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Perso - Snow snow, happy happy, joy joy

Well, in a nutshell. It’s been snowing for a couple of weeks now. With, meanwhile, the usual disappointing raises of temperatures which melt our hopes of an oncoming afternoon of snowboard. But tomorrow, and sunday, it’s going to be the real shit. I mean, nice fluffy snow, low temps and all… Like Steve, a friend from Ubi wrote in an email he sent to us lately : “Snow snow, happy happy, joy joy”. That’s my state of mind actually (Not much room for deep thoughts, as it seems. Mix it with long hours on the 360 playing NFS and you’ve got the idea).
We went to Mt St Sauveur this last monday with Oleev, and that was a pretty honest and pleasant first trip for the season. But I’m now eager to see more of it, and quickly please. :)

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Perso - Lack of entries recently

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Techno - PSP, my new friend

I’ve bought a PSP 3 weeks ago, and it is already occupying a part of my awaken day. There are so many apps (Homebrew) coming out everyday, plus all the emulators, that it’s painfull to even try to count and keep a working updated list from one day to another.

I’ll try though, and by the way, describe what you can do with your PSP. Stuff that wasn’t planned by Sony I guess, which would prefer to sell a quite and peacefull (ie. controlled piece of entertainment). For my own, the fact that you can launch emulators, run homebrew applications, play scripts on it, are major reasons I bought one. I’m waiting for some games to get on the shelves, for sure, like Burnout revenge or Worms, but meanwhile, I’m doing plenty of things with my new friend. Here are some details…

  • Encode your own videos in MP4 format. Well, it’s already embeded into the PSP, but the fact you can create many kind of videos from almost whatever digital video format you wish is amazing (Using PSP Video 9 or Nero recode 2). The magic behing this is portability. You’ll have to reduce the quality and overall file’s weight to play on the psp, anyways. Basically, I watch videos when doing some gym. 45 minutes is a good timing. Colors are vivid and the sound, played in headphones, is enough for me. I’ve seen an UMD movie too (Compressed and retailed for the PSP. Thx to Oleev for lending me Blackhawk down.) and the quality was very high. If it wasn’t s expensive as hell and useless with a living room DVD player, I’ll buy a bunch of UMD movies tomorrow.
  • Play your fav’ audio files of course. There are already homebrew players but for a day to day use, the PSP’s default is doing the job.
  • Read your comics. I’ve plenty of comics in France, but as I moved overseas, I had to leave them. Fortunately, the PSP’s diplay is wide and sharp enough to read comics in relative comfort. Resizing the page to a 560 px width is working pretty well, when displayed by the homebrew Jpeg viewer. It’s quicker and more customizable than the built-in picture viewer. In fact, it’s lacking a slight bit of pixels to be very comfortable, but that’s something.
  • Browse the web. Sooner this evening, while waiting for my new glasses to be finished, I was sipping a beer near a free access point and reading this guy’s blog. In a bar, quietly, beer, blog, Wifi… Cool.
  • Remotely browse the web, from my PC. What a nice port from VNC for PDA! If you know what a VNC is, you get the idea. It’s working fairly well and I get a 5fps when playing a video on my PC (Well, that’s not the purpose of it). VNC man ! It’s almost fluid and bug free at this stage. I love the way technology helps me staying in my couch.
  • Read books. MAny formats are supported. Of course, the amount of books you can carry on a memory stick is amazing.
  • Play with the homebrew FTP server and the infra red file exchanger. Honnestly, I haven’t tryied the last one yet. But I’m eager to use the IR functionnalities. For now, you can capture IR sequences, there’s already an IR keyboard working, etc…
  • Play old school and abandonware games. Neogeo, PC engine, ScummV (Sam&Max, Day of the tentacle…) and Flashback are good exemples. I mostly played Flashback and launched some oldies on my PSP AMiga 500 emulator (Yeah, UAE!). Too bad there’s no keyboard for now…
  • Play homebrew games as well. There’s a pretty good chess game, a Tetris, and many little apps, puzzles, too.
  • Write your own scripts in LUA. Yep, there’s a LUA player for the PSP. I’ve just started from scratch and it’s quite amazing that I’ve already been able to display some text, mixed with contextual infos (Path names etc), custom pictures and background. For today, I’ve stopped trying to play another sound than the one recorded by the guy who just released an exemple of the use of the milkmod lib (Homebrew sound for PSP)… One major feature is missing in that player actually, a built-in USB connection. It’s a pain to exit the player, run the USB, modify a script, debug, launch the player again, and so on… I guess it will be fixed soon.
  • Play regular games too. Sure, it’s even designed for it, dammit! You play alone, or against friends wirelessly. I mostly played Wipeout pure and I’m actually fond of Hot shot Golf. A friend told me that Tony Hawk was excellent and I’m arguing with myself weither or not I’ll buy it next week. I also put my hands for a few minutes on NFS and Twisted metal but I didn’t get the driving feeling at all. That’s personnal, I guess. I love precise driving. The one from Ridge racer is also too “arcade”, from my point of view, even if it’s less bothering than the first two I was talking about. In short, Hot shot golf simply rocks. ;)

Please, note that if you intend to use homebrew applications and play a bit with your psp, you’ll have to keep a v1.5 firmware (Or at least a 1.0 if you were lucky enough to get a early Japanese one). Latest firmwares, like 1.51, 1.52 and 2.0 won’t let you play freely with all the features I’ve been describing. But PSP’s 2.0 has its own appealing features anyway. Sometimes, the latest games won’t be playable neither on a v1.50, and will force you to upgrade. Unfortunately, downgrading is afterwards, impossible. So think twice about it. I’m not promoting anything here, and I just feel fortunate to be able to emulate an Amiga 500 on a handheld device when sitting in a bar (DeluxePaint rules!). The appealing features released in the v2.0 are just not enough for me to upgrade. By the way, I discovered that american people knew few about Commodore and the Amiga, which was a kickass computer 15 years ago. Contemporary of the Atari 520st, but better… Flame wars even occured about this). You could play hundreds of games, do real CG-3d, page setting, video editing, compose music, etc… There was nothing cheap about the Amiga during these times (And even a 2-buttons mouse goddamit). I started being an infographist by doing 3d and page setting on an Amiga in 1991-92. x86 and PC compatible were a joke, and you just could find some expensive Mac IIcx to do the same job.

Note2: I’ve bought an external 3800Ma battery (2 times more the PSP’s battery life. Ideal for a plane trip.), a metal hardcase and a japanese screen protector. I do not regret any of these purchases. The PSP is a nice object, which requires care, specially the screen.

So long, I’ll write some updates, depending on my successes with the LUA language. ;)

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Blog’s lifting

It took less than one hour, and the lifting is already finished.
I’ve cut deep in the useless features, tried to make a more understandable interface, less messy and more friendly (yeah!)…
Let me know what you think if you wish. For my own, I’m pretty happy with the end result. The former theme wasn’t handled very well by IE, now it just seems to work the same than with Firefox (Font size and so on)… I played a very long time with the css, trying to set the line’s height, units in em, then in pixel, (bad idea) and even in % without luck. IE stood with 12 inches ugly body fonts when Firefox was reflecting each of my painfull tries correctly… Well, I still have some slight differences, like the border on the right which isn’t exactly on the background image cut when viewed with IE, but I don’t care much…

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SGI casemod - a PC into an SGI O2


This little fantasm was running into my head for the last days. At first, I wanted to buy a used one in order to play with Irix. As a CG artist, these SGI beasts were often unreachable icons. Now they’re just obsolete pieces of hardware. […]
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Splinter Cell CT "Flash experience"

Splinter Cell CT Chaos Theory
The more we’re approaching march, the more infos about Splinter Cell Chaos Theory are out. I’ve been at last able to hear the theme of the map I’ve been working on as a level artist for the last 6 months (PS2 version). As Amon Tobin did it, I was eager to hear it for sure. I’m already a fan of his work anyway. :) […]
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Splinter Cell Chaos Theory is almost out !!

It was a pleasure to work with you guys. Lachez pas. :)
Here are some funny Sam Fischer’s videos (Vintage third echelon training videos). More will be released soon, but I won’t spoil the surprise [… Read more in extended]
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Yeepeeyeah - My RSS feed (Rss 1) is working again

I do not know why, but it’s working again, thanks to Lucas Janin. :) I probably messed in the php file without noticing and then assumed, after some slight modifications and flast rollbacks, that the file was still working. By the way, the Atom feed is also working well. :) Have a nice day.

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Dotclear - Clear choice

A friend of mine has been using this little piece of software for the last months and switching to it seemed to be a natural choice. Thanks Lucas !
The community around Dotclear is friendly (french speaking, mostly) and peacefull. It was quite easy to install and configure it, then “migrate” every infos I had on my former site. Even if I’m not php savvy (read “not at all”), by the way. Long life to Dotclear !
My only problem, actually, is it’s lack of integration with other php applications (Else than RSS feeds), due to the relative size of its community (Growing I guess, but it isn’t one of the dev’s objectives). I mean many many plug-ins of course. I guess every programmer with some experience of PHP may translate a plug-in from one application to another in a snap, I am no programmer.
For example, I’ve no idea how to display some random pictures from my Coppermine gallery into Dotclear (As I’ve found a plugin for Serendipity which is doing that, of course). You can find that plugin here by the way.

I’m already using bunch of lines of code and plugins dedicated to Dotclear, though. Thanks to the guys behind “BBclone”, “Referers”, “Swatch beats”, “theme edition”.

Life is too short for my blog. Have a good night. :)

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-RSS feed - waste of time

///Update/// I’m still trying. Some pseudo links going to pseudo php scripts let me think that perhaps, somewhere, there’s a rss working… ;) /// end of update ///

Well, after 3 infortunate hours of search on “how to create dynamically RSS feeds related to my entries”, I started to think… “Who’s going to use this kind of resources anyway?” - “Why the hell are there 4 differents formats? To ease communication? RotF.” - “Where are these 3 hours of my life, spent for nothing except trying to figure out how to generate the perfect rss.php or atom.php file…”

Sorry, but until further notice, there will be no RSS feed for this site, and who cares anyways ?

***Going to interact with my Blogwidow-girlfriend instead of scratching my head for absolutely nothing except satisfying my insane technigogo curiosity***
Good night chaps ! :)

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