Woohoo! I have a Toppy! Man they are awesome ^_^ Set it up last night, and after reluctantly demoting my DVD player from the component video input was pleasantly greeted with perfect SBS DIGITAL coverage! This meant Mythbusters in glorious digital goodness! Yummy… Plus timeshifting and recording. Only SBS coverage in Deni for now, but the good news is that it’s coming from our local tower so now it’s only a matter of time before the other stations get off their collective arses, and join the rest of us here in the 21st century. Not getting any EPG info yet, not sure why…
Apart from the obvious advantages of a PVR, these are my favourite Toppy features based on first impressions:
- Change aspect ratio at the touch of a button for those 4:3 shows which just look sad when you watch them in letterbox mode with a massive black border
- Trim recorded files during playback. Although I have a feeling this ’snaps’ to the nearest HDD cluster or something so you can’t get frame precision and it takes some fiddling to get it right. I just set bookmarks instead.
- Download recordings via USB (haven’t tried it yet)
- Pretty good safeguards to prevent you screwing your recordeings (prompting etc.)
I’ve scheduled all my SBS timers: Mythbusters, South Park, Drawn Together, Eco House Challenge, Nerds FC, Top Gear, Iron Chef, Insight, and a massive 4 hour slot this Sunday from 7:30pm which looks interesting. Now to transfer the old shows onto something to free up some space.
As previously mentioned ABC coverage should be here in June, but I’m seriously tempted to start a petition to the other stations…
I just discovered one of the major benefits of having a dual-core processor: when I render a song in FL Studio, I can actually continue using my computer! This completely negates the major downside to rendering FL songs so now I have no excuse and can render them all! Hmmwwhahaha!
Published by Si at 5 May, 2007
in Site.
Well, the SiteMeter stats are in and only 2% of my visitors use a screen resolution under 1024×768. So I thought it was high time I widened the site design. Now, I’ll have more flexibility in my posts, being able to include medium sized Flickr photos. At 500 pixels wide, they didn’t quite fit in the old design. I redid the logo, but I think I’m getting sick of this one. When I get inspired, I’ll update it. But right now, I have a major craving for Stargate that needs satisfying ^_^
Published by Si at 4 May, 2007
in Games.
Whether you’re a demonic scourge or angelic blessing, Fable: The Lost Chapters is a lot of fun. I might bitch about some aspects of the game but overall it’s one of the best games I’ve ever played. And only on Xbox, I don’t think it would be as good on PC, but that’s probably just a reflection of my preference for playing games on a comfy couch, not crammed in at my desk on a crappy chair that needs replacing ;-) And don’t even bother with the original Fable. Lost Chapters has all the original content and more.
I recently finished Fable for the second time. I played being good, then being evil. The difference? Well, it’s very very easy to be really good since the plot is heavily skewed that way. Most of the core quests in Fable require you to do a lot of stuff that gets you good alignment points. E.g. slaying heaps of monsters and bandits. It is this very aspect of the game that makes playing as evil a bit harder. Monster-slaying experience is easier to get than the villager-slaying kind for two reasons. There are a lot more monsters than people (especially in quests). And you don’t get fined or kicked out of town for slaying monsters. There are a few evil non-core quests that help in evil-ing up your alignment. And it’s really quite obvious to me what actions will result in what alignment, so it wasn’t that hard playing as evil.
SPOILER WARNING!!! Read on at own risk!
Continue reading ‘Life of the Aligned’
Published by Si at 4 May, 2007
in Music.
Congratulations to the Lisa Young Quartet on their album Grace being awarded Best Vocal Album at this year’s Australian Bell Jazz Awards. I know how hard these guys worked on their album so it must be great to receive recognition like this. Well done guys!
Published by Si at 3 May, 2007
in Music.
On a recent bus trip I was flicking through my MP3 player for something to listen to and stumbled across an album I hadn’t played in ages; Pnau’s Sambanova. Half-way through the track Keep on Truckin’ I suddenly thought “Damn, this is such an awesome song, why don’t I play it more?” I played the whole album and was thoroughly impressed but at the same time a bit ashamed I’d let such a work of pure skill lie dormant in the depths of obscurity for so long.
A few days later, the curiosity was nagging at me and the googling started. I found out some interesting info. Pnau are actually an Aussie dance duo and the original release of Sambanova was pulled from all record stores in 1999 for uncleared samples, only a week before they won the ARIA for Best Dance Release. I also read about their second album, Again which I proceeded to source through the usual channels ;-) It proved rather difficult, the album obviously not that popular but I eventually found a copy. It wasn’t quite what I was expecting but still a mostly decent album.
I have no idea about genres and believe pigeonholing music for the sake of it is an exercise in pure wankology. But at the risk of sounding like a total wankologist, I’m going to propose that Sambanova is probably “electronic funky breaks”. This classification is only necessary to illustrate the difference between the two albums. Again sounds more like “downtempo drum-n-bass”. I feel like a traitor for attempting to label music that simply defies classification, so ignore this whole paragraph and decide for yourself.
I will say that Again is harder to listen to, in the way that Pendulum and The Presets are sometimes hard to listen to. It’s only good in small doses. Sambanova is very easy to listen to in the way that Hybrid (Wide Angle) and Massive Attack are easy to listen to. But you don’t want to overplay it until it’s that annoying background noise you just have to turn off or you’ll go insane. After this whole experience, I can attest that Keep on Truckin’ has made it into my Perfect Song List.
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