The Syncing Apple

I just ripped the Incredibles from a DVD and stuffed it on the PSP. The total movie is amazingly only ~300 megs. And the quality is excellent, except for the scenes with the most motion (the kid running thru the forest). USB2 makes transferring the files quick- the G5 moved the 300 megs in under 4 minutes. Not having chapters makes it hard to jump around, but you can imagine that the battery life is a lot better watching a movie from DuoStick than UMD. And with only 4 minutes needed to blast a movie onto the stick, it makes it easy to keep new movies on. Already I’ve about filled my new 512 Duo. When are they releasing the 2G Duo?

I used Handbrake to rip the DVD to mp4, and FFmpegX to encode to the PSP. Nice and easy. Finally, I have a reason to rip some of these Netflix dvds, for my personal backup of course. Yeah.

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This is great game. There is a FAQ is worth reading. I’m playing it more and more every day.

My Seido G2100S finally arrived this week. The G2100 is like the G2500 in that it has a GPS serial input, but it has no speaker phone for the Treo. It charges the phone and the GPS receiver. The latest update from TomTom fixes the T650, and the serial TomTom GPS receiver works fine with the G2100. Its nice to be able to use the T650 as a GPS again in the car.

The Good news: the MS Duo fits nicely in my generic USB all-in-one reader that I have on my G5.

The Bad news: the MS Pro MagicGate 256 that I have won’t fit in the PSP.

It seems that the Duo standard is not only half as big in length, its half as wide also. The Duo is very thin indeed. The big old MS Pro won’t go into the PSP. Thanks Sony.

At least, when I get a bigger Duo I can jam it into the reader and copy over this episode of Firefly that I just ripped from DVD and encoded for the PSP.

There seems to be a lot of MS info at Memory Stick Dot Org Did you know there are three familes of Memory Sticks? Family 1, Family 2 and Family 3. See where your sticks end up.

My latest gadget is the PSP: and it certainly lives up to the hype. The screen is gorgeous, watching the included movie (Spiderman2) is lovely. Sony was smart to include a movie with this- I’m ready to buy some more just to be able to watch them on the PSP. I got the last one at a local EB Games, but later that week I saw about 10 at the Target. They are not scarce.

There is only one game that looked interesting to me, which I purchased: WipeOut Pure. I recall playing F-Zero on the super nes, and it was a blast, so WipeOut seemed like a good fit for the PSP. The game play is amazing- the gfx seem comporable to the PS2 itself. There is no comparison to the wimpy screen of the GBA. I’m looking forward to GTA and FF VII, both of which are slated to be out this summer.I actually found the old-style pad buttons easier to use than the cool analog thumb pad. The thumb pad is located a little low on the PSP, and caused some thumb fatigue after a while.

I was able to get the wi-fi connected to my home network and I got onto the web using the browser that comes with wipeout: pure. Jump to absurd genius to see how to use his web portal for the PSP.

To punish myself I just got the PSP iSync conduit from PocketMac. Even though I’ve sworn them off twice before (for their PocketPC sync and their Blackberry sync) how bad can the PSP Sync be? Its also only $9.95. It can only wreak my macintosh…

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