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July 2008

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July 2008
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Awww Yea… Tony Jaa’s Back

By Alde

From the folks at Twitch, they get the envious exclusive first look at the english subbed trailer and sales reel for Ong Bak 2. I don’t want to compare him to Jackie Chan, because martial arts wise, he’s hands down better than Jackie, but his versatility (at least in the trailer) is like the Three Dragons rolled into one.

Posted in Cinema | 1 Comment

Wanchai Ferry Kungpao Chicken

By Alde

So, my friends know that one of my idiosynchrosies is to use the words “Kungpao Chicken” as a blanket answer for lots of questions. I even have a server named Kungpao (my servers are named after asian foods). My wife says that I say “Kungpao Chicken Optional Pancake” even though I should be be saying “Mushu Pork Optional Pancake”.

Back in my freshman year of college, my friend Jason Engh was taking a karate class, and my friends Rich and Joel came up with this idea that Jason should use chinese foods instead of the typical “Hi-Ya”.

I found the Wanchai Ferry Kung Pao Chicken pre-made kit at the super food town while shopping for groceries. On an impulse, because I have very little impulse control with asian foods, I picked it up to make for dinner one night.

It comes with rice, kungpao sauce, peanuts and peppers, all you add is a teaspoon of vegetable oil (for coating the wok/pan) and a pound of chicken.

Making it was fairly easy, especially for someone like me who sucks at cooking. Put the rice and water into a pan, boil it, simmer for 15 minutes, then let it sit. The chicken was easy, but I messed up one thing; this stuff was FREAKING SPICY.

The package comes with 5 dried peppers. at least 3 of which opened up and dumped all their seeds into the mix. I haven’t had kungpao this spicy since my friend Chris Takasawa’s roommate cooked Kungpao and pork dumplings one night.

Note to self: next time, empty all but one of the peppers of their seeds before placing them in to cook with the chicken.

It was very good, even with the spice, you just need to give it a little time to allow the final product to reduce and thicken a little otherwise you end up with a thin brown sauce that doesn’t really stick to the chicken.

Posted in Food and Wine | No Comments

Computer Upgrades, v2

By Alde

So, instead of piecing together the franken-puter, Beekers convinced me to go with a custom built machine. But who would be the one to make the box itself?

First part in any good project is to determine specifications. Mine are:

Intel 6750 processor
nVidia SLI
nVidia 8800GT
2GB Ram
Expandibility (Able to upgrade to a Quad Core down the road)

This put me in quite an odd area of the market; I’m not a budget gamer, because I still want support for the high end, should I desire it, but I’m not the extreme overclocker that those types of hardware are built for.
Read the rest of this entry »

Posted in Gear | No Comments

Sony’s Inability to Sweat the Small Stuff

By Alde

Hurray! Firmware 2.10 is out… The PS3 supports DivX. Which is quite handy, seeing as DivX gave out free versions of it’s 6.8 software just recently.

But yet again, Sony misses the mark. It’s become increasingly frustrating, as the PS3 was targeted as a home theater entertainment hub, that an owner would use to “enjoy their digital entertainment content where they want to.” But Sony really doesn’t believe that.

Sure, you can use that big PC you have, only if you use a certain version of Windows, or some third party Universal Plug-and-Play software to share your files. It would be beyond Sony to support Samba, an open source file sharing software.

Sony added playlist support on firmware version 2.0, but it’s only for audio stored on the PS3 itself. Nevermind that Western Digital World Book that you ripped all your CDs to using 320kbps MP3 (Sony.. FLAC & OGG support please thanks.), you can’t use a playlist on that at all.

So, it’s beginning to feel the same with the DivX support. Guess what: It doesn’t work over shared UPNP services. You can’t even copy it to the PS3. So I took a MOV I shot with my Minolta Dimage camera, opened up DivX Convert. Dropped the MOV file onto convert, copied the resulting .divx file into my UPNP share, refreshed the share itself, and the movie shows up as “Unsupported Media”. I take that same file, copy it to a SD card, take it over to the PS3, Movies->SD Media… Then have to hit triangle to have the PS3 “Display All”.. And there it is, watchable.

I don’t understand, Sony. Why must you test my patience so.

Sony PlayStation 3 PS3 - Game console - 40gb 60gb 80gb