NBA Live 08 Dynasty Mode on PSP

It's been a long time since I've played NBA Live 08. Now I'm currently starting a Dynasty with my favorite team Dallas Mavericks with fantasy draft.

The 12-man roster for the first season are as follows:

Starting Line-up:
Dwight Howard - Orlando Magic
Dirk Nowitzki - Dallas Mavericks
Rudy Gay - Memphis Grizzlies
Mike Miller - Memphis Grizzlies
Javaris Crittenton - Memphis Grizzlies

Bench:
Marcus Vinicius - Memphis Grizzlies
Andrew Bynum - Los Angeles Lakers
Trevor Ariza - Los Angeles Lakers
David Lee - New York Knicks
Michael Pietrus - Golden State Warriors
Ryan Gomes - Minnesota Timberwolves
Gerald Wallace - Charlotte Bobcats

Note that I didn't actually realize I was drafting four players from the Memphis Grizzlies. I just drafted young players to keep them going with more seasons to come and I think Dirk Nowitzki is the oldest among the group.

How to display TV-out in Creative Zen Vision M

Creative Zen's dock with AV-out cable connected

AV cable connected to the Sanyo TV

Entire set-up with the movie "21" being played from the Creative Zen Vision: M 60GB to the video out of the 19" Sanyo TV

While fiddling with my Creative Zen Vision M, I tried connecting the AV cable which comes from my Canon Powershot S3 IS.

I tried connecting the AV cable to the dock of my Creative Zen Vision M. At first, it didn't really work even when I already plugged the cable to the Sanyo TV. Anyways, I was amazed when I adjusted the cable to be about a couple of centimeters away from the dock and it worked.

Just when I was about to buy a separate AV cable for the Zen, the AV cable coming from my camera worked wonders for me, saving at least a thousand pesos just like the direct charger in which I found out that the Sony PSP Slim charger would also work for the Zen.

Bottom line is, if you have other gadgets with accessories, go and figure out if these accessories may actually work for your gadget. It's a lot cheaper experimenting this way rather than buying the accessory specific for that product.

How to download using Torrent

There are actually a lot of step-by-step HowTos for downloading torrent files found on the Internet. I just thought of creating one myself to remind me of I actually do it myself.

What is a Torrent?

According to Wikipedia:

BitTorrent is a peer-to-peer file sharing (P2P) communications protocol. BitTorrent is a method of distributing large amounts of data widely without the original distributor incurring the entire costs of hardware, hosting, and bandwidth resources. Instead, when data is distributed using the BitTorrent protocol, each recipient supplies pieces of the data to newer recipients, reducing the cost and burden on any given individual source, providing redundancy against system problems, and reducing dependence on the original distributor.

Basically it is a variety of P2P much like the Kazaa, Limewire and Morpheus.

How to download torrent files:

1) Download a torrent installer. As of now, I am currently using BitComet which is available at http://www.BitComet.com. It is free and although it is not quite as popular as uTorrent and Azureus, it is user-friendly and has a lot of options in it. Install it on your PC and you're good to go.

2) Search target files to be downloaded on popular torrent sites with a high number of seeds. It is important to note that the specific torrent file has a lot of seeders and not just leechers themselves. Seeders are actually the number of downloaders who also share the file both of you are currently downloading or the uploader himself sharing the file.

Some sites with the best torrent searches (and quality seeds):

http://www.demonoid.com
http://www.mininova.org
http://www.thepiratebay.org
http://www.isohunt.com
http://www.torrentz.com
http://www.torrentportal.com

Note: You may also look for the comments posted on the torrent itself to find out whether it is a fake, troll or contains virus.

3) After searching, you can either download or open the ".torrent" file in it. You can open in via the torrent downloader you've currently installed. As for BitComet, go to File Menu -> Open Torrent. Locate the file in you'd like to download. Choose which partition on your hard disk you'd like to store the file being downloaded.

Note: The torrent file already allocates the whole storage for the file you will be downloading even if you haven't finished downloading it yet.

4) After downloading, verify the status of your download on the Download column. If the torrent file you've downloaded contains a lot of files, you may either choose your target files first in the Files Portion on the lower right portion of BitComet. You can check the file you want to download first or queue it and set it on a higher or lower priority depending on your choice or you may opt not to download it at all. Once the download's percentage is 100%, your download is now complete.

And that's it! I hope you had fun downloading torrents!

Lego Digital Designer

While I was busy searching for Philippine stores selling a variety of Lego products at philbricksters, I came across a perfect fit for Lego enthusiasts - the Lego Digital Designer.

Lego Digital Designer is a free 23MB installer from the creators of Lego product itself. If you have played The Sims before, you'll probably be more familiar with it once you've installed it. It is like the Build Mode in The Sims wherein you can create your own house. You can either build it from scratch or modify existing sample layouts.

Some key features to note about the Lego Digital Designer: Take a Screenshot - Allows you to take a snapshot of the design you've created. Currently, it is in PNG format.

Building Guide Player - Generate HTML files for step-by-step tutorial on how your creation was built.

Save and Open - Share your creations at the Lego site itself and let other builders vote to your creation. You can also download other designers' works and open it as LXF file. This allows you to copy just about everything and modify the creation to fit your needs.

LDraw Files - You can actually create your custom bricks on another application program and import your bricks to the Lego Digital Designer.

Themes - Choose from either Factory, Mindstorms and Creator themes. It's fun building from these digital bricks, however it is much more fun building it in real life.

Although actual Lego bricks are expensive, this program may at the very least mellow down the itch of buying the actual Lego products. It really came to me as a surprise to see that Lego has created an application like this for its followers. And I hope that the Lego building bricks won't become extinct over the next generations to come despite the challenges presented by the digital generation.

Current Download Queues

Current download queues (June 18):

House of Wax - Movie
Cloverfield - Movie
Balls of Fury - Movie
Madagascar - Movie
Lego Star Wars II The Original Trilogy - PSP Game
Typing Master Pro 7
Gong! - PC Game Installer


Lots of movies to watch on my Zen.

The 7th Philippine Toys, Hobbies and Collectibles Convention 2008

SM Megatrade Hall - Time to have some fun reminiscing about your favorite toys.

Around 5PM, Sunday, June 15, I lined up to enter and pay 80 bucks for the Toy Con 2008. It was a fun-filled activity as I was still lucky enough to arrive just an hour before the Group Cosplay competition. Upon seeing lots of photographers, I quickly gathered mine, set it up and captured pictures of different toys feasting our eyes scattered around the hall.

A few booths worth noting:

Gong! While loitering around, I saw around four players playing a cute soccer online game called Gong! I was ecstatic to see a football online game being played on PC because not only is it promoting football in the country but it's also my favorite sport.

Guitar Hero - Want a free Game Mag? Get ready to line up and play Guitar Hero on PS3.

Lego - My favorite toy is still very much alive! It's been 50 years since Lego started these little building blocks helping the toddlers develop their inner passion for designing anything out of these blocks. A Philippine community was built as Lego also pays tribute to the recent Philippine Independence Day. In this huge lot, you'll be able to find a city hall, police station, houses as well as portions featuring space and pirates.

Wacom - Wacom has always been present when it comes to toy events. The booth boasts of lots of talented Filipinos drawing in a variety of Wacom tablets showcasing their drafting skills in Adobe Photoshop.

Alfredo Alcala and Mars Ravelo's comic booths - While many of us find Filipino artworks cheap, it never ceases to amaze me how they've managed to fight for Filipino comic book survival against American and Japanese giants such as Marvel, DC Comics, Shounen Jump!

Private Collectors - Mostly, these private collectors want to showcase their toy collections to various toy fans. They, trust me, are a lot knowledgeable in terms of the collectibles.

Group CosPlay

Ten groups participated in the group costume play. It got me guessing whether I had the guts to ask them to pose for a shot at my camera. With the help of luck, I was able to get more than enough as the Group Cosplay competition just started a few minutes after my arrival.

Among the participants were the following:

• Shinigami Captains dancing in Hagibis songs
• WWE's Incredible Hulk + Hulk Hogan vs Triple H
• Counterstrike with Zenigata (?), Zoro of One Piece and school girls
• Sven the Rogue Knight of DoTA, Magic Knight Ray Earth theme dancing the Michael Jackson's Black or White while imitating the Coca-Cola commercial with C2
• Power Rangers with Sentai theme battling an alien
• Cross-dressed boys wearing Japanese school girls' uniforms
• Resident Evil with Crush and Freddie Krugger (?)
• Macross story narration
• School Rumble with Hard Gay fighting Cyclops, Manny Pacquiao and Spartan's Leonidas
• Ragnarok players dancing the Kuro-chan (?) song

I'll be posting more once I get the photos uploaded to Multiply.

Google Bombing

While researching for topics related to RSS, I jumped over and over a couple of wiki pages to be able to get a gist of some of the computer internet jargons such as digg. To my surprise, I also saw this term "Google bombing" and it made me more interested in it rather than "digging".

It cited an example of Google bombing such as the "miserable failure" leading to George W. Bush's site. I can also recall in the past that I've done this search-the-keyword "miserable failure" and tada magic... the top site searches led to the white house's site.

I'm not pretty sure about it but I think some of it maybe done thru the meta tags in HTML in which you enter the keywords which best suit the description of your site. An example of it is the tags or labels you want to associate for this blog entry for your site.

Here's the site I found with Before and After searches of the words "miserable failure"
http://www.flickr.com/photos/dannysullivan/369539947/

And now I'm wondering... how is this possible? Is it alright to directly put the blame on the web developer of those sites inserting such keywords in it?

Supposedly, yes. But in this article, I found out how it works. I think it best describes the whole Google bombing event and how it was resolved.

While there are tips concerning SEO (Search Engine Optimization), there will always be something mysterious popping out around the web for us heavy web users. But it is quite interesting to note, for myself, to document this in my blog.

Podcasts 101

From a simple guestbook to now popularly known as blog, everyone from all around the world is now capable of writing and/or recording articles they want to share to their audience.

It evolved from simple write-up content sharing to now audio and video podcasts. While I myself am not too familiar with both the terms and tools for podcasting, I'd like to share what I had just learned a while ago about it.

Podcatchers - In simple terms, podcasts are just audio or video clips uploaded by people who want to share their knowledge about a certain topic. These podcasts may be streamed or downloaded by their audience. As for the audience on the go and with portable media players accompanying them, podcasts need to be downloaded or streamed thru their media players. One tool I'd like to recommend, although this is the first time I have actually installed a podcatcher is Juice, formerly known as iPodder. You can schedule downloads for your favorite podcast sites to ensure that fresh new episodes are downloaded immediately.

Podcast sites - Right now, I can only recommend the links that my former classmate referred to me for the latest in the IT industry. A bit of a warning though, you may find some sites geeky.

Dr. Dobbs' Podcast
http://syndication.sdmediagroup.com/feeds/public/cmp_podcast_all.xml

Attack of the Show's Daily Video Podcast
http://www.g4tv.com/attackoftheshow/podcasts/5/Attack_of_the_Show_Daily_Video_Podcast.xml

The Naked Scientists Naked Science Radio Show Podcast
http://www.thenakedscientists.com/naked_scientists_podcast.xml

PSP Podcast - Portable Gaming Revolution
http://feeds.feedburner.com/psppodcast

Podcast Player - VLC player is still the most preferred podcast player, imho. For convenience sake, I'd recommend this one as you are able to play a lot of audio and video formats here. You can download it on http://www.videolan.org

Podcast Portable Player - You have successfully downloaded the podcasts and you want to listen or watch it when you're away from your PC. There's iPod, Creative Zen and Zune to choose from besides other portable players. But if you want wifi capability, then iTouch is the one for you. You don't have to plug your iTouch to your PC just to download podcasts. Once set-up, it automatically downloads podcasts directly saved to your player.

That's it! Hope you learned something about a newbie's first hand experience in podcasting.

Creative Zen Vision M 60GB

Just a while ago, I bought a second hand Creative Zen Vision M 60GB. I must say it's a bang-per-buck unit and I'm very impressed with it and I find myself amused by the features in which I am still exploring as of this moment.

I connected my Zen to my PC and installed the ZEN Vision:M Series Media Explorer for faster drag and drop and organization of my files. I'll be posting quick updates probably tomorrow or on the weekend once I get these features working: SD Card Connectivity thru USB Host, AV out (in which I later on found out that the accessory costs more than a thousand peso) and downloading and listening to video/audio podcasts.

Ja Ne!

Orbs Tutorial for Paint dot Net

Want to know how to make orbs? How about making one and still don't have the luxury of affording a Corel PaintShop Pro or Adobe Photoshop?

I found this great tutorial for creating orbs from scratch in Paint.Net.

http://www.freewebs.com/cmdsketchpad/glassorb.htm

Now that you've learned how to create one, you can customize it to insert images inside the orbs. Just click the layer and set the layer mode to Multiply for that image. Note that this may only work if both layers have the same background color.

Animation Thru ZSnes

This was an old article I've written on the 30th of October circa 2005 which didn't find its way on the internet.

So, you want to create an animation out of the snapshots you’ve saved from your favorite game in SNES? This simple guide will teach you the basics of saving snapshots in ZSnes, a popular SNES Emulator.

First, load your favorite game. After loading, go to the desired screen and press F1. The game will freeze and then a menu will appear displaying the Miscellaneous Options. From there you can use the following options: Save Snapshot, Snapshot per Increment Frame and Increment Frame Only.

Save Snapshot

When you just want to capture the screen and you probably won’t use it for animation purposes, you can opt to choose this. It isn’t a recommended approach to use this option when you want to capture multiple successive screens because it is quite tedious in doing so. But if you want to do so, just press F1 when you want to save the screenshot.

Snapshot per Increment Frame/ Increment per Frame Only

Snapshot per Increment Frame is a good option if you want to capture the screen as the frame increments. A warning though, if you want to capture in a longer timeframe, it is a good practice to also use the Increment Frame Only option along with it. Successive frame increments do not always mean the animation or movement of the screen is worth saving the screenshot. Increment Frame Only lets you increment the frame one at a time without saving a snapshot of the screen.

Additional Options

Some of these options might be of help to you if you just want to capture a specific object in the screen like the character, enemy and background. Press these keys as you play the game.

1 - BG1 Layer is Enabled
2 - BG2 Layer is Enabled
3 - BG3 Layer is Enabled
4 - BG4 Layer is Enabled
5 - Sprite Layer is Enabled
6 - All Switches Normal

Pressing numbers 1 to 5 again would enable or disable the specific layer. Press 6 anytime if you want to enable all layers again at the same time.

That’s it. The screenshots you’ve made is located at the folder where your ZSnes is located. It may be in BMP or PCX format. If you want to create a GIF file for animating the screenshots you’ve saved, just open your favorite animation editor like Microsoft GIF Animator or Jasc Animation Shop (creator of Paintshop Pro) and compile the screenshots.

Will Wright's Imagination

Whether the Spore, Will Wright's new god-mode simulation game, kicks ass or not, Will Wright's legacy in game development is a living proof that games are not just made popular thru high-end power hungry graphics, innovation of already proven genres and countless hours of eyecandy features. Games are also created thru the game developers' creative minds.

Will Wright captured the eyes of both gamers and non-gamers alike thru the best-selling PC game of all time - The Sims. He started the craze with The Sim City, Sim Ants and then dreamt of creating a virtual world where you can control people - much like Tamagochi. Although one of the game's weak points may be the open-endedness, which a lot of hardcore gamers tend to get rid of, it also became one of the most attractive feature of the game as the gamer keeps on playing the game without even having to put pressure in himself finishing the game. Bored with the simulation process? Get interested on the design stage wherein you'll be able to build houses for the Sims families you've been playing with.

Now, he and the rest of his team will be soon releasing the Spore - the much awaited game which has been under development for years.
I think probably the bottom line here is that he was never afraid to continue to challenge even his own masterpiece to create another soon-to-be-legendary game. The ability to not only extend the game beyond possibilities but also increase the game's hardware performance thru what he called it as "procedural programming" without affecting the game itself is something that huge game developers must learn to appreciate and adapt within themselves upon game creation.

With that in mind, developers won't be really having a hard time creating a long storyline, realistic heavy graphic-reliant, redundant games but instead consider games that both the hardcore, casual and non-gamers alike will like.

An Alternate to the Alternate

iPod Touch is cool. Creative Zen Vision W is what I'm craving for. Unfortunately, due to budget constraints, I'm leaning towards the Creative Zen Vision M. But wait, let me think about it first. A friend of mine referred me to Microsoft Zune and it somehow made me rethink about the stuff I really wanted my portable mp3/ video player to have.

Drool or be disappointed? http://www.zune.net/en-us/products/zune80gb/specs.htm

Currently I have these must-haves for the player:
- FM radio
- Large HDD capacity
- DivX video player

Nice to haves:
- WiFi (Heck, the PSP Slim and DS Lite really kicks the competition, iPod Touch, out with this feature)
- SD Memory Card Slot (this feature is a very good combo to allow transferring of files thru my Canon S3 IS PowerShot)
- Bluetooth (Cellphone connectivity)
- Thickness (Which is a downside for the Zen Vision M)
- Touch Sensor (iPod's forte)

CNET Prizefight's PSP Slim vs DS Lite

We take a look at what CNET has to say about the handheld console wars... guess who's the winner? Check out the podcast link below:

http://www.cnettv.com/9742-1_53-50002265.html

While we're still waiting for Microsoft to come up and produce their own handheld gaming device, I'm pretty sure it's clear for us to see what gadget has more in store for gamers on the go.

Mid-range Gadget Exploration Adventure

Ok, so here's the problem: Gadget upgrade itch

Solution: Resist the temptation and look for prices to go down beyond the high demand of the latest gadgets

As simple as it is, it will be really hard to accomplish. Even if the gadgets you're itching to buy get cheaper, another batch of gadgets are there to make you drool over them. Thus, giving you a hard time to settle down for that one gadget because technology is so fast that the gadgets you've just bought will get toasted in six months by another kick-ass gadget.

Anyway, here's a list of want-to-buy low to mid-range gadgets I have in mind buying:

Nintendo Wii - Even if the XBox 360-PS3 graphic battle continues to heat up, I'll be satisfied with some serious fun-loving gaming. But of course, if Playstation 3 gets cheaper then why not? Blu-ray and high end graphics? Well, that's not what I had in mind of console gaming right now. Anyways, Wii would be a perfect fit for my DS Lite since I'm more attached to my DS rather than my PSP Slim.

Creative Zen Vision M 60GB - Okay, so I'm a bit lagging in this category since there's this new kick-ass Creative Zen Vision W 60GB. But I can't wait for another gadget anymore since my old iPod Shuffle 1GB is starting to annoy me because of the lack of lcd display and advanced features which you'd really crave for an MP3 player. And now that I'm inching closer to wanting the DivX video and FM features, I won't opt to choose the iPod Video/ iPod Touch just for the brand and not the features that I really want.

Asus EEE - Is it about time to pick it up and join the bandwagon? Or is it too late to pick it up? With an 8GB, afaik, as the largest size (or maybe 16gb or 32gb, I don't really know right now) it may be the quickest way to own a laptop. Add the Vision M as the combination, then I think I won't be upgrading my gadgets for a long time.

Basically, that's it. Well, I hope I'll be able to resolve my gadget upgrade itch - which in official terms would be buying a new batch of gadgets and not really an upgrade.

Month-long Home PC Hiatus

After a month of hdd file recovery, I'm finally back! About a month ago, it was quite a nerve-wrack hoping what would seem to be an unfathomable 130GB loss of personal files be recovered. Anyway, thankfully, thru the help of an officemate of mine and his trusty Paragon Partition Manager, he was able to temporarily ease the moaning of a dying Seagate 160GB hard disk.

Symptoms or not... it seems that the PC upgrade which I had projected to be two years from now would seem like a six month-long project. With an AGP aging His Excalibur ATI 9600 VIVO and a 1GB DDR, it just won't seem to fit in to the multiple core technology and hardware changing bandwagon. While I'm up to the challenge of exerting countless hours of researching for cheaper priced low to mid-end range of CPUs, I'm also quite heavily up to the challenge with a very tight budget as my gadgets also need their own upgrade.