sail+sailesha

My home theater / media room is finally coming together. I just received my eDimensional 3D glasses. I haven’t had a chance to try them out but I’m sure they’re going to rock.

My speakers are also hooked up now. It required a bit of soldering but over all it was fairly simple. I was originally planing on mounting the spears to the wall but I chickened out and instead I’ve got them just sitting on various tables.

The only thing left now is to mount the projector to the celling. Currently I have it resting on the top of my sofa which isn’t very stable. Here’s a grainy low res picture from my cell phone.

Project Sylpheed looks like a great space shooter to keep an eye on. It’s set to be release by Microsoft later this year.

I have some old code that uses ::NewMovieFromDataRef() to play movies from memory. Recently I added some calls to ::MoviesTask() so that movies would properly loop and stuff but for some reason this caused lots of random crashes. The crash stack trace looked like this:

RGBForeColor

TaskMovie_priv

MoviesTask_priv

MyIdlingTimer

It turns out that ::NewMovieFromDataRef() is one of those old QuickTime APIs that still uses Graphics Ports. I was crashing because the port that was active when the movie being created would be gone by the time ::MovieTask() was called. Read the rest of this entry »

Beyond the Red Line is a really good game set in the Battlestar universe. You control a Viper ship and carry out missions with a squad of 2 other ships.

What’s really notable about this game is that it’s created by a modding community using the open source Freespace 2 engine. The guys at BtRL did a great job of bringing the show to life. The models are really detailed and missions are engaging with very professional voice overs.

I came across the game while searching for a good flight sim game. It sad to see how the genre has been completely abandoned. Freespace 2 is acknowledged to be the last great flight sim published and that came out over 8 years ago! Fortunately a lot of people have improved the engine since so BtRL looks fantastic.

I’ve been thinking about building a home theater for a while now and after reading this article I finally have a reason to. The article shows how to setup a 3D display using a DLP projector and some 3D glasses. After reading this article I finally feel motivated enough to want to spend the time and money on such a project. Here’s my shopping list so far:

• 5.1 Speaker System: So far I’m leaning towards the Logitech 5450 which come with wireless rear speakers but unfortunately cost a whopping $450
• 3D Glasses: The Tom’s hardware article used these which seem like a safe bet. I don’t think nVedia supports streoscopic drivers for Vista yet so that might be an issue eventually. The wireless glasses cost about $100.
• DLP Projector: No idea which one I’ll buy but I’m budgeting $1000 for it.
• Wireless Keyboard: This isn’t strictly necessary but would be a great bonus. If I was rich I’d get the Logitech diNovo Edge which cost almost $200!!

Since the staples of my television diet (Rome, Day Break, Life on Mars, and The Black Donnellys) have all been canceled here’s what I’m watching these days:

• Blood Ties: Based on novels by Tanya Huff. About a female PI hunting vampires, etc… on the streets of Toronto.
• Drive: A secret, illegal cross country race starring my 3rd favourite start ship captain Mal
• Sopranos: The final season! My bet is the show ends with Tony killing Chris.
• Supernatural: The only show I like that hasn’t been canceled yet.

For some reason I’ve been find a lot of good (maybe not great, but good) TV shows this year. Here’s a list of what I’m watching right: Day Break, Supernatural, South Park, Rome, House, Bones, and Psych.

I think this is the first time in my life that I’m actively keeping up with shows as they air. Usually I’ll just download an entire season of a show and watch it all within a day or two. Maybe I should setup a RSS feed on my bittorrent client so that I don’t have to try to remember to download the show the night it airs.

It looks like season two of HBO’s Rome is going to be great. I watched episodes 201 and 202 last night and they were both amazing. After reading the Wikipedia article on Octavius I knew there was a big fight coming between Mark Anthony and Octavius. What I didn’t expect was for it to happen so early. Episode 202 ended with a specular showdown between the two and Octavius fleeing the city. I can’t wait till next Sunday for episode 203 to air.