HD Capture Woes

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Quite a while back I bought an Intensity Pro on eBay for quite a lot of money so I could finally capture things in HD - specifically PlayStation 3 gameplay movies. The trouble is... I just can't get it to work.

My ultimate goal is to be able to play in HD in my brother's room while recording gameplay in HD in my room. Here's the setup I had in mind:

The HDMI to VGA / component adapter is necessary because the PS3 outputs everything with HDCP so I wouldn't be able to just straight record via HDMI like I would with an Xbox 360... though it would be pretty nice to be able to record stuff on the DirecTV PVR in HD too. But I right now don't have the adapter, the splitter, or those cables.

So now my choices are:

1. Spend what little money I have left on the rest of the equipment and hope the setup all works out in the end, or...

2. Accept the fact that this Intensity Pro card is defective and hope I can return it to the manufacturer.

Religulous

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Current mood:amused

I saw this movie on Monday in Pasadena at Laemmle Theatres.

Chances are, if you're going to go out of your way to see it (and you have to), you're probably already going to love it. I know I did! My cousin... not so much, but then again he didn't even like Bowfinger or Ong Bak, which clearly means he's the one with weird-ass tastes, not me.

The wiki entry is informative enough, so here's what I remember and / or care to write about:


Christianity -
- Jesusland
- Some dumbass Arkansas senator who misused words (like "literacy" instead of "literalism")
- Singer-turned-preacher who obviously got rich doing what he does and sees no disconnect between his wealth and the fact that Jesus is supposed to be for the poor
- Gay-to-straight guy
- The Spanish-speaking, self-proclaimed "Second Coming of Jesus" (Maher doesn't count "dubious descendant" as "reincarnation")
- Creation Museum, with Ken Ham saying there's a "conspiracy among scientists" to keep creationism down

Mormonism:
- Much of the craziness was already documented by South Park, but I didn't even know God lived on another planet!
- Also amusing was that they believe "dark skin was a curse, but through faith (or something) they can attain lighter skin"... here they showed Michael Jackson.

Islam:
- The violence we all think of when we think of Islam is not motivated by religion, it's "political." (my ass!)
- Muslim guy: "Oh, no, we do allow women here. They have a special corner."
- Also amusing was some Muslim guy's cell phone going off during an interview - to rock music, no less. "Damn this 21st century!" says Maher.

Judaism:
- There was a store with crazy-ass gadgets allowing Jews to do things otherwise forbidden on the Sabbath. Like dialing phones. The guy running the place says "the loopholes were there on purpose for emergencies."


The last 10 minutes of the movie is where Maher makes his points:

1) Why is religion bad? The religious right has a frightening control over government (recent example), these religious assholes can see a silver lining in, say, nuclear war (it's when Jesus is supposed to come back), and that because these religious assholes believe in "End Times," they won't care to improve the quality of life right now.

2) The non-religious should speak out more. At 16%, they surpass other minorities, but they don't even have government lobbies that get everything their groups want.


All in all, it's very similar to The God Who Wasn't There, but not quite as good IMO.Religulous has its points, but it's 90% "LOL they believe in this shit!?" and 10% "Okay, now here's the problem with all this." TGWWT makes its case throughout, and the people interviewed aren't nuts but people who know what they're talking about; Sam Harris made the point about the "silver lining of a mushroom cloud" very well. TGWWT and Religulous both made the point about how the story of Jesus had a lot in common with other religious tales (check out Osiris), but only TGWWT mentioned the Church's official stance regarding this - namely that Satan "counterfeited the story in advance." Heck, TGWWT even has a cool soundtrack which is still available for download.

Religulous does a few things I can't say I'm a fan of. First, there's the Family Guy-style cutaway scenes, though they may be wholly appropriate, and I realize they're for comedic effect. Second, according to Wikipedia, while filming the documentary, Maher used a fake title. This was dishonest in Ben Stein's Expelled, and it's dishonest here.

If TGWWT was a 5/5, I'd give Religulous a 4/5. Maher is a funny guy, but I liked TGWWTbetter, even if it wasn't (intentionally) funny. Plus Maher is still kind of an asshole for all his work for PETA.

On top of all this, I'm excited that I now know about a theater where I can see foreign and independent films; I was so impressed with the trailers, I regretted not having a pen and paper handy to jot down the titles! I'll have to keep an eye out for The First Basket and Let The Right One In. Often I'd watch At the Movies with Ebert & Roeper, but I'd ask myself where the hell I'd get to see those films with "limited showing." Now I know.

Proper pronunciation of "Beijing?"

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Current mood:grumpy

Although it's entirely possible I'm acting like an asshole here... is anyone bothered by the butchered pronunciation of "Beijing" that you often hear on TV?

I'm not talking about Chinese tones, or even the "Beijing / Peking" thing... I'm talking about the "j" sound. What's with everyone pronouncing "Beijing" using the [Ʒ] sound (as in measure or visual) like it was some sort of French word? Last I checked, Beijing isn't in France, Jacques, it's in China! I'm almost certain the Chinese say it with something resembling our "j" or "ch," which shouldn't be too much of a stretch for us English speakers.

I'd confirm the whole matter myself, but months of my tenuous "relationship" with someone who would know just makes me not want to pursue this further. Angela.

(and yeah, the Ʒ looks a lot like the Japanese ろ...)

Why I love FARK

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http://forums.fark.com/cgi/fark/comments.pl?IDLink=3920656

Not often I blog about a single link, but goddamn...

Feel smug. Give blood.

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Just announcing that I once again donated blood, thereby saving someone's life, and I got a voucher for a free skillet queso appetizer at Chili's to show for it.

Things got a little scary when something dropped (and made a loud crashing sound) right as the needle was going in, and I was a little pissed off that I still had to fill in forms, despite them apparently recognizing who I was when I called in for appointment.

Oh, and there was an earthquake in the Los Angeles area today at around 11:43. From where I was it only lasted about 10 seconds, and nothing fell off any shelf.

一石二鳥

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Current mood:accomplished

一石二鳥　（いっせき　にちょう）, isseki nichou
(n) killing two birds with one stone

As most people know, my computer (or at least my hard drives) blew up, so now I'm on Vista with none of my old files. But I'll write about that later.

In Vista, when you select a file and hit F2 to rename, the file extension will not be highlighted. This is good news for most people, but since I use VirtualDub a lot, I need to be able to open files quickly, and that means selecting and copying the entire file name, with the extension.

After wracking my brain trying to come up with a solution, it was good old AutoHotkey to the rescue. With this hilariously simple script, I was able to quickly and safely remap my always-useless F1 key to instantly send the sequence Ctrl+Home, Shift+Ctrl+End, enabling me to rename and highlight like I used to with just a roll of my fingers:

CommentFlag @
@Changes commentflag from ; since caffeine uses that to move right in PC Tetris games.

F1::
send ^{Home}+^{End}
return
@Highlights everything - handy for highlighting full file names.

I barely know how to write scripts for AutoHotkey (heck, I just modified this script), but I'm glad I was able to think of this workaround. It sorta makes up for that lousy Thursday at that temp agency (please, no follow-up questions)...

-

EDIT: I've since modified this script to include "Ctrl+C" by tacking on ^c to the end.

Movie reviews

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Current mood:accomplished

Just some quick reviews of movies I've seen in the past two weeks...

Harold & Kumar 2 - I was afraid it wasn't going to match up with the original, but I'm glad to say it surpassed it with more raunchy humor and what has to be the sweetest ass anyone has ever seen.... ever. And as an aside, this movie and this thread made me want to start writing poetry. Not lame emo poetry, but funny and / or sardonic poetry. And limericks are pretty funny by themselves, so...

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly - Watching a scene of this movie from videogrunt made me want to see the whole picture, and a few movies down the Netflix queue and it arrived. It was nearly 3 hours which almost made me want to skip it, but I was working on my kanji project and it helped pass the time. At first I was wondering why some of the voices seemed dubbed, but then I looked at the wiki and saw the words "Italian epic spaghetti Western" and it, surprisingly, made perfect sense. It's probably the best movie anyone will ever see... ever.

The Forbidden Kingdom - Now this was a disappointment. The ads on TV made it look like a totally awesome kung-fu flick starring two superstars, and in the commercials when Jackie said "We can kill each other later," I thought it was going to be some awesome-but-uneasy partnership, not unlike The Good, the Bad and the Ugly... or that one G.I. Joe episode. Instead, moviegoers were fooled into seeing something resembling a Karate Kid rip off, with a kid even more unlikeable than Daniel-san, that took a HUGE detour, with fighting scenes that weren't all that spectacular (it ain't Iron Monkey) or even necessary. And for a movie with Jackie Chan, it was surprisingly unfunny; there were exactly TWO funny moments, and I'm being generous here because I don't even remember one of them. I almost cringed when some kid I've never even heard of is shown in... surprise... a training montage (queue the "montage" track from Team America). And we're supposed to believe he's a match for the same bad guys that give Jackie a hard time? Perhaps the only saving grace is the beauteous Li Bingbing, but if you've ever attended community college, you've met hotter women. I gotta say, that's the last time I leave the movie choice to my cousin! And I wanted to see Forgetting Sarah Marshall.

My PSP "homebrew" app was released!

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Current mood:accomplished

PSP Kanji Learner - it's the product of my three passions: the PSP, video editing, and kanji. Learning C was too hard (although I did manage to create a Hello World) so I just made my flash cards with videos. I've wanted to put my flash cards in some kind of digital form for years, but I just didn't know how I was going to do it. But then I was playing around with videos on the PSP and I realized that if you enable Sequential Playback and Shuffle, the same video won't play twice and the playback will stop when all the videos in a folder are played - ideal for flash card practice. So much better than that old NDS homebrew app I used to use... and good thing too, since I hardly ever touch my DS Lite anymore.

And yes, I'm "billylee8." When I feel like being an asshole, I'm "billylee8" (I can't help but trash that overhyped but ultimately useless N64 emulator, Daedalus, every chance I get). When I'm everyone's favorite poster, I'm "Triple Lei." Even the name "billylee8" still cracks me up; it could make people think that either my name really is Billy Lee, or that I'm just a big Double Dragon fan. The "8", of course, is completely random. But saying and hearing "Triple Lei" used to make me laugh too, so whatever.

I also made sure to put "oh ya btw billylee8 = Triple Lei lol." at the end of the readme - just so they know that billylee8 = Triple Lei = Justin Sison. And when I say "Justin Sison," I mean thereal Justin Sison, not the 16-year-old asshole who either lives in Van Nuys or the Philippines and bumps me down in Google page rankings.

PSP goodness

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New PSP Setup:

- PSP Slim (Daxter Pack)

- Invisible Shield screen protector (better than Hori!)

- Extended Life Battery Kit (10+ hours on a Slim!)

- Pandora Battery & Despertar del Cementerio v3 (now back to 3.71 M33-4!)

The downsides:

- With no 1.50 kernel, I have to remember which homebrew can be booted normally from the XMB, and which homebrew has to be booted with eLoader.

- I have to earn my Tekken: DR ranks from scratch since the saves are tied to the MAC address. But doing d+1, cd+3 isn't too hard... (good thing I found that out by myself!)

- My PlayGear Pocket isn't quite as useful since the Slim rattles a bit, and the headphone port (due to the repositioning) is blocked. I don't want to mod it, either...

And a repost from my GameFAQs topic:

Yeah. I just got all 284 gold medals in Wipeout Pure (US Version), and since I didn't feel like pirating the Euro release of Wipeout Pulse, I ended up buying the original Wipeout again. I already put it my PSP by ripping it from my own game, but at $6, curiosity got the better of me.

The icons in the XMB look extremely ugly and the gameboot seems to be a generic health warning, but I'm more than satisfied with the purchase for two reasons:

1) It uses my previous save, so I didn't have to unlock Rapier class again. It even overwrites the saved data icon to the official PSN Store version... nice.

2) The game is now only 74 MB instead of 437 MB. I'm pretty sure I used the highest compression when ripping, too. This was a pleasant surprise since the page lists it as 393 MB. This means I can actually put a full-length movie on my "all-purpose" memory stick!

So really, there is no downside to buying from the PSN Store, other than actually having to buy them. I look forward to getting the other Wipeout games; hopefully they'll port over the Euro-only Wipeout 3: SE instead of the plain old Wipeout 3 released in the US!

This is probably old news to some, but as a proud CFW user, I wouldn't have bothered to learn anything about the PSN Store.