Consoles are just dust in the wind

I twittered about this but I realized I wanted to write something more permanent in my blog. Saturday Xbox 360 #3 died - froze playing Assasin's Creed and then Red Ring of Deathed when I restarted it. Some more messing around Saturday established it was throughly borked - if I could get it to turn on at all it would lock up within five minutes or so. Monday I called and spent a bit over 20 minutes dealing with their customer support before they agreed it was under warranty for Red Ring of Death. (Stupid stuff like plugging the console straight into the wall, as well as getting them to read their own computer system.) The sucky thing is that GTA IV comes out in three weeks. I hope they get me a replacement before thing. Xbox #1 was nine days turnaround, Xbox #2 was 18. I'm hoping the trend isn't linear or I'll have to sit around for three or four days after GTA IV comes out. Also, after having not watched a HD-DVD in months of course Netflix sent me a HD-DVD today (sigh). Gotta send that back now. I wish this generation wasn't a choice between sucky, cheaply made hardware (the 360) and sucky, cheaply made online functions (the PS3).
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OK, fine if I drink the Kool-Aid will you all leave me alone?

I should come clean. I've had a 16 Gigabyte iPhone for just over a week now. "But Tim," you say, "didn't you explain why you didn't want an iPhone, and why you still didn't want an iPhone? And didn't you get a new iPod Classic for Christmas?" And then I would say back to you, "Hey, stop using my blog search function!" But yes, all these things are true. Several things happened. The most important one is that Sprint decided to see if they could piss me off enough I'd shut off my Sprint account, damn my Treo. Turns out they could. Huzzah! The second thing was the iPhone SDK is substantial enough that I believe all my iPhone complaints will be resolved come June. As a minor third thing I actually wanted to develop stuff for iPhone, and didn't figure Karin would take kindly to me grabbing hers and debugging on it for long stretches of time. (Yes, I assumed it would be easier to get the hardware certificate than it appears to be thus far.) So yeah, now I have an iPhone. I really and truly blame Sprint. I don't want to get into the whole thing, but the short version is that they claim that I did something to the billing in 2006 that re-upped a 2 year commitment on both my Treo and Karin's 2003-era phone. So when Karin got her iPhone for Christmas they charged me an early termination fee, despite the fact that I hadn't terminated the account or even tried to change the plan I was using. During that conversation I confirmed that because I hadn't sent in the $50 rebate paperwork on my Treo 700 that I *wasn't* under a two year contract, and that my phone number was released on March 5th. Exactly one week before my birthday. Hmmmm. Happy birthday to me, happy birthday to me. It is a slick little device. I'd just prefer it to be a little less internet-oriented and a little more Tim's-data-oriented. The fact is that the biggest function of my Treo was probably the Calendar, and iPhone's calendar is less functional that the Treo, much less iCal. But I gotta admit, it is a fantastic video iPod.
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PS3 and Universal Remotes

So now that Toshiba threw in the HD-DVD towel maybe you're thinking, "OK I should get myself a sweet, sweet PS3 and some Blu-Ray discs." But there's a problem and that problem is universal remotes. If you aren't using a universal remote than you're A ) foolish and B ) very likely a bachelor. I talked about my Harmony 880 remote before and there are newer Harmony remotes out there so I might not recommend buying an 880 today, but I really highly recommend the Harmony line. The fly in the ointment is that the PS3 doesn't have an IR receiver. It uses Bluetooth for the Sony remote. The Sony remote works well enough, but once you achieve one remote nirvana having that second around is really irking. I recently found out that Nyko sells a IR dongle and small little remote for the PS3, called the Nyko BluWave ($14 at Amazon). You plug the dongle into an USB port on the PS3 and then teach the remote codes to the Harmony. (I did that last night, but I've since learned today that apparently you can PICK Nyko->BluWave as a device on the Harmony and it will download the codes.) This isn't perfect. There are two minor problems and one fairly big one. The first is that a USB device can't turn on the PS3, so there's no power button on the Nyko remote. (The Sony Bluetooth remote does have a power button.) This isn't huge, it's only an issue if you already had a Blu-Ray disc in the drive and wanted to power it on from the couch, and don't have a controller within arm's reach. The second minor problem is that the Nyko remote doesn't have all the buttons of the Sony remote - it lacks both the 10 key keypad and the colored buttons. I'm not sure this is a problem at all, I've never used those on my PS3. I'm a little worried about the Blue/Red/Yellow/Green buttons because I assume those are for Blu-Ray features and I might want them at some point in the future. The much bigger problem is really annoying. If you have the USB dongle connected to the PS3 and you turn on the PS3 via a wireless controller the dongle apparently becomes controller 1. (The Sony Bluetooth remote somehow manages to always be controller 7.) The controller you just used to turn on the console ends up being controller 2. Most games won't play ball with this. Oddly enough if you turn the controller off and then back on it ends up being controller, but that's an awfully clunky workaround. After some thought my current plan is to leave the dongle sitting by the PS3 and only plug it in when playing a Blu-Ray. Figure I'm up there turning the console on anyway, so it's not a big deal to connect the dongle at that time. Given all that, personally I think it's worth $14 to let my Harmony control disc playback. I can't quite unconditionally recommend the BluWave, but I guess you can weigh the issues listed above versus the issue of having to use two remotes (the horror) to watch movies. Update 2/22/08: I realized today that if you're in a game on the PS3 that you can reassign a controller ID. There's a menu that comes up when you press the PS button. This is where you can turn off the controller or the system, or quit the game and return to the Cross Media Bar (XMB). There's also an option called "Controller Options" and from there you can reassign the controller ID. So now I leave the USB dongle plugged in, but I can grab a controller, start a game and then correct the whole controller 2 thing. Still a pain, but better than having to turn the controller off and on again.
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Sony's Rube Goldberg Device

So I decided to download the new demo of Patapon for the PSP. This marks the first time I downloaded something for the PSP via the PS3. In the past I've downloaded files on PC or Mac and just put those files on the memory stick, but I figured, hey let's try the PS3. This is a silly process. Here's what you do. 1 ) Download the title via the store. At least you can download in the background now, so you can go play something else while stuff downloads. 2 ) OK, now the title you downloaded (which, mind you is a PSP demo) needs to install onto the PS3. This happens for anything you get from the Playstation Network store - you have to install it to the PS3 before you can use it. It would be nice if this occurred in the background as well, but I suppose I can see how random hard drive and CPU access during gameplay would be bad. 3 ) Now you need to connect the PSP to the PS3. This requires using a USB connection cable, no wireless here, no sir! 4 ) Now you run the program on the PS3 to install the software to the PSP. 5 ) Now you can delete the PS3 installer. 6 ) Now you think you're done, but wait! Has it been more than a week since the last time you upgraded the PSP firmware? (I kid Sony, but they do happen about monthly. Put it this way, I bought a new PSP holiday title (Final Fantasy Tactics) and my firmware was *four revs* behind.) 7 ) Turn on the PSP Wifi and check for Network Updates. Log into your network. (You do have your network configured already right? Else it's another whole hoo-hah.) 8 ) Download the update. 9 ) Reboot the PSP and install the update. 10 ) Delete the firmware update from the PSP memory stick. That's it! In just 10 easy steps you've installed a hot new game demo on your PSP!
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