Brain Assassin

I’m quite into movies, you all know that. I don’t own a nice home the­ater but then I think my 42 inch plasma TV is enough to keep me enter­tained. 1060i really is an improve­ment over the good old PAL stan­dard. Throw in a PS3 and you got your­self a pretty default setup. Of course, it’s not what I call a home the­ater. Today I’ve come across a setup that cost $6 mil­lion! That’s insane. Head over to Audio Video Inte­ri­ors and see for yourselves.

If I had $6 mil­lion to spare, I would have done things dif­fer­ently. I don’t know if I could’ve done bet­ter but I think $6 mil­lion is a waste. To my mind, it’s way too small. I don’t think this guy can accom­mo­date more than four peo­ple on that couch. There’s one more impor­tant ques­tion: What about the power require­ments? I mean, holy shit. Watch­ing one movie with this setup prob­a­bly wastes more energy than my com­puter does in a whole year. Any­way, it’s impres­sive nonetheless.

Actu­ally, I wanted to post my opin­ion of The Foun­tain, star­ring Hugh Jack­man and Rachel Weisz. Instead, I’m writ­ing about the PS3. First of all, I didn’t encounter any prob­lems at all after my ini­tial expe­ri­ence with the PS3. I did notice though, that a bunch of work­ing col­leagues weren’t so lucky (In ret­ro­spect, I should prob­a­bly call them dum­b­asses but that’s for another story.). Any­way, they have some prob­lems and so I ended up writ­ing this text to get them started. OK guys, let’s tackle your “problems”.

Here’s the offi­cial site and they have a work­ing forum. If you can read, stop try­ing to per­suade oth­ers to help you out. Check it out for your­self and you may actu­ally learn some­thing new. How­ever, some guys over at the PS3Forums have com­piled quite an exhaus­tive FAQ which should be more than enough for trou­bleshoot­ing pur­poses. And there’s a short list of PS3 error codes which can be found here.

As for the guys I’m writ­ing this – you most cer­tainly have a NAT prob­lem. Since the lousy lot of you has dis­abled UPnP on their wire­less routers you have to for­ward ports man­u­ally. Just access your router’s web inter­face where you should be able to find a topic like Port For­ward­ing. Here we are. Just for­ward ports 80, 443, 5223 (TCP) and 3478, 3479 (UDP) to your PS3′s IP address and you’re done. If you like to uti­lize the won­der­ful voice chat, you also have to for­ward 3658 (UDP). Now, every­thing should work like a charm. You may have to extend this list even­tu­ally, depend­ing on the games you play. Don’t ask me next time, look it up some­where on the net.

Since I’m already writ­ing this for your, here’s how to upgrade your PS3′s firmware. If you absolutely have to per­form the update using your PC, get your new firmware here. ATTENTION: Always use the firmware made and pro­vided for your region! After you down­loaded the upgrade, copy the firmware to a portable stor­age device. You have to cre­ate a folder called “PS3″ and within that a folder named “UPDATE”. The lat­ter one receives the firmware. Please note, that you absolutely have to use upper­case let­ters or your Playsta­tion won’t rec­og­nize your update! Last but not least, remove all USB devices, start the update process and fol­low the instruc­tions on the screen.

Yes­ter­day I dis­cov­ered some­thing very inter­est­ing. An enter­prise called Emo­tiv Sys­tems intro­duced some kinda hel­met that allows gamers to con­trol games with their mind. Thus, it’s safe to call it a brain/​computer inter­face. The sys­tem is called Project Epoc and it can move objects based on gamer’s thoughts, reflect facial expres­sions, and respond to the excite­ment or calm the user men­tally exerts. The hel­met con­tains lots of sen­sors which pick up elec­tric sig­nals in the brain. The soft­ware part ana­lyzes the sig­nals and wire­lessly relays them to a receiver which is plugged into the USB port of a game con­sole or PC.

The devel­op­ers all share the same vision: to trans­form the way humans inter­act with machines. They’re going to develop this tech­nol­ogy for use in other indus­tries too, includ­ing med­i­cine, secu­rity, mar­ket research, and inter­ac­tive tele­vi­sion. Cur­rently, the hel­met on dis­play at GDC is a pro­to­type and some video footage indi­cates that it takes a high level of con­cen­tra­tion to actu­ally make things hap­pen. Nonethe­less, it’s an impor­tant step into the right direc­tion: cre­at­ing a highly effi­cient inter­face between humans and machines. Accord­ing to Emo­tiv Sys­tems we’re going to see the device on the mar­ket in 2008.

Pretty cool stuff, isn’t it? Fright­en­ing too.