Dark Alex calls it a day.

Oh deary me, are things getting from bad to worse for my PSP; Dark Alex, one of the top PSP hacker/homebrew developer has call it quits.

Here's what Dark Alex had to say:

Bye, scene.
I've decided to cease OE development, and leave PSP scene.
The reasons are various.
One of them is the time it consumes, which i'm losing from other things.
The other is related to my security. I didn't like Sony menaces to PS3 hackers.
I think it is better to leave now rather than end paying the consequences.

I wonder is it similar to what happen to Booster, developer of the other great PSP contribution DevHook; when Sony was breathing down their necks and it just wasn't stirring up heat if it's better to wait it out. I hope he's just taking a nice break and add updates every now and then, I fear if he had pushed on that $ony would have treaten legal action and kill off all future possibilty of updates from DAx.

He will missed that's for sure.
PSP-Hacks' user comments
QJ's PSP Updates user comments
My PSP hasn't felt this cold in my hands.

Thank you very much DAx for squeezing so much potential out of the PSP, enjoy your (permanent) break.

Sh!t Charge up damn it!

I think I fried my battery and at least I hope it's only the battery, and not anything between the DC plug and the battery connection. Tried charging by USB instead of my AC charger, nothing.

I've got two 3600mAh internal batteries on the way, including a battery charging cradle should arrive next week.

Fingers are crossed

Strange trend... capacities doubling.

Anyways here's my new 2GB Sandisk SD card for my current Canon Powershot A540 (new A570IS on the way). Sweet except that this Compaq laptop's built-in card reader wouldn't recognise this Sandisk SD card at all, all my other SD/MMC cards work in the card reader.

Then don't know what happened, my camera image numbering got reset and it's screwing with my folder organisation, so I'm sitting on the continuous shooting drive mode to work it up to something like IMG_5600 from IMG_0001. I have ~7,200 pictures in my "Photo Box" but one 1GB card got misnumbered back then so I lost a few hundreds of numbers then as well.

Right now using my USB plug in card reader to download photos.

Guaranteed crisp shirt, no strings attached

Starch OD.

Original packaging recommendations are:

• Heavy: 3 scoops per 5 cups (1250ml) water
  
• Medium: 2 scoops per 5 cups water
  
• Light: 1 scoop per cups water

... Application is by dipping the clothing article into premixed starch solution and left to air dry.
I instead premix 3 scoops in 500ml of water into a spray bottle, and in the course of an afternoon 'laminated' the shirt with layer and layer of starch fluid. Hung to sun dry over two days.

CRISP...

Suck on that spray-on starch cans.

I made it onto QJ

I made it onto QJ
... well not exactly.

But they did use my screenshot from the my thread on the PSP-Hacks forum, I know because of a few tell tale signs like the double wave, standard fonts, standard blue background, Shooting Memory Stick and all the flaws of my poorly converted bmp to jpeg screenshot.

Before I leave on my holiday...

Before I leave on my holiday from Perth to Adelaide and possibly on to Melbourne, Sydney and Newcastle; where I might not be able to drop any blog posts.

So I'll leave you'all with my favourite YouTube video to entertain you'all for a little while.

Silence Precision Drill... with an Umbrella.


... if you're saying to yourself "Auhh jono?... why the?, thinking aboot drills again", come on people at least I'm wasn't doing duty at Golf 2 when clearing Leave like somebody!...

Naughty...

Hee hee, look what I've found in my local supermarket.

The Real McCoy is what we have here ladies and gentlemen in powder form.
Not the slacky crappy spray can stuff, which is convenient to say the least but wasteful, expensive and not very effective even in double starch grade.

Luckily I don't wear much clothes that needs starching, you No.3 boys have a go at this. (ie. 'paper'-sleeves)

PMP-AVC vs. Sony VSH AVC (Post C: The Downloads)

Downloadarama:

• For playback for PMP-AVC video you'll need a PMP Mod AVC player such as, PMP Mod AVC v1.02M-K (Revision K, the latest as of 06MAR07; for those who haven't already got a PMP Mod AVC player)
• For playback of the AVC in your XMB you'll need Dark Alex's OE custom firmware on your PSP, 3.03 OE-B or newer.

Files that are available to you'all are bulleted and they are available with the help of file factory, so click away:

(Please leave a comment on this post if there's a problem downloading the file(s), I'll try my best to solve it.)

For the PMP-AVC files place them in ms0:PSP\VIDEO:

• Basic quality PMP-AVC of the Gran Turismo HD video
• 'Top Quality' PMP-AVC of the Gran Turismo HD video
  

And for the AVC file to be played back in the VSH, place them in ms0:MP_ROOT\100ANV01:

• Gran Turismo HD AVC-converted video
• & accompaning .THM file
  

Plus lets not forget about MPEG-4, drop this pooper in ms0:VIDEO:

• Gran Turismo HD MPEG-4 SP-converted video (in improved 368x208 resolution)

FileFactory.com

PMP-AVC vs. Sony VSH AVC (Post B)

Mini update on the AVC 'testing':
- Screenshots of the PSP XMB courtesy of Screen Video Capture, which have a habit of compromising the quality of the screenshots by overbrightening actual images.
# So for the previously posted screenshots of the front shot of the Subaru Impreza WRC in the XMB actually has lighting detailing in the clouds in the form of some shadowing. But detail of the road surface is more or less the same compared to PMP-AVC.

- Something I did notice when watching my reference video in the XMB AVC, is that it seems to be smoother in terms of frame rate compared to PMP-AVC (for which in these videos are 25FPS).
#(Update: the XMB AVC playback on Quicktime on PC reports the frame rate at 29.97FPS (Playing FPS averaging 30FPS))
Farther investigations of frame rates to follow...

I'll try to find a suitable file hosting to upload the videos for you'all to download on your PSP to watch and compare for yourself.

For my PSP friends out there... (PMP AVC vs. XMB AVC) Post A

Battle of the Full-Resolution PSP Video Codecs

PMP Mod AVC vs. PSP XMB AVC

I'd always been a fan of the PMP Mod from day I came across it at PSP Hacks after the first few releases from johnny, then came PMP AVC with full resolution support, sweeet! Only problem was since I first downloaded my first PMP Mod, was a converting videos to PMP format. Got confused using PSP Video 9 and Videora, after one year of searching, experimenting dissappointment came XviD4PSP. It was godsend I tell you'all, besides that it may or may not have crashed my friend's unstable free computer a few times.
Now back home I Australia and using my parents computer (Old skool 1.2GHz AMD Duron with 224MB RAM) while less powerful than my friend's PC, it made up for it with stability.

Pack in XviD4PSP 4104 and my reference video clip of choice.
(Gran Turismo HD replay of Subaru Impreza WRC at The Eiger Nordwand: 10978_gthd_demo_replay_01.wmv {8062kbps 1280X720 122MB 2:17})

PMP AVC Max.- XviD4PSP 3-pass Extreme, PMP-AVC, 16384kbps x264 Video, 256kbps MP3 Audio
XMB AVC- 3gp Converter 2-pass, MPEG-4 AVC, 768kbps AVC Video, 128kbps AAC Audio
PMP AVC Basic- XviD4PSP 1-pass Extreme, PMP-AVC, 768kbps x264 Video, 256kbps MP3 Audio


Left column: PMP AVC Max Centre column: XMB AVC Right column: PMP AVC Basic (CLICK TO ENLARGE: Tabbed browsing does help to compare screenshots.)

For those who took the time to see and compare to video screen shots, both the PMP videos have a edge over the PSP's XMB video. PMP AVC (Max.) takes the cake for quality, to which I add that it could have been better as I tried out the Remastering and SBC options on that on that conversion. As you can see for the PMP AVC (Basic) screenshot shows better detail in the puffy cloud over the hill on the right than both the other videos, which seems I'd picked the wrong options to apply to my video conversion.
Both PMP AVC beat the XMB AVC as you can see simply better detail on the road surface on both the Front and Back stationary shots.


Now let's on forget that about the horrible MPEG-4 player in the PSP, forcing itself to stretch out 320X240 pixels to fit the screen, terrible video quality just sours the experience, detail a complete wash out. Sometimes makes me want to hurt my eyes less by going to watch videos on an iPod, visual nightmare galore. It cam't even show the Gran Turismo HD 'logo' properly, it can dare to crap out such a simple thing, shameful.




Now take in the fact that the file sizes are 96MB (PMP AVC Max), 15MB (XMB AVC), 10MB (PMP AVC Basic) and 4.5MB (MPEG-4). As you can see the PMP AVC Max is 20X larger than the MPEG-4 video and 6-10X larger than the PMP AVC Basic and XMB AVC videos. Which means if you want to get your average 2 hour movie in PMP Mod AVC (Max.), you'll need 6GB of space.
I can forget about doing, and screw the 8GB MS Duo from Sony, if you're smart you'll wait for the rumoured 10GB from SanDisk coming out next month. Hell you can go ahead and put the Lord of the Rings in there.
So space consumption-video quality ratio seems to point to a basic PMP Mod AVC conversion to keep us all happy and jolly.

MPEG-4 while small and quick (speedy if converting via WinAVI) is how I'll conclude as diarrhoea and Maxed out PMP AVC as constipation. So MPEG-4 may be quick but I'll leave you feeling like you shat your guts out and PMP AVC (Max) while top quality but it's a real drag.

So it seems Basic PMP Mod AVC video is the way to go for me.

And to add one other thing the PMP videos are the only ones I've actually managed to sync the sound properly with video.

And talking about CD Ripping...
I've done 3 out of at 40 CDs.

Blog Bucket Startup

jonowee's new blog is now here, had an old one but never got time or resources to edit it.

Just spent the past night ripping my CDs to Ogg Vorbis and painstakingly editing every song's ID tags in iTunes and dropping in my new 320GB HDD cos the 40GB just can't hold all my music, videos and PSP games. I've got a Ogg Vorbis 'plugin' for my Quicktime components but iTunes willn't allow me to directly rip CDs (with 'instant' ID tagging courtesy of iTunes) to OGG.
Some day I'll get a Samsung/iRiver HDD MP3 player to carry around my music, for now I can drop in my PSP running PSPRadio. Samsung made the 'best' MP3 player IMHO the YH-J70L but I say they got greedy and gone all flash music players.

For my friends back in SG, can't find a good pic to show but how about a shot of my room as I'm unpacking and reorganising the quagmire. Small room, even smaller than my sis's room Singapore.
I've somehow managed spill the liquid you collect (in your products like Thirsty Hippo to dry excess moisture in cupboards) in my Dampsord container (which is two year old water in there). I've tried to mop it up and the water has been sitting there for half a week and doesn't look like it's even drying up one bit.
Next attack: Hot water, mop and soap