Technofart » Motion Picture Farts

Sony PSP 3000 Review

Flatulent One — Wed, 15 Jul 2009 09:03:59 +0000

The Sony PSP 3000 series is just an updated version of the Portable Slim and Lite (also know as the PSP-2000), released in 2008, but the improvements are important and since the price is the same as before, I’m quite happy with it. It’ll soon be replaced by the PSP Go, which is supposed to get released in October of this year (2009). Compared to the Slim and Lite PSP’s, the PSP 3000 has a better LCD screen (most notably an

increased color range), half of the pixel response time which reduces bluring and ghosting problems, as well as five times the contrast ratio and a new sub-pixel structure, a better microphone, newly redesigned logos and buttons, a new disc tray design, along with

anti-reflective technology to improve playability when you’re outside. Have a look at what CNET thinks about it:

Hacking the PSP 3000

The hacking community was initially unable to hack the PSP 3000 because of the new CPU (the motherboard turned out to be a TA-90v2), and that board does not work with the PRE IPL exploit used to break

the previous versions. The reason for this is that the motherboard has its own PRE IPL that checks the firmware thoroughly, if this is bypassed then the PRE IPL is cut off completely which thereby stops any potential modifications to the system. On June 5, 2009, Custom Firmware 5.03GEN-A for

HEN was released, and that is compatible with both the old PSP-2000 v3 and the new PSP-3000. It lets players play game backups (ISO/CSO), PS1 games, and let’s you get into the VSH, PSN, or recovery mode if you want. This was a huge step in the right direction for ending Sony’s PSP 3000 piracy protection.

Additional Resources and Further Reading

Check reviews and prices for and/or purchase the PSP 3000 from Amazon.com

See what GameSpot thinks of the PSP-3000

Official Sony Website for the PSP series

If you’re interesting in hacking your PSP-3000, check out PSP-3000hacks.com

Sony Xplod Review

Flatulent One — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 22:34:36 +0000

The Sony Xplod CDX-GT920U In-Dash Car Stereo System

It’s sexy, it’s cheap (relatively speaking: around $150 for the full system), and most importantly the audio quality is excellent for the price. The Sony Xplod CDX-GT920U has a front auxilary input, a rear USB input, three preamp outputs, plus you can add satellite or HD radio control modules, which lets you have plenty of options for expanding the head unit. The interface

plus the structure of the menus within are superb and make finding songs exceptionally easy. The only real downside is that the CDX-GT920U doesn’t natively support the Apple iPod, although you can still simply plug it in through the front aux.

Interface and Controls

The way in which the CDX-GT92OU is laid out is very similar to the rest of the Xplod line: there are four buttons (Mode, Source, Shuffle, and Display) and a chrome toggle which surrounds the dial. This layout is very easy to use because of the way almost all operations are handled through the dial. The dot-matrix display is very good, clear, and easy to read, but I would advise you to simply turn off the animations as they resemble the quality of an early Nintendo Gameboy.

The primary reason you’d want to buy the CDX-GT920U is

its digital audio features plus the “Quick BrowZer” mode–makes for very easy navigation of your digital audio files. This particular Xplod supports WMA, MP3, and AAC burned to a CD or stored on a USB device (like a MP3 player or USB stick). Also, there is an external iPod adapter

which you can get as an add-on for $50, and there are modules for satellite and HD radio available as well.

Audio Quality

The CDX-GT920U is packing serious heat with a three-band EQ with seven presets, along with Sony’s DM+ which improves the audio quality of a digitally compressed song like what you would find on the MP3 format. I tried the DM+ system by listening to music on audio CD, and then the same song from a 128Kbps MP3 file. As I would expect, the CD did sound a little bit better than the MP3, whether the DM+ was on or off, but the DM+ system did work to a degree by improving clarity at the high end of the audible spectrum.

The DSO system (that’s Dynamic Soundstage Organizer) created a much more ambient sound field and really made a big difference, I must say–it really feels like it’s lifting the sound up from the floorboards and making the high end of the sound spectrum clearer. Around the top volume, DSO did cause some low-end distortion, but at all other levels I think it can make even OEM speakers sound awesome.

Power

You’ve got 52 watts (maximum) pushing through

4 separate channels, so yeah the CDX-GT920U can be quite loud if you want it to be. The sound quality is even fairly clear at these higher volumes, but, like I said, there is some distortion near the top. And if that’s not sufficiently eardrum-busting for you, there are three 4-volt preamp output lines, one of

which is dedicated specifically for a subwoofer that has an adjustable, built-in, low-pass filter.

Additional Resources

Official Sony website for the Xplod Car Audio System

See Amazon.com for different Xplod systems and read the reviews for them (I haven’t found anywhere with better prices for these systems)

Samsung N510 Review: Nvidia Ion Powered Netbook

Flatulent One — Tue, 30 Jun 2009 08:21:05 +0000

Samsung have just announced the coming July release of their first (and one of the first ever) Nvidia ION powered netbooks: the Nvidia ION is a motherboard

platform that includes a Nvidia GeForce 9400M (MCP79) GPU, DDR3-1066 or DDR2-800 SDRAM, and the Intel Atom 230 microprocessor on a Pico-ITXe motherboard. This is a big deal because netbooks don’t normally get a dedicated GPU, and Nvidia has gone and designed their own

motherboard such that they can get an Intel Atom processor AND their own 9400M GPU on board, which is the same GPU used in Apple’s Macbook Pros. This will allow small, cheap, compact netbooks to do what everyone expects small, cheap, compact netbooks to suck at: heavy-duty graphics. Nvidia is actually claiming that netbooks equipped with the Ion system are capable of being full-on gaming and HD video machines that are so powerful they might as well be called laptops:

“The Netbook term was created by Intel to define a segment offering a limited experience, but with Ion you don’t have those same limitations. These systems can handle mainstream gaming, HD video, and new GPU-powered applications. You might as well call them notebooks, because that’s what they are.”
–Rene Haas, general manager of notebook products at Nvidia

Specifically, Nvidia says the Ion has:

Premium DirectX 10 graphics with advanced digital display connectivity
Full 1080p HD video with true-fidelity 7.1 audio
NVIDIA® CUDA™ technology to accelerate the most demanding applications, vastly improving your PC’s ability to work with visual content such as video encoding
Premium Windows experience with Windows Vista and Windows 7

The Samsung N510 will also have a 160GB hard disk drive, 1GB of memory, Wi-Fi (draft-n), Bluetooth, and a Webcam. It’s expected to be released sometime in July of this year (so VERY soon then, as it’s June 30th right now as I write this).

Additional Resources and Further Reading

Official Nvidia site for the ION system

Gateway NV Laptop Review: Pretty and Powerful for $500

Flatulent One — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 07:58:59 +0000

I love capitalism. It encourages competition which causes companies to constantly one-up each other and produce

better and better products at lower and lower prices, hence the recent spurt of cheap, powerful, and, surprisingly, good-looking laptops all right around the $500 mark such as Toshiba’s new a500/u500 line and Acer’s new Aspire laptops, and

between the 3, I’d say these new Gateways are the prettiest, just look at this:

Tech Specs

The 15.6 inch models get an LED-backlit display with 1366 x 768 widescreen resolution, they’ll take up to 4GB of DDR2

RAM, a 320GB hard drive, a DVD optical drive of some sort, multi-card reader, 802.11a/b/g/Draft-N, VGA and HDMI out, four USB ports, a 6-cell lithium ion battery (no word on how long a charge lasts), and Windows Vista Home Premium. They’re available in: NightSky Black, Midnight Blue,

Cherry Red, and Coffee Brown. They start at $499 for the 2.1 GHz AMD Athlon 64 with Radeon HD 3200 graphics, while the 2.1GHz Intel Core 2 Duo with GMS 4500MHD runs $599.

Additional Resources

Official Gateway page for the NV series

Twirl-A-Squirrel Violently Slings Hungry Squirrels Off Birdfeeder – For Heartless Bird Watchers Everywhere

Flatulent One — Thu, 15 Mar 2007 01:10:12 +0000

I’ve never understood why anyone would want to select certain wild animals to feed, in particular the whole ‘I’ll feed the cute birdies but not the mangy squirrels’ routine which has caused the invention of countless products design to deter squirrels from nourishing themselves at your bird feeder – this is the worst ever (and the funniest ):

The Twirl-a-Squirrel activates when enough weight is placed on the feeder (the idea being a squirrel is heavy enough but a bird isn’t) at which point the squirrel begins to rotate along with the feeder until dizziness, centrifugal force, and the general unpleasantness of the situation overtake the animal and they are slung to the ground at which point they become violently ill and vomit up what little precious bird seed they stole from you for the birds to come along and peck up later

Thanks, Gizmodo

Stumble It!

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The Tacoma Narrows Catastrophe – Bad Engineering + Penny Pinching = Liquid Concrete!!

Flatulent One — Mon, 05 Feb 2007 11:58:46 +0000

The Tacoma Narrows Bridge is a one mile long bridge stretching over

the Tacoma Narrows connecting Gig Harbor, Washington, to Tacoma. What essentially occurred was that the bridge oscillated in the wind due to a phenomenon known as mechanical resonance which quickly caused it to collapse and the whole event was caught on film:

What doomed the bridge was the state’s lack of funding caused by the recommendations of East coast engineers, specifically Leon Moisseiff (helped design Golden Gate and Oakland Bay Bridges), who advised the state to save money by reducing the bridge’s girders from 25 feet deep to 8 feet deep, which caused the roadway to be less stiff and therefore more susceptible to wind-induced oscillation.

The collapse occured on November 7, 1940–the following is an eyewitness account by Leonard Coatsworth:

“Just as I drove past the towers, the bridge began to sway violently from side to side. Before I realized it, the tilt became so violent that I lost control of the car…

I jammed on the brakes and got out, only to be thrown onto my face against the curb… Around me I could hear concrete cracking… The car itself began to slide from side to side of the roadway.

On hands and knees most of the time, I crawled 500 yards [450 m] or more to the towers… My breath was coming in gasps; my knees were raw and bleeding, my hands bruised and swollen from gripping the concrete curb… Toward the last, I risked rising to my feet and running a few yards at a time… Safely back at the toll plaza, I saw the bridge in its final collapse and saw my car plunge into the Narrows.”

A new bridge was finished and opened on October 14, 1950, and is still currently in use today with no indications of any malfunctioning. It was designed to handle 60,000 vehicles per day, currently handles 90,000, and is projected to be able to handle 120,000 by 2020.

References and further reading:

Wikipedia article on the Tacoma Narrows Bridge

Thanks to Library Pulse for the photo

‘Learning Through Failure’ from Eide Neurolearning Blog

Televizzle.org’s Article on the Mythbusters’ Earthquake Machine that was tested effectively (relatively speaking) on a bridge that demonstrates the principle of mechanical resonance

World of Warcraft – I’m Too Sexy

Flatulent One — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 05:37:18 +0000

Oh my god – World of Warcraft characters jamming to Right Said Fred’s ‘I’m Too Sexy’. This is what happens when a gamer has too much time on his hands (dude, clean up the coke bottles and twinkie wrappers that are piled up around you–and the sticky Kleanex, too, you nasty thing).
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Apple MacBook Running Windows XP, OSX, And World of Warcraft At The Same Time

Flatulent One — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 05:21:52 +0000

And in a continuation of my previous post showing a video of a perfectly good iMac subjected to Windows XP, now we see a MacBook running Windows XP inside Mac OSX while playing World of Warcraft ALL AT THE SAME TIME–this mac did nothing to you, why do you choose to punish it so???

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Windows XP Booting On A Mac

Flatulent One — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 05:04:04 +0000

This is a video someone did where they show how they got Windows XP to boot on their Mac–now is it just me, or does this just reek of the worst sort of antithetical irony imaginable? I mean, this is like putting chrome rims on a junker!

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Windows 386 Promo Video

Flatulent One — Wed, 31 Jan 2007 04:57:49 +0000

Microsoft sent this tape to retailers to explain the benefits of Windows 386. Boring until the 7 minute mark when the production is taken over by crack-smoking monkeys and the chick doing the commercial starts rapping–yes, rapping…about Windows 386… and her hair turns red while she seduces William from accounting.

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