KITT for your Car!

On June 24th 2008 Mio announced it’s Knight Rider GPS system. Simultaneously, I punched my friend in the

face out of pure glee. Now thats what I’m talking about! For as long as I can remember, I have always wanted the KITT system to be a reality. I even went as far as to name my first car (a 91 Acura Integra) after KITT. In theory, making a KITT system never really seemed that difficult to me. I mean come on, we have fu*king dancing Honda robots but no KITT system? Well now that dream is a reality, well sort of. This iteration is basically the normal Mio Gps but with the lights, sounds and voice of KITT. Yes, you heard right, our very own Mr. Feeny (William Daniels) will give you turn by turn directions Knight Rider Style! What more could you ask for? A low price you may say? Well not to worry, Mio has it covered. The expected price when it hits the stores in August is supposed to be around a meager $270.

AMD’s Cinema 2.0, “Show me the money!”

On June 16th AMD debuted its new “Cinema 2.0″ technology which is part of AMD’s upcoming “RV770” (codenamed teraFLOPS) platform of graphics chips. The debut, per usual, was accompanied by a shiny interactive demo displaying exactly what the chip could supposedly do.

“With Cinema 2.0 you won’t just play movies, you’ll play in them. Imagine the ability to look around the environments in a sci-fi movie, put yourself in the driver’s seat in a race scene, duck behind things and pop up to see what’s going on in an intense firefight — all of these things are possible with Cinema 2.0,” said Charlie Boswell, director, Digital Media & Entertainment, AMD. “The challenge for any director has always been taking a wonderful vision in the canvas of the mind and translating that to film for the audience to see. Cinema 2.0 breaks down the time and cost barriers of getting a scene or shot that’s ‘just right’, and what’s better, allows audiences to dive deeper into the experience to explore every part of that director’s vision.”

Hot Hardware

As a self admitted AMD fanboy, I really hope this “Cinema 2.0″ stuff is true. Yet in my over 18 years as a gamer I have heard the terms cinematic, photo realistic and true-to-life thrown around more times than “flip-flopper” was thrown around in the last presidential election. Pretty much all I have to say to this is, “a technical demo is one thing but what I actually end up playing time and time again is a whole different situation.”

When it comes to games and graphics, “Show me the money!”

The 2nd Amendment is NOT hard to understand!

You Tube and Lisa Nova Collab Video

Here is a You Tube, Lisa Nova (as seen on Mad TV) collab video that I did as a joke. It was filmed on a Canon HG10 in the “SP” mode, took about a day to shoot and a week of on again, off again editing. Oh yeah and I used Sony Vegas 9 Pro. It is meant to spoof those cheesy law commercials that we all tend to see on daytime TV. The whole process of making this video was so much fun up until the point where I had to upload it to You Tube. I had never actually used You Tube before that point so I really didn’t know what to expect. Evidently I should have expected very little. To begin with, You Tube profile updates such as your user picture or any other changes can take up to hours. Not to mention that your user picture can only be 75x100x pixels! What happens if your picture doesn’t meet this criteria? It is resized, resulting in a mutated picture of you that could only be duplicated if you were on a 3 day acid trip. Those are just the small  problems, the largest issue is the upload time. Never in my wildest dreams did I think a 3 minute, 90 megabyte video, would take 4 hours to upload! The despair of the 4 hour wait was compounded even more by the multiple failed upload attempts and the resulting video quality after the upload is finished. Anyway, enough about You Tube, my video can be found below. Hope you enjoy!