As you may be aware from elsewhere on this site, I’ve recently acquired a “free” Sony PSP from internetopiniongroup.com. During my holiday shopping, I had the opportunity to pick up a USB link cable and Datel Max Media PSP software for $12.88 at Target.
The cable worked perfectly, and the software was FAR better than I would have expected for the price. It allows you to transfer just about any digital movie format you like to your PSP memory card (AVI, MPG, ripped DVD “VOB” files), as well as most digital audio formats (e.g., MP3, WAV, etc.) and digital pictures (JPG, etc.). You can also backup and work with game save files.
So far, I’ve only worked with the digital video transfer. Using it, I was able to take an episode of Alton Brown’s “Good Eats” show in a few minutes from MPG format to the PSP’s MP4 format. I also transferred the entire movie “Mr. and Mrs. Smith” from a ripped DVD to the PSP memory card over a longer period of time. The video transfer supports both 4:3 and 16:9 aspect ratios, so wide-screen source material looks wide-screen and normal material looks normal (albeit with some black borders on the PSP display). At “high quality” mode, each 1GB VOB file became approximately a 56MB MP4 file for the PSP. That means you should be able to fit a typical 100-minute movie into about 256MB of PSP video data. With mono audio and a lower bitrate, you might get quite a bit more on there. Quite impressive.
I plan to do a more thorough review after I’ve spent some more time with it.
admin Cool Electronic Gear analysis, Datel Max Media software, examination, review, Sony PSP
My musical taste would probably be described by most people as
“very eclectic” or “unfocused” or simply
“weird”. My music collection includes the likes of
Morrissey, Blink 182, Bowling for Soup, Annie Lennox, The Beatles,
Willie Nelson, Conway Twitty, Beethoven, Bach, AC/DC, and others you
wouldn’t expect to see on the same shelf. But the further toward
the musical fringes you get, the less likely you’ll find me listening to
it. For example, metal that gets much heavier than AC/DC is not
something I care much for. I pretty much hate jazz altogether, and
I wouldn’t listen to Neil Diamond, Barbra Streisand, or James Taylor if
you begged me.
When I first encountered the name of the
band “Death Cab for Cutie”, I pretty much dismissed it
offhand. With a name like that, I figured, they’re probably some
kind of goth-metal-punk band that sounds like a room full of industrial
equipment going at full tilt. I’m big enough to admit I was
wrong. They sound nothing like that. In fact, they remind me
a lot of the alternative bands I listened to on college radio in the
80’s and 90’s. I felt very much at home and comfortable with them,
almost as if I’d been listening to them for years. Their latest
album is “Plans” and was the first Death Cab for Cutie album
I’d ever heard.
Read more…
admin music album, dcfc, Death Cab for Cutie, examination, plans, review
Release Date: July 22, 2003
Label: Compass Records
ASIN:
B00009Y3OF
Approximate Price as of 8/3/2005: $14
new, $13 used
All right, I admit it. I am a child of
the 80’s and 20 years later I still have a soft spot for the music of
the group “Men at Work”. It should come as no surprise,
then, that I seized the opportunity to listen to Men at Work’s former
front-man Colin Hay performing his album “Man at Work”.
I wasn’t sure I was going to like it, though. All too often I’ve
found that when a member of a popular band goes off on his or her own to
record an album, you realize that what you liked about that band wasn’t
the lead singer, but the combination of the singer and the rest of the
band.
Read more…
admin music album, CD, colin, colin hay, colin hay review, critique, evaluation, examination, hay, man at work, man at work review, men at work, review
Released: June 1, 1999
ASIN:
B00004TLWM
Having just reviewed Colin Hay’s “Man at
Work” album from 2002, I decided to give another of his albums,
“Transcendental Highway” a listen. Unlike “Man at
Work”, this album contains nothing from his “Men at Work”
days of the 80’s. It is entirely new music of his own. After
a few spins, here’s what I think of the album…
Read more…
admin music album, CD, colin, colin hay, Colin Hay Transcendental Highway Review, critique, evaluation, examination, hay, men at work, music, review, Transcendental Highway
Terry Pratchett’s “Discworld” is a rather interesting
place. Firmly located in the realm of fantasy, the universe of
Discworld combines traditional fantasy elements like vampires, golems,
witches, trolls, and wizards with concepts from the “real
world” like equal rights for men and women, technology, and – in
this case – mail delivery. The Discworld books have a little of
that same kind of British humor we see in Monty Python or Douglas Adams’
books, combined with some humor that is uniquely Pratchett’s.
From
the title “Going Postal” one might think this is a book about
a person losing their grip on sanity and killing lots of people, but
that’s not the story at all here.
“Going Postal” opens
with the main character Moist Von Lipwig being sentenced to death and
about to hang. Shortly after he hangs, he becomes
unconscious. When he awakens, the local official tells him he was
hanged expertly, within an inch of his life. He now has two
options. He may take a civil service job that is being offered to
him at the post office, or he may walk through a door leading out of the
room. After learning that on the other side of the door is a pit
leading to his death, Moist decides that becoming the new Postmaster is
the better option.
Read more…
admin Books analysis, book, evaluation, examination, going, going postal, postal, pratchett, review, terry, terry pratchett
A while ago I purchased an entire box of Indian Tabac’s “Fire” cigars. I bought
them having never had a cigar by Indian Tabac before, and of course
never having had the Fire line either. Based on what I’d been
reading in the forums, Indian Tabac makes some good cigars, so I figured
it wouldn’t be a huge risk. I just had my first one of them
tonight, and I’m pleased to say they were a good choice.
Read more…
admin Cigars cigar, critique, evaluation, examination, Fire, indian, photo, picture, review, Tabac
The Pinar 1958 Series B Pre-Embargo
Cuban Rothschild cigar is frequently being sold on the CigarBid.com auctions lately. The forum
participants on the site have discussed this cigar a few times, and the
general consensus was pretty middle-of-the-road. Some liked it,
some didn’t, and some were indifferent. Having recently purchased
a 5-pack at auction, I decided to try one out. Since none of the
reviews I read on the forum covered the smoking experience in detail, I
decided to do that here. In fact, this review is probably going to be more detailed than any of my
earlier reviews.
Read more…
admin Cigars cigar, cigar review, evaluation, examination, Pinar, Pinar 1958, Pinar 1958 Series B, Pinar 1958 Series B Pre-Embargo Cuban Rothschild cigar, Pinar cigar, Pinar Pre-Embargo, Pinar Rothschild, review, review of Pinar Series B
Panda Antivirus Platinum dutifully reminded me tonight that I have only
28 days to renew my subscription to their update service. Last
year, I blindly renewed because I didn’t want to take time out to look
at my other options. Panda’s product is a good one, though I had
some problems with its firewall and update procedures. The
firewall didn’t like MMORPGs very well, especially if they had updated
recently, which most do pretty often. Other network based games
had similar problems, where Panda’s attempt to bring up a warning about
a program trying to access the network would crash, slow down, or at the
very least interrupt a gaming session. The updates often had
trouble connecting to Panda’s servers, and frequently displayed messages
about it, even though they would connect a few minutes or hours later
successfully. So I decided it was time to look at
alternatives. And being a bit of a cheapskate, I decided to look
at open source (free) alternatives. This search brought me to the
open source “ClamWin” AntiVirus package. I’ll
review that package here.
Read more…
admin Windows Support antivirus, clamav, clamwin, clamwin antivirus, clamwin antivirus evaluation, clamwin antivirus review, clamwin evaluation, clamwin review, detection, evaluation, examination, review, virus, virus detection, virus removal
I’m something of a video packrat. When I moved into
the house with my wife, I had something like 200-300 VHS tapes and
probably 100 DVDs. Naturally, I’m not terribly interested in lugging
around that many VHS tapes forever, especially considering that they
don’t last forever anyway. So I started capturing the video into my
computer and using Sonic DVDIt to produce my own DVDs of the content
(typically old sci-fi shows I recorded in the late 80’s or 90’s). One of
the problems I ran into pretty early on is that often my discs were too
big for DVD-R, the medium I chose to write this video collection to.
While DVDIt would happily compress the video to a smaller size for me,
it’s monumentally slow in doing that. I began looking for another
option. DVD2One turned out to be it. This review
will tell you what I think of the software.
Read more…
admin Movies backup, compress, compression, DVD, dvd backup, dvd compression, dvd copy, dvd re-compression, dvd recompression, dvd shrink, DVD-R, DVD2One, evaluate, evaluation, examination, examine, fit, recompression, review, reviewing, rip, shrink, squeeze, video
If you spend much time on the Internet, sooner or
later you’re going to run into this issue… You find a very interesting
audio stream that you just can’t listen to right now. For example, if
you’re a sports fan it might be an online broadcast of a game that’s
important to your team. If you’re a gamer it might be an interview with
a favorite developer. Whatever the reason, you find yourself wishing
that you could somehow “record” that streaming audio webcast
so that you could listen to it later on.
Unfortunately, systems
like Windows Media Player and Real’s RealOne player are designed to
prevent just that sort of recording. There’s no “save” feature
in the player to capture these streams and no option (usually) to
download them later. What’s a listener to do? Get High
Criteria’s Total
Recorder, (reviewed here) that’s what…
Read more…
admin music audio, capture, convert, evaluation, examination, High Criteria, MP3, Ogg Vorbis, record, recorder, recording, review, schedule, sound, stream, total, Total Recorder, wma