Old School WoW Goodness NSFW

For those of you that experienced Onyxia in the Vanilla WoW days, here's a blast from the past:

Again NSFW!!

AWESOME!!!

More AWESOMENESS!!

Fallout 3 Machinima. Come get some...


nsfw, btw :)

NVIDIA 3D Vision, First Looks. Part One - The GPU and Monitor

Work has finally slowed enough for me to crack open all of my new gear and start playing. I had a 9800 GX2 going into this bit I got a GTX 280 with the box of goodies from NVIDIA. Being the perfomance addict that I am I decided to do a quick side-by-side test to see which card had the most pure horsepower. This is not the no-brainer you think it might be because the 9800 does single-card SLI, due to having 2 GPUs inside, vs the 280's single chip:




















This is just a simple test to see how many megapixels/second each card processes and not an in-depth bank of benchmarks but it eases the decision to pull out my faithful 9800 (on the bottom) in favor of the GTX280.

Now for the other half of the display end of our kit. For the GeForce 3D Vision to work you need a 3D Vision ready Display. NVIDIA was generous enough to provide the 22" Samsung 2233RZ. Until now I had thought the Samsung 22" 226BW I bought almost 2 years ago looked good but the RZ is stunning. It is capable of refresh rates up to 120Hz (twice what "old school" LCDs are capable of) and has a 20000:1 contrast ratio the so colors are deep and crisp and, with a 5ms response time, not even the craziest shooter should have the opportunity to tear, blur or blink.

That wraps up what we'll be looking AT while we play with the 3D Vision. Next we'll cover what came in the box, how "user friendly" the kit is and talk about how this thing looks when you're actually playing a game.

Gifts! Toys!

Some good friends at nVidia have sent a care package! Over the next few days I'll be playing with a GTX 280/1G and a set of Ge Force 3D Vision stereoscopic glasses, all on a shiny new 22" Samsung 2233RZ! Unfortunately I'm currently mired in the drudgery of the daytime job so it will be a couple of days until I can post anything solid but what I've seen so far is exciting!

TVersity For The Win

Or... How I came out of a virtual Stone Age and learned to stream.

I've accumulated quite a collection of videos over the years and my game systems (360 and PS3) have long been a way to watch them someplace other than my PC. I know, 360 and XP Media Center are *supposed* to stream... I'd rather go to the dentist.

In the past I used to have to burn anything I wanted to watch to a DVD, as it was the only supported format. This could be a time-consuming process and if it was something from the web, there were sometimes compatibility issues with my DVD burning software. With the introduction of native support for several media formats I now had the ability to copy files to a USB drive and play it on my PS3. I did try several times to connect my USB HDD to my 360 but it just rekindled the desire for dental surgery...

Today I was having some issues with a large AVI performing poorly from the external drive so I decided to Google "USB Video Performance PS3" and very near the top of the list was a Gizmodo article from last November. Most of the article was old news to me, as I'd been using external media to play videos for years but it did reference and app called TVersity.

TVersity comes in two flavors, Free and Pro. The Free version will give you everything but the ability to stream web content (Hulu, YouTube, Sling) but you don't have to pay up front for Pro and the web content is cool.

The setup is really simple and the interface sharp and reasonably intuitive. In less than 10 minutes from downloading the app I was watching streaming content on my 360, directly from my PC. My old issues of potential codec/format compatibility is gone now, too. TVersity has a client-side transcoder that will decode the stream on the fly.

While some of my friends are gleefully harassing me for *just* stumbling on to this, I see it as the dawn of a new era in my home entertainment. Well, off to configure sling.com..

Who is this guy?

Welcome to Day 1:

Because of my background in technology, love of gadgets, and a driving need to know how things work, people are always asking my opinion on all manner of manner of technology and gadgetry. I liken it to the "Doctor at a party" cliche, people find out I'm into computers and tech and immediately the questions start.... which mobo is better, what are the features on this new phone, why does my game performance suck so badly, what USB drive can I plug into my PS3, AMD or Intel....

Answering questions like these and many more, as well as having a place to memorialize my ravings and ruminations is going to the running theme here.