Author: Andrew Huey

San Diego schedule

The Thursday and Sunday schedules are up at the comic-con site. As usual, plenty of interesting stuff.

Some Thursday highlights: a Paul Gulacy spotlight, Doctor Who and Torchwood panels (both with Russell T Davies), an Eddie Campbell spotlight, the Mark and Sergio panel, DC Nation, and, at night, the annual Ric Meyers’ Kung-Fu Extravaganza.

And Sunday: The Jack Kirby tribute panel, a Kyle Baker spotlight, a second DC Nation panel, the Art of the Cover panel, Cartoon Voices, Dave Gibbons, and Buffy the Musical!

PS3 update

For no good reason, I thought I’d write a post on what I’ve been doing with my PS3 so far. I haven’t played MGS4 yet. I’m waiting until I have a good block of time to get started on it. (Maybe after I finish Final Fantasy 8.) I’ve spent a lot of time messing around with Pain, which is a downloadable game that came free with the PS3/MGS4 bundle. It’s a lot of fun. Basically, you shoot a guy out of a slingshot and try to cause as much damage as possible, both to the guy and his surroundings. Very cathartic.

I felt like I needed to go out and actually buy at least one game for the PS3, so I went to Best Buy and bought Orange Box today. The main reason for buying it was to get Portal, which is a nifty little puzzle game with a twisted sense of humor. And an end-credit song by Jonathan Coulton. I’ve already started playing it. Supposedly, it can be finished in just a few hours, so I may be about half-way done. (Or maybe not. I’m usually slower than average with these kind of games.) I’m not sure if I’ll bother with any of the other games in Orange Box. I’m not that interested in online multi-player stuff like Team Fortress 2, and I’m not sure Half-Life will be my cup of tea. I guess I’ll try it out at some point and see if I like it.

Rhapsody MP3 store

Rhapsody has just opened an MP3 store, in beta. If you sign up for it now, you can get a $10 credit to your account, which is enough to buy Perception, a 90-track box set of pretty much everything The Doors ever released. And if you want to spend another dollar, you can get The Herbie Hancock Box, which is a 34-track collection. I’m honestly not sure if either of these box sets is at these prices purposely or due to a pricing mix-up, but either way it’s a good deal.

Unfortunately, the store itself is a bit of a mess. I had a lot of trouble downloading the Doors set. The download manager they provide just didn’t work, so I switched to an option that allowed you to download the tracks in zip files. That got me 81 out of the 90 tracks, but the remaining 9 tracks came down in a corrupt zip file. I had to go through a customer service chat session to get them to credit me for the missing tracks and allow me to re-download them. On the Herbie Hancock set, I found that I could use the download manager if I manually downloaded one track at a time. Queuing up multiple tracks didn’t work. So, basically I had to sit in front of my computer and, click on a track, wait for it to download, then go back and click on the next, and so on.

I don’t think I’ll be ordering much more from them until they get the download manager working well. Still, it’s nice to see another outlet for legitimate MP3 downloads!

Tales of HDMI joy and woe

I’ve been slowly getting all the pieces together to get my new TV working well. I went out to my local Cablevision office today and traded my old cable box in for an HD box. My plan for the new box was going to be to hook it up directly to the TV via HDMI, then hook up the S-Video output on the box to my Tivo, so I could continue to record standard def stuff on the old Tivo. (I’m not quite ready to pop for a Series 3 Tivo yet.)
I wound up having a problem with this setup, that’s reasonably well-described here. I had to switch from HDMI to component. The picture’s still really good. And, surprisingly, the S-Video output to the Tivo seems to be way better than the S-Video output from the old box.
So now I’m set up to watch football next season in HD, though I won’t be able to use the Tivo functionality on it, unless I switch back to the standard def output. I guess that’s a good compromise until I’m ready to pop for the Series 3 Tivo.
I also hooked my HD-DVD player up via HDMI yesterday. I watched a couple of movies on that yesterday & today, and they look great.
So, now I’ve got the PS3 and HD-DVD player on HDMI, the Wii and cable box on component, the Tivo on S-Video, and the old PS2 on composite. I’ll probably retire the PS2 soon, since I also just got the little box I need to transfer my PS1 and PS2 game saves over to the PS3. Assuming Final Fantasy VIII, IX, and X work OK on the PS3, I think I can get rid of the PS2. That’ll be something else to sell on eBay, I guess.

eBay – old video games

I just listed some old video games on eBay. I only wanted to put up a few simple listings quickly, so I just used eBay’s most simple listing method, pulling in item details based on UPC. This method backfired on me, though. Every one of the games I listed wound up with “Gran Turismo 2” in bold letters above the stock box art photo. That was the first game I listed, so I guess some bug pulled it from page to page as I was listing stuff. While you can revise listings on eBay, it seems that you can’t fix something that’s wrong in the standard layout that’s generated when you pull in an item description. Very frustrating.

I tried the eBay online chat support, to see if I could get it straightened out. In the end, I’m not even sure if I convinced the support rep that anything was wrong. I think she thought I was just too stupid to navigate the “revise your item” page. Oh well. Everything else in the listings is right, so I just added a line to the description asking people to ignore the “Gran Turismo 2” heading.

These are old PS1 and PS2 games that nobody’s likely to want anyway. I just thought I’d toss them up on eBay to see if I could find them a new home rather than tossing them in the garbage.

In looking through other listings for PS1 games, in particular, I was surprised to see some games going for more than they originally cost. Apparently, the “black label” version (vs. the “greatest hits” version) of some of the old games is considered collectible. I guess that’s no stranger than some of the stuff that makes certain comic books more collectible than others (price variants and so on).

random TV-related stuff

I picked up this antenna at Radio Shack today, in the hopes of picking up some over-the-aid HDTV. It didn’t work out; it only allowed me to pick up one station, NJN. I guess I’ll be taking it back to Radio Shack tomorrow.

I also started playing around today with the idea of streaming audio & video from my PC to my PS3, using Nero MediaHome. It, surprisingly, works pretty well. There’s a how-to here. You need Nero Ultra Edition 7, which I conveniently already have.

new TV

I bought a new TV yesterday. It was kind of inevitable that I’d trade in the old CRT for an HDTV of some sort at some point, but I guess the PS3 was the tipping point. It just didn’t make sense to have both a Blu-Ray and HD-DVD player in the apartment, and not have a decent HDTV. I got a 32″ LG from Best Buy. It’s this model. It works great with the PS3, but that’s the only device I have hooked up via HDMI at this point. I only had one HDMI cable in the apartment, and I didn’t want to pay Best Buy’s price for HDMI cables. Instead, I ordered some from MonoPrice. When they arrive, I’ll be able to hook up the HD-DVD also.
Alas, there’s not much I can do with the cable box / Tivo combination. That’s composite at best. I can get a new HD cable box from Cablevision, but that’s probably not going to do me much good unless I trade up to an HD DVR, which I’m really not ready to do yet.
The Wii can’t do HDMI, but I can trade up from composite to component, which my friend tells me is worthwhile. I should have ordered a Wii component cable set from Monoprice when I ordered the HDMI cables from them, but I didn’t think of it until after I’d placed the order. Looking around, it does seem that Wii component cables are nearly as overpriced as HDMI cables — $6 from Monoprice, $30 elsewhere.
I’m also thinking about getting an antenna, so I can pick up over-the-air HDTV. Antennas are cheap enough, though I’m not sure how well they’ll work here in Somerville. We’re basically too far from both New York and Philly to pick up regular TV or radio stations from either market without some grief, but I’m hoping I’ll be able to pick up a few stations with a good antenna.