Logbook: tech ect
Phone Fun .. Katana LX mini-review
I was on a Pay as you go plan for AT&T and it worked out well if you made next to no calls. but then again there were times you were forced to make calls. That got expensive quick, the silly rounding rules for minutes killed off money faster than anything. After signing up to sprint on there low plan 29.99 for 200 minutes.
The Katana lx is decent looking phone but looks do not make up for its problems. the problem maybe more from my point of view, but moreso they tend to be things I look for in a phone and i have basic requirements for a phone.
1. to make calls
2. that the phone is somewhat configurable
3. can add/make own ringtones.
4. Durable
well the phone right out of the box passes only on #1 and #4. I had started with a bluetooth connector the phone connected right up but after that the phone really as far as accessing data and such was worthless, the best that could be done is a tether if you had a DataPlan.
Another issue i have with sprint is the fact that the phones dont use Sim cards which makes programing your phonebook a pain in the ass and you look like an ass doing it with 2 phones in hand. As Far as a Dead basic phone the Katana LX is just that.
After the bluetooth try i figured maybe the USB Cable would be more fruitful in getting the phone to be somewhat responsive , I was wrong, as Far as drivers from Sanyo – Good luck with that. It took me two days of looking and when i finally did get it working , the phone did Even less than when connected to bluetooth.
But for being a basic phone it does have its pluses , You can hear it ring from jupiter on its loudest setting. The T9 texting was decent.. but overall it was not what I would personally want in a phone.
So after talking to the rep at the sprint store I ended up returning the Katana after a good weeks use and learning its up and downs.
The phone would be good for someone who just wants to have a phone with not many bells and whistles.
Cuil sucks ..
Cuil A new search engine that came out, On the day it was released they plastered every site possible that they had come out with this. The company says that Cuil is Irish (Gaelic) for knowledge, It should stand for pile of shit. really what it seems is Cuil maybe knowledge but in no way experienced, there search just doesn’t make sense. Just a simple test will prove that. Cuil claims to have a larger index than any other search engine, with about 120 billion web pages. ok that’s stretching it there.. BADLY The only way for them to index that many webpages (4 times as much as googles index ) is to take every irrelevant page and index it , but thats cant be it , because why is it anything you search You get absolutely NO results relevant to your search, Dunkin donuts brings up the providence civic center. there Storage method for finding pages is insanity. you could Probably search what ever your looking for than type in moose balls in anger and find what your actually looking for .
Maybe someday this will be the next google but as far as knowledge that cuil claims to have its just not there. they basically make it where if you had a set of encyclopedias, and you searched “Car” the result would not be the “car” your looking for but rather opening up a random encyclopedia and finding a random Car stuff in under something completely irrelevant like the Carina constellation because it contains the word car.
from there site..
Rather than rely on superficial popularity metrics, Cuil searches for and ranks pages based on their content and relevance. When we find a page with your keywords, we stay on that page and analyze the rest of its content, its concepts, their inter-relationships and the page’s coherency.
Translation: blah blah blah we’re jealous of google, cuil blindly picks out words we think are related, More useless filler words because we don’t know what the fuck we are doing, We like adding big words and make it sound really personalized to you!
That’s about the right translation.
Now that I’ve typed out this clusterfuck Lets see how Cuils Search Picks up on this and i BET it wont show up under cuil sucks or cuil sucks monkey nuts or cuil sucks buffalo ass.
One more Test
Cuil = 12 results for cuil sucks
Google = 9,330 for cuil sucks. (0.14 seconds)
seems strange for the lack of cuil not indexing 9318 pages..
Yahoo Not-so Unlimited
Yahoo Music Unlimited i used to use that as a primarly everything for music , Itunes tunes is like a bad hooker everyones had a ride on with a bad deasease. I had tried Itunes and saw how much crap it installs on your system everything from a browser hijack to shit you will never use. I could complain all day about ITunes all day .
yahoo music was not that bad. but what there doing is silly there shutting yahoo’s servers down and basically leaving people out to dry.
The Banhammer commith.
For awhile spam was not to bad on my site, but now its rediculous.
So today i shined up the banhammer and banned a bunch of spammers.
101st post =p.
Wow.. 101 Posts. thats a bit crazy by my standards, and no i did not feel like saying 100th post.. its way too overdone.
Today brought wii out with the original cable thinking I’d have a nightmare setting the thing back up for my monitor. I got home and was pleasantly surprised by the ease that 480P stayed on.
After looking through my games collection i started thinking what the future games I’d be interested in.. And the problem i see with the Wii is the amount of Game Vomit. Game Vomit is what i call it when developers just toss anything they can at a system and call it a game. Unfortunately the Wii has Enough Game Vomit to warrant surgery to reduce the amount of crap that the system intakes. Personally I think it makes the *Nintendo seal of Quality* 
Look Horrible.
VD-W2 Wii VGA cable part III.
Over the weekend i picked up a few GameCube games, Metroid Prime , F-zero GX, Killer7and Need for speed Hot pursuit 2. Now i previously wrote about the VD-W2 Wii VGA cable, This is the first time I’ve had a problem with the cable. The first game i tried was NFS:HS the game starts up and the display on the monitor goes nuts. Typical, EA and more crap they put out, You would figure as the one of the “top” gaming manufactures, it would support 480p. The gamecube supports 480p , but theres a catch. in order to get the game in 480p you need to hold down the B button on the gamecube controller when starting the game.
this is a small problem in my opinion since i don’t play too many GC games. But, if you intend to play Game Cube games using the VGA cable There is a list too help you out at Mobygames.com .
Overall the cable in my opinion is worth it with the one minor downfall of not supporting GC in 480i , but Most of the good games are supported in 480p for the game cube.
overall i’d say the cable too me is a 9/10 with that small drawback (to me)
Media… Completely fascinated with bored people .. and there wii’s
I find the media often gets fascinated with some pretty weird shit at times, weither its the next missing garden gnomes, or some star taking a dump… the media is there normally to smell it. Lately with the media getting involved with console gaming, they have been attacking it as the next WMD, to the Media it is something that beats your wife , kills your pets and makes your children into cannibals. When the media is bored i find thats when there at there most dangerous to themselves and others around them. So just doing my normal thing of looking at Fark.com , an article caught my eye and I clicked. the Title of it was “Growing a wii bit bored” from the Calgary Herald. but the dumbfuckery of this one gets to me. its a long write by me but I’ll take a stab at his stab.
read on for my silly take to this article of playing with numbers and attention whoring at its best from the calgary heralds department of pulling numbers outta there ass.
It starts
In an interview with gaming publication IGN.com, the president of Epic Games, which produces the incredible Gears of War for the Xbox 360, dumped on Nintendo’s Wii, dismissing the system that has sold 20 million units as a fad that will soon wane, and saying his company won’t ever be releasing games on it.
“The first time I played a videogame with my parents was on Atari 2600,” says Mike Capps. “The next time I played a videogame with my parents . . . was Wii Tennis. So it’s about bringing people together, families, Thanksgiving, all that. I think it’s kind of like a weird virus because I have not yet found a reason to play with my Wii since then.
“It’s a virus where you buy it and you play it with your friends and they’re like, ‘Oh my God, that’s so cool, I’m gonna go buy it. So you stop playing it after two months, but they buy it and they stop playing it after two months but they’ve showed it to someone else who then goes out and buys it and so on.
theres so many things wrong with this I don’t even know where to begin. To Immediately just start dumping on something means your pissed off for one reason or another rather than taking a neutral bias to what your writing about. Also bringing the Asshat from epic in on the first line from and interview just starts this article all wrong.. I’m allowed to have bias here… gears of war? I couldn’t care any less for the game. I mean just how many times can you rehash unreal tournament. The comment alone is shortsighted, The reason people get the Wii is it is FUN…
As far the wii being a virus, i think not , Nintendo has realized that power is not everything. Generally i have one rule with gaming, the more eyecandy generally the shittier the game is for fun and replayability. I Do not play a game for eye-candy , I learned that lesson once too many that general focus on graphics tend to kill games, Or make the game so short its not worth it. Balancing graphics and gameplay is the key, people still play D&D… now theres some heavy fricken graphics for ya .. This guy is full of it .. by the looks of it this guy never played anything past Wii Sports. Continuing…
Console Gaming without a TV part II..(VD-W2 Wii VGA cable)
I do not usually watch TV, the last TV i had I ended up giving up because it just took up too much space. So I’ve always used my PC to watch Movies, Play games and such , until i purchased the Wii. From my last post
Console Gaming and Movie watching
I have tried almost every PC HD TV card under the sun in order to get a better picture/ less lag time out of the display with results fairing for the worse rather than better. One of my biggest problems was screen lag time.. On the HD Cards you had at least a full second of delay while moving the cursor around, on the analog card the lag time was barely perceivable but enough where it was noticeable if you had played on a TV, also If the PC is doing ANYTHING what so ever , you will get graphical corruption in the display thats the fault of the PC not the Wii. As far as using a TV card the display is fuzzy in fullscreen.
After all those cards my thoughts on internal tuner cards for PC’s are they are all piles of shit… But, looking around i saw one possibility the VD-W2 Wii VGA cable from Vdigi I had taken my time on ordering this because I didn’t see any sort of review for this cable. Also being from HongKong and I am weary of Ordering from sites i don’t know. Resellerratings.com had next to No information about them, After much thinking I finally decided to order the thing…
After an impatient 2 week wait the cable arrived in a simple brown envelope from hongkong. Following the USPS tracking site.. Not really worth even tracking because they barely update you on the location of your goods. Anyways the packaging is dead simple , right to the point, you don’t need user testimonials on how it works. Anyways anything with a billion testimonials usually is a pile of shit.
the cable seems to be built of really good quality, Setup is a breeze as long as you understand the basic premise of what your doing. since the monitor your plugging into does not have an analog tuner, you have to use the component cable plug in on a tv
The Green RCA jack you just plug into a TV and power on the wii , After doing so you goto your system menu and Display selection of 480i or 480p , You want to choose 480p , but doing this will look like something bad is happening . the screen will look completely fucked, don’t worry here, because the TV doesnt know how to handle the signal. after this Power down your Wii , Disconnect the Green RCA than proceed to connect the Cable to the monitor , you will need a male to male VGA connector/Wire to complete this action, After that you should be all set on Connecting up to your monitor.
As far as quality goes , the cable kicks ass.
it removed every problem you would have with a TV card and basically gives you the same response as you would get on a TV screen. with the added bonus of You can turn off your PC to play the console if you run your Console like i do.
Lets see where this goes… Logitech this is in your hands now. Part I
I’ve always loved logitechs mice and keyboards , I would recommend them to anyone in the past … but now since having multiple hardware failures with the G7 double clicking when your just trying to single click. my confidence has been shaken. Hopefully I wont have to jump through 87 hoops to get this replace but this is chapter one in firing emails off to logitech. I just want a damn mouse that works without being fucking possessed to completely screw up at anything its doing.
Console gaming and movie watching… When you dont have a TV.. Wait what?
When I got my Wii, it was a thought to exactly how i’d play the console since i don’t have a TV so to speak. Eventually I just ended up going to most efficient route for myself. I connect the Wii to my PC via an analog TV Card, it works fine for me. but there are little things you do notice between having the Wii connected to a TV vs connected to a PC through a TV card.
Personally i use my PC as my center for media, Watching movies, playing games(PC), and playing the Wii. I don’t need a super huge screen, having one would be nice but eh… what can you do. I don’t watch enough TV to validate the idea of getting cable or anything, the way channels are these days its just all rehash of programs anyways… what are we on now “survivor 923 – Night with the power out” edition? About the only thing I tend to watch is mythbusters.
The only thing about having the wii through an analog tv card though is that the screen looks a bit fuzzy and lagged a bit. I’ve tried out many digital Tuner cards with no luck whatsoever, Either I have some sort of weird problem or perhaps my pc is getting a bit aged.
I have tried –
- WinTV-HVR-1600 – This card is ok, If you have an Via Chipset/Nvidia Video card you will run into an overlay problem, easily fixed but …. the Crashes are not, generally HD channels look spectacular but on occasion the software would crash on channels with a low signal or format difference. Using it to play a console through was worthless, Trying to play the wii on this was like trying to play the Wii underwater , You would move the cursor, and the screen would always be half a second behind becoming extremely annoying fast.
- Pinnacle PCTV HD Card – out of the box the card was purely annoying… the install software DEMANDED to have WinXP Service pack 2 installed, Nothing would progress unless you did that. as far as channels it did not have the problems that the HVR1600 had, but there was a noticeable unsynchronized Audio, For having the Wii hooked up , Again Display lag issues made this card useless.
- Visiontek TV wonder 600 – based off the ATI TV wonder 600, installation was painless, Installation of software was relatively painless, Operation was terrible. Trying to pull in any sort of digital channels was totally out of the question no matter the position of the antenna NO channels were received. I even Put the antenna outside the window in hopes of seeing some sort of life from the tuner itself, For the Input part of the card for the Wii, This card got the Worst of the ratings – Display lag was far greater than the other cards, Up to 1.5 seconds of display lag which made any sort of console gaming Completely out of the question.
These card were all tried through about a years time, and Likely in the future possibly there will be a Digital HD TV card that will serve my purposes for both a TV Card and a Console hookup. but I have discovered theres a 4th option that would remove the PC completely from the math , which hopefully will remove all my percieved points that i dont like about running my Wii to Tv Card to PC output. while its the cheapest of the options I’ve only heard and seen very limited reviews on this I’ve ordered the VD-W2 Wii VGA cable . This will skip having the PC as an intermediary and plug directly into my monitor , which thankfully has 2 VGA inputs and 1 DVI input.
My hope is this will solve all my complaints about having the setup i do and having a more direct setup which eliminates a device which the console Passes through