GTA IV PS3 ‘Loading…’ Fix

First of all, the game rocks… buy it and clear your schedule. However, a lot of people are reporting freezing issues. Most of the time the freeze occurred when initially loading your latest save or shortly after accessing your phone. There were a ton of suggestions on preventing the freeze with many going so far as deleting the game and all of your saves… insanity. I had those same freeze issues and I think the final solution.

The problem only seems to happen when you have two identical save games and you’re PS3 is connected to PSN. The easiest way around it is to turn off your network connection. That’s not an option for people like me who bought it to play with friends. In that case, simply delete all but one of the identically named saves and your ‘Loading…’ game will start right up. You can move them off to an external storage device first if you really need it.

(more…)

Play it on the crapper…

Since we’re sharing, I play my Nintendo DS almost exclusively on the crapper. It’s my most played console… Think about that next time you see me with my DS in public.

Your turn.

Review: I Am Legend (Movie)

Ok, I’ve come to notice that I don’t review movies so much as watch them and then bitch about the bad parts and in the process spoil it for everyone. So, if you’re actually going see ‘I Am Legend’ at some point, let’s give it a B- and you get the hell out of here. The rest of you, come on in.

(more…)

Can’t Stop Listening to Newton Faulkner

Not that I’m a huge music nut or anything, but I have pretty wide open tastes; obviously barring country and rap (those don’t count as music anyway, right? Right!?). A couple weeks ago I stumbled across a folk-y UK singer while looking for instrumental-only versions of Massive Attack songs… bored on a Saturday night, of course. Anyway, this dude is incredibly talented. His guitar playing is awesome, his song writing is fantastic and his cover of Massive Attack’s ‘Teardrop’ is better than the original. I don’t usually spooge over new music… (Also got Pinback and Kate Nash in the playlist though, worth checking out) … however Newton is certainly spooge-worthy.

(more…)

Review: Everything Firefly (TV/Movie)

I love good Sci-Fi. I loathe bad Sci Fi. Battlestar Galactica was engrossing and I was glad to sacrifice a couple dozen hours of my life to the show. ST: Voyager was pathetic and I’d rather stab myself in the eyeball with a rusty fork than sit through another hour of that crap. And with that, the bounds have been defined. It gets no better than the first season of BS:G. It does get worse than Voyager, but I won’t watch it. So how about Firefly and it’s theatrical companion, Serenity?

(more…)

iPhone: VNsea Application Review

I’m a huge VNC fan. I love that it’s easy to use, easy to install, cross platform, unencumbered, all that jazz. I have UltraVNC installed on all of my home machines and a few of my work machines as well. So, when I saw VNsea, a native VNC client sitting there in Installer, I had to give it a shot. How could a device so small control a screen so large? What about lag and refresh?

(more…)

The Best Video Games Ever

I was lucky, I was a child when gaming went ‘mainstream’. I was not so young that I can’t remember or couldn’t enjoy early video games and I surely wasn’t so old and stodgy that videogames were a brain-rotting waste of time. Upon listening to a recent Maximum PC podcast where they thought back to the gaming days of yore and coming up with a solid two games, I thought I’d compile my own list. Feel free to add your own selections in the comments… but I won’t approve crap.

By the way, I’m leaving out there normal crap that even the non-geeks played like Super Mario, Pac Man, Burger Time, yadda yadda. If your ‘rents can identify it I’m probably not putting it on the list.

(more…)

iPhone: Custom Ringtones Using Free Software

iPhone/iTunes ringtones are a f’n ripoff. They expect you to pay $400 for the phone, $1 per song, and another $1 for each 30 second ringtone clip. If that’s not wallet-rape I don’t know what is. Do not buy them! Not now, not ever! Damn the man, down with the facist pigs, all that jazz. On the other hand, who wants to be the dork that still has ‘Marimba’ as his ringer. Sheesh…

One extra piece of free software and you can flip off S.J. while not putzing yourself out in the process.

(more…)

iPhone: Video on your iPod/iPhone

One of the largest drawbacks of the iPod line and one of the reasons I really wanted to like the Creative Zen Vision M is the limited video codec support on our tiny devices. Basically there are a hand full of MPEG4-based codecs that the little players support and if your video isn’t in the right format you’re pretty much SOL. Luckily one of the supported mpeg flavors is the new H.264 standard which handles video compression better than almost any codec out there. Getting your videos into that format may be a trick though as most tutorials on the net center around purchased software or are so damn complicated they are unusable. So here we are. I’m going to give you my simple video conversion process using only 3 pieces of free and relatively simple pieces of software.

You will need to get the following software from the net. 1) DVDFab HD Decrypter 2) vStrip 0.8 CSS 3) Super-C video converter. I apologize for not putting in direct links but a simple google search should get you there pretty quickly. Install (or extract in the case of vStrip) all 3 programs.

(more…)

Oh Dear, This May Be My New Addiction

So, last night my friend called to let me know the he bought his iPhone. There was a gentleman’s agreement that we were going to get them at the same time but he went ahead and got one anyway. Sheesh.

(more…)