Just this week, Walmart (one of the nations/worlds largest retailers, infoweek news link) has joined other big namers such as Best Buy, Target, Netflix and Blockbuster in supporting Blu-ray exclusively.

For those in the HD-DVD camp, this move almost seems to be the final blow to HD-DVD in the format wars giving Blu-ray the possible HD format TKO.

In my opinion; Sony forcing Blu-ray into the PS3 was probably one of the smarter moves vs Microsoft making the HD-DVD drive an optional, add-on accessory.  Nonetheless, Microsoft was not pushing HD-DVD as much as Sony and also did not have as much at stake since Toshiba was the main supporter/creator of HD-DVD and Sony the big pusher for Bluray.

So hopefully, we will see an upcoming  ‘THE FORMAT WAR IS OVER’ types of announcments/messages soon! :)   or the war could limp on but again, HD-DVD seems to be on life-support and we will see if Toshiba will be merciful and just pull the plug.

now lets get some more HD content out there and get those prices down so those people who ‘were waiting for a winner’ can get involved and force TV to go full HD!!  i predict HD market penetration to be very deep this year and we should start seeing more and more HDTVs in households and people finally giving into the HD upgrade.

Plus, almost a year from now the analog tv broadcasts go digital; do you have your converter yet?

fanboy, life, news, x360, ps3, hd, console, geek, culture, opinion | 4 Comments »

a few weeks back, i broke down and got Guitar Hero 3 for my PS3.  the main reason being that it was $70 cheaper than Rock Band (yes, i know that you get a guitar, drum set, and mic w/it) and was out then.  however, after playing Guitar Hero 3 religously for the last few weeks with my pals, i realized that Rock Band would really be fun since we could all be playing at once.

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ps3, news, culture, console, gaming, opinion, hardware | 3 Comments »

well, sony finally did it and released firmware version 2.0 for the PS3.. for most PS3 faithfuls, this was supposed to be the FIXITALL one that would give us ingame XMB and custom music at the very least.  however, 2.0 does not seem to live up to its version number.. hehe..

things that are fixed taken from the playstation blog :

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news, fanboy, ps3, geek, gaming | 5 Comments »

i love it.. as a windows user/pc user, i love how the other side claims that its product/os is nearly unhackable but yet only less than a day after being released; Leopard has been hacked and patched to work on an Intel/AMD based pc hardware. 

Daily Apps has the full guide to making your own patched dvd and installing over here:

http://dailyapps.net/2007/10/hack-attack-install-leopard-on-your-pc-in-3-easy-steps/

i plan to try the patch myself on my Tiger partition.  hopefully my network cards (one of the two hopefully) will be recognized and then i can try using Leopard as a main os for a week or two and give a write up on it.

just thought i’d let the uninformed informed! Go OSX86 Hackers and pc geeks!

fanboy, news, osx86, culture, geek, apple, mac, hardware, pc | 5 Comments »

just got done watching a movie on the PS3 and got notified that an update was available, good ole 1.92.  hopefully this resolves the warhawk issues we’ve been having with my ps3 freezing on bad connects to servers and of course the stat tracking.

no update info was included on the update so… i guess we’ll see if warhawk is good to go or not.

bitmapping feature in Music (not sure what that is, options include Off, Type1, Type2) seems to be the only UI change i can see.
 

news, PlaystationStore, ps3, console, gaming | No Comments »

well, i and the rest of the world knew this was coming; a way to unlock the iPhone sim card.  prior to this newest hack (which will run about $90-100 for the blank sim card and sim card reader/writer), the non-ATT/Cingular users could activate the iPhone via a hack but were still unable to use the phone (basically it made it a wifi ipod).

however, the good folks over at hackint0sh forums have found a way around this!  here’s direct link to the forum post on the how-to.

http://www.hackint0sh.org/forum/showthread.php?t=2215&page=1

so, it seems like i may perhaps end up w/an iphone at some point if this hack works w/Tmobile USA.  i’ve  always wanted to get into the whole SIM card hacking but really never had a reason to and now i may.  i know, i am still an iphone naysayer (but thats mainly because i didn’t want to switch to cingular/att) but may sway to the dark side.  we shall see.

oh yea, on top of this, Windows users now have a nice iPhone file browser. check it out at modmyiphone.com:  http://www.modmyiphone.com/forums/downloads.php?do=file&id=301

so.. anyone wanna send me an iphone to unlock and then in turn post up a nice tutorial?? hehe, had to try.

culture, news, modding, mobile, hardware, opinion, apple | 1 Comment »

well, not sure if most know this or not but i live in Minneapolis, MN and if you follow any news lately, you probably have heard about the collapse of the 35W bridge that spans over the Mississippi River.  the bridge collapsed on wed around 6pm during the tail-end of rush hour.  around 50 vehicles were involved and so far the death toll has been very low for such a catostraphic event. 

i was shocked when my pal called me around 6:15pm after hearing about the collapse on the radio.  i flipped on my tv and was awed by the pure shock of seeing the bridge, collapes and in pieces. 

if you live in Minneapolis or near it, you probably have driven on that section of road quite a bit.  that area is considered to be one of the main veins into downtown minneapolis, usually seeing about 200,000 vehicles passing over it each day. 

the scary thing about whole incident is that there was no warning of the collapse.  it just literally fell to the river.  most of my pals live in the southern part of minneapolis (aka uptown) however i still made sure everyone was accounted for and thankfully no one i knew was involved or at the scene.   even crazier is that if this would have happened on Thur night instead of Wed, i might have been on that bridge around that time since i was meeting some pals for a reunion-tour happy hour over on the UMN campus.

my heart goes out to all of the victims and family/friends of those injured/killed.  hopefully the cause of the collapse will be found and lessons are learned.

props to my fellow MNers and their willingness to always help those in need or at the scene, always great to see/hear!

news, life, blogging, culture, opinion | 4 Comments »

well, i’ve been using my ps3 mainly for its multimedia capabalities as of late and was overjoyed to see at midnight my ps3 saw the v1.80 update!!

basically this update adds a slew of things we’ve been wanting, not quite the infamous v2.0 update list but very nice nonetheless.

the list includes the ability to now upscale dvds and ps2/ps games to 1080p.  on top of that add in the ability to connect to DLNA devices (ie my pc running vista and Windows Media Player Media Sharing; lets me stream all of my music, vids, photos to the ps3 now; works pretty good.  however you can only stream a limited but popular formats like mp3, wmv, jpg, etc).  head over here for the full press release from sony.

nice job sony! this summer may end up being a good sony summer afterall.

the upscaling on my hackers dvd looked pretty good, figure w/that much cell power you should be able upscale better than most standalone dvd upscaling players.  prob will check out god of war tomorrow sometime and see how that upscaling looks.

aiy, peace.

htpc, fanboy, news, ps3, culture, vista, console, geek, gaming | No Comments »

well, yesterday we witnessed a pretty significant event on the web. we saw a site/company bow down to their users (http://blog.digg.com/?p=74) and in turn disregarded the advice of their attorneys. we also finally saw the power that we users hold and the beauty of the web and inability to censor it.

for those uniformed, here is a quick recap of what happened.

Digg.com received several cease and desist letters from the movie industry to take down any user submitted content relating to the HD DVD crack thats floating around on the web. initially, Digg wanted to avoid any possible legal issues or take down of their site by removing the content (http://blog.digg.com/?p=73 ) but after receiving tons of emails, posts, they decided that they would listen to their users and leave the content up.

Surfers/Users then started their backlash towards the industry by posting the now infamous HDDVD key in any way possible. some create some very witty photos w/the key, while others flooded message boards and post comments w/the code. Initially Blogspot and Wordpress tried to remove any posts/blogs that contained the code; i’m not sure if they are still doing this or not (guess we’ll see!)

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life, news, hd, culture, opinion, geek, web | No Comments »

well, it seems that the PS store has updated content and included content such as:

trailers for: LittleBigPlanet, Spiderman3

downloable classic Mortal Kombat 2 (with blood, fatalities, babalities, etc)

and a “Coming Soon” link that brings you to vids of future PS3 games.

enjoy my fellow PS3 owners!

 updated:  btw, for you wii owners, the Wii/Opera final version is out.  it requires a system update and then going to the Wii Store and updating the Opera Browser in the Wii Ware section.  the added/finishing touches on the browser still make it the best console browsing experience of the big 3, well atleast in my opinion..

PlaystationStore, news, fanboy, ps3, console, gaming | No Comments »