I've got good news and bad news.

First the good. A long time ago I bought a used Mac Cube for the express purpose of playing Baldur's Gate on it. Why you ask? Because Baldur's Gate (BG) is generally accepted to be the best role playing game ever made and I never had a chance to play it when it came out roughly a decade ago. Ok, so why buy a Mac just to play it you ask? BG will technically run on OS X and therefore on modern Macs but there's a number of issues and the performance apparently sucks. Therefore the best experience is obtained when running it on the older operating system OS 9. The great thing about the Cube, besides being an amazing piece of engineering (it makes modern SFF PC's look like outright monstrosities), is that it's highly upgradeable and once upgraded offers the fastest OS 9 box possible.

Like many projects I dream up I have great intentions but rarely have the time to fulfill them. Well over the weekend and thanks to being snowed in I dug out my Cube determined to get BG installing and running. I'm happy to say I succeeded as it's now installed and fully patched. A few things still need to be done. For some reason I can't get it to work on my old Apple monitor using it's proprietary ADB connector and instead have had to resort to running it on my trusty Phillips LCD over a standard VGA connection. So I've ordered a faster video card with more memory and once installed hope to be able to use my modern HP monitor over the DVI interface for a fully digital signal. I'll also likely order a processor upgrade and new case as well. While the CPU upgrade would give me 3 times the processing power the overall system would also run cooler. Which is hugely important in that tiny case - you gotta love technical advances!
 

Now the bad. I finished watching a movie on my Kuro plasma on the weekend and when I switched from the Blu-ray connection to the TV (cable) input, the show on that channel happened to be in Standard Definition (SD). Meaning I temporarily had the black border around the display before it auto stretched it to fill the screen. Well in the black border I noticed a flashing light. I went right up and sure enough there's a 'pixel' that continuously flickers off and on. I've verified that it does this regardless of the channel, SD or HD broadcast, or even when it's playing a Blu-ray movie. From a seating distance it's hard to notice but the fact that it's there is driving me crazy. I checked and it looks like I bought it in March of this year so it's still under the manufacturers warranty. Therefore I intend to call Pioneer this week and see what they can do about it. Fingers crossed!

It looks like Shaw has started selling PVR 'Expanders' - essentially external Sata drives that you can use to record more content. A 1 Terabyte drive allows you to record up to 600 hours of regular TV and up to 120 hours of Hi-Def content.

I know that before this came along people had tried to expand the drive space on their own with varying success. There's a good thread here that details the process and the pros and cons of doing so.

That said, Shaw is selling them for $150 and a quick look on Memory Express shows similar drives selling for slightly higher. In my mind it wouldn't be worth the hassle of trying to get something not officially supported working especially when they're basically the same cost or slightly cheaper from Shaw.

The only thing I don't really like about them is that they're external. I'd much prefer being able to take my box in and have them swap in a larger hard drive.

On a related note I called Shaw's tech support today as I was having issues getting the PPV events to come up (I want to watch UFC tonight). They reset the box and while they were doing that I dug out the PVR manual and for whatever reason decided to look at the internal settings menu. To my surprise I found that it was set to output standard definition shows in 480i instead of 480p resolution. I imagine I had set that previously and maybe during a box reset it went back to the defaults, but I'm not sure.

However now that I've changed the setting, regular TV shows look much, much better than before.

So the moral of the story is in addition to the settings on the TV itself and your DVD/Blu-Ray player, don't forget to get into and check out the menu of your Cable box or Satellite box. You may not be getting the best picture out of them.

Lately we've been looking at ways to save money and so the thought crossed my mind that maybe I should sell my Sony camera.

First some background. When I bought my Sony DSC-R1 camera a few years ago, SLR cameras weren't quite yet mainstream and were still very expensive. The Sony I bought was also equally expensive and was considered the pinnacle of non-SLR cameras. Its lens was considered the absolute best you could get.

However it is also big, heavy, and I was always worried that something would happen to it if I took it with me on trips and vacations. The sad truth is that for most of its life it just sat on top of the fridge collecting dust.

So I took a peek on eBay to see what they were selling for and in most cases it was below $500 - and that was when the seller had a bunch of extras (carrying bag, lenses etc.) I then looked at a bunch of reviews of my camera and to my surprise found that although the manufacturer no longer sells it, it is still highly coveted by professional photographers. Some were even saying they got rid of their SLR and went back to the Sony. Quite a dramatically different opinion of its 'value' compared to the point and click crowd on eBay.

After mulling everything over, instead of selling it I went and bought new lenses for it - a wide angle lens and a macro lens. I figured that because I'd take a bath on it if I sold it and because it is still considered a premier camera I might as well put in the effort to use it.

I checked with Jay as to what he thought of the lenses. For those who aren't aware, Jay has become quite the expert photographer - and has even started up a website to showcase his talent. He said they were a decent deal which was good enough for me, and I fired off my payment.

So somehow instead of saving money I ended up spending even more money. However as I told Chris when she shook her head disapprovingly at me I'm going to make good use of the camera from now on. Besides, I've always half jokingly said that if I ever lose my job my backup plan would be to start a website where um, I'd be doing a lot of photography. Considering how things are going with the economy I'd better be prepared.

I haven't done any gaming for awhile but this weekend I got the itch to fire something up. But what?

Well when I bought Half Life 2: The Orange Box a couple years ago it also came with a neat little game called 'Portal'. I'd been meaning to play it since day one but for some reason never got around to it. So I sparked it up yesterday and took it for a spin.

Portal is a puzzle game where you wake up in a chamber and have to figure your way through 19 levels to gain your supposed freedom. All you have is a device which allows you to create either a blue portal or a yellow portal as well as grab certain objects.  The portals obviously are the main focus of the game and it took the first few levels before the light bulb went on over my head and I 'got it'.

While I finished it in only a few hours, maybe six hours total gameplay, it definitely was fun to play. The puzzles were challenging but never frustratingly so and I loved the humour sprinkled throughout.

So if you want a unique, fun game, that won't tie you up for days playing then I highly recommend this one. You can find it on the Steam gaming network and it only costs $19.99.

I was reading an online story in the Globe & Mail a few days ago and came across an article on how people today are less concerned about their loss of privacy in a world awash with bloggers, Facebook, and Twitter.

They had a link to one blog site (NSFW) which is about one middle aged, overweight lady who's into bondage yakking about her experiences and which is highlighted in a new book that's on Oprah's must read list called 'The Peep Diaries'.

Naturally I clicked on the link to check out this revolutionary site on popular culture and the epitome of blogging - did I mention it's in one of Oprah's recommended books??? Imagine my surprise (and annoyance) when the site looks like it was designed over a decade ago on Frontpage 2.0. Even more surprising is that this website has had over 2 million visitors to date . Ok fine, the topic might be a bit (pardon the pun) titillating and you get the odd boob flash here and there but to have that many visitors? Shit I don't think I've had one hundred unique visitors to my site in the more than 5 years it's been up.

Frankly I just don't understand how some crappy website, badly designed, with useless, short blurbs about trivial topics can end up being recognized in a national newspaper. What am I missing? Maybe I need to start showing some skin on here. Perhaps I'll post some pictures of my bare ass along with a few short stories on how I've been a naughty boy and need to be punished. I'm sure I'll hit the big time then.

Nah. I'll just continue doing what I've always done and keep sharing my thoughts on here with friends and family. I'll leave the national recognition to everyone else.

At some point over a year ago I bought a Marantz AV9000 'receiver' off of someone on eBay for about $500. These boxes first came out a decade ago and were several thousand dollars at the time.

The reason I got this was that it was one of the few devices still generally available that had a RF port for Laserdisc players. This port allows you to have 5.1 Dolby Surround (which used to be called AC-3). The other cool thing about the AV9000 was that it was also THX certified.

Well until today it sat in the basement collecting dust.

I recently got my Sony widescreen tube TV moved downstairs and I realized that I'd be able to hook everything up to the Marantz and I'd be able to make use of its high end audio goodness! There was only one problem. On the back of the unit all the speaker connectors were RCA jacks. There were no standard speaker wire connectors at all! I thought what the hell?

I did some digging and it turns out that it's not a receiver after all. What I bought all that time ago was in fact a preamplifier. A preamp's job is to process the signal coming out of the Laserdisc, DVD player etc. before passing off the improved signal to your receiver. I had read about preamps before, but they seemed to mostly exist in the realm of snobby (and expensive) AV aficionados. Well I guess I had unknowingly become one of them.

After hooking all the cables up I fired up a number of both Laserdiscs and Blu-Ray's. Surprisingly, I noticed a definite improvement in sound compared to just running things straight to my receiver. In some cases it actually sounded like I was in a theatre. I guess these things really are worth the money after all. All I know is that when the iconic 'You're listening to THX' logo at the beginning of movies comes on I still get a big grin on my face - even more so now that my basement setup is THX certified.

I'm not sure if a new TV was in our budget, but in any case I'm now the proud owner of a Pioneer Kuro plasma.

And the funny thing is Chris was really the one who suggested we get it. Let me explain. As detailed in my previous post, I've had it with my current Blu-Ray player so I was planning on getting a new one. I had broken it down between the latest models from Sony and Panasonic, and one from Pioneer. Eventually I decided on the Pioneer because when it came to absolute best video quality (note, not features) it came out on top. Future Shop had it in stock so we decided to swing by there one day when we were out and about.

I had previously buttered Chris up to the idea that we should get a new TV. And surprisingly she didn't kick me out of the house. I've long had my eye on the latest Kuro's and had already decided that would be my next TV. The reason? Again, picture quality. The Kuro is generally regarded as the absolute best in the industry. The current generation is also the last from Pioneer as going forward they'll be obtaining the actual panels from Panasonic - there's also rumours that they like many other manufactures will be getting out of the plasma market altogether.

So while at Future Shop Chris suggested we should maybe see if they had the TV I wanted as well and see if we could get some sort of package deal. I had only gone in there with the intention of getting the Blu-Ray player, but I couldn't really argue with her logic. Sure enough they had it on the wall looking all pretty and just begging me to buy it.

In the end I'm not sure how much of a 'deal' we got. They agreed to knock off roughly $700 from the price of the player, TV, and stand. However in order to do so they insisted we take the 5 year extended warranty, which coincidentally was also roughly $700. Oh well, at least delivery was free.

Of course as usually happens with these things it doesn't end there. My silver Sony speakers now look woefully out of place next to my shiny black Plasma and stand. But if I get new speakers I obviously have to get a new receiver. And of course having spent so much money already I'll just have to get the TV professionally calibrated.

Such is the price for perfection :)

So I had some fun last night trying to watch a Blu-Ray movie rental. Chris and I had our snacks, we flopped on the couch, and I pressed Play. And.....waited......and waited....and waited. Nothing was coming up.

I pressed the Stop button and got the 'you can't do that' image on the TV, pressed the Menu buttons and got the same thing. I looked over at Chris and she had that 'why didn't we just rent a regular DVD again?' look on her face. Great. So I hopped on the internet and sure enough lots of people had issues with this movie (the latest X-Files movie) working in their player. I went to Samsung's website to look for a firmware update, and sure enough there was one which came out only a month or so ago.

I ran downstairs and grabbed the world's longest Ethernet cable and connected my player to my router, went into the setup menu and told it to update the firmware. It came back with a 'You are already running the latest version' dialog. Huh. Maybe I was running the latest? Nope. There was no way I had updated it since Christmas. So I downloaded the .ISO disc image, burnt it to a CD, slapped the CD in and got some kind of error message. By this point Chris had moved on to doing other things.

I then realized I had downloaded the file for a different model player. The CD was then tossed in the garbage while I downloaded yet another file, and reburnt yet another CD. After putting this new disc in I got a 'Would you like to update' message. Yay! So I told it to update, and after about 10 minutes of it doing it's thing the player powered down.

After powering it on again and pressing Play I nervously waited while it loaded. This time to much relief we got a picture and were able to watch the movie.

So what did I learn from this? One, Samsung no longer supports my model player (BD-P1200) and has cut off updates over the Internet. The latest firmware update which I had to burn to CD is also likely the last one they'll release. Secondly, anyone with a player older than a year or so will most likely not be able to upgrade to the new version 2.0 spec and will probably have issues with newer movies. This new version adds a lot of interactive features and fancy menu options. PS3 owners are lucky in that their players are upgradeable via a firmware update. Those of us with dedicated players however aren't as lucky.

A good overview of the different profiles can be found here.

Sigh. I love how Blu-Ray looks, but I honestly miss the simplicity of the days when you could rent a movie, put it in your player and just watch it.

With my rig once again operational I've been gaming up a storm.

First up was Quake 4. While not earth shattering or anything, overall I quite enjoyed playing it. It continued the story of Quake 2 and threw in a few of the creepy elements of the Doom remake. The boss characters were hard but not ridiculously so. If you put some thought into what you were doing there was always an easier way to kill them. Graphics were good but not outstanding, then again this game came out over three years ago. If you are running an older system and haven't played this yet, it would make a perfect addition.

Having conquered Quake I turned my attention to Bioshock. I loved this game. Overall it's yet another First Person Shooter (FPS) but what really sucks you in and makes it unique is the story. The game takes place in an underwater city that evokes visions of Fritz Lang's silent film classic Metropolis. In addition to the gorgeous graphics the gameplay itself is well thought out. You can finish the game by using the typical tactic of blasting everything in sight, you can finish the game by using the specialized power ups, you can finish the game by employing strategic ambushes, or obviously you can finish by using some combination of all three.

The one knock against this game, at least on the PC, is that it's notoriously buggy and crash prone. Unfortunately I wasn't able to escape it's temperamental nature either. When loading the final level I found it would repeatedly crash and exit out to Windows. Imagine my frustration at being that close to finishing it. So I did a bunch of Googling, tried this, tried that etc. Finally I was able to 'fix' it by temporarily copying off my saved games, reinstalling it, and copying my saved games back. While the game does an auto update upon installation, there is a separate 1.1 patch available which supposedly fixes most of the problems. Easily the best game I've played since Half Life 2!

From there I decided to kick it old school and revisit Ultima V. I remember spending literally months playing this game when I was teen, almost exactly 20 years ago. I had almost finished playing it on my Commodore 128 when one of the floppy disks got corrupted and the game became unplayable.

I've always wanted to go back and finish it. And finish it by playing the real deal, not via some emulation platform. So I took my Mac Color Classic with Apple IIe card to work and have been playing it during my lunch breaks. Frankly I don't know how I ever came close to finishing it. Remember this was in the days before the Internet and easily available hints and walk-thru's. I can't believe that after 20 years everything still works. Truly amazing.

I'm not sure how long it will take me to finish and I have my fingers crossed that the disks hold up (I need to make some copies). But when I do get there I'm going to record the final screens for posterity. Lord British fear not! Pondo the Brave will rescue you from your Underworld prison!

I got Kim's motherboard back and all the bad capacitors had been replaced. I slapped it in her case fired it up, and got a blue screen. Just friggin great. So I went to go into safe mode to diagnose what the problem was. Well it wouldn't let me in safe mode because I had to activate windows first. Because we had installed a new network card windows needed to be re-activated. Not that big a deal however as mentioned I couldn't do it in safe mode and I couldn't do it in the normal mode because it would keep blue screening. I was in a classic catch-22 situation.

At this point I was about ready to take a hammer to things but instead I did a bunch of Googling. Finally I came across an obscure suggestion to reduce the speed the AGP bus operated at. So I went in the Bios, turned off the 4x mode and sure enough the system booted up just fine. So Kim is now back in business.

Onto my own system woes. A few months ago I was playing a game when suddenly I got what I call the 'stuttering of death'. Basically the sound went into a stuttering loop for a few seconds before hanging. I powered off the system and pushed the power button to start it up again - except it was dead. Nothing. No power. Nada.

I opened up the case, checked all the connections, checked for obvious damage, smelled for smoke etc. It all seemed fine. I removed all the extraneous cards and power connectors. Nothing worked. Figuring it was the power supply I ordered another one off of eBay. After what seemed like forever it arrived, I installed it - and nothing. System would not power on. Ok, so it must be the motherboard. I ordered a slightly newer Asus board with a faster bus. This was extremely hard to find as I needed a Micro ATX motherboard which had a x4 PCI Express connector as that's what my raid controller used. The place I ordered from online informed me that contrary to what their website said they didn't actually have it in stock and it was back ordered.

While I waited for it to come in I also bought some new memory. My old system ran DDR-800 and according to the specs my new motherboard supported DDR-1066. So I ordered the specific memory which was certified as compatible for the motherboard at that speed.

After an agonizing wait I received my motherboard. I put everything together and powered it on - and - yay! It powered up. Awesome. Problem solved right? Well I soon found out that anytime I played any game within a few seconds the system would blue screen. Arrrrgggghhh!!! I mucked around with drivers, installed the latest ATI offering, played with various settings to no avail. Ok, so it must be the video card right? At this point I had replaced every other component short of the CPU. So I got online and ordered a new video card.

Once again I wanted a very specific version which was extremely hard to find and was again backordered. Eventually it came in, I installed it - and - the same @$!*# problem! At this point I was literally jumping up and down and screaming at the top of my lungs. Back to Google to try and find a solution. I punched in 'ati2dvag "blue screen"' and found that I wasn't alone in the world. EVERYONE seemed to be having this problem. As usual, lots of suggestions but no solutions.

In the end I found one posting which pointed to memory as being the culprit. I went through my motherboard manual and in the memory section it stated 'This chipset officially supports DDR2-800Mhz. With the Asus Super Memspeed Technology, this motherboard natively supports up to DDR2-1066Mhz.' Hmmm. So the chipset doesn't even support the speed I was running. Even though the manufacturer said it supported faster speeds it achieved this via overclocking. I went into the Bios, punched in DDR-800, and - problem solved! No really. For real. Everything works fine now. I've been playing Quake 4 for hours and hours without any glitches.

So in the end I bought a new power supply, motherboard, memory, CPU heat sink, video card, and power supply tester. Total cost was well over $1000. All so I could play a $50 game. After this experience I think my next gaming system will either be my Mac running in dual-boot mode or I'll just put up with the crappy interface and do what I said I'd never do and become a console gamer.

As Roger Murtaugh said, "I'm too old for this shit!"