Real guitar + guitar hero – Hack a Day.
Another Hack a Day Post??? Yeah, well I was on Hiatus… shoot me.
This is somehow not as cool as the Old NES Cart wallets.
Theremin controlled Mario – Hack a Day.
This guy basically fashioned a homemade sony eyetoy and is using it to play super mario… Pretty leet
USB reader for SNES game carts – Hack a Day.
Hack a Day posted a nice guys write up to playing your old super nintendo carts, check out the vid here:
Looks pretty cool, and it’s a nice alternative to doing it the illegal way, ala mininova.org.
Punchy Punchout, improved – Hack a Day.
Hack a day has a nice video up about someone turning a martial arts dummy into a controller for the NES game Punchout. It might be kinda old-school, but it’s also kinda cool.
when god crafted Adam, he surely looked at the back of his skull. Was there a giant cathode ray tube protruding from there? no, and thusly was born man. So it is only fitting that when I looked at my previous monitor, despite it’s years of faithful service (it’s seen 3+ builds beside it on my desk), I had to find a replacement. After plenty of research and some slight budget management, I settled on the following:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16824009127
The
Acer X193W+BD
Acer X193W+BD Black 19" 5ms Widescreen LCD Monitor
At 19″ wide it is considerably larger than my previous 17″ CRT and the picture… well there’s no contest. Moving up from 1280X960(sometimes 1024) to it’s native 1680×1050 is dumbfounding, and makes my games look beautiful. I would have rather it have been full HD 1080p, but with 16:10 being more widely supported for gaming, I went that route instead. anyways the monitor is great, and I got it from new egg in 1 business day with free shipping. NO dead pixels or artifacts, just crisp, clean, concise clarity.
Anyways, I’m glad to be back in the world of the net, and will try to make posting a habit again. Lets hope theres some great steam deals to celebrate this weekend!
Mar 232009
Okay everyone, FINALLY ProGamingLife.com is back online. It turns out one of the ram modules was slowly decaying and that was causing it to run like molasses in winter, making browsers report ProGamingLife as “timing out”.
Well that issue is fixed for now.
On the sad end of the spectrum however, panther A.K.A. Operation New PC ’09 is currently down. While screwing around with the BIOS settings it somehow became corrupt… very corrupt. For about a week now, after trying dozens of fixes, I’ve been unable to revive it. I’ve still got one more trick up my sleeve prior to trying an RMA, but I’m still waiting for the BIOS chip in the mail.
Unfortunately this does mean I’m back to playing source games that lag… grrr…
anyways, I’ve also installed a new cooling system into the panther rig after the old thermaltake waterblock sprung a leak. It’s the Coolit A.L.C. Domino.
The Sleek and Powerful Coolit Domino ALC
I can’t really do a proper review as of yet, since I can’t put it under any load while my computer is unbootable, but it looks nice, and installation is considerably easier than a full fledged liquid cooling system.
Anyways, peace to you and yours in these troubled times,
~Zypher
Right now on steam you can pick up a copy of valves newest hit “Left 4 Dead” at an alarming 50% off. I must say I had avoided buying this game up until this point, solely because of its’ cost… I cant really just ify $50 for a game unless it happens to strike me in just a certain way.
From what I understand so far, this game is essential a little bit Man Hunt mixed with a little bit resident evil, multiplayer. Anyways, I’ll probably purchuse before the weekends out, and will try to post my review accordingly. If you own the game, why not buy a friend a copy, cause “it’s the zombie apocalypse, so you’d better bring friends…”
~peace, Zypher
EDIT:
been playing the game since work, it is pretty fun… I’m kinda running out of stuff to try in single player, but hopefully some mod packs exist out there. Multi-player is fun, and offers a great team-work experience, I’ll be working it into my regiment pretty soon.
Overall its a new valve game, which isn’t bad. It’s not the most inovative game on the market by far, but what it does do, it does right and that means a lot. If you don’t own this game, I’d still suggest picking it up, especially at 50% off.
PS- Watching the zombies fold over with awesome ragdoll effects is quit3e possible my favorite part.
Solar charging your DS – Hack a Day.
hack a day has a new story up about how to use solar power to charge your DS lite while it’s not in use. It’s pretty interesting, except that you have to have the ds open and face down in order to get the most power to it. Have you ever played with a ds? though screens are fragile. Anyways, if it interests you, head over to hack-a-day and check it out.
Jan 312009
This year I had to make a choice. Stick with intel’s proven and useful Dual Core arcitechure, or move it on up to a quad core… The descision ultimately wasn’t hard.
With the slew of games now supporting multiple cores, but most still shuning anything more than two, and with the core 2 duo’s AMAZING overclocking capabilities, the core 2 quad’s offered little competition. Now, I might regret this the next time I burn a DVD and it takes over an hour to transcode, but when I’m flying through UT 3 with my 4.2Ghz Dual Core processor, I think I’ll forgive myself.
The only Issue then was which model. Processors are notoriously known for having huge price jumps bewteen processor speeds, and I didn’t want to break my budget on one chip. I initially settled on the E8400 as my processor of choice. Featuring low power consuming wolfdale cores and coming stock at 3.oGhz, It seemed like a good bet.
The Intel E8500 Blazing Fast.
However, At the very last second before ordering, I found that the E8500 (wolfdale @ 3.16) was only $20 more. While I typically don’t like to feed manufacure egos, and would rather have gotten the extra .16 through overclocking, I am sure that this purchuse (and liquid cooling) is what enabled me to hit 4.2Ghz.
Parts From:
