Bush Mackel

It may come as a surprise to many, but for the past month I’ve been in possession of a PS3. That’s right, Sony’s Playstation 3. Trust me, I’m STILL shocked I ponied up the money to buy one. Well here’s how it happened - As you know, most of my gaming is done on a big ol’ home theater projector these days so watching movies in standard def is like putting a knife in my back.

Sorry guys, it just is.

Here’s the Story Morning Glory
So when I wanted to throw my wife a bone about a month ago and rent Twilight for her (horrible movie) I decided I would rent it on Blu-Ray and play it on a PS3. (Besides, I really wanted to beat my co-worker’s score in Super Stardust HD anyhow)… Everything that night went fine and the PS3 was a very capable device in my humble opinion. Fast forward about a month to present time and I had a WAY overpriced gaming system that didn’t have any games I really wanted. (I never did buy a single game for it). BUT, I was probably going to just keep it anyway since it played Blu-Ray movies half way decently and I can be lazier than the day is long sometimes.

It was at that point that I received word about this baby:

Now I knew that Blu-Ray player prices were far below the horrific price of PS3’s, but I didn’t know you could find a capable Samsung with just about all the bells and whistles for sub $200! Now to be fair, this is a refurb from Tiger Direct, but cNET gave it a good rating for what it wass and Pete gave me the approving nod on Twitter, so I pulled the trigger!

You Did This to Yourselves Sony!
Chances are that this doesn’t excite you like it does me but that’s ok. If on the other hand you have been BEGGING for an excuse to get a player at a bargain - Why not give this a go? And on a final note, I can’t be the only one who feels this way. I’ve said it before that I have BEGGED Sony to give me a reason to buy a PS3… They haven’t done it with their game library, they haven’t done it with their price, and now with Blu-Ray player prices falling, they may have missed me entirely for this console generation.

With all the web design work I’ve been doing, I’ve had to send out a lot of proposals and contracts lately. And since those documents have been in different formats and with different fonts and such, I’ve had to convert them all to PDF format. This hasn’t been the worst thing in the world because I have a laptop with Acrobat Pro which allows me to print any document into a PDF. Unfortunately though, I do most of my work on my desktop so constantly going back and forth between the two is becoming something of a cumbersome process.

Free PDF Conversion from Adobe.com?
Then I remembered that Adobe offers free PDF conversion online! So I went on the site, logged in with my standard user/pass, and was promptly informed that I had already used up my 5 trial conversions. *frown* So I said, “Ok, I’ll just log on as someone else,” and I went to my backup user/pass. It would seem as if I had been down this road before as I didn’t have any trial conversions left there either. I would consequently have to sign up as a new user to get another 5 but I thought to myself, “Ok, you sometimes print 5 PDFs in 5 minutes as you catch a typo after the fact… This isn’t going to work out, you use the software enough, why don’t you just buy it?”.

But to be truthful, it’s hard to justify spending $450 on a full version of Acrobat Pro just so you can print documents out to PDFs. SO, I did what I was always do when my back’s to the wall and that’s turn to the Internet! Turns out there is more than one company offering free PDF software including one who I found that provided a great solution, PrimoPDF! But the question wasn’t really if I could find a PDF converter download but instead if I could find one that rivaled Adobe’s online free PDF conversion. Otherwise, I guess I could just create new e-mails for new Adobe trials…

Your Free PDF Printer!
PrimoPDF - You gotta love their look. You got the person with the surfboard and of course the tagline, “Totally Free PDF Creation because It’s everybody’s PDF” just gives you the “screw the man” feeling right? At first I was really scratching my head as to why they would give away their stuff for free but after a bit of research it looks like PrimoPDF is apart of the ActivePDF family which DOES sell a bunch of PDF solutions. So we can all feel a bit less paranoid about the wool being pulled over our eyes. When I originally set out on my search, I really had just hoped to find some free pdf software. You know - Something that installed to my computer in Program Files that I’d fire up, load up a file and then have it convert it to a PDF. Imagine my surprise when I found that it gives you, (are you ready for this?)…

a FREE PDF PRINTER DRIVER!

For those of you who don’t understand why you should be so excited, let me break it down for you. This is the same functionality given to you when you have Adobe Acrobat Pro. When you want to convert something to a PDF, you select print so you bring up the Print dialog box and then you select “PrimoPDF” as your printer. A second or two later and you have your PDF! Ha, you know the more I write this post the more it’s sounding like I was paid to write it. But I assure you that I wasn’t, I’m honestly just excited that I don’t have to shell out “beaucoup dólares” for Acrobat and I no longer have to constantly flip between my desktop and laptop.

Same as Adobe.com?
Before I definitively looked to PrimoPDF to be my PDF converter of choice, I had to do a sample test on a flyer I had made in Publisher. So what I basically did was convert the flyer into PDF form at both Adobe.com and by using the free PDF printer driver installed on my computer by PrimoPDF. Frankly, I was shocked by the results!

The PDF I created with PrimoPDF looked better than the one created by Adobe! I attributed this to something like JPEG compression or the like so I went back in to Adobe.com, put all the settings I could on maximum and ran it again. This time I got a much better result from Adobe.com, but still not as clean as PrimoPDF! I also went ahead and printed out both PDFs (and maybe it’s just my lackluster printer), but I couldn’t see any difference between the two in print. It’s only when you’re viewing it at 200% which I’d think some people are inclined to do.

Conclusion
If you’re looking for a free pdf printer, you could do FAR worse than PrimoPDF. After electing to print your document into a PDF, a PrimoPDF dialog appears so that you can change the quality of the PDF between their custom settings, edit document properties such as authorship and also add security. The process is fast, the file sizes are comparable to PDFs created with Adobe, and their logo has a surfboard in it. What more could you ask for?

The short answer to that is “not yet”. Here’s the longer answer

If you’ve been following along recently, you know that I was pretty much forced into reformatting my hard drive. Of course, nothing is as simple as just that (because of a semi broken mobo) but it all led me to reformatting a spare ATA drive, abandoning my SATA drive for the time being, and really setting it up from jump as a solid dev box. I mean - Figured might as well since I’m doing a lot of web development these days anyway (hint hint) and up to this point I didn’t even have IE 6 on my computer.

So after I got Windows updated to SP3, got all my updates in and then got IE 6 on there, I wondered what else I should put on my new box. Well for me, the first thing to go on is usually Paint Shop Pro (since I’m a Photoshop n00b). After that I thought about installing Creative Suite, but since I didn’t have a full legit copy, I didn’t want destroying my new box on a bitTorrenting spree. Plus, since I’ve used CS products for so long, I figured I ought to buy at least one version in the next couple months.

Onto the Cool Stuff!
So for those of you who don’t know, my background is really in “traditional Computer Science”, whatever that means. And just because of where my life has gone professionally, I tend to do A LOT more of “web programming” than anything else these days… Which is to say that ActionScript, CSS, and PHP are pretty much my constant companions. One of the things that I had always wanted to learn but “never had the chance to” was .NET. I knew I had a full copy of Visual Studio 6.0 laying around so I put that in, but unfortunately that didn’t seem to have .NET on it. Then I remembered that a friend of mine was toying around with XNA for 360 and had downloaded Microsoft’s Visual C# 2008 Express Edition…

And I said why not?

So now I have Visual C# 2008 Express with the XNA Game Studio 3.0 on my desktop PLUS I have Maya 7.0 on there too! YOU may not be excited, but for the LONGEST time I’ve wanted to try my hands at some basic 3D Game Programming and now I’m finally all set to do it!

The Cold Hard Reality
Though the truth of the thing is that I have a TON of things going no right now the least of which is my 9-5. I mean, I just have no idea when I’m going to have the time to start working on this thing. But, back in the days of DirectX 6 and stuff, I don’t know that I had the time then either… I just stopped sleeping. (#):) So we’ll see. How cool would it be to see something up on Live from yours truly?! PLUS, I think I already have an idea of a stellar game (though I’m pretty sure someone has already made it and it’s probably already caught up in M$ Legislation). Stay tuned true believers!

As I eluded to sometime ago, I’ve upped my home theater game in several different areas. The part that I did something about was my receiver.

I had been rocking the Pioneer VSX-D812-K and while it has been a “loyal friend and true” for quite sometime, not having HDMI inputs or decoding for HD audio was starting to grate on me a bit. Honestly though, I never really made up my mind to change up the receiver but while I was at Worst Buy, I happened upon a receiver that made me cock an eyebrow.

The Pioneer VSX-90TXV
So this receiver was sitting out on a table of “Manager’s Specials” and was listed at $323 I believe. Immediately, the look of it caught my eye as do most of the receivers in the Pioneer Elite lineup. And of course being me the first thing I do is turn it around so I can drool over the connections in the back. Certainly it puts my old receiver to shame but I still had enough restraint to do some research that night at home to check out what it decodes and what it can do. I won’t hit them all up here, but if you’re curious click the link to go to Pioneer’s VSX-90TXV stats.

Fast forward to the next day and I went back to Best Buy and basically fought off another customer to get the receiver. Needless to say, I was grinning from ear to ear thinking I got something that looked really attractive and was indeed really special. That is… UNTIL I hooked my stuff up to it including my 360 and projector… How about - I COULDN’T GET ANY SOUND OUT OF THE RECEIVER. What gives you may ask? Well after many many minutes of research on the big G and forums I found out that if this receiver doesn’t pull audio for HDMI connections, it just passes it through (to say your TV).

I found this out and was just ticked off. What’s the point of having a receiver with HDMI connections if it can’t parse the audio!? The manual says that if you want digital audio, you have to make ANOTHER connection using an optical cord or something… AND SO I needed to find a new receiver.

Enter the Pioneer VSX-1018AH-K!
Over on the AVS Forums, I found out that people who didn’t especially like the 90-TXV went over to the Pioneer VSX-1018AH-K. Sure it doesn’t look AS nice, but the features are really spectacular for its price point. (And I think I managed to snag it at $4-$500 w/ an employee discount). Again, hit the jump to check out all the VSX-1018AH-K specs but some highlights are HD Audio decoding, HDMI connections, and *drumroll* video upconversion!!! That last one is huge because I wasn’t feeling running tons of cables to my projector so being able to put everything through on ONE HDMI cord was pretty choice.

Since hooking things up, I’ve been very happy with the receiver. Things look just great on it and sound even better. Unfortunately, I didn’t take in to account the fact that I live in a townhouse with slotted stairs… Yeah you guessed it, the sound just travels throughout the whole place COMPLETELY unabated. So.. If the wife is sleeping, I can’t crank it too much, but even when it’s on a little it sounds FAB U LOUS.

Filed under : “No, REALLY?” it would seem that the big US Electronics store Circuit City might be facing bankruptcy early next year.

I say “No, REALLY” because if you’ve ever been to Circuit City, you know it has paled in comparison to Best Buy ever since Best Buy came into inception basically. The store is dark inside, even more woefully staffed than Best Buy, and just sucks in comparison. (At least on the brick and mortal side of things).

As far as the programs they offer, I tend to like Circuit City more than Best Buy. Their 10% gamer club is pretty good, and them giving you a gift card if they don’t have new release games on the wall is pretty awesome too. Unfortunately, I think these programs have been overlooked by consumers for Best Buy’s Reward Zone where you earn $5 in GC for ever $250 you spend… Even though CC’s gamer club is far better, consumers just think they do better at Best Buy. (an example of genius marketing I guess)

But, maybe all this is neither here or nor there. I think if anyone heard this news (if it actually becomes a reality) that it won’t come as a surprise, though I’m a bit fearful to think of where WORST Buy will go when it faces no decent competition. Maybe us East Coasters will get lucky and we’ll start to get some Fry’s out here. For more…

Not saying that I do it a lot, but when I find myself in a new place the first thing I have to do to feel at home is setup my home theater. So when I bought the new place, first on my list of priorities was to get my home theater stuff up and running!

But then it came to my attention (by way of some friendly wifely reminders) that apparently I was married and had a new kid on the way, so the home theater work became very hurried.

Still, I got SOMETHING done. (#):)

If I Could Start at the Beginning…
I bought my first home theater system from a box for about $300. It was a nice 5.1 system and thankfully the receiver that came with it wasn’t one of those cheap dvd/receiver combos. And over the years as better jobs have afforded me to do so, I’ve updated the system here in there a piece at a time. First it was the receiver that got the upgrade, and then it was the speakers. The last piece that was upgraded was changing my sub from an unpowered to a powered sub.

The Newest Upgrades
Well after moving into the house, I decided to give a big upgrade to two different components of my home theater system, one of which I had never upgraded before. The first one was the receiver. Even though my old one was just fine, it didn’t have HDMI inputs nor did it have support of HD Audio sources. The not having HDMI inputs anywhere has been KILLING me for a LONG long time. The second was, *drumroll* THE DISPLAY! And would you believe it?, I went with a projector! There were a lot of things that went into this decision and rest assured I’ll clue you in on them soon.

The Other Biggie
Not saying that it’s absolutely needed, but one of things that always intrigued me about so called “professional” home theaters was how they often had their audio components in a special place like a closet or something. And so, I went out to build myself my own home theater enclosure! And along the way for this part of the project, I learned a TON that will certainly serve me well in other like minded projects.

Coming Up
I purposefully have not provided much detail about anything here because as I wrote this post, I learned that a single post really couldn’t do any of the above subjects its due justice. So in the next couple of posts I’m hoping to really give some nice detail and pictures about all this stuff. To say it a different way, if you’re a fan of home theater and electronics, some good posts are coming your way! Stay tuned true believers!

I think my wife is an odd person when it comes to presents.

Personally, I like presents to be fun. If you’re gonna get me something, get me something that I’m not going to buy myself and that I’ll have fun using.

My wife on the other hand hates being given anything that she can’t use. Yep. She’s one of those people.

One of those people who likes “useful” gifts.

The Problem
So when mother’s day rolled around (what’s that, like two months ago now?) I was struggling to find a suitable present for her. Around the same time, I started to notice how much she was complaining about having to use 3 different remotes to turn on the TV. If you’ve been following this blog for a while you know that I’m a big home theater fan, so in my house for you to watch something on cable you need one remote to turn on the cable box, another for the TV, and another for the receiver. Depending on the situation you can use one remote and push a different input button to control a different device but that’s still a pain and you often can’t get all the devices under that one remote anyway. PLUS it’s a lock you can’t get all the functionality of those devices into that one remote anyhoo.

The Solution
Enter the Prestigo 10! I first saw this on woot.com and after seeing the price I knew that I had found my wife’s gift! What you have here is a very solid entry level home theater remote. Now stay with me - I know some of you are saying that you don’t have a home theater system, but if you have a couple components just think of this as one of the best universal remotes you can buy for the money.

What Makes This So Special
Oh where do I start!? I know, let’s look at my situation. Before the Prestigo, the wife had to use two or three different remotes to control the TV, Cable and Receiver. Now she uses one. And that one she uses - She’s not selecting the different inputs as she wants to use them. That’s to say when she presses the volume up, it ALWAYS controls the receiver. When she presses the channel up, it ALWAYS controls the cable box. And when she presses the input button, it ALWAYS controls the TV. How cool is that!?

And setup is unbelievably easy. For me, it’s always been a frustration in the past to set up universal remotes because you had to either get online or read the manual to get the device codes. With this remote, all the codes are already in the remote! You just have to select the type of device and the brand and you can start tryin’em out. PLUS, it will keep track of the codes as you go through them so you don’t waste time accidentally try the same code over and over again. Oh, and none of that dumb code search turning the TV ON and OFF nonsense where half the time you lose the code in the process.

Oh, and did I tell you the remote can learn any function from your previous one? So in my case, I made sure to grab all the On Demand features from my cable remote so I could make sure I had them on my Prestigo. And all the receiver functions (like surround mode and inputs) - I got those copied over as well. I also programmed some basic macros into the remote too. My wife’s goto is the ON/OFF which turns on/off all the devices. Mine is probably GAME ON or OFF mode which sets my TVs input to a specific one, and my receiver to a specific one so I can instantly be setup to start gaming!

Why I’m Bringing This Up Now
Well I meant to write about this for a while now since it’s made my tech life so much more enjoyable but as we all know that lately I’ve been struggling with blogging consistently. So better late than never I suppose and I just checked on Amazon, and it’s way way way on sale for about $50. So if you’re in the market or need a gift for your favourite tech lover, check out more of its features including a color LED screen, His and Hers favourite list, Kid lock… And finally, check out the description on woot and buy one under my Amazon Affiliate Link!

It was only recently that I got to see an iPhone in action as a new co-worker of mine is apparently iPhone crazy. Gotta say,

I’m impressed.

There was a time where I was really into cell phones, but after a little bit they just became something else people could use to find me.

As time has gone on, I really wish my phone, (the LG Chocolate), had more features that could easily be used…

Which is naturally why the iPhone is starting to look very attractive to me.

Verizon = No iPhone
And I’m on Verizon so I guess you could simplify the above to Bush = No iPhone. Of course I could switch carriers but I’m on a family plan, then I’d have to buy the $300 phone blah blah blah… So until the iPhone comes to Verizon, I’m probably outta luck. And even when it does, I’d probably still have to convince the wife to let me spend $300 bucks on a cell phone. *nod*

The SDK
When I heard that the SDK was out, I thought that it’d still be cool to develop for the device even though I didn’t have an iPhone because they’d probably have an emulator built into it right? Well unfortunately I didn’t think very hard about the whole thing because I neglected to think about how much the SK would cost. $99. bleh. I think that pretty much pushes me out of the iPhone development game for the time being, especially since I DON’T HAVE AN iPHONE!

But for those of you who do, it looks like there are a ton of cool things you’d be able to accomplish using the SDK including using the iPhone’s OpenGL for 3D games, building “standard” applications helped by code they provide and I guess plethora of other things too. I didn’t look at the whole keynote on Apple’s website, but it’s pretty long and has a lot of info about the whole thing including (I THINK) the ability to download the SDK for free? I’m not exactly sure on that one.

Anyone else have any interest with the iPhone or the SDK? Better question - Anyone planning on doing any development on the iPhone recreationally or professionally?

I can’t believe the big news dropped when I was kaputski but it’s official that HD DVD is dead!

And I say good riddens!

Now don’t get me wrong, I feel bad for all of you who were early adopters of HD DVD.

I mean, at point or another I guess you had about a coin flip’s chance of coming out on top and now…

Well now the writing is on the wall.

Was This How it Should’ve Ended?
I don’t know. Even though I’m definitely more tech savvy than your normal consumer, I never learned of any big differences between the two formats and the smaller ones look to be fixed or getting fixed in recent updates of the Blu-Ray format. So personally I’m just glad things are over so we home theater enthusiasts can put some real money behind a serious solution. But on a related side note, I really wasn’t happy when HD DVD seemed to prolong things by offering HUGE sums of money to buy out studios in support of their format so I’m not really shedding a tear over how things shook out.

HD DVD Fallout
Now that the dust is starting to setting, maybe the most interesting thing is how companies are trying to deal with it all. Engadget HD is a constant source of HD DVD updates and amisdt all the crazy (but true) stuff they report, the thing I’m most interested in is the price of the HD DVD add-on for the 360 being lowered to $49.99. I mean, that’s cheaper than new games!! Obviously, I’m a bit tempted to buy it but then that voice comes back and says, “Hey! They lost remember! How much longer will movies be sold for it!?” But then I think about it for a bit longer and say, “But with a little more time, chances are that prices for HD DVDs could come WAY down!” Oh wait - Looks like they already are.

What do all of you make of this? Should I get a player now? Should I just not and go Blu-Ray when I eventually get a PS3? Do any non home theater fans care about any of this?

The Consumer Electronics Show is nearing an end is Las Vegas and if you haven’t been keeping up, a lot of cool stuff has been coming out of it in the past couple of days!

Lately, I’ve really been getting back into home theater. I just slimmed down and reconnected my own system and it’s looking better than ever.

So it should be no surprise that the first thing to really catch my eye from CES was the very cool, Slingbox Pro HD!

What’s Slingbox?
If you had to make three guesses, you’d probably figure it out - But in a nutshell, Slingbox allows you take your home tv content and “sling” it to another device through the internet such as your laptop or mobile phone. Obviously, this makes for a pretty cool little gadget since now you no longer have to miss your favourite playoff game ’cause your wife drags you to some horrible potluck or something.

Slingbox Pro HD
Slingbox enters into the HD era with the Slingbox Pro HD, now allowing you to watch HD content on your devices. My thoughts are : This is awesome. And even better, there’s something now called the Slingcatcher that allows you to take Slingbox content and play it on a TV! Not too long ago, I was looking at Slingbox to do just this (since my bedroom TV doesn’t have a cable box on it) but I was left out in the cold. Now with a Slingbox and a SlingCatcher… Everything is coming up Millhouse.

The ONLY problem I have at the moment with the Slingbox Pro HD is the lack of a HDMI connection. From the video I saw on G4, this is because HDMI’s HDCP which means that a HDMI signal can’t be copied… Which means no worky with the Slingboxy. If you wanna check out the video from G4, click the picture above!