While reading TUAW I saw that iTunes 9.0.3 was out so like everyone else I tried to update. Strange thing is that while iTunes says its out, Software Update says I have nothing to update. Funny.

Last week I picked a Playstation 3 because I am getting a new TV soon. I wanted to get a Blue-Ray player but being that I am also a gamer I didn’t just want a stand alone Blue-Ray player so I got a PS3. Of course being the geek that I am I wanted to see what all I could do to the PS3 as far as hacks and such like changing out the hard drive. That’s when I came across some videos on YouTube about using 3 PS3′s to ray trace a model in real time. But first if you don’t know what ray tracing is here is some info.

In computer graphics, ray tracing is a technique for generating an image by tracing the path of light through pixels in an image plane. The technique is capable of producing a very high degree of photorealism; usually higher than that of typical scanline rendering methods, but at a greater computational cost. This makes ray tracing best suited for applications where the image can be rendered slowly ahead of time, such as in still images and film and television special effects, and more poorly suited for real-time applications like computer games where speed is critical. Ray tracing is capable of simulating a wide variety of optical effects, such as reflection and refraction, scattering, and chromatic aberration.

This isn’t the first time that some one has done ray tracing in real time in gaming. A few years ago I remember see a video of someone taking Quake 3 and doing real time ray tracing. Of course that video is on YouTube as well. If the video below plays fast just pause it and hit play again. I linked to the high quality version so that might be the reason.

Now what use to take a shit load of PC’s at a college can now be done using just 3 PS3′s in your house. Maybe it’s just me but I think that is awesome.

I made a post about a year ago giving my thoughts on why I think Vista was bad. I gave it the title of Vista = Shit on a Stick. Turns out that alot of people felt the same way I do and left comments on why they think Vista is shit. At the time I wrote that post Vista was still very new and SP1 was not out yet but now it is.

Now that SP1 is out and I have been using Vista again for a few months it hit me. Its just bad design. Most of the time I don’t think about this but it hit me when I was using my girlfriends Mac Mini. The User Interface is like night and day and I am not talking about the fancy stuff like Expose on the Mac or Flip 3D on Windows. Its about how many clicks of the mouse will it take to get to where I need to go. To show how it is much better on a Mac I made three videos where all I wanted to do was change the time it take for the screen to shuts off.

There are two ways of doing this in Vista, at least for a normal user. The first way that most people will do is thru the start menu. So it gos as followed – Start Menu, Control Panel, System and Maintenance, Power Options and then what you need to click on is in the left hand menu.

Now the way I did it was right click on the desktop, Personalize, Screen Saver (brings up new window), Change power setting (brings up new window), and then Choose when to turn off display which is on the left side menu again.

Now lets do the same thing on a Mac. Click on the Apple logo, System Preferences (video did show me doing this, it jumped), Energy Saver. Thats it.

So what do you think? Is Mac OS X really better then Vista or am I just giving in to the marketing hype?

I was doing my daily surf around the news sites when I came across a game called Race Driver: GRID on Voodoo Extreme. Why I haven’t seen this game before I don’t know but I am glad I found out about it now because it looks awesome.

I don’t buy that many games because of two reasons. One is that I hate to pay $60 just to play it once since I am not a big multiplayer person. The other is replay value. In order for me to buy a game new it has to have a good amount of replay value and that is one of the biggest reasons I love racing games. But this game, from the footage below, gave me some more reasons that I might buy this new.

First is the damage. Forza 2 had damage but not like this. Wheel flying off, parts going everywhere. Now thats cool. Another, and one I have been waiting for, is you can really roll your car. This something that you can’t do in PGR, Forza or Gran Turismo. Add to that open wheel cars and you got me hooked.

Just watch the video below. You looking forward to this?

This video is no longer on hulu, which suck. Not hulu, just the fact that they took the video down. But you can just go there and check out all the other videos they have. Just not the one that was here.

This is the fastest way to get past Chamber 14 in Portal. And Happy New Year!

This is a video for the remix of Voodoo People by Pendulum. The video itself is a bit strange but the song itself is great. The video is from Stage 6 which is Divx’s online video site. The quality of the videos are far better than anything that you will find on YouTube or most other online video sites. I like this quote from there site.

It’s a high-quality platform that lets anyone upload, download, view, share and experience everything from short clips captured on mobile phones all the way up to full-length, high-definition feature films. Anyone can become a publisher, anyone can build an audience and every video available on Stage6 is compatible with over 70 million consumer electronics devices from every major manufacturer, making it easy to play back Stage6 videos on your television or portable device.

UPDATE – Stage6 is no more here is the video from You Tube.

This could of been call Matrix Monk, Ninja Monk or Shut the Mother Fuck. It has monks, vikings and a duck. Don’t need much more then that.

Follow me on this little trip. I’m playing around with my new Ubuntu install and checking out Amarok. Nice program and does what I want but I want to see if it can do more. So I find some scripts that you can install into it and one of them is a script that will search YouTube for the video of whatever song your playing. Ok that sounds cool so I check it out and after a few songs that I know it could find I try some on my Drum and Bass stuff. Its not finding to much of that so I search for the song on Google and find Dave.tv. Seems alright then I see a Drum and Bass channel that has alot of Drum and Bass videos. And that takes me to Dnbtv.com. Fun trip huh! Video from YouTube after the break.