Assassin's Creed

I finished Assassin's Creed on the PS3 yesterday.

The game was very good. I liked the story line but the missions could get a bit repetitive at times.

The Informant missions was dumb as hell, didn't like them much.

The fighting engine was especially good.

Bioshock

I finished Bioshock for PS3. Took me a few days but being on leave I can play almost 8 hours a day now.

The game was really good. The story was very rich and I haven't had this much fun playing a game since Fallout 3.

So a game worthwhile investing my time.

My Playstation 3

I have been wanting to buy a PS3 for a while now, but I never got to it. I bought one today and I am very happy with it. Already I am streaming my media (movies, videos and photos) over the LAN to the PS3 to display on my new LCD TV.

I have no games yet and with South Africa's horrible broadband costs I also can't download any games. So Take2 will be my next stop for some games and maybe a Blu-Ray movie.

It seems to have been a worthwhile investment. No more ugly PC's in my living room.

I am a dad at last.

Alexis was born today. 2.85kg and 45cm tall.

Geat stuff.

Sinotec 42" Full HD LCD

My 84cm CRT TV broke for the second time, so I decided to buy the Sinotec 42" LCD TV.

Works amazing sofar. It even has a D-Sub input and can do 1360x768, so 720p movies on my hard disk can be displayed at great detail.

Video streaming wirelessly 2

Ok so I invested in the Ellies wireless AV sender / receiver. So far it works great. Only problems so far is when a heavy Thunderstorm is raging, the signal is very weak then, but other than that is seems to work great.

So now I can record my DSTV shows without the need for my PC in my living room.

Pinnacle Studio

So I tried a few things to get Pinnacle to record my shows in MPEG2 correctly but I failed. Now I just record the shows in DV quality and the use VirtualDub afterwards to encode it into DivX format. So no more sound sync problems and DivX is supported by most hardware these days anyway.

DarkStar One Cheat

I started playing DarkStar One and it is a very nice game but the level system sucks. You have to collect stupid crystals and that becomes boring very quickly.

So I used Artmoney to find the memory addresses for money and the crystals. So now I can set the crystal count, collect one more crystal and then levelling is all sorted.

The downside is the higher the ship level the more difficult the enemies become, but that is fine, I like the fighting part it was just the mundane crystal hunting I didn't like. So I added these 2 cheats in the .amt file.

Artmoney

I found a new way of cheating in my games. Some games are just so boring or mundane that cheating is the only way to enhance the experience. Low level cheating of course, just that little extra to take the boring out of it. This usually boils down to cheating with money. I found this nice tool to help. It is called Artmoney and works well.

American Road Trip

I decided that starting 2009 I will start saving for my American road trip. The current draft route is quite long but I would manage to see all the stuff I want to see.

We will have to do some miles in South Africa first before we attempt this one. Maybe a nice Southern African tour as soon as Bob is out of the picture.

94.7 Mountain Bike Challenge

So I did the 94.7 MTB Challenge, 40km. Finished in 3 hours and 20 minutes. The route was very muddy, so maybe I will have a faster time next year, but still I am happy with the time I did.

HTML Signatures in GMail

I always wanted an HTML signature in GMail but could never get it right. Now with some Firefox magic I can.

BlackCanvas has a plugin that does just that.

So now I can have this as my signature

Ubuntu 8.04

So Windows Vista kept on complaining about me not buying it yet, so I decided to get legal and get rid of Vista. My previous experience with Ubuntu on my laptop was good but I had to do a lot of tweaking.

I decided that this time around if it does not install out of the box I am not installing it, will get Vista or XP instead then. Much to my surprise it worked out of the box first time. Even Compiz works in Ubuntu 8.

So all in all a very good experience.

Winter gloves

Commuting to work and back with the motorcycle gets very cold now that the winter is starting. So I invested in the IXS Mirage gloves. Swiss made apparently and hopefully it helps. I do not want to invest in heated grips, not at 10x the price of the gloves, so here's hoping it works.

Kawasaki Z750

I currently own the Kawasaki 250cc baby Ninja, but I went to look at the Kawasaki Z750 in real life and I am convinced this is the bike I want. The thing is awesome, and with the optional extras the bike is really going to rock. Unfortunately I will only be able to buy it in April 2009 or even later, which really sucks.

MPEG2 sound sync problem

The Pinnacle Studio software I am using to encode my movies to MPEG2 always seems to have a sound sync problem. Apparently it is a known problem so this tool might help.

I will give it a whirl today and see if it works.

Speedtraps

I had the great fortune today to drive 120km/h in a 60km/h zone with my new motorcycle. There was a retarded cop with his radar gun and I thought damn! That is when I remembered my motorcycle does not have a license plate in the front only the back, so these retards with their radar guns can keep on coming I do not care anymore, they can't catch me. Maybe they will start doing some real work now instead of just sleeping under a tree with the radar gun pointing to the oncoming traffic.

Detecting the screen resolution in Ubuntu

To detect your monitor's correct settings to allow the correct resolutions just run this command from the console: sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg

Install Ubuntu 7.10 in Virtual Server

I need to install Ubuntu 7.10 onto a Microsoft Virtual Server VPC and this post might be a good place to start.

Samsung DVD-R Sucks

So in my previous post I talked about my new Samsung DVD Recorder. What a piece of junk it turned out to be. The thing broke after just 6 weeks of use. I had to fight with Makro for almost 2 months to get my money back I paid for this piece of junk.

Makro's policy on electronic replacements are horrible to say the least, but I suspect all the retailers in South Africa has the same type of return policy, so I am between a rock and a hard place with this.

I took my money and went to HiFi Corp and bought myself a standard cheap Philips DVD player that support DivX playback.