Young at Heart
Young at Heart
Been traveling quite a bit lately on the weekends, so I’m just starting to get to the backlog of photos from the last month. Here’s a recent favorite.
PS3 HDD Upgrade
Ran out of disk space on my 40GB PS3 last week, so I took a bit of time last night to swap out the hard drive. One of the great things about the PS3 is that it uses a standard 2.5″ notebook drive, as opposed to a proprietary setup. I had replaced the stock 120GB drive in my Macbook a while back with a 250GB model, so I decided to put the leftover drive to use. The process was easy, with the actual hard drive swap taking about 10 minutes. Of course, doing a full backup of the data on the PS3 took about an hour, but I just let that run while Jordan and I cooked dinner.
CNET Asia has good step-by-step instructions here. The PS3 backup utility mentioned in the instructions is a bit buried in the XMB interface; here’s the path: Settings >???????? ????? ???????? System Settings > Backup Utility.
After installing the new drive I ran a restore off the backup, and I was up and running again with a bit more headroom for game demos, GT TV downloads, SingStar songs, and TV episodes that I’m making my way through. Finally, I put the old 40GB drive into a portable enclosure for quick data transfers between the office and home.
GT Academy
So top European players of Gran Turismo 5 Prologue can now compete in the newly-launched GT Academy for the opportunity to race cars in real life. It appears that the racers will be culled from online time trial races, and then head-to-head national competitions. The fastest three drivers from each country then get to go to GT Academy and train to get their official racing licenses, with the ultimate goal of racing in a 24-hour endurance race in Dubai next year. I wonder if this GT Academy idea points the way towards even more real-life extensions of video games. What’s next — actual military trailing for top Call of Duty players?
FDT, AS3, and OS X
Just set up the trial of the Flash Actionscript IDE FDT. There’s a few things to keep in mind when installing it on Mac OS X, however:
1) You need to download the standalone Flex SDK, and point to that in the Core Libraries Settings (Preferences > FDT > Core Libraries > AS3 Core Libraries). If you’re running the standalone Flex Builder and try to point to the SDKs in that install it won’t work. Make sure that there’s no spaces in the path to the SDK, either, otherwise FDT won’t be able to find it. I put mine in ~/Documents/sdks/flex_sdk_3/
2) You need to copy the playerglobal.swc file to a location without spaces as well, as suggested here. I put mine in ~/Documents/fdt/playerglobal.swc.
Those were the two big differences from the instructions in the Basic AS3 tutorial (Help > FDT User Guide > Getting Started > Basic AS3 Tutorial).
I’ll be putting FDT through its paces, comparing it to TextMate of course. I have a feeling for big projects it’ll be pretty useful, since it has the project-level hinting/completion that TextMate lacks.
Filco Majestouch
This just in, after clearing customs from Japan: a Filco Majestouch FKB104M/EB.
I first heard about Filco via the geekhack.org keyboard forums, and eventually ended up placing an order for one via BeNippon. I had originally tried to get the newer FKBN104M/EB (which features N-key rollover) via another Japanese buying service, but it was sold out everywhere they looked. So I went for the standard model, figuring that since I’m not a gamer the lack of N-key rollover wasn’t going to affect me.
