At first, I really debated and wondered how well something of this nature could work. I will say I was most certainly surprised when they worked as expected. I will honestly say I thought it to be one large gimmick to up sales and rake in a fortune. This is not the case in the slightest.

In terms of gaming will they increase your performance? Well I will say this, if you suck, you’re still going to suck. What the Gunnar’s will allow you to do is suck no worse than you already do over an extended period of time in front of the screen. After a period of time with the joysticks pushed forward and the triggers down, your eyes will not be able to react to situations quite as fast due to the simple idea of fatigue. No one really understands it, no one really understood how to correct it until Gunnar released this fabulous line of products. When your eyes get tired, your game gets worse. You miss that clutch snipe or that blur on your screen was an opponent you couldn’t call out to a teammate because you simply thought your 2nd bag of Pizza Rolls was having an adverse effect on your skills.

You will have to get used to the glasses before you begin to notice a difference, things will seem a bit weird and your eyes will have to focus through a new lens. Though it is well worth the $80 dollars I paid. I highly recommend and suggest the Gunnar Optiks even if you just want to reduce fatigue on your eyes in front of the computer.

You can find the full line of glasses and more information at Gunnar Optiks

Stay tuned next week for my review of KontrolFreek’s FPS sticks.

Here are a few links that I thought would be great to place into my lessons.  Let me know what you think.

http://www.mrnussbaum.com/amflash2.htm

http://www.pbs.org/ktca/liberty/

http://www.civilwarinteractive.com/

http://www.bbc.co.uk/schools/primaryhistory/world_war2/

Believe it or not many of the people in my education courses don’t want to integrate technology in their classroom.  For instance, I brought up the idea of creating a classroom blog, where I would post homework on a daily basis.  Students would be welcome to post questions on the blog, and parents could have easy access to what their students were doing in class.  Half of the people in my class thought it was a horrible idea, because the students would “probably type in ‘text’ talk” and that such a blog would promote poor writing skills.  Yet shouldn’t students be exposed to blogging?  Wouldn’t that be a great tool to have after graduation?

I understand that everything has it’s pro’s and con’s, but I really think that our youth needs as much exposure to technology in order to compete globally.

We still need donations, so please feel free to keep them coming (go to the “Live” page to find the donate button). We still need more hardware and cabling that is just too expensive for our staff members right now.

Once all is said and done, the setup should follow this flowchat exactly. (Click for a larger view)

Once we continue collecting donations, we should be able to purchase the other remaining components and start streaming our HD consoles and even capturing some moments in HD for posting on sites like YouTube.

I will be sure to photo/video document the unboxing and installation of the Intensity Pro card, and let you all know how it works.

There has been some doubt about it working on my X58 architecture board, but some forum goers have said it shouldn’t be an issue. Blackmagic’s official take on it is “not supported” but the retailer I purchased from allows a 30 day grace period for money-back returns. If this setup doesn’t work, there are other (slightly more expensive) solutions we will strive for. I’m fairly certain this should go off without a hitch  though.

It does a good job in the tests I put it through… It’s just a quick install, then you give Rapportive access to your gmail account and it’s off and running indexing content on your contacts. Surely you wouldn’t need this for your most frequent contacts, but when you get other emails from people you’re no so “in touch” with, it helps you become more in touch with them, by listing social networks and other information about them.

At the very LEAST, it’s much more pleasing to the eyes than the gaudy ads that Google serves up, but at the best, it could be an extremely useful communication tool. I can see this being an essential addon for people who do business with others over email. It will allow you to get a quick “at-a-glance” perspective of people, and allow you to quickly and easily check out their social networking accounts.

Pros:

• Quick Install and Authentication.
• Extremely useful information for business partners.

Cons:

• Only supports Chrome/Firefox
• Slow in finding information on a new contact

Other Thoughts:
It’s in it’s early stages, and already a GREAT addon, keep an eye on this, and install it you like the idea at all, you wont regret it.

Overall: Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars

You can download and install Rapprotive here.

• Intel BOXDG45FC LGA 775 Intel G45 Mini ITX Motherboard
• Athena Power AP-MP4ATX55FEP8 550W MicroATX Power Supply
• Intel Core 2 Quad Q8300 Yorkfield 2.5 GHz LGA 775 95W Processor
• G.SKILL 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 800 RAM
• Western Digital Scorpio Black 320GB 7200 RPM 2.5” SATA HDD
• MASSCOOL 80mm Case Fan
• Intensity Pro Capture Unit

Modding this case is going to require one major detail; the ability to easily remove the capturing unit when necessary is a must. Unfortunately right now I don’t have the funds necessary to purchase a SECOND Intensity Pro, so until I do I’m going to have to give myself the option of removing it so I can swap between computers. What will save me a ton in terms of necessary power is the fact I’m going to use Windows XP 64-Bit. This will ensure none of my resources will go to waste. Stay tuned for more info, pictures, and even a time lapse as this project unfolds and takes shape.

Update edit: I decided to drop the DVD ROM and just install my OS once I have the components in hand and remove it, seeing as I have no use for it. Also I updated to a 320 GB HDD as it was only 5 dollars more than the 250 GB. I ran into a dilemma with the height of the card exceeding the height of the XBox casing. Thankfully due to my half brained idea and Corey’s ability to find what I’m talking about, we found a PCI-E x1 extender which will allow me to put the card in horizontally and thus leave the box (for the most part) unmodded. The parts should arrive mid week where I can map my process on how to set this up in a more proficient manner.

We are going to make an attempt to get console games streaming for roughly $50, but it’s really a 50/50 chance if it will work or not. Regardless of if it works or not, we need something called an “Intensity Pro” from Blackmagic Design. It’s an HD capture card that will allow us to feed an HDMI signal straight into my PC, to allow high quality, HD streams over the internet.

We all need your help though. Donations are key in this matter, because the Intensity Pro is $200!

Let me just say that the Intensity Pro would be a WORLD of a difference in terms of quality, and viewer satisfaction.

Right now this is the current setup I have PLANNED (the cheap one)… Which will take my HDMI sources, and hopefully downsample them enough to work with cheap hardware. I have my doubts that this process will be enough though, generally you need a very expensive downscaling box that converts the digital HDMI signal to the analog composite signals.

The converter is simply a cable, and is likely our failing point.

There is another option we will try as well, which is using the AV out on the back of my TV, however I’m not sure that the TV will downscale and convert from digital to analog like that. We may have no choice but to go for the Intensity Pro after this.

I also want to point out that Jacob Wolfrum was nice enough to buy us the equipment we will try to start with before the Intensity Pro, but we need everybody’s help to get us the real professional equipment we need to complete this task.

I’ve reverted back to Leopress, which is how this blog was a while back. I’ve changed up alot of things already, and had Jacob Wolfrum and James Kaczynski II help me on a bit of the CSS for the sidebar… which was the main reason I stopped using this them. Widgets just didn’t want to act properly at all.

I’ve also re-done the Live page, and am starting over on that as well. I’ll try to keep up with streaming sometimes… Although MW2 is taking up most of my time, and I don’t have the technology to stream my XBOX 360 just yet.

Dell OEM Windows 7 Theme

Sure you might argue that their theme is only a background wallpaper, but I wanted to extract the theme entirely rather than just give you a wallpaper.

So really all you need to do is download and extract the theme below to:
%USERPROFILE%AppDataLocalMicrosoftWindowsThemes

You can access this folder by putting it into your location bar, like this, then press enter.

Then right click your desktop, and go to “Personalize” and choose your new Dell theme! It’s that simple.

Dell Theme Selection

Here’s the download link:
Dell_OEM_Windows_7_Theme.zip

Enjoy!

Yesterday, Facebook announced that Facebook Chat now fully supports the XMPP protocol.

This is great news, because we can now all ditch whatever hacked-together methods we were all using to connect to the Facebook Chat service with Pidgin, if you were ever using one. I’ll also cover how to transfer your logs over from the old connection method to the official connection method below.

CLIENT SETUP

1. You’ll first need to go to your Accounts menu, then to Manage Accounts, then choose Add…

2. From here, you need the following settings:

• Protocol: XMPP
• Username: {Your Facebook username, not your email address, to get this you should be able to go to your Facebook homepage, and hover over your “View My Profile” link, it will be http://www.facebook.com/username and you’ll need the username part, and that is all.}
• Domain: chat.facebook.com
• Password: {Your Facebook password}

3. Switch to the Advanced tab, and uncheck “Require SSL/TLS” and check “Allow plaintext auth over unencrypted streams”

4. That’s it, if you were using an old method to connect to Facebook, be sure to remove that account!

LOG TRANSFER

In your Pidgin log directory, usually located at:
%APPDATA%Roaming.purplelogs (Vista/7)
-OR-
%APPDATA%.purplelogs (XP)
unless you set up PURPLEHOME environmental variable (like I did), but if you did this, you should know where they reside… and as for Linux users, you should also know where your log directory is already…

You’ll see some folders in there, with various logs for accounts.
You will have a folder called “facebook” with a “username” directory inside it, and now a new one called “jabber” with a “username@chat.facebook.com” directory inside of it.

In order to transfer the logs, you need to rename all the folders in your “logs/facebook/username” directory from

######
to
u######@chat.facebook.com

and then move them to the “logs/jabber/username@chat.facebook.com” directory.

All your logs should continue to work properly after this.

It’s been quite a few years since I’ve purchased my MacBook.

MacBook 1,1
Model Version 1, Revision 1.

It’s been though hell and back, with a power adapter that lit on fire, a battery going dead, and a (still un-fixed) dead SuperDrive.

I recently realized that I also have the infamous failing hard drive that was shipped in some, but not all, first revision MacBooks. Yay for me!

This has been a known problem since a few weeks after the MacBooks were released, yet Apple still hasn’t issues any sort of official statement, or recall of its failing products.

I was lucky enough to get my power adapter and battery replaced, but that is only because they likely wanted to avoid any legal issues with A CABLE SMOKING AND SPARKING, CAUSING A FIRE IN A COLLEGE CLASSROOM!

I’ve been lucky enough to not have any major problems with this HDD yet, but I now know it’s only a matter of time before it grinds a hole through its top layer of the platter.