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Make your Playstation 3 region free HTG
For the past weeks my girlfriend and I have been on holiday in the USA and Canada which was – of course – awesome. With the cheap dollar/euro conversion and enough luggage space left we decided to do some serious media shopping: DVD’s, Blu-rays (Lost 6 is superb!) and some PS3 games (Playstation Move is fun!). Back home we started using these with our Playstation 3 console. Blu-rays and games worked fine, but the DVD’s refused to play due to a wrong region code. Damn, I totally forgot about this and I just threw away my old region free DVD player a few days earlier. Nice. Blu-rays and PS3-games are by the way always region free.
A quick Google search learned me that I wasn’t the only one with this problem. Sadly, the region code for the PS3 can not be changed. Bummer. The only workaround given was to make a copy of every DVD to a blank DVD and use the copy. Since I didn’t feel much for that (too much work) I found a better way to view your wrong-region DVD’s.
Go to this site and download the PS3 Media Server. This nice piece of software enables you to stream all kinds of media from your Mac/Windows/Linux computer to your PS3. Not only the usual AVI, MPEG or MP4 files, but it also works with DVD’s! Just insert the DVD into your Mac or PC and browse to the files in the VIDEO_TS folder with your PS3. Easy and it works! Okay, you don’t get a DVD menu but who cares, you can finally watch the content.
If your PS3 is connected to your network by Wifi you should lower the video quality settings because PS3’s Wifi is too slow (max 54 MBit/s) to receive all data in real-time, which will make the video playback stuttering. In the ‘Transcoding Settings’-tab I set the maximum bandwidth to 14 and chose keyint=25:vqmax=7:vqmin=2 /* Medium quality for HD Wifi Transcoding as the video quality setting. This setup seems to work fine.
5 reasons I like Spotify
I recently discovered this online music service called Spotify and after a try-out of a few weeks I just have to let you know how great this concept is. Spotify is a cloud based music service, which means that you don’t have to download a song before you can listen to it anymore. It just streams the music on demand. Spotify is available in Sweden, Norway, Finland, the UK, France, Spain and the Netherlands (sorry USA and Canada). Try it!
1. Big music catalogue
Spotify contains over 8 millions musc tracks including artists from the big labels like Universal, EMI, Sony etc. Of course the traditional ‘difficult’ bands don’t show up (Metallica). The Spotify software has an option to import music files, so you can still listen to these non-available bands with Spotify if you get their music from other sources. Also, I found a lot of local bands (Jacqueline, Acda & de Munnik, Lars Winnerbäck).
New GMaps Plugin v2 for Xcelsius try-out
This summer Centigon Solutions released the latest version of their Google Maps add-on for Xcelsius (uh, SAP Crystal Solutions Presentation Design…). Although I liked the first version of this add-on, I really missed an option for showing regional alerts. You still had to use the standard Xcelsius map-components which did support this feature.
In this post I will show the steps you have to take to create a dashboard showing a Google Map with regions that have alert colors and are clickable with some drill-down functionality like the example below.
Update: First check this post concerning changes on the Google Maps API.
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The surprising truth about motivating the knowledge worker
Still think money motivates the knowledge worker? Wrong!
Watch this cool animated presentation on the facts behind what really motivates us at home and in the workplace:
iPad is here! Finally…
Yesterday the iPad officially arrived in Holland, finally. With the iPhone 1 introduction a few years ago I bought one (overpriced) at eBay, got into some issues with the seller and had to pay a lot of additional tax at the Dutch border. So I decided to wait for the European release this time.
While waiting in line with over 50 others I thought about how things have changed. 15 years ago I was the only Mac-user at my school and Apple made some pretty boring products. Now in 2010 almost everyone I know owns at least one Apple product. Great!
Below are some pictures of the launch and some screenshots of the iPad in action while reading a SAP Press book and using the SAP BusinessObjects Explorer for iPad.
