Month: July 2005

Picked up a copy of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince today for 28,000 won.
So far a very good read. In Ulsan, you can get English books at
Chuyouny Bookstore
052-261-7842

English teachers get a 20% discount!

VirtualDub is a video capture/processing utility for Windows. It’s main strength is it is small and very fast.
With this program you can cut out the scenes in a movie you want to use in class.
So rather then have the whole movie you can just have a few small files wih what you want.

Homepage

Support Forums

For experienced users only

Wikipedia entry
Want to edit a file with AC3 sound?
VirtualDub-MPEG2 1.6.9

Modern computers are great for movie fans. You can backup your DVD’s or download movies from the internet to watch.

A single CD sized file can contain a movie with subtiles and multiple soundtracks! e.g. A Korean language soundtrack and an English one.

If all you want to do is play back movies on your PC then I recommend GOM Player.

GOM Player comes from Korea – http://gom.ipop.co.kr/

Unfortunally for us Non Korean speakers you have to guess how to download the player and when you install it, the installer will be in Korean. But the very last option is to choose the language – Korean or English
Gom Player has an excellent interface, is very easy to use and has a host of hidden features for expert users. Do I like it ? Well, I use it daily as my main media player.

The other contender for a good general media player is VLC Media Player

An excellent, but ugly player that will play most videos without you having to install K-lite or similar Codec packs (below)

VLC (initially VideoLAN Client) is a highly portable multimedia player for various audio and video formats (MPEG-1, MPEG-2, MPEG-4, DivX, mp3, ogg, …) as well as DVDs, VCDs, and various streaming protocols.

If you want to use Windows Media Player to watch your videos then you will have to install a codec pack

The one I am most familar with is K-Lite.

K-Lite Home page.

K-Lite Codec Pack is a collection of codecs and related tools. Codecs are required to encode and/or decode (play) audio and video. The K-Lite Codec Pack is designed as a user-friendly solution for playing all your movie files. With the K-Lite Codec Pack you should be able to play 99% of all the movies that you download from the internet.

There are three versions of the K-Lite Codec Pack: Basic, Standard and Full.
?¢‚Ǩ¬¢ K-Lite Codec Pack Basic contains only the most essential things. It contains everything you need to be able to play the most popular and widespread formats. It is small enough to fit on a single floppy. Also great for including on your movie CDs.
?¢‚Ǩ¬¢ K-Lite Codec Pack Standard contains everything you need to play all the commonly used formats. This package should be enough for the average user.
?¢‚Ǩ¬¢ K-Lite Codec Pack Full contains even more codecs. It also has encoding support for the various formats. This package is for power users and people who do their own encodings.

Download K-Lite here

Calling all geography fans out there.

NASA’s World Win 1.3 is the program you have been looking for.

Price: ZERO
Fun Factor: w.o.w

What does it do?

World Wind lets you zoom from satellite altitude into any place on Earth. Leveraging Landsat satellite imagery and Shuttle Radar Topography Mission data, World Wind lets you experience Earth terrain in visually rich 3D, just as if you were really there.

Virtually visit any place in the world. Look across the Andes, into the Grand Canyon, over the Alps, or along the African Sahara.

Download here

Click here for More satellite pictures of Korea

Google Earth

Very similar to Nasa World Wind, the price is the same too, Free!

MSN Virtual Earth – http://virtualearth.msn.com/

Microsoft’s entry into the map / atlas market

http://metropolitician.blogs.com/scribblings_of_the_metrop/2005/06/korea_herald_ar.html
by Michael Hurt
An excellent article on prostitution in Korea. The statistics and their implications about the Korean sex industry are depressing when you stop to think what it means.

Read more

Today was my 37th birthday.
Went to school as usual

My students were very cute when they wished me happy birthday.

I went to lunch with my co teachers. I had a hamburger steak for lunch. It was nice, but it is definately not a real steak.
Mum also called me, which was nice.
For dinner I went to the new Chinese restaurant and had seafood on rice, which was not bad. But at 10,000 won a little expensive.
Had a snack with my kwang-jang-nim at da-glow man hof.
Had some dried fish, very nice.

Last night I was really angry with EA’s Battlefield 2 because

1. My PC wouldn’t recognize the PLAY CD because of the copy protection on CD !
… So I couldn’t officially play the game without a NO CD crack!

A PLAY CD is a CD that has to be in the computer for the game to play. It is designed to stop people from copying the CD.
A similar scheme exists for music CD’s.

The main reason I purchased the game was for the serial number which lets me play online. A cracked version of the game does not give you a valid CD Key. So the best protection for the game is the fact that you can’t play online without a valid cd key. The only way you can get a valid CD key is to buy the game!
So this begs the question, why put copy protection on the CD ?

2. Worse still when I could run the game it would crash on me particularly after it had loaded a new level.

Status: Problems solved. I love the game.

How ? … Download the 1.01 update
Result: the No CD crack does not work, can’t even open the game

Downloaded a mini CD image to use with Daemon tools from http://www.gameburnworld.com/gp/gamefixes/battlefield2.htm

Result: This circumvents the copy protection. This combined with the patch has meant I can play more games then I should!
It just works.

So I think the key here is the CD mini image, not the patch.
So if I had to rely on EA for a solution I would still have a legal game which does not work.
Now I have a legal game but I have ‘broken’ the copy protection by using the Mini Image and it only took me six hours to get to this point.
Very frustrating!

Went for a bike ride today after school to do the rounds of the big department stores in Ulsan.
The local equivalent of Myers or Grace Brothers.
So I rock up in my grubby shorts and Tshirt. I looked a little out of place, especially in the cosmetics sections you have to walk through on the ground floor.

Anyway I was looking for a copy of Battlefield 2. I finally found it at HomePlus. They had three copies left.
So I ride back home, working up a huge sweat riding up the hill to my suburb.
I install the game and …. It tells me please insert CD 2

OK no problem, obviously some sort of copy protection.

I insert the CD and it does NOT recognise it!
What the fuck!
I purchased a legal copy of software, which I know works b/c I had an illegal copy before 🙂
And how do they treat their customer? not very well.
So I download a NO CD crack, which is probably a classed as a crime these days in the USA and I can now run the game.
But, it keeps crashing all the time!
The demo never crashed !
The pirated copy running single player did not crash.

So why all the hassle.

I guess this is what happens when you do the right thing!

Superflous classrooms

An elementary school with 36 classes opened this March in Jukjeon, a newly developed residential district in Yongin City, south of Seoul. But it is to be closed just one semester after opening. The reason: the number of students is too few. When it opened, there were only eight students enrolled.

Read more

I have been playing the Battlefied 2 demo since it came out and I love it.
The biggest problem with the game is it requires a new video card. The game has very high requirements, much more then doom3
I have been playing it at a friends shop because my pc does not have a video card that is good enough.
I wanted to get a Nvidea 6800GT but because I have a Shuttle XPC SB81P I had problems.
Specifically heat and size: The shuttle is a small form factor PC. What this means is that the space for a video card is very limited !
If space is limited it also means heat can become an issue.
So when choosing I had to make sure that the card is low heat and that it will fit.
This means either recommendations from other shuttle owners or trying out cards by plugging them into my PC.
Well living in Ulsan ruled out the second option.
It is pretty hard finding a shop that stocks 6800GTs even six months after they have come out!
So I ended up buying a 128MB 6600 for 120,000 w (@SU$120)

In hindsight this is a bad idea, but I was impatient!
(When do we want it? NOW, no fuck that, yesterday)
Pros: It works !
Battlefield Earth plays very well at medium settings at 800×600@60hz.
Cons: I should have got the 256mb version, if they had it, which they probably didn’t

I also ran Nasa’s World Wind which is an excellent program to test a video card. Result, fantastic, it works really well.

Now for the game itself.
I downloaded a version of Bittorent. I love it!
So now to buy it!
Fortunately I live in the Mega city of Ulsan 🙁
So I looked at HomePlus, Wal Mart, and Save Zone.
They are all big department stores / supermarkets

RESULT:Not a bloody copy in sight!

I looked online, and they appear to have it for sale.
But I would rather support local businesses, so I will wait.

There are some fantastic shops for XBOX and Playstation gamers, but alas, for PC games, the field is barren indeed.

Here is my PC.
You can see the video card in the bottom right.
At the top is a Seagate Baracuda SATA 200GB H/D
Inside the PC you can see a green circuit board belonging to the second hardrive, a Western Digital 200 GB IDE drive.
The space above the IDE drive and next to the Seagate is where a second SATA HD will fit.
I put a 2nd Seagate Baracuda there and the system could not keep it cool even when the fans were running at 100%! So I replaced it with the IDE drive you can see now.

The WD drive runs about 7 degrees cooler then the Seagate!
The Seagate is too hot for a small form factor PC like the Shuttle.
It can easily hit the high 40’s, while the WD sits on 37.