Brain Assassin

Yes­ter­day, the sec­ond offi­cial trailer of the soon to be released Prince of Per­sia movie adap­ta­tion hit the web. If you want to know more about the movie, check out my first post on the topic. Prince of Per­sia will be in cin­e­mas on May, 21^st. With­out fur­ther ado, here’s the trailer:

This march promises to be quite event­ful. I’ve just pre-​​ordered Bat­tle­field: Bad Com­pany II and God of War III from Amazon.co.uk. Best of all, Ama­zon is kind enough to pro­vide an in-​​game early AK-​​47 weapon unlock code for BC2. Accord­ing to a pre­view over at Ars Tech­nica you can beat the single-​​player game of BC2 in about eight hours or so. That’s O.K. because mul­ti­player ist the meat of the game. Appar­ently, you’ll also get a day-​​one map pack in the form of a one-​​time-​​use code included with the game. Just enter the code and you get two addi­tional maps. If you buy the game used, you’ll have to unlock the con­tent for US$ 15. Here’s a pre­view of things to come:

God of War III on the other hand is all about the single-​​player expe­ri­ence. Ama­zon bun­dles the game with a code to unlock a For­got­ten War­rior char­ac­ter skin, if you pre-​​order with them. GoW III ups the ante in terms of size by offer­ing areas up to fours times larger than those found in its pre­de­ces­sor. The pro­gram­mers and design­ers have included new instru­ments of death and ruth­less tech­niques for Kratos to learn. The third install­ment will con­clude the tril­ogy but there already are plans to cre­ate more games with Kratos. Here’s a trailer for your view­ing pleasure:

Obvi­ously, the 8001050F PSN error fixed itself when the inter­nal clock date changed from Feb­ru­ary 29^th to March 1^st UTC. If the time dis­played on the XMB is still incor­rect, you can fix it by adjust­ing time set­tings man­u­ally or via the inter­net. I just took a quick look at it before going to work and I could sign in to the PlaySta­tion Net­work with­out expe­ri­enc­ing any error mes­sage. I’ll have to check whether I’ve lost any data but I don’t think so because I really couldn’t do anything.

If you started a game while this hap­pened your local tro­phy col­lec­tion may be blank. Just get a new tro­phy and your local list should be refreshed and alright. If it doesn’t work, you’ll have to wait until Sony makes an offi­cial state­ment regard­ing this issue. Have fun once again.

Just a few hours ago I said that you couldn’t fix the error 801050F on your own. Looks like I was wrong. Some guy claims that you only have to open your PS3, dis­con­nect the bat­tery for a few min­utes, stick it back in and you’re fine. Sounds very nice if you’re adven­tur­ous and don’t care about open­ing your PS3 sys­tem. I don’t know for cer­tain but I’m pretty sure you’ll lose your war­ranty so it is safer to wait for Sony’s fix to arrive. If you absolutely can’t wait, that seems to be the way to go!

By the way, if you try to fol­low the link only to see a mes­sage about the board being down for the moment, try Google’s cache. When the site has loaded, press the Escape but­ton or click the Stop but­ton in your browser’s toolbar.

The PS3 error code 8001050F is wreak­ing havoc on the Playsta­tion Net­work. Appar­ently, this prob­lem is caused by a bug in the clock func­tion­al­ity and affects mod­els other than the new slim PS3 (120÷250 GB mod­els). Accord­ing to some reports in a num­ber of forums some »fat« PS3s have worked ok.

If you are affected, date and time set­tings have been re-​​set to Jan­u­ary 1^st, 2000.  This pre­vents you from sign­ing in to PSN with the error mes­sage »An error has occurred. You have been signed out of PlaySta­tion Net­work (8001050F)«. Your tro­phies will also not dis­play cor­rectly or fail to sync.

You can’t fix it. Sony prob­a­bly stores some form of date in UTC for­mat, then mod­i­fy­ing it accord­ing to your time­zone to get what­ever you see on your on-​​screen clock. If it won’t fix itself, we’ll need a firmware update which we will prob­a­bly have to install man­u­ally from USB stick (I don’t really think so but always expect the worst). Chang­ing the sys­tem date man­u­ally won’t change any­thing at all.

What did Sony have to say about the issue? Not much but they do advise us to »not use the PS3 sys­tem, as doing so may result in errors in some func­tion­al­ity, such as record­ing obtained tro­phies, and not being able to restore cer­tain data«.

Read more…

Over the last few days I’ve tried a new Fire­fox exten­sion called After the Dead­line. This exten­sion is a gram­mar, style, and spell checker which does a bet­ter job than the built-​​in proof­read­ing mech­a­nism in Fire­fox. Actu­ally, I’ve always con­sid­ered OSpell for Opera far supe­rior and I des­per­ately wanted the same fea­tures in Fire­fox. Until recently no exten­sion or user script could offer the same functionality.

With the intro­duc­tion of After the Dead­line things changed. It’s unob­tru­sive and it doesn’t slow down Fire­fox (Yes, I’ve already decreased the value of extensions.spellcheck.inline.max-misspellings to 50 or so). Any­way, AtD pro­vides a small icon in the lower right cor­ner of text areas which you click to check the text it con­tains. It also has a nice options dia­log and the lat­est ver­sion (1.11) fixes a few bugs. Check it out!