Entries Tagged 'hardware' ↓

I was reviewing my posts, and found one I had to do a follow up. Once I said that I would go with PS3 if I could afford it. Well, I can, but when it came the time to buy, it was not worth it.

There is a big price difference between the PS3 with no accessories, and the XBox 360 with extras (controller, DVI, 1 game, remote control, etc). In the end, the XBox offered a better price/benefit rate, and I decided to go with it.

Also, the price of the games in Brazil is also huge, and it’s easier to find good titles for the XBox than the PS3. The amount of PS3 games selling in Brazil is lower than XBox, and even if I would go with legacy PS2 games, what good would be to have PS3 and run legacy? In any case, XBox also runs legacy games from the original XBox console.

So, now I have an XBox 360, with a few accessories and some nice games. The graphics look fantastic on my 32″ LCD TV, connected using the HDMI cable (1080i) Well, let’s be honest, that’s all Windows is good for: games.

Unicamp, a very prestigious university in Brazil, is using a cluster composed of 12 PlayStation 3 to run scientific research for biologists (atom behavior dynamics). They claim that the game console is much more stable than a cluster of PCs, and they had only one crash since June/2007 (no power, and the building generator failed). They also say that with the same amount of money they spent on a 72 CPU cluster using the PS3, they would by only 32 PC CPUs. Another interesting fact, is that in the original article you can see a photo where the researcher uses a computer running Fedora, which is probably what they have running on the cluster. Original article here (pt-BR only, sorry).

Last week I bought a cheap bluetooth dongle for my home desktop. My wife just wants to copy MP3 to her cellphone, and download pictures from the phone to the computer, so I didn’t see the need to spend too much. So I got this weird dongle that simply identifies itself as ES-388 on the box. When I got home, connected, and:

hcid[2280]: Can’t read name for hci0: Input/output error (5)
hcid[2280]: Can’t read class of device on hci0: Input/output error(5)

Dam… After googling around looking for the product name (found nothing) and the USB ID (0a5c:2100 Broadcom Corp.), I finally discovered that this little guy is, in fact, a Broadcom 2045 (why hide?). After some more google love, I finally stumbled with the final tip that fixed my problems:

options hci_usb reset=1

Add the above line to /etc/modprobe.conf and be happy. Now I can transfer files back and forth, easily (well, not that much), even though veeeeery slow.

Oh, before you ask, the phone is a Sony Z550i.

Yesterday I received my brand new Samsung 226BW. It’s a 22″ widescreen monitor, that can do 1600×1050 (unfortunately @60Hz, but that’s all the monitor can do) with 2ms response time. I had no problems making it work at full resolution on my Fedora 7 with a NVIDIA GeForce 6600. The image quality is awesome, specially because I could connect it using a DVI port. I’m going to have some fun during the weekend.
Oh, by the way, the picture above shows the monitor and my living room TV, which is a 32″ widescreen LG 32LC3R, another one of my recent acquisitions. They’re together in the picture with that Matrix box just to show you the appropriate proportions.

Falem mal o quanto quiserem do Velox, da Telemar, e da falta de tecnologia no Norte/Nordeste, mas eu nunca tive tanto problema com acesso à internet quanto eu tenho com o Virtua.

Ficar sem internet em casa pelo menos uma vez por semana tem sido uma coisa corriqueira. Quando eu utilizava Velox cheguei a ficar sem acesso 3 vezes em um período de 3 anos (média de 1 vez por ano). Hoje a média é 3 vezes por mês, ridículo.

E o atendimento do Virtua? Nem o tiozinho da feira me atende tão mal assim. Gente mal educada, mal instruída, e que não consegue conversar com o cliente por mais que 5 minutos (vira e mexe um atendente desses desliga o telefone na minha cara, sem resolver o problema). Vejam como é incrível: “amigo, por favor, meu modem está sem sincronia” … “senhor, por favor, desligue seu computador e ligue novamente”. Noooossa. O que uma coisa tem a ver com a outra?

Eu nem sonho em mudar pro Speedy. Se dizem que Virtua é o melhor acesso que se pode conseguir em São Paulo, não quero nem imaginar o pesadelo que deve ser conviver com a Telefônica.

Antes que me perguntem o que motivou esse post: o sinal caiu às 21h de ontem, eu saí de casa às 9h de hoje, e nada de voltar. Eu ligo pra central de atendimento e a mensagem é “estamos sem sinal nos bairros X, Y e Z, com previsão para retorno às 0h”. Hã? Tem certeza?

Humor: péssimo.

“A former Dell kiosk manager writes us to share helpful tips about doing business with Dell. He has no particular problems with Dell, he just wanted to share some helpful tips for consumers looking to get the best deal.”

Read it on: “22 Confessions Of A Former Dell Sales Manager”

Não sei porque, mas continuo lendo sobre essas comparações entre LCD e Plasma, mesmo depois de já ter me decidido por uma LCD. Mais uma da série relacionada à TV digital.

Wow! Playstation 3 (PS3) is already selling in Brazil as an imported product (as already mentioned), and just confirmed that I can’t afford it.

Americanas.com is selling the console for the modest price of BRL$ 7.980,00 (aprox. USD$ 3,666.94)!!!

Dam you import regulations!!!

For those of you who don’t know how much that means, it’s equivalent of buying an used low-end late 90’s car. 22 times Brazil’s official minimum income. Its just too much.

Well, I can just dream about it for now.

Following the “what-should-I-buy” type of articles, I’ve just read one that intends to help deciding among Wii, Xbox 360 or PlayStation3 (pt_BR only). Nothing changed my idea about buying a PS3, I just realized that it would be more difficult than I thought because Sony won’t officially sell it in Brazil. Dam!

Well, besides it, here are my points that made me choose PS3 over the others:

1. PS3 comes with a Blue-Ray drive, which IMHO is much better than HD-DVD.
2. PS3 can run Linux (another article).
3. PS3 will run legacy games from PS{1,2} (even emulation from other platforms).
4. PS{1,2} market is very big in Brazil, so it will be easy to find games for PS3.
5. Xbox 360 is from Microsoft (big negative point).
6. Wii looks fun, but the graphics are just horrible (maybe I’ll buy one just to satisfy my geekness).

So, despite the fact that I will probably need to spend some considerable amount of money, PS3 looks much better to me, and it’s in my 2007 Christmas’s shop list. Why not now? Because I first need a decent TV.

I have a Pixelview PlayTV Pro Ultra which I wasn’t able to get any channels above 60 when plugged to my local cable TV company.

After some brainstorming on video4linux-list, Hermann Pitton came up with the final solution. He guessed I wasn’t getting it because of an incorrect tuner setup.

Well, the default setup for my TV card was made using YaST2. It added “tuner=27” to my modprobe.d/tv. Hermman suggested a new approach:

/etc/modprobe.d/tv
options cx88xx card=27 tuner=69 i2c_scan=1

So the trick is changing to “tuner=69“, and be happy! Now I get all my full 80 channels!