iSkin Solo Case for iPhone 3G

http://www.iskin.com/solo/
- Only after a few months the leather started separating from the inner plastic lining on the corner on my Griffin Elan Form case. Sure it was still under warranty but you have to ship the case back and then what are you suppose to use in the mean time?
- A co-worker had the iSkin Solo. It wasn't your typical super sticky silicon skin. It had a smoother plastic texture, yet still slightly rubbery with a slight grip. I like to keep my iPhone in my front pocket, and this way it doesn't invert your entire pocket when taking it out. I still prefer the feel of the leather on the Griffin but the seam where the two halves of the case join also bothered me a bit. The solo is a nice single solid piece.
- It also has more complete coverage including the sleep and volume buttons.
- It's a bit pricey but I found it cheaper on ebay (about $22 shipped). Acutally it's only $21 at amazon right now.
- This case isn't as rigid as the griffin so my guess it probably offers a bit less protection in some ways.
- Also, be a bit careful about the finish on the case. It's possible to permanently damage it if you aren't careful.
- I'm using this case along with the Power Support Anti-Glare Film which I already had installed.

Highly recommended especially if you can find it at a discount.

Prince of Persia (2008) (XBOX 360)

- Finished in under 12hrs. The Epilogue took me over 2 hrs.
- I've pretty much played all the prince of persia's since the very first PC game and its many ports including the most excellent XBLA version. I even played the horrible Prince of Persia 3D a bit. I loved Sands of Time but never got around to playing its two sequels (which I will someday). So I was quite excited about this reboot of the series.
- I loved the stylized graphics. It's not exactly cell shaded though it does share quite a few similarities with that style. I loved everything about the way this game looks from the the character design, to the intricate architecture, to the beautiful backgrounds.
- The musical score was also quite excellent. I never got tired of the healing grounds theme which embodied the feelings of wonder, mystery, and hope.
- The gameplay feels closer to sands of time than it does to dragon's lair. It's not quite as on rails as some people might lead you to believe. The "no dying" actually worked better than I expected. It didn't make the game too easy. Instead, it just shifted the challenge to other areas. Frustrating pixel perfect jumping is replaced by environmental based navigation puzzles. This especially comes into play when you start orb, errr light seed, collecting which has some of that same addictive quality as Crackdown did.
- Combat is also quite satisfying. Timing is pretty tight for countering. Combos are pretty easy to chain together. Just make sure you learn the 14 hit combo (which also earns you the sword master achievement) early on since it will make the combat much easier and enjoyable for the rest of the game. Plus, it just looks cool with some amazing animation. Speaking of which the animation throughout the game is quite varied and excellent. I'm a bit tired of all the mini QTE events that are sprinkled throughout the combat (similar to God of War). I'd be a happy man if I never have to do a another rapid fire button press QTE again. It's fine for a while but gets a bit tedious toward the end.
- I really enjoyed the two main characters and the way their relationship developed. I constantly chatted Elika up to see what they would say next. The writing was excellent for the most part and so was the voice acting. It's not quite Uncharted levels but close. Both game leads were voiced by Nolan North which I'm becoming quite a fan. He sort of reminds me of Nathan Fillion but for video game voice overs. I found most of the witty banter quite amusing.
- The story was just average mostly due to the cheesy ,unsatisfying, cop out, lets set it up for a sequel ending. I really didn't like how they don't give you much of a choice on how it ends where it really felt like there should have been a player choice.
- The $10 DLC Epilogue was mostly worth it to me. I got a good 2+ hrs of play out of it. It had some nice environmental puzzles though the combat was pretty repetitive and a bit frustrating. Quickly defeating the boss that keeps repeating depended more on your QTE skills. The ending even in the epilogue kind of sucked where it just kind of stops and sets it up for the sequel. Also, I didn't think it adequately explained your actions at the end of the main game.
- Speaking of recycled material. You revisit each area: once dark/corrupted and again light/healed which is fine because they feel quite different, and your objectives are different (reaching the healing grounds vs orb collecting). You also fight each of the 4 main bosses 6 times each. Yeah the setting changes each time. There are some minor differences (especially for the warrior) but yeah there is quite a bit of asset reuse. It's no where near as bad as say Devil May Cry 4 but still it's pretty blatant.
- Did all the speed run achievements which were quite entertaining.

Highly Recommended. It was a thoroughly enjoyable, highly accessible experience. It definitely lives up to the Prince of Persia name.

Killzone 2 (PS3)

I just finished the first level on the default difficulty setting.

- Aiming feels sluggish to me. Something is off. Maybe I just need to fiddle with the sensitivity settings but the acceleration or the auto aim or the combination of both just makes everything feel sluggish and imprecise. Basically just the opposite of COD4 where everything felt fast, snappy, fluid, and precise.
- The little hitches when loading the next area are a bit annoying but not that big of a deal.
- Save points seem pretty frequent so far.
- Graphics are very nice but didn't make my heart stop or anything. Framerate seems solid.
- Why does it take what seems like 30 seconds of animation to toss a grenade????
- You're pretty tough. A rocket in your face from about 4 ft doesn't kill you....wtf. I guess it does cut down on frustration.
- Can't hit crap without zooming in. I mean it's pretty ridiculous. I would expect a bit better accuracy if you are crouched and sitting still. The crosshairs expand very rapidly.
- Cover system works pretty well I guess but I still think r6 did it better.
- It seems the game can't decide if it wants to be a twitch shooter or a slower more methodical one.
- What is up with having only ONE main weapon at a time. That's kind of annoying.
- I found controlling the tank awkward.
- I get the midget thing now. Even the tables come up to your armpits while you are standing. It is rather distracting.

Man I think I bought into the hype a bit too much so I was bound to be a bit disappointed. Still, I'm enjoying it for the most part though it's definitely no system seller. I'll post more as I get further into the game.

UPDATE: 3/2/09
I've put in a few more hours into the single player.

You know there is different and then there is just bad. I think the controls for the most part are just bad. Having finished resistance and uncharted I had none of the control issues I'm feeling with KZ2.

Take the following scenario: You are hiding behind a corner healing up. Some dude comes running around the corner. He is too close for the scope view so you leave it on the expanding crosshair view. You swivel to line up your target but since the acceleration is all screwed up (takes too long to get going, maybe too big of a dead zone, and then once it does get going it accelerates way too fast, maybe some auto aim assist that impacts acceleration when the crosshairs are near a target would help like in halo) so you over shoot and swing back the other way and over compensate. Combine that with the wacky accuracy model/bullet spread when not scoped just compounds the issue. I don't call this different. I call it sucky and frustrating. I think I've actually resorted more to melee in these situations because of the controls.

And for the argument that they feel more weighty and meaty well that would be fine except a small light SMG feels almost the same as the big heavy machine gun.

I'll still finish the game. I think the game gets better after the first level with more intense set piece battles and defend bits which I quite enjoyed.

UPDATE: 3/24/09
- Finished the single player. No real desire to try multiplayer though I hear it's pretty good. The controls were still frustrating throughout which gives me even less desire to try the multiplayer.

- Not much plot, didn't really ever care much about the characters.

- The battles do get better and more epic in the last third of the game which was really exciting.
- Final boss is a bit cheap but not too bad once you learn the pattern.

Overall, a beautiful if a bit derivative looking, mostly solid shooter with some pretty flawed controls. Only recommended for the die hard shooter fan though it is still one of the better ones on the PS3.

OCZ Rally 2 8GB USB Flash Drive

- Picked one up from newegg for only $14 shipped after $10 MIR.
- Yeah sure USB flash drives are getting bigger, cheaper, and more of a commodity every day. In my case I was looking for only one very specific feature: performance. I wanted something that was fast at read (which most are) and write so I could run portable firefox better with cache turned on. U3 was a good idea but apps just aren't updated frequently enough so I'm back to running apps from portableapps which are updated frequently. I've gone as far as uninstalling U3 from my sandisk (it actually removes the fake cd-rom partition too). Size was secondary since apps don't take up that much space. I installed almost every portableapp I thought I might ever want to use and only used up a little over 1GB of space. That still leaves me 7GB to transfer files between the office and home.
- There are some very fast usb flash drives out there but many are discontinued and hard to find with pretty high ebay prices. Others like the ocz rally 2 turbo are incredibly fast but also extremely expensive. I felt the rally 2 was a nice compromise and seemed like a relatively good value.
- I hate the cap. I really prefer a retractable connector like on the Sandisk cruzer micro. There isn't even any way to attach the cap to the rest of the flash drive.
- It has a nice aluminum body that feels very durable.
- I used ATTO Disk Benchmark since it's free and does write tests too. I'll compare it to the sandisk cruzer since that is what I'll be replacing.

Windows XP Pro 32bit:

Sandisk	OCZ Rally 2

As you can see read speeds on the OCZ was pretty impressive at ove 28 MB/s read on larger transfers. It was a bit disappointing in write speeds. I guess the dual channel architecture does help a bit.

Vista 32bit:

Sandisk	OCZ Rally 2

Yeah something is messed up. I even tried a usb external hard drive and read speeds never went above 17MB/s. Either Vista is messed up and basically giving me only half of the expected usb 2.0 speeds or ATTO doesn't like vista. I'm leaning toward this being one of the stupid sucky aspects of Vista.

Recommended especially if you are going to primarily use it in a windows xp environment. I can really feel the difference in portable firefox. Things do feel snappier. If you are running vista then I would recommend you run some usb benchmarks to see if you are capped somehow like I am.

OrbLive

Sample video recorded with a hauppauge pvr-250 in mpeg2 format transcoded on the fly and streamed in real time to an iPhone using OrbLive. Quality setting is set to maximum over wifi:


Sample video recorded with a hauppauge pvr-250 in mpeg2 format transcoded on the fly and streamed in real time to an iPhone using OrbLive. Quality setting is set to medium over 3G:


- I picked up OrbLive for $10.
- there is a free lite version available but it only lets you try 3 random pieces of media from each folder.
http://www.orb.com/
http://revision3.com/systm/mediastreaming/
- I've been testing it quite a bit for the last couple of days. I installed orb about a year and a half ago and tried it with my wife's att 8525 which worked ok. Since then I've built a new quad core server so I decided to reinstall it and give the dedicated iphone app orblive a try. It's like simplify media but on steroids because it streams video (with transcoding if needed), livetv (with compatible tuner), photos, live camera, and other Internet content too. You can stream all of it over 3G too.

Orb service revisited
- First, not a whole lot seems to have changed on the pc side of things in the past year and a half. For streaming to consoles or other PC's orb is still pretty bad with pretty awful video quality with interlace artifacts. It's fine for music I guess. I still find the web portal pretty unwieldy and slow.
- The orb service that is installed can still eat up quite a bit of resources especially if you add a lot of media folders with thousands of files. HDD activity is pretty brutal not in just generating the database file but also the logs it keeps which can grow quite large. On my q6600 oc to 2.9ghz cpu would spike sometimes to 25% during initial transcoding/buffering. Memory usage is around 70 MB for me though this can grow much larger if you have a lot of files.
- Don't rapidly add/remove media directories or you can end up corrupting your orbmedia.db file. I did this and ended up uninstalling, running orbcleanuptool, and reinstalling. Then I added one media folder at a time and let it database it all before adding another one. I'd watch the orbmedia.db file until it stopped growing. It seems to be working much better now. You can check by looking in C:\ProgramData\OrbNetworks\OrbMediaV2\OrbMedia.db (at least in vista). When the file stops grown and no more OrbMedia.db-journal are created, it should be done updating the database.
- Once all your media is properly databased, stop the orb service, and backup the database file. The media database file can easily get corrupted and this will save you the trouble of having to completely uninstall orb and reinstall it. You should do this anytime a significant amount of media has changed.
- If you've added network paths MAKE SURE you stop orb before you shut down or reboot any of those remote machines. If the network path just disappears while the orb service is still running you will very likely corrupt your orb media database. If that does happen then just stop orb, delete the database file, and copy over your last back so at least you don't have to start from scratch, and restart the orb service. Orb service will update the media database on its own during pc inactivity.
- It says it will support any formats that you have codecs installed that will allow it to play in windows media player. I didn't find this entirely true since I can play MKV's just fine in wmp yet they don't show up in orb. UPDATE: looks like you can add additional file extensions that it scans for.

Orb on the iPhone
- Quality is highly dependent on your isp upstream bandwidth. I only get around 500kbps up on my dsl. If you are using that upstream bandwidth for other applications, you better hope you have a good QoS router like dd-wrt.
- Streaming audio works quite well. It's nice having your entire music library available. Sound quality isn't bad. Buffering happens at a minimum. There are short pauses (say < style="font-weight: bold;">Satellite Radio and Orb
- There are add ons to stream xm or sirius:
http://www.millardsoftware.com/uxm
- I more or less followed these instructions.
- A few tips: make sure you click the delete cache button after you first install. Also, I highly recommend you reboot the pc after install.
- Make sure you pick the high bandwidth url (64kbps) vs the low (32kbps).

Recommended. Having the massive amounts of media off your home pc hard drives available on your iPhone almost anywhere is all kinds of awesome. Just make sure you have a pretty beefy machine that you don't mind leaving on all the time. Overall it does quite a lot for $10 and you can get quite a bit of functionality for free with just installing orb on your pc and using the safari browser on the iphone (or really any mobile phone browser). For me the $10 was worth the added convenience and video transcoding abilities. If they just polish it up a bit, add the ability to sort songs in track order, and resume, then they would truly have an iPhone killer app on their hands.

UPDATE: 5/5/09
- If all you want to do is stream your music collection I highly recommend you also check out Simplify.