Uncategorized

Official PS4 Remote Play

by

PS4OfficialRemotePlay3.50 System Update

Some time ago I wrote a post about the unofficial Twisted Remote Play app.  Since that time I have used that thing on a nearly daily basis, if for no reason other than the pull screenshots off of my PS4 without having to play move the thumb drive.  It worked well, and honestly offered a level of game play that was nearly indistinguishable from sitting physically at your machine.  It worked amazingly smoothly over my laptop downstairs and while I didn’t do anything super serious with it, I did spend quite a bit of time farming resources or doing daily bounties in Destiny through it.  When I bought into the Alpha I believe it was $10 and since then he has shifted the pricing scheme to a free/premium structure.  As a former paid user I got transitioned to premium, and from what I can tell the paid version just gets newer updates.  However around the time I wrote my original post it was confirmed my Sony that they would be releasing an official version of the Remote Play application.  For anyone who cares to know, it turns out that Twisted simply reverse engineered the existing Xperia remote play app that had been available on the android and then greatly tweaked and improved the net code.  The improvements were not insignificant, and I honestly doubted that the official app release would even come close to the performance of the Twisted client.

I am guessing the existence of this unofficial dark horse client lit a fire under Sony and maybe caused them to improve their product offering to compete.  As of this morning the 3.50 system update is available for the PS4 and with it brings the official client that you can download here.  Out of the box it honestly performs like shit.  The default is 540p 30fps and using your PSN account to find your machine over the internet.  However if you kill the client and relaunch it, you will notice a settings box down near the bottom on the left hand side.  I found that if I cranked up the resolution to 720p and the frame rate to High it also changed the way the application worked.  Instead of finding your machine over the internet, it instead looked for it on your local network and as a result greatly improved the performance.  Granted my tests this morning were over a wired connection straight into the same router my PS4 was connected to, but I have to say the performance was reasonable.  I am not 100% sure if it is quite as smooth as the Twisted client, but it was absolutely playable.  I popped into Destiny and ran around the planet working on some bounties and while it felt like at times there was maybe a tiny bit of lag in the input… it was absolutely playable.  If you are doing anything serious at all I would still highly suggest sitting at your machine and just playing like Sony intended… however if you want to chill out from a laptop I have a feeling that the experience will be comparable to the Twisted client.

All of this said… I really hope that the Twisted client updates and gets fixed.  There were a lot of interesting things that he was doing that I want to see continued.  For example he was doing some work with emulating a Dualshock 4 controller with a Keyboard and Mouse.  Now it wasn’t quite there yet but it worked “well enough” to play around with on bounties and such in Destiny.  The other thing that I would love is for him to figure out how to pass through the Microphone input to the remote play application allowing folks to hang out and talk on PSN party chat while playing remotely.  I also feel like Twisted is going to ultimately support complaints with his client far better than Sony will.  PSTV for example is a mess and there doesn’t seem to be any sign of fixing it… given that they officially cancelled the product.  I feel like the PC and Mac support here is just to be able to say that they can do this feature that Xbox One has been touting for awhile, and once that check mark has been ticked off they simply won’t devote the resources to making sure it continues to work as well as it could work.  All of this makes me hope that they did not permanently break support for the method that Twisted has been connecting, because I really want to see that project succeed.

So Much Cheese Pizza

by

April Fools On Me

ThePizzaOrderYesterday morning began with a really interesting turn of events.  I got up, got dressed, went out to get breakfast… and as is often the case when I finally got set down I opened email to see if there was anything important for me to deal with.  In my inbox was an order receipt from Domino’s Pizza… which at first in my sleepy state didn’t seem all of that odd.  Then it dawned on me… that it has been weeks since we last ordered anything from Domino’s so I opened it to figure out what was going on.  Much to my shock… it was a very real looking order statement for some $600 worth of stuff… ordered at 1:30 in the morning and to be delivered to my address at 11 am Saturday.  The list goes something like this…

  • 25 Large Hand Tossed Cheese Pizzas
  • 13 2-Liters of Coke
  • 3 Stuffed Cheesy Bread with Bacon and Jalapeno
  • 25 Side Marinara Dipping Cups
  • 6 Side Garlic Dipping Cups
  • 6 Side Ranch Dipping Cups
  • 25 Side Blue Cheese Dipping Cups
  • 25 Chocolate Lava Crunch Cakes
  • 25 Side Icing Dipping Cups
  • 1 Sweet BBQ Bacon Specialty Chicken

It seemed like someone had gotten into my account on Dominos.com and placed an order, using an old credit card that was on file there that expired sometime in 2015.  At 8 in the morning on a Saturday neither the local Domino’s or the corporate Call Center were open, so I instead called my credit card company who assured me that they denied the order.  So for a little bit I went on about my business yesterday morning with the intention of calling the local office around 10:30 when they opened to make sure they realized it was a fraudulent order.  I had been in the backyard spraying weed killer for a bit, when I went back inside and realized I had a few missed calls.  Apparently the manager of the location had physically come by the house to verify that the order was legit before processing it.  His workers however apparently thought nothing of it, and were just about to start in making the pizzas.  I mean who orders 25 cheese pizzas?  I am not sure if this was a targeted attack on me in particular, or if this was just some sort of scripted attack, whatever the case it made for an interesting morning… and a very interesting story.

Day of Chores

RemotePlay 2016-04-03 09-17-13-72

Yesterday as a whole was a day filled with doing stuff around the house.  I got to play exactly one match of Iron Banner yesterday before shutting back down to run some errands.  It was largely a day for doing a bunch of stuff that had been needing to be done for a bit.  One of the major goals of the day was to get the new wireless multi-function printer hooked up, and working with all of our devices.  Other than taking a bit to install drivers on each machine this actually went pretty smoothly.  There is some strangeness with Google Cloud Printing, in that the printer must be owned by one google account, and then shared to other Google accounts.  But I have to credit my wife with figuring that bit out.  It is kinda cool being able to print from a chromebook finally, or print from chrome itself anywhere and have it come out on the printer at home.  I could see that useful sometimes, especially for printing order receipts.  The next mission was to try and figure out why our high volume printer just stopped working last week.  When I went to investigate whether the Parallel to USB cable was still hooked in tightly… the entire thing fell apart in my hand.  Not sure what happened but it seems like I simply need a new one of those.

As far as today my goal is to play some more Iron Banner because I really want to be able to hit rank 5 and maybe see some of the weapons as drops.  I am not sure that any of the rolls available on Lord Saladin are really worth purchasing, but in theory if I got some better perks it would be well worth my time.  I still need to get several heavy kills to complete the weekly bounties.  I am holding onto all of the brown bounties because I have been told that they greatly increase in value as the event comes to a close.  We have the usual laundry and cleaning to do, but my hope is that unlike yesterday…  today can be largely a day of gaming and chilling out.  Yesterday was a really strange day, but other than the pizza thing a good one.  I was super excited that for the most part AggroChat went off without a hitch.  We recorded a fairly long show about a bunch of interesting things, and there was zero occurrence of chipmunk Belghast.

Life in Tornado Alley

by

Closer Call
tornadofun

Last night was an interesting night to say the least.  In the morning folks were talking about the potential for serious storms, but in Oklahoma we tend to take that with a grain of salt.  From the months of March through June pretty much every week there is some severe thunderstorm either hitting or looming on the horizon.  Living in “Tornado Alley” gives you a strange relationship with the weather.  It is something you fear at least a little, but also something that you get used to.  There are close calls and then there are close calls so when you hear a storm is a few miles away, you get to the point of being able to look at a map… knowing the general topography and deciding that will never make it to me and going on about your business.  Last night was not really one of those nights, because the storm in question was a bit of a sidewinder.  At first it looked like it would miss the suburb of Tulsa that I live in, so I was milling around upstairs not thinking much about it.  Then I got an urgent series of messages from my wife saying that they were watching it out of the window of the church and that it was coming straight for town.  I of course did the most Oklahoman of all things that I could do… I went out on the front porch and tried to see the storm.  In the above picture I circled the area of the cloud that was starting to lower, and moments after taking this photo I watched it slowly rope its way downwards towards the ground.  It was at this point that I started to take things deadly serious.  The below video that I found linked to a local news site shows the same area as I pointed out in the picture, but as it was actually lowering.

The problem is… if a Tornado hits our house we are probably dead.  The conventional wisdom is that you need to get to an interior room, as close to the center of your house, with no windows and doors.  The way our house is laid out this room doesn’t really exist.  We do however have a very tiny laundry room crammed between the garage and the hallway outside of the bedroom.  From the garage side there is a steel core door, and from the other side a wooden one.  So I proceeded to hang out on the floor of our laundry room crammed between the washer and the dryer with a thick blanket to pull over my head if things went really bad.  I tried to gather the cats, and as any cat owner will know… the best way to get your cats into an area is the shut the door.  So I shut myself in the laundry room and within a few moments the cats were scratching at the door so I let them in and shut it again.  I had the bedroom television blaring so I could somewhat tell where the storm was, and this is when it shifted course drastically again.  This time instead of coming straight for us like it seemed, when it hit the reservoir it shifted go to more straight east than north east and ended up passing just to the south east of us.  Since I mentioned it last night, we are fine just was a much closer call than I was used to.  Had the Tornado continued on its course it would have hit us, but instead it went off and hit a neighborhood about a mile and a half from us.  I spent the rest of the evening watching the weather as the storm picked up strength and hit other communities.  Unfortunately this is going to be the norm for the next several months as we make our way through another “Tornado Season”.  Huge apologies for missing the raid last night, but when shit like that is going on… I kinda need to prep to duck and cover.

Obsessions

20160329_170132

I originally had a post for this morning talking about “chasing unicorns”, but I feel like I want it to have its own full post, and with the happenings of last night I felt the need to talk about that instead.  So instead I am going to talk about another one of my Craigslist dealings.  I am cheap… and if you have read this blog for very long you will know that I really hate having to pay retail price for something.  I’ve gotten countless laptops, desktops, and gaming systems from Craigslist, but using the local site is an absolute craps shoot.  Some days there are amazing things out there, and then there are weeks or months of absolutely nothing.  When I get something stuck in my head that I would like to have… I tend to start searching Craigslist for it.  Recently one of those obsessions has been a Wii U and I had it in my head that I wanted to try and get one for under 200 bucks.  The bane of my existence however is that apparently on the Tulsa site no one EVER removes anything once they have sold it.  So you always have to start every discussion with the same message “Hey do you still have X thing you posted on Craigslist?”.  Last week I thought I had found my Wii U.  It was not in the Tulsa metro but was within easy driving distance… was $180, came with a pro controller, and I believe a single game.  The problem is by the time I contacted the guy he already had someone coming to look it at 4pm that day.  After not returning a text asking if they did in fact buy it… and the person still not having removed the ad from Craigslist… I was back at the drawing board.

The only problem is at this point the obsession set in completely.  I don’t have a clue why I decided I needed a Wii U, but apparently it was one of the more important things in my life for a period of days.  There was a point where I had text conversations going with four different sellers, trying to talk them down to the price range I was willing to pay.  All of them had positives and negatives… and none of them were willing to go all the way down to $200 for this reason or that.  The biggest problem in Tulsa is that everyone thinks their stuff is worth more than it actually is.  Then my wife suggested that I contact this one newer seller that had a bundle of stuff they were trying to sell for $300.  I had completely ignored it because it seemed so far out of my target price.  Amazingly enough after a few back and forths I got them to a $250 price tag for a very new looking system and four games:  Mario Kart, Hyrule Warriors, Splatoon, and Bayonetta 2.  All of the games being ones that I would have eventually picked up for myself…  except Bayonetta.  I figured if nothing else that game could potentially be traded off for something else, or it might surprise me.  Once I got the unit it actually ended up being a better deal because also installed on the system was Super Mario U/Luigi U and Megaman Battle Network 4: Blue Moon.  So a total of six games and a unit with no scratches that I could see for $250.  While the price was not as low as I was hoping I think the end value of the deal was worth it.  At some point I am going to pick up the title that ultimately made me want a Wii U in the first place…  Mario Maker, but I want to spend some time playing the games I just got before going down that road.  Now I need to keep my eyes peeled as we are junking for some of the Wii titles I never actually played.

 

100th Episode Mishap

by

Things Happened

This morning I am blogging a bit out of sequence, because things happened.  Normally speaking on Sunday mornings I go through a little ritual.  Traditionally I manage to get what I think of as my first pass edit done on Saturday night, so that Aggrochat mostly resembles its final form by the time I go to bed.  I get up in the morning and mash it all together and do the final pass, before posting it all over the place.  Last night however… when I listened to the show my heart fell in my chest as I noticed that it was significantly screwed up.  All it took was for me to see the waveform to realize that something just wasn’t right, and I thought it was pretty much going to be an entire loss.  This morning however I screwed with the audio until I reached a point where… it is still very much screwed up but it is salvageable.  Essentially for whatever reason on the new Teamspeak setup my recording is completely jacked an sounds like trying to watch Cinemax in the 80s when you didn’t have it added to your subscription.  Admit it guys… we all tried to sneak a peak at stuff we shouldn’t be seeing through the constant mechanical hum.  The original pass this morning sounded pretty much exactly like that with me being shifted to a higher pitch than normal…  dubbing it Chipmunk Bel.

After a few hours of trying various things I managed to isolate a lot of the hum, and now instead it just sounds like I am in the witness protection program and disguising my voice with a really horrible modulator.  I think the show might be salvageable, and I am getting a push by our fans on witter to go ahead and post what exists.  The thing that shocks me is just how little I have freaked out over this.  The worse case scenario was that we lost a show… and in the the grand scheme of things it is pretty much a miracle that this… show 100 is the first time we have really had major issue.  Sure there have been times we have gotten disconnected in the middle of recording and that I have had to knit together a show out of two pieces.  However overall we have had really good luck, so much so that we never even thought about having more than one person try and do a recording at the same time.  In the future however I think we are going to have a bot hanging out doing nothing but recording the channel with the hopes that it catches everything in one nice constant volume stream.

Stuff Went Wrong

Additionally on the positive side everyone OTHER than me last night sounded amazing.  So the new set up seems to be great…. once I can sort out what the hell went wrong with my side of things.  That is what is so screwy is that while talking everyone else said I sounded great too, however when it came to actually recording my own voice it went horribly wrong.  If nothing else doing the bot recording thing should take care of that problem, but I still think there is some setting somewhere that is wrong… given that teamspeak saves audio settings on a server by server basis and even at times a channel by channel basis.  The plan is to do a bunch of testing between today and next weekend and will hopefully sort out which magical setting unscrews my voice.  In the meantime however I am pretty damned proud of how much I managed to minimize the effect.  Granted things are still screwed up… but they are in a much less screwed up state than they were this morning.  One of these days I really need to take some lessons in audio engineering because it would help if I had a damned clue what I was doing.

Podcast: Play in new window | Download