Year end blog

Hi:
 It's time to do my year end blog. They have been some bad things that happened this year but I would rather focus on the good things:

• I traded in my Sega Genesis and games for 70% discount on a used PS3 at GameHord(here in town). It was a good decision. More info about this can be found here: http://jamiemarchant.blogspot.ca/2016/07/ps3.html
• My friend Barb from the camera club gave me her old Nikon D90 as a birthday present! The quality of my photos have improved. 
• My Dad retired yesterday and I am happy for him. 
• Here are some other highlights. 

Best movies I saw(in no order):

• Paddington
• The Pirates! Band of Misfits
• Finding Dory 
• Documentaries hosted by David Attenborough and David Macaulay. Macaulay wrote a series of illustrated books on historical subjects like Castles. These where turned into documentary latter on.  People my age probally know him best for his kids book "The Way Things Work". 

Best TV show I saw: 

• Murdoch Mysteries. I especially liked the Christmas special. 
• Ounce Upon a Time. << still a good show! 

Best video games I've played:

• Kingdom Hearts Birth By Sleep(HD)
• Evoland 2 
• Sonic Unleashed(which I bought for my PS3) 

Best video game I watched someone else play: 

• Obduction! << I would have a copy of this but my computer can't run it. 

Other memory things I have done: 

• Played many games of Monopoly Deal
• Gone on photo shoots. I have done this with the club and I've started doing it on my own. At Christmas and Halloween I did shoots around my neighbourhood. I also started doing shoots with my friend Doris from the camera club. Check out my Halloween and Christmas photos here: https://flic.kr/s/aHskJdwzYw (all Christmas photos) and Halloween walk: https://flic.kr/s/aHskGmSyGF
• Played board games with groups like Georgetown Geeks and Gammers, as well as a Brampton group that I can't remember the name of. 

Next year: 

• I will get a new credit card from RBC. They are retiring they old line of cards, the new card will have the same rates as the old one but the rewards(which I never used), we work differently. 
• I will keep watching good TV shows. 
• My sister got my some online multiplayer games and we will be playing them. 
• I will be watching less YouTube videos next year, as they often are more of a way to pass time. 
• I will improve myself in other ways that are private and I don't feel like talking about here. One should remember that new years is not the only time when one can improve oneself.
•  With Ontario's new fixed election cycle the next election is scheduled for 2018. Those of us involved in political parties may have to start planning next year.   
• It will be Canad's 150th anniversary next year so they will be losts of celerbrasoins along those lines. 

Lastly a silly thought "It's almost 2017 and still don't have my darn hover car! come on people hurry up and make those!".

NOTE: Not sure why some of the text is different. 

change history by editing your posts

I wrote this on Facebook but thought it was interesting enough to write here:

Here is a question for today: should you be able to 'change history' and delete/edit a comment/post?
Sometimes I say the wrong thing or am not clear and find editing useful. However, I feel you should not be able to change a comment if someone has responded to it.(that's too confusing). You also should not be able to change a post you made a while ago.(it might be confusing since someone may have read it and now thinks it to say what it said before.). Changing spelling and grammar(but not structure) is fine anytime. One site I found would let you edit your post but only if no one had responded and you would only have so long to do it before it would 'time out'.
It's an interesting topic since you can't unsay things in real life.

Let's start a discussion if you read this(even years from now) leave a comment bellow and tell me what you think.

DRM that downscales BlueRays

Hi:
  I recently ran into an interesting and annoying form of DRM. It forces Blue Rays to run at 480i(SD)instead of there native resolution.(eg. 1080i) when component cables are used.(since they don't sport copy protection). This is part of "Advanced Access Content System", a spec that has been around since the Blue Ray players creation. Any BlueRay disk can have a flag on it that forces the player to downscale the image -- YUCK! It has not been used until a couple years ago. Up until then it was felt that there where to many people using component cables.(so USEING the DRM would hurt to many people)

 Recently this has been applied to new(2011+) BlueRay players since Component is no longer a problem. Don't worry though people will not get confused as most of these new players will only come with HDMI.(the signal will be encrypted off course)

 VGA on the PC(which also does not support encryption) is also not supported.

 Why do I bring this up? I have a newer model PS3 and it's effected by this. Fyi this does not effect anything but BlueRays and DVDs(oddly they are effected by the spec too), PS3 games work fine and are in HD.

One last interesting point is the target they are trying to stop! Well, it's impractical to run a pirating business by capturing a Blue-Ray movie with a capture card since it would take to long(you would have to watch the whole movie). They are going after people who want to use a capture card as an easy way to backup their movie collection. I disagree with DRM and that is a discussion for another day but like most DRM, this makes me scratch my head and ask, is it worth it?

PS3

Hi:
 So I went to the game store in our mall today. They buy games for 50% of what they sell them for. They try and sell them at their 'market' value. I had a Sega Genesis(model I) which I hardly used and did not enjoy very much. I decided to sell it.

 I was thinking I would get $20 - $40. It turns out the Genesis and games were valued much higher! Close to $100! At this point I had 3 choices, take the money as cash and lose a small percentage of it and 2 other choices. There was an Xbox 360 and PS3 there. I could buy the 360 with store credit, the PS3 would be about 40 dollars more. I thought Oh so I get the 360, what a great deal. It was cheaper since it was not as valued. It was one of the old white ones and they are not as good as the modern ones.

The man behind the counter asked if I were sure that is what I wanted, he wanted to make sure I did not walk into a rush purchase. We chatted a bit and he pointed out some of the exclusive titles for the PS3.(like LittleBigPlanet) I was reminded that my sister has a PS3 and that we could share games. He took his PS3 with him when he moved out but I had some save games on it. At one point I asked the salesman 'which would you choose?'. He said 'I would choose the PS3 since I like Sony consoles and it has a lot of great RPGs.

I gave it some more thought and the final decision came down to what he said. I don't have a massive collection of Sony equipment but I have always been impressed by there equipment including they game consoles. I also love RPGs. So I decided to pay the extra 40 dollars for a PS3. Thinking about it now it's a great deal since the PS3 has more multimedia features like a blue-ray player. Now I can watch Blue Rays whenever I want.(even if Mom and Dad are using the only other player in the house)

UPDATE: Kindong Hearts 1.5 and 2.5 are tottally worth paying an extra $40 to play! They are free from the libary so I did not hay to pay anymore.

I brought it home and ran into an annoying issue. Instead of a TV, I play through a video capture card. Unforchently the PS3 I had bought was setup to only use HDMI and the HDMI uses HDCP. This caused an issue for me but I did find a workaround.

This parts technical if you don't want to know about HDCP and my workaround you can skip this paragraph and the next paragraph. HDCP is a type of encryption put onto the digital signal that goes over the HDMI cable. Like any type of encryption, the data(in this case audio/video data) is unusable without the decryption key. An organisation can pay a company(not sure what company) to receive the key. Keys are only given to companies in certain industries, manufactures of video capture cards are not given keys. In the United States, it's illegal to circumvent the encryption. They are expensive boxes you can buy from China that will do this but this is not how I solved this problem.

 I had anticipated this and so decided to use component video. This is no big deal as you can still get great HD images with component, see:

This is only 1080i by the way, my capture card can't do 1080P. It's also only a $15 'all systems' cable from MadCatz.

The problem was that I had to enable component video out and to this, I needed a device which supports HDCP. So I had to bring the PS3 downstairs to our Sony Bravia and set it up to use component video and then bring it upstairs to is permanent home of my bedroom.
UPDATE: I guess I was not feeling very welll since a quick Google search showed that you can hold the power button down for 10 seconds to reset the video modes.

Now onto the PS3 itself, it's working great, I don't own any games for it, so I borrowed Tales Of Xillia(an Action Role Playing Game) from the library and it has no issues.(so far the game is really good). The PS3 even works with my Dolby Digital decoder*(my expensive piece of audio equipment.) This is really neat since a lot of PS3 games encode Doubly Digital signals on the fly.  I also tested the Blue-ray, media and PS1 functions, all of which work great! What a great console!

* My decoder is the only way I can get surround sound from some game consoles including the PS3.

UPDATE: My monitor supports HDCP so I can use that to run the PS3 not hooked up to my computer. I use a DVI to HDMI converter and the sound a separate. Due to Digital Rights Managment THIS PS3 will only output 480i when playing BlueRays or DVDs unless I use HDMI.

Short-circuited a power supply

Hi:
 So I got back from the computer store just now. I had dropped off my computer yesterday as my power supply had suddenly stopped working. At the time I thought it was odd that a 5 year old power supply would suddenly stop working but as it turned out there was something lose inside it. This loose object shorted out and destroyed the power supply. I must have had a loose screw in my case that I forgot to immediately remove. An expensive lesson for $70. The good news is the $30 maintenance fee also included a dusting out, installation of a front fan(which I bought for $20), a disk and memory check and could have included an antivirus check.(I opted out of this so I would not have to give my password.)

Here is what the inside of the computer looks like after the company(Odyssey Systems) worked on it:

JavaScript tips(#2)

Before I wrote here some things I learned after having some issues programming with JavaScript. Here are some more issues to watch out for:

• Sometimes you want to pass a function to a veritable(example: event handler). Make very sure you don't put parentheses on it or else your browser will call the function and pass the result too the veritable which is not what you want. 
• Also I had a problem today when I tried to make a function called 'submit' and when I called it, a global  function by the name was called instead of the local one. 

That's all for now, feel free to leave your own tips in the comments bellow.

Start of 2016

With the old year behind us, it's time to think about what the new year has in store:

• I will turn 27 this year. I'm starting to feel that I have some 'experience' in life but I still feel very young. 
• I will continue to attend things like Geeks and Gamers and the camera club.
• I'm going to try and find even more interesting things to do! Hopefully I will meet new people and maybe find some more job opportunities. I have a contract at the moment(I forgot to blog about it.) but it won't last forever. 
• Parliament will resume and we will see how good the new government can govern. 

Well looks like it will be a good one!