find, was the debug log showed that it was trying to use a temp directory that didn't exist. However, even creating that directory and making sure it had permissions, it still wasn't working. This may also be a problem on Windows 2008, I'm not sure and I didn't find any mention of it on the PS3 Media Server forums. The solution was to use good old instsrv / srvany from the Windows 2003 Resource Kit. Go through the normal process of using instsrv, naming your service and then pointing to srvany. Edit the service in the registry, add a ...

This is all old news, everything I have here is found other places, but I did run into a big bug that I had to sift through forums to find the answer to: 2.8 and above has broken image uploads. And from the forum posts its not just when running on IIS. I hadn't run into it when I was running 2.8 on Apache, but I was also running a very old version of PHP. The symptoms are that when trying to upload a picture into a post, the screen will show, 'crunching' and then, when finished, will be blank where you'd normally expect to see the uploaded image along with it's options. If you check the server, thinking there might be a permissions issue, you will find the image that you uploaded. My solution was to downgrade back to 2.7.1. Couple of things we'll need: Windows 2008 with IIS 7 ... obviously (or 2008R2 IIS 7.5) URL Rewrite PHP 5.2.11 or 5.3 Non Thread Safe MySQL 5.1 Community Server [optional] MySQL GUI Tools Wordpress see release archive for 2.7.1 if newest version is still having problems with image upload The focus of this post isn't a complete end-to-end Wordpress setup since ...

Okay, so I've been a big Forza fan from the beginning. To me, it just seems more sim-y than Gran Tourismo; especially GT5 Prologue. I love the new tracks, and I love the new graphics. But, I wouldn't be me if I wasn't hyper critical; Forza 3 is weak sauce. What's weak sauce about it? The damn cars! They're the same damn cars that were in Forza 2. Hello, the world has moved on since 2007. Yeah, sure, there are a couple of new cars here and there, but for the most part it's the same old same old. Audi R10; Audi is racing the R15 now. Oh, and they felt necessary to add the Benz ML63, but not the C63 or the E63!? For that matter, they add a couple of SUVs but then neglected to put an SUV racing series. So, what? You're supposed to race around in normal races against normal cars with a big old SUV? W E A K sauce. And then, I hadn't been paying attention and apparently I have to purchase the Limited Edition if I ever want to get ...

After Lewis made his first pit stop and they started talking about the Brawns being on a on one stop strategy, I knew, I knew, that Rubens was set to hoist himself up into the top three; possibly even the win. The big question was, would the team pull the dick move of delaying him just a touch in the pits to let Jenson leap frog? Or would Jenson pull a Schumacher and put in a stellar in and out lap to pull the lead? Everything played out. Ruben's gear box (that caught on fire two laps from the finish of the last race) held up and it was his second victory of the year. Bigger yet, the old man has out raced Jenson in the last five races. I don't have big hopes that he's going to catch and pass Jenson for the championship. I'm certain Jenson and the team feel that any wins Rubens can take, mean that Jenson's rivals aren't getting them. It's almost a certainty that this will be Rubinho's last season, so I get crazy stoked that I can watch him go out on a high.