Getting Totally Side Tracked

October 3rd, 2011 Thomasso

Well, there is nothing like getting totally side tracked when you are having fun. The new video card had opened the door to a whole new world of PC goodness, all at the expense of my precious time. I am now able to play 3D video games that were otherwise beyond the power of my previous machines, and to my amazement, I like them now; every pixel energy sucking one of them.

Like “Extreme Tux,” from my September 28, 2011 post, not only can I play the game, but I can also screen-capture the event too and play them back as a movie – in HD quality.

So here I am playing “Open Area,” a free Open Source 3D arcade style video game, that requires a huge video acceleration card to make it work. I seem to have more than enough power to play this game.

Warning: This game is not for children, and contains violent graphic content that may be offensive to some. Viewer discretion is advised.

Posted in Diatribe, Featured Software, General, Software, Video | 1 Comment »

New Machine, More Money

September 28th, 2011 Thomasso

What started out as an experiment for recording and viewing HDMI on my PC, turned into a major upgrade. I just did the CPU upgrade and bought a really nice graphics card, but that is not the end of the money pit issues for this machine?

For the CPU, I bought a AMD Phenom II 840 x 4, and a Radon HD 6770 graphics card.

Once I bought the graphics card, I realised that becuase of my video capture card being a PCI x 16 slot, it was right beside my PCI-E slot, and the graphics card was not going to fit because of its size, the big fan to cool it with. solution: I need a different size Motherboard with the PCI-E away from the PCI x 16 slot.  And along with the new Motherboard, I will need a 500+watt power supply due to the graphic card’s power requirements.The list keeps growing and growing.

Everything will be changed over, except for the Case (tower) once I am done! I should have just bought a whole new machine for the start.

So, here is a short little video of me playing Extreme Tux Racer. What is so special of me, who cannot play a video to save my life? I could never play a video game in high resolution, do a screen capture and do tweaking to the configuration at the same time. The times where the video cuts out was because I was setting the bit-rate and other adjustments while I playing the game.

Je vous présente Extreme Tux Racer avec moi, jouer le jeu!

Added: October 3rd, 2011

Ok, I should have put a download link if you want it.

For LINUX, just go to your favourite repository: search and choose “install.”

For Mac and Window$, go to these links: TUX RACER and EXTREME TUX RACER, for download and installation files.

Posted in Featured Software, General, Linux, Software, Video | 3 Comments »

HDTV on my PC

September 24th, 2011 Thomasso

My pet project has finally come to fruition, as I now can watch HDTV on my Personal Computer, and record in high definition too, just like a PVR. This is due to my latest purchase, a Hauppauge WinTV-HVR-1250 (Model 1201) that I got today. This video card is a TV capture PCI Express bus type that can view both digital high definition, and regular old analogue signals. For my purposes, I am using the card for capturing off air HD TV from a old pair of rabbit ears that came with my old school CRT TV set of yesteryear.

I live close enough to the transmitters to receive between 8 and 10 signals from Canada and the US, so with that kind of selection, I thought I would invest in a card that would allow me to make my PC into a personal video recorder, (PVR). This is also why I can use an old pair of rabbit ears for my antenna.

I was worried that buying a capture video card was going to be a challenge becuase I wanted to record in HD, so that I could watch my programs in that format during playback. So I picked the hauppauge brand over a bunch of others becuase of the great reviews Hauppauge was getting. Then when I decided to go a hunt down a card, almost every store in the Lower Mainland had none in stock. I suspect that there is a run on them now that our off-air channels are strictly digital?

I found a card, which was not my first choice, but it had all the specification I needed. I originally wanted the WinTV-HVR-1600, or higher, but no one had any in stock. London Drug, in Langley City had this 1250, which was previous opened by another customer who probably did not know that this was for PCI Express X16 card slot, so I got for a discount price. Lucky me. My only worry was does this card capture in MPEG2 format. It does. In fact, whatever the station’s output, it captures in that format – 1080i, 720p, etc.

I run all my machines on Linux, using Ubuntu. The card is supported in Linux by Hauppauge. It works very well for digital capturing using Linux, and the best software that I have found so far for this card is ME-TV. It does the scan, and has a wonderful format for scheduling the recording of programs, and the interface is very user friendly too.

From start to finish, installing the capture card, downloading the software, and scanning the channels, it took me about ten minutes before I was watching HDTV goodness.

The major drawback that I found was the antenna placement was really critical. Fortunately, you can save all of your scanned channels, and then scan for more when you reposition the antenna, then save those too to your config file.

I am very happy with this card, and the whole off-air digital idea. I am almost ready to ditch cable altogether.

Posted in Diatribe, Featured Software, General, Linux, Photographs | Comments Off

Ad Blocking While Surfing the Net

July 8th, 2011 Thomasso

I am sort of a rebel when it comes to what I allow into my home. When watching TV, I see very few commercials as my home-made PVR simply allows me to fast forward through them. I only listen to ad free radio content, preferably, CBC Radio One from Vancouver, and when I am surfing the net, I try to cut out as many ads as I can.

In my quest to rid ads altogether from my Intranet experience, I am finding this battle more and more challenging to do. For example, on two of the most visited places I go while using my browser, ads are like the plague there, and when I block the ads on those sites, the ad companies seem to try harder to circumvent the code that blocks them from the programs that I am using to block them altogether. Now it has gotten to the point that when I block URLs that contain adds from within my browser I might as well not look at them becuase they are void of any useful information. I know this sounds drastic, but when I am doing research, I brows hundreds of websites in one sitting, and I can have several very clever pieces of code do some very funny things to my browser that try and grab my attention in those sittings.

I have had a site that had some web code that tried to shut down my browser. One site that tried to open several pop-up windows, even with the pop-up blocker on. And even one web site that had a scrip that tried to open my email program and send out an email to that company!

I never bothered to report these website becuase there is no one really worthwhile to report to except for the web hosting company and domain name companies that are suppose to regulate what these people/organisation do online. So, it is really a free for all world out there, with law enforcement agencies overwhelmed, and with very little powers in the first place, why bother. Could they really combat this problem anyway?

So this is what I do to cut out most of the ads. Now, I target the legitimate ads. The illegitimate ads are much tougher to cut becuase, well, they are illegitimate. So, the first thing you need to do is down load the FireFox web browser. I am sorry if your running Window$, OK, I am. These fixes are not going to fully help you out becuase of the nature of your operating system. It is proprietary, and as such, it needs to send advertising to you–because that is what you paid for. That is capitalism, so deal with it. However, if you want a good chunk of these ads stopped, and you value your on-line time, then use LINUX. There, my plug!

Here is a really good website to get you started blocking ads, especially those Google ads. You can use it on Window$ too.

How to Get Rid of Google Ads!

The plug-in for FireFox is here: Adblock Plus — for annoyance-free web surfing. Adblock plus 1.3.9

So, give it a shot. I think you will be happy with the results, and how much faster some of the web sites load up too!

Added, July 10, 2011: Now that I have lived with the ad blocker for a few days now, I can safely say that it is working out great. It does not wreck any the off web pages that have mass amounts of advertising on them, and so far, it seems to be catching all the scrips that sneak ads onto your browser. I’m giving it 8 out of 10.

Posted in Blog and Web Tech, Diatribe, Featured Software, General, Nifty Plug-ins, Socail Media, Social Justice | Comments Off

The Power of Gogh, and My Drawing Tablet

May 10th, 2010 Thomasso

I like simple, and sometimes there is such a thing as having too many bells and whistles when all you want is pure simple. Gogh does this for me. Gogh is a ridiculously simple, yet beautiful drawing/sketching program that just gives you the basics: pen, pencil, smudge, colour and an eraser. It works great with Ubuntu 10.04, and is quite stable.

There is a bit of a trick to starting after you uncompress it – you must either start it up in terminal (the Gogh executable file),e.g., “./gogh,” or simply right click on it and choose run, or create a short-cut, but the folder must stay somewhere in your home directory. You can download it from here: GOGH.

Both of these sketches took only seconds to make.  They are not perfect, but I like the feel of the program, so any mistake you can either erase yourself out of trouble, or hit the undo.

Posted in Art, Featured Software, General, Linux, Photographs | 4 Comments »