Winter Vacation, To-Do List Placation

Well, the madness of the end of semester is over.  An uneventful (which is good) Christmas has passed – all I did was sit back and watch Slumdog Millionaire, which is a surprisingly awesome movie.

It feels as if I’m making no progress at chipping away at the long to-do list of things I wanted to catch up on during this vacation..  I’m suspecting that to-do lists really do not work.  It seems like, despite the fact I’m barely working two days a week right now during break, I still am falling behind.  There’s so much to do on my list and yet, bam, suddenly tons of bills come, birthdays, holidays, other responsibilities, etc.. The original ToDo list just sits there and pretty much now there’s a NEW ToDo list of more urgent tasks.

I need to somehow pay for tutition which means generating $1k in two days which doesn’t seem possible – this would not have been a problem if my winnings from QuakeCon 2008 QuakeLive had been what they were supposed to be.. They told me that I won $2000, but the check that arrived in the mail was $1000..it’s hard to complain since it’s prize money but still I was really counting on that money for school.  Oh well, guess it’ll be a high interest payment plan for this semester.

I need to learn Adobe AfterEffects well enough to start a level 2 course even though I’ve never taken level 1.. I suspect that during my sleep deprived final two weeks of classes I managed to totally forget to go to my Science of Color and Light final and so I recieved an INCOMPLETE.. Ugh, so disappointing, don’t know how..I thought I went.. I did.. didn’t I?  I don’t remember anything really from the last weeks of school.  It’s kinda frightening.  Next semester I need to make sure that I sleep no matter what happens.

Anyway, so the good thing is I’ve recovered my home built desktop computer from it’s neglected, virus riden state.  What really did it under was a virus that I aquired during an epic two day attempt  at installing the patch for  Resident Evil 4 / Biohazard.  This is a patch that is necessary since the PC port of the game was a total hack job and should never have been released without more work.  I failed miserably in the end at patching the game (trust me, building a computer and setting it up as a headless linux server is easier than patching this game).  And well.. the good news is, now the computer is all fixed up again as a dual-boot machine with a minimal install of WindowsXP sp3 (just for games) and LinuxMint 6 (for everything else).  It’s still not tweaked as nicely as my old Ubuntu Studio setup, but it does the job for now and I found this FlickR group of 360 degree photos to use for the fully rotatable skybox.

Well.. time to enjoy some gaming at long last.. Enemy Territory Quake Wars and HalfLife: Episode One (FINALLY!)

PSP to PC with RemoteJoy Lite

So my final animatic is due tomorrow at 9am for storyboarding class and as per usual, I ended up procrastinating till past midnight.  Tonights form of procrastination was an attempt to capture video and audio from my PSP (fat) to my PC (at school – AMD 64bit).

Requirements: (google them) are:

• A PSP running custom firmware ( i.e. 5.00 M33-4 )
  
• RemoteJoy Lite v0.19
• RemoteJoySDL 2007 (if you’re using 64bit)
  

RemoteJoyLite Installation Instructions
(THIS IS ASSUMING YOU ARE RUNNING CUSTOM FIRMWARE)

• Extract both archives.
• Copy the remotejoylite.prx from the RemoteJoyLite package into a folder called seplugins/ in the root of your memory stick.
• Completely reboot your PSP, hold R-trigger to access recovery menu.  Under Plugins, enable the remotejoylite.prx plugins. Exit to XMB.
• Connect the USB cable, the PC should recognise a new PSP Type B device.  In the install wizard browse for the appropriate libusb0.dll – I believe you can find the driver in the RemoteJoyLite package, but if you’re using a 64bit PC like I am, you’ll need to install the 64bit libusb0.dll from the RemoteJoy SDL package.
• Then you can simply run RemoteJoyLite_en.exe! Double click it for fullscreen

Game compatibility seems to be sketchy, here’s my list so far:

• Starwars Battlefront Renegade Squadron – WORKS PERFECTLY!
• Monster Hunter Freedom 2 - WORKS PERFECTLY!
  
• Prince of Persia – Rival Swords – Doesn’t work!
• Syphon Filter – Logan’s Shadow – Works Partially (Glitchy sound or textures)
• PSone games – Don’t seem to work..

Here’s an experimental screencapture I did of Syphon Filter – Logans Shadow (Episode 3 part 3 – Nowhere to Run) (hard difficulty)
You’ll notice the odd glitchy sound that occurs when running RemoteJoy with this game.. too bad, it would look great on a big screen