Twitter officially 100% more useful

I admit it, I have a Twitter account. If you clicked that link just now, you'd see that I only really used it for voting. But last Wednesday the PlayStation Blog was giving away 10 copies of the Shatter Soundtrack through a Twitter contest (first 10 posters to correctly reply) and I made sure to snag one. When I won, I ended up doing a search for "twitter dm" because I had no idea what it was. ("Direct Message." Makes sense.)

Thanks to Google Chrome for speedy page loading and keywords for search engines, Online Stopwatch for easily letting me know when 30 seconds have passed so I could hit F5 to refresh, and Sidhe for making it all possible.

The soundtrack itself is pretty groovy. Reminds me of MJKO at Coalesce (the soundtrack I used for the following video):

Capturing on a Blackmagic Intensity Pro through S-Video

This is the cable adapter you want, folks: "S-Video to 2 RCA - Female to 2 Male" by svideo.com. It was $22 (free shipping), but at least now I can finally capture from my older gaming consoles through S-video.

I paid more than I wanted to (which was $0), but it's a great quality cable, it's only as long as I needed it to be (6 inches), and to be fair it's a reasonable price. Blackmagic Design links to two other sources, but judging by those pictures, neither of those sites were offering the cable you actually need!

I got the Intensity Pro when it was much more expensive (they dropped the price considerably only 5 months after I got it, those jerks)... but at least now I feel better about paying the "premium" for the analog connections. Back then, Blackmagic used to offer a lower-end Intensity (no "Pro") which was just HDMI - no analog connections. It's probably true that no one bought an Intensity Pro just for s-video; I only really wanted the analog connections for recording in HD 720p through component to get around that pesky HDCP. Now I can actually use the s-video input as well, and thanks to the Intensity Pro's video-out, I can also play lag-free on a second monitor (ASUS VH236H, naturally) as opposed to playing while trying to adjust to the lag of a video capture display.

Kudos to svideo.com for their low prices, speedy service, and great customer service. They accepted my Vanilla Visa gift card without any problems. Check them out for all sorts of video converters and adapters. If you can think of it, they probably have it.