AT&T Samsung Sync (SGH-A707) - A poor man's iPhone

Okay, Okay I own a sync, and I'm a "loyal" AT&T wireless customer, now before you get all bent out of shape yes I work for the cable company. To a certain extent that makes me a hypocrite but because I am a AT&T wireless customer, that doesn't make me less of a cable man. First and foremost, the thing you have to understand is originally i subscribed to the service back when It was Cingular. Then AT&T came out and bought Cingular... well.. something like that; but at any rate it doesn't matter much to me cause the service works and I don't have to think about it.... and that's fine for me.

ehhem, with that said we can get down to brass tacks... I LOVE MY NEW PHONE! First off it's red, yeah i know it shouldn't matter but I haven't had a new phone in like FOREVER! so that being said it's great that finally I get a new phone. But that's not why your here I'm guessing you want to know a little bit about the phone before you buy one. Well first off; it's dirt cheep right now when you sign a contract... i picked mine up for $20.00 with a contract from AT&T, upgrade rate online deal... it was a steal (i thought) till i saw it at wall mart for free with a contract... sigh. Well all of that aside it's a nice little phone; that gets even better when you get yourself set up with Blue Tooth and a MicroSD card.

Everything I've read about this phone says that if you have head phones plugged into it it becomes bulky and the port cover is venerable; easily solved by investing in a set of blue tooth headphones; which the phone supports. I think this phone was originally conceived to take advantage of bluetooth; and it's highly miss rated by the community as bluetooth is not as hyped of a feature for phones. Because the phone supports so many bluetooth features you don't need to use the io port for anything but plugging in the power to charge the thing. Another drawback that's de-bunked by blue tooth is the SD port being fragile and hard to operate... both of these statements are true; however you can copy things to and from the SD card over Bluetooth as well as through the cable with no trouble. This eliminates the need to remove the SD card from the phone at all. I purchased a USB Bluetooth key for 20 at walmart, also the SD card was bought there but i don't remember how much that was... it was cheep though.

Video playback is tolerable and SUPER (TM) makes excellent quality files from most media formats; making watching video on the phone very easy to accomplish and low cost. The phone supports 3GP and MP4 container types. Limited to only Narrow Band AMR audio codec, but allowing mpeg4 Visual codec, as well as standard H.263 video (of the two the phone uses Mpeg4). I have successfully viewed videos up to 320x240 at 15 FPS with a Fixed bit rate of 350Kbps. the audio is monual 8000Hz 13Kbps (even though the unit has 2ch speakers). Minimal blockyness was seen on animated clips at this resolution but i haven't tried anything live action. Serial TV episodes (around 29-35 minutes) end up being around 54 MB. Recommended to accomplish this task is SUPER at a bare minimum but you may have to adjust the aspect of the Video in virtual dub so that video doesn't look so stretched out. One minor annoyance is the video playback bar stays peasant on the screen during playback. Long movies might be cumbersome to watch from the middle as there is no playback support for encoded chapters.

Audio playback supports (at least) WMA, and MP3. The phone Records in AMR format and play's it back. The unit was bought more or less as a video player so i don't know much more than this. it seams to play whatever I through at it in these 3 formats however.

The phone has quite Decent Internet Access, as I don't use it much, I have little to say about it. It supports bidirectional IM and that's all i need it for. Phone has 3G support so those of you buying the phone for streaming video or audio will be pleased as punch. It has built in SongID, from what I can tell from the 3 day trial it seams to work well.

The phone book is useful and intuitive, it integrates with the IM client to tell you if contacts are on line or not at a glance. I haven't tried integration with a calendar or outlook.

Over all The phone dose what I need it to. I couldn't be more happy with it, I hope this review sheds some light on a well thought out purchase. but feel free to leave comments here if you don't understand something or need additional information. I will gladly try to accommodate.

Fun with CCE or one of the things less fun than shooting yourself in the face.

This is just a quick slap up here, i've started to work with the MPEG output generated by my DVD player.... I am currently working on a project to convert some off air episodes to DVD (yeah i know i just recored them to DVD), with subtitles, and chapters... the easy part is pulling apart the commercials but when it comes to taking CCE (closed captions) thats where the fun begins. I have tools for riping them right out of the MPEG output generated by dvddcrypter... but; then i have to cut out the commercials leavening the subtitles badly out of sync... what's a boy to do? well currently i am trying a method involving a frame server and subrip. I want to eventually write a little app to cut the subtitles from one of the various output types that comskip generates; but as far as i can tell that's going to be a pain in the ass as well. well here's hopeing :)

Three computers too much for one desk?

Ok, so i have 3 computers on my desk... 4 if you count my pocket pc. I use one of the laptops for video conversion, one for document reading and software development and the third for games and ohter stuff. I don't see a problem with this. I payed for one of the computers the other two are hand me downs... anybody else think this is pathetic?

Final Fantasy VII PC on Windows 2000 SP4

Well, I dusted off my old copy of Final Fantasy VII for PC on a whim early this week. Mainly cause I was impressed with all the fan based patches that were coming out for it. I was flabbergasted by the lack of support for windows 2000 SP4. Not to mention that there's conflicting opinions about what patches to use; what makes playability better etc. What Annoys the hell out of me is that to finally make it work under windows 2k you need Micro$oft's Application Compatibility Toolkit V3.0; not surprisingly enough you can't find it simply anywhere... (wouldn't want people to get the idea that they don't need to upgrade to window$ vi$ta would we..) Well after googleing around much of the known universe I managed to find a copy. Then it was a simple matter of patching the hell out of the game to make it work. Since there's a lot out there and it's a popular TFH starter, i will refrain from telling exactly which patches I used. Suffice to say theres quite a bit of information floating around out there and you can decide for yourself what you would like to run.

Here's the ACT (Application Compatibly Toolkit) settings

Start the ACT Compatibility Administrator Tool - hit fix, Enter Name and Publisher (FF7//Squaresoft and browse to the ff7.exe Hit next. Select None, hit next, enable: Shrinker, EmulateWriteFile,Virtual Registry. Hit Next. SelectAll and then finish. Run should do it now! (thanks to: http://www.ffseven.com/faq.php).

After that you might want to save the database... I don't know if you have to but it worked for me. From here on out you can run FF7.exe by clicking on it and it will work. I don't know about the High Res Patch or the Sound Replacement projects I will be trying those later.

Usefull Links:
This is were the settings for the ACT came from.
Get All (most of) the patches here

Files:

The_SaiNt_High_Res_FF7PC_Patcher.7z (I had problems with alot of the distributions out there ... this one works)
act30pkg.7z ~ managed to pull this off a Russian tech help site... heres the download without the Russian

OH AND ONE OTHER THING:

Stay away from the XP patch... it's a hack of 2 different fan patches and it was done without permission, it has also been known to cause problems with midi playback.

Vampire The Masqurade ~ Redemption (on windows 2000)

OK, here goes! The Activision web site says you have to use a replacement .ins (setup.7z below) file and copy the setup directory from the first disk to your hard drive. Go ahead and follow those directions. THEN, what you need to do is download the modded registry files below and run that. You should then be able to patch the game's files and go from there. PLEASE NOTE, you may have to edit the .reg file to your system settings in the notepad before installing it or the patch wont work AND the game won't run. Pay special attention to Drive letters... if you install to C:\ then leave it the way it is but for certain, unless your CD drive letter is E:, your gonna have to change that. YOU WILL RUN INTO A LARGE NUMBER OF ERRORS while installing, this is OK as far as I can tell you just click through them. The game runs splendidly at 1024x768 32bit color; with all the settings at there highest levels, on the presario 2100. Better than i remember it running on my first athalon (733mhz).

Files:
vtmreg.7z - Modded Registry file
setup.7z
VampirePatch.7z

Radion IGP 320M

Boy, and i thought getting my IDE cards working right under win2k would suck.

TURNS OUT... GART support is NOT included with the Compaq drivers for the Compaq presario 2100... Well you can download the drivers from ATI, and then install them... i would suggest you do that before you install the drivers... or you might have to reinstall the drivers ... lol anyways the Machine supports AGP, the drivers work in PCI mode but MUCH better when you can enable 4x agp. I have the omega 3.8.252 drivers installed (the newest version that works right) and the newest GART drivers from ATI.

Below is a modded GART driver... and the IGP 320M Omega Drivers.

rad_w2kxp_omega_38252.7z
Radion IGP 320M modded GART drivers.7z

Bash head Here X....

OK so it's 7:53 at night and I'm reinstalling the computer... YES AGAIN! I've had it with Vista, and everything it stands for! I'm putting win2k back on and it's staying till something else comes along that's WAY more reliable. I went to win2k with the laptop about a week ago and i found myself doing WAY more than i wanted to do with the lap top, and it's slower and has less memory!!! well, anyway enough about that rant, on to something more my style... I have a question. How come you have to Reboot windows 30 or 40 times to reinstall something.... and were not just talking windows 2000 but even vista, you make the slightest system change and BAM! your rebooting your machine. I just think Micro$oft has been in the operating system business with PCs since what, 1983? perhaps earlier... here we are 2007, and ... Please wait wile we reboot your computer because you made a two character change to this configuration file. WTF? anybody who's been around to the other side of the block knows you almost NEVER have to reboot a mac or a Linux box for that matter. So what gives? is it just laziness or, no competition that drives this. Micro$oft seems to be so good at stealing open source software and getting away with it *Ehehm... Qteee ... eh, cough cough* sorry just clearing my thought; perhaps they should steal a few software engineers from the other camp to show them how to write a kernel better, or better yet; take a stand, realize that there platform is out of date, and stop perpetuating compatibility with older platforms at the cost of performance, reliability and system security. But what do I know, I'm just a cable guy. See you all on the flip side.