As many people, I am an avid gamer. I have been a fan of rhythm games for a long time. I pay the price of the game I take it home and have a lot of fun, but recently I have noticed that Guitar Hero is having occasional updates but nothing changing. Then I noticed what changed, they added an ad for a movie in my game. I already paid full price for the game so what right do they think they have by doing this. The problem I have with it is that they charge $60 for the games, now they are making me look at ads without any compensation. If they want to lower the price of the games, then I wouldn’t mind them putting the ads into the games.

Today I learned that Barack Obama is going to be putting ads into Guitar Hero and other games. Isn’t he the one says things like “stop playing Game Boy”. I am not a McCain supporter nor an Obama supporter so I don’t want to see his ads in my game. I play games as an escape, not as a way to see ads for the latest movies or candidates. If the game industry thinks this is a new way of getting revenue, then they are mistaken. The major problem I have with them is that you are required to download and install the update if you want to play the game online. I deny all updates to Guitar Hero now because of this. I do not play them online so I don’t need the updates. Also downloadable content really doesn’t interest me. The only games I allow to update are the ones that I know that do not have ads in them. When the game industry sees that people no longer install the updates for their ads, then hopefully they will understand that we don’t like them and stop doing them.

Until the game industry understands that putting ads into games is not acceptable without lowering the price, I will no longer update their games to get their ads. Websites are free because they have ads to pay for them. I am not saying that the game should be free, but they are selling me to a client without giving anyting in return.

• 3 Comments

WARNING: Going through with this walkthrough could cause problems with your iPhone. Stop Geek is not responsible for any irreparable you do to your iPhone. Proceed with caution

• 1 Comment

Wow, this is a pretty cool tech demo. It’s about the technology ‘Image Metrics’. I stumbled across the video not knowing what it actually was. Needless to say I was surprised when I got pretty far into it.

• 2 Comments

Wall-E, if you haven’t seen it yet do yourself a favor and go this weekend. I’ve been a huge Pixar fan since the days of Toy Story. I’ve seen all of the Pixar films, and have liked each one. It looks like the guys at Pixar are upgrading their operating system, along with their rendering program.

It’s Hard To Imagine Pixar Has Been Around For 20 Years

When Microsoft officially releases their Windows HPC Server 2008, it will be their most advanced operating system on the market. The Windows HPC Server 2008 is used for high-performance computing clusters and super computers. So I’d say that the system will have enough power for the rendering that Pixar will be using in the future.

Here is a quote from Todd Needham’s, Senior PM in HPC blog, “4 versions going back 20 years, nothing else like RenderMan, and now you’ll be able to work with 64-bit datasets, get some choice in your pipeline configuration, faster AOVs, enhanced threading, let’s put it this way, your graphics pros, your render wranglers, they just got their headroom doubled, I’m talking creative headroom”

[via: Computer World]

• 2 Comments

I recently got an iPhone and was very unhappy to discover I couldn’t use one of my own mp3s as a ringtone. I thought this was very strange until I discovered Apple wants you to pay again for the right to make a ringtone. So you pay $.99 for the song on itunes, then they want you to pay another $.99 to make it a ring tone. Ok that doesn’t sound right to me. I have already paid for the song once, why should I have to pay for it again? Well I remembered that if you ripped an audio book, you had to rename the file to get it to be in the audio book category. That got me thinking maybe you could do the same thing with a ringtone. So I did a search and found they had an extension of m4r. I tried renaming an mp3 to that but it did not work. Then i converted an mp3 to aac and renamed it, still did not work. Then I discovered that ringtones are normally around 30 sec long. So I converted 30 sec of an mp3 to aac (made it an m4p for some reason) and then renamed it to m4r. That worked, so now you can make any song you have into a ring tone.

Here is what I did to make my ringtone.

1. In Itunes right click on an mp3 and click “Get info”.

Read the rest of this post »

• 33 Comments

Today, I am going to be telling you about the Archos 705 WiFi. I received mine as a gift for my birthday in June and have been playing with it ever since. The first thing I noticed about the player was the size of it. It is larger than you would expect. My wife has an Archos 605 WiFi but the 705 dwarfs it at 7.05″ x 4.96″ x .775″. The entire 605 is the size of the screen on the 705.

The 705 also comes with a remote that works without having the dock. Surprisingly, I used it more than I thought I would. The ability to skip 30 sec was my favorite feature of the remote. I was also surprised that it worked from across a room.

The screen of the 705 is 7″ with a resolution of 800×480, which is roughly the resolution of a DVD (720×480). I have watched many videos on the 705 at different resolutions and bit rates, and the 705 handles them very well. It has a zoom feature so you can make a full screen movie wide screen, but i do not recommend it. The screen is crisp and has a fast refresh rate with little artifacts during fast action scenes. The biggest problem I have with the screen is that it does not show up in bright sunlight very well.
Read the rest of this post »

• 1 Comment