New consoles
I'm still in the debating mode about getting the new consoles. I have 2 weeks to decide on the PS4, there really aren't any games that are coming out that I really have to play, I would get a couple of cool indie games for free because of PS+ though. The biggest game for the PS4 is Killzone, it's about 50 Gig, this raises an interesting point that I just thought about for both consoles. Each console only comes with a 500G hard drive, and from what I've read Xbox One games must be installed and I think it's the same for the PS4(I've read something about caching instead of installing the whole game). Since most of the games are 40-50G that means that you can have around 10 games on the hard drive at any one time. If you want to play that 11th game then you have to mess around with hard drive maintenance deciding which game to delete or keep which is a pain.
The PS4 will let you install any 9.5 mm hard drive which 1TB is the max so that helps a bit, but no external drive support. The Xbox One's hard drive can't be replaced but will support external hard drive installation sometime in the future. Until this gets resolved it makes digital distribution not very attractive, with no way to offload games you'd have to re-download these huge files that could take awhile plus eat at your bandwidth limit so to me it's a step backwards. Hopefully they can reduce the game sizes or I guess just don't buy or play many games.
Fun Exciting Weekend
Well maybe fun and exciting isn't really the way to describe it, more like frustrating and hair pulling is a better description. Went to lunch with the guys on Thursday and after a discussion I decided that I wanted to hard wire a couple of my PC's together and finally complete the media server I've been trying to setup for a long time. I first went up to my attic to see if I could run my wires there and instantly ran into a problem. Where I have my cable modem sitting was apparently wired before the roof was put on because there is about a half a foot gap that I had to work with so that was out. I have an unfinished basement which is where I should have started anyway. It just took a long drill bit and three holes and I had my wires run easily, I'm not sure why I didn't do that when I first got the house, it could have saved me a lot of money. All the connections were working at the full speed, 100MB/sec, so I was able to transfer some PC games between them quickly, did I mention that game sizes were increasing?
So now that I had my wired network working I was ready to get my media sever setup. I bought a Mac Mini back in 2010 and messed around with it as a media server using Plex. Plex itself is awesome piece of software, but I really wasn't fan of the Mac OS. My data drives were formatted using NTFS and the Mac can't natively write to that format. I tried a couple of applications that added support but they didn't work that great, I've actually had 2 hard drives that have failed that were plugged into it so I was hesitant to use the Mac OS. I used the bootcamp utility in the past and also ran into some issues so I was thinking I might have to get another small windows PC as my server. My router does support a hard drive and I was getting around 22Mb/sec with it which wasn't bad, but I did want the faster speed. I decided to try bootcamp one last time, messing with computers is fun, right?
The first thing the bootcamp utility tries to do is download the drivers of your Mac for the new windows installation. For that you need a FAT formatted USB stick, once I found one and got it formatted it tried to download the software but failed saying something about the server being down. I tried that about 5 times and each time it failed so I skipped that step, I really only needed the ethernet port to work anyway and thought that Windows would find a generic driver for that. The next step is partitioning the hard drive and that took about 20 minutes then it started installing windows. The initial setup worked fine and it rebooted a couple of times and finally got to the part where windows really boots for the first time and I got a blinking cursor. I looked up that error and most of the hits didn't apply to my setup, I finally found one that had me issue some boot commands from the windows repair utiltiy and it finally worked, I'm not sure how he found these commands but I was very happy he did.
Once that was setup everything else on the box ran fine. Plex is really the best media server software that I've found. If you name your content correctly it does a great job of finding the descriptions, pictures, and even theme music for TV shows. The interface is slick and easy to use on Widows and on my iPad. Once it processed my 1TB of data I was ready to test it out on my living room PC. I started Plex and streamed a video and noticed that it took awhile for the video to load so I double checked my LAN connection and it had the speed rated at 10 Mbps. Yes that was a 10 and Mbps not the 1 Gbps that I was expecting, so I was so close to having everything working correctly, unfortunately I really brought this issue on myself.
The night before I was upgrading drivers and messing with the BIOS on that computer because of a USB 3 issue so I thought it was a driver issue. I messed around with various drivers and every time my connection was at 10. I googled and googled, rebooted and rebooted, and tried many different things for about 3 hours and still no luck. I was upset at myself for messing with it the previous night. Then I remembered in the BIOS menus there was a utility or something called SmartLan that I tried, it was supposed to check and see if you had any cable errors. I then Googled that and it led me to fixing the issue. I'm using a 50ft cable and I guess when I ran the utility it set my connection to 10 and the only way to clear that was to power off and unplug the PC for 15 seconds. There was something somewhere holding onto those bits and by unplugging the PC from the wall it reset them. Once I did that it worked and I couldn't believe it, sometimes PC's ..............
Now that I had my connection issues resolved I was able to test the media server and it worked perfectly. I setup remote desktop support for my 3 PC's and now I finally have my wired connected setup that I've been wanting and should have setup the first day in the house. All it takes is time, frustration, and Google.
New Releases - Call of Duty releases this week, may be the first Call of Duty game I don't buy on release day.
PC
Battle Worlds: Kronos (download - $30)
Call of Duty: Ghosts
Final Exam (download - $10)
Luxuria Superbia and Poof VS the Cursed Kitty - First of a bunch of oddly named games.
Poof VS the Cursed Kitty (download)
Sid Meier's Ace Patrol: Pacific Skies (download - $5) - The iOS version is really good.
State of Decay (download - $20) - Really liked the game on the 360 and it should improve with higher resolution.
PlayStation 4
Call of Duty: Ghosts
Xbox 360
Ben 10 Omniverse 2
Call of Duty: Ghosts
Castlevania: Lords of Shadow Collection
Final Exam (XBLA - $10) - Unsure?
Zumba Fitness World Party
Ace Patrol: Pacific Skies and Final Exam
PlayStation 3
A-Men 2 (PSN)
Ben 10 Omniverse 2
Call of Duty: Ghosts
CastleStorm (PSN)
Castlevania: Lords of Shadow Collection
Final Exam (PSN - $10)
How to Survive (PSN) - Bought this on Steam and really wasn't impressed.
The Adventures of Cookie & Cream (PS2 Classic)
The Guided Fate Paradox
Wii U
Ben 10 Omniverse 2
Call of Duty: Ghosts
Toki Tori (eShop)
Wii Sports Club (eShop)
Zumba Fitness World Party
Wii
Ben 10 Omniverse 2
Zumba Fitness World Party
Vita
A-Men 2 (PSN)
CastleStorm (PSN)
Nintendo 3DS
Ben 10 Omniverse 2
Crazy Chicken Director's Cut 3D - Has to be awesome.
Moshi Monsters: Katsuma Unleashed
My Baby Pet Hotel 3D (eShop) - Ok.....
Pac-Man and the Ghostly Adventures
Power Rangers MegaForce - They are still around?
Nintendo DS
Moshi Monsters: Katsuma Unleashed
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