Category: Life

There’s a new feature included with Microsoft’s new OS, codenamed Longhorn. It’s OPM, short for Output Protection Management. It works with a chip fitted inside new monitors.

So what does that mean? Well, if the industries feeding you [legal] television and movies do not like the monitor you’re watching their content with, they can opt to reduce the quality of their feeds. Supposedly, its to minimize piracy.

Of course, as all piracy protections go, this too will be easily defeated. Leaving consumers to suffer for the stupid decisisions of corporate heads who understand nothing about what it means to shell out $30 for a DVD; only to find out it won’t play on your computer because the corporate heads are snobby prick bastards. *gasps for air*

This would all be fine if I payed $30 for a low-quality DVD. But to pay $30 for a high-quality DVD and have the quality purposefully reduced because I chose to buy a certain very suitable monitor? Pshh.

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Well, I’ve wanted to have one of these HMDs for about 4 years now.
Finally found one off of eBay for $70. So I went for it.

My main use for it was to view movies while I was too physically exhausted to keep my head up to watch them on my monitor. The resolution is about 320×240. The same as a standard TV. Right now, it behaves as my 2nd monitor.

The resolution is low, and it makes font 10 text extremely difficult to read. But for anything bigger: its awesome. Also came with battery pack.

My new project is to pair it up with the house’s digital camera (which has RCA out), and have it play movies stored on the camera’s review mode (working out .mov formatting – see if I can get a movie on there).

Proxy Back Up:
After an appropriate sabbatical, the proxy is now back up. Edited content to prevent it from being easily google-mined.

Hosting Hacknip Radio:
I am now the host of the front-end (ie. not hosting episodes…) of HackNip Radio. Made the front-end header. Check it out.

MIT BlogSurvey
The people at MIT are having a survey for all bloggers out there. Check it out via the following clikeable image:

EYNTO Links Fixed
I was wondering why my bandwidth consumption had gone increasingly down. It turns out that the anti-slashdot PHP script I had written had gone off, and had renamed the EYNTO Show WMV file to some gibberish as an anti-leeching measure. This is now fixed.

Blog Software Updated
Following the “defacement” of this site; I’ve updated this blog software twice. The first was a makeshift patch against that kind of vulnerability, the second was the more formal update of the blogging platform.

Brooks Brown had the experience of attending Columbine High School around the time of the now infamous shooting incident. Via his blog, Brown goes into a detailed discussion of Why Violence in Gaming is a Good Thing. From the article: “GTA isn’t about fucking hookers or killing cops. It’s a story of a guy who got screwed trying to get back on top. It is, by nature, a story game. Postal 2 may let you kill anyone you want in bloody and disgusting ways – but that’s not what it is about either. It is, by nature, a tech demo in the abilities of programmers and AI. it is WE – the gamers – who change what the game is about and determine what happens. It is the person playing who determines what the game contains.“

The Blog Entry in Question:
http://d-fens.1up.com/do/blogEntry?bId=5179966&publicUserId=5629740

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