Trip to Akshardham

I am just back from a trip to the beautiful Akshardham temple in Delhi. For some reason, cameras aren't allowed inside so no pix I am afraid :(

1. Park inside the complex - charges are Rs. 20/- Only one person can go into the parking lot and mobile phones are not allowed in the complex, so its best if everyone gathers at the enquiry desk. Alos, you can buy a guide for Rs. 5/- at the enquiry desk, it really comes handy
2. Once inside you can buy tickets to the three shows - Sahajanand Darshan, Neelkanth Darshan, Sanskruti Vihar for Rs. 120/- per adult. The shows take 1 hr 15 min total, waiting time outside should be approx 15 min if you go for the Hindi version; an English show with very few patrons occurs, but only once an hour
3. There is a nice pure-veg Premavati Food Court inside that is nothing short of being a food factory - even Dosas are delivered JIT - order and takeaway within 20s
4. There's an Abhishek Mandapam where you can offer prayers, also a souvenir shop where you can buy stuff
5. There are musical fountains at 6:15 PM (Rs. 20/- per adult sold separately). Other attractions are a nice garden with displays of prominent freedom fighters and Indians in history, as well as a lotus shaped lawn.
   

The main temple complex is beautifully decorated and architected with marble interiors and red sandstone exteriors. There are intricate carvings on the interior and exterior walls, modelled on the Konark temple, minus the erotic carvings of course :) One difference is that the Konark artisans didnt leave any emtpy patches, these guys do leave occasional small ones. The carvings on the roof reminded me of the Jain temple at Ranakpur, very details and multi-layered, particularly on the inside of the domes.

Overall, the entire trip takes something like 6 hours on a weekday when the temple is empty. Its a must see place but only on weekdays when its less crowded. BTW, for some reason "Drunkards" are listed as banned items, so dont tell these people you drink (if you do :) ) There are also anti-war and pro-vegetarianism displays inside, so be prepared to be assaulted by that too :)

Trip to Sultanpur Sanctuary

Well I am back from my one day trip to Sultanpur is over and I am back in Delhi. Pix are up, you can see them here.Overall, the place and environment is really amazing, you get to see a ton of birds easily, its a really cool place to spend a day... if you can get to it. The road to reach it is a living nightmare. HUDA certainly lives up to their name :) My City's bottom scraped the road like 6 times due to potholes, and I was driving really carefully.

Today I also completed my pre-order of the 5800 - you pay Rs. 2000/- and get the 5800 in first week January '09 for Rs. 20k. As a gift to those pre-ordering, Nokia is giving a discount of Rs. 2k on the phone (er... I am not too sure of this, I might have to end up paying 20k more at delivery, meaing no discount, including booking amount :P), also they are bundliing a pair of Sennheiser LX 90 earphones for only Rs. 600/- as opposed to the "list price" of Rs. 4k ($80) Before you get all excited, Amazon UK is already selling them for £6, which comes to approx Rs. 420/- anyway. Prices in Amazon US are higher ($48 i.e. ~Rs. 2300/-), if it makes you feel better...

Still, with or without freebies, you do get the handset early. Clubbed with my 8 GB 2nd Gen iPod Touch (Rs. 12k in Pallika), I get way more features and storage (16 GB total across both devices) than an 8 GB iPhone 3G, a handset that is not locked to any provider at a total cost equal to a 8GB iPhone 3G (Rs. 32k in India), making for a really good deal. The last date for the pre-order is 31st Dec BTW. (Thank god I didn't buy that Xbox 360 - I would be bankrupt next month if I had)

Secure Passwords Howto

Lifehacker has some interesting tips on how to secure your EMail from hackers. The main tips are choose a better password and obfuscate the answer to security question (which is often the weakest link in the chain)

Alternately, you could use a password manager like KeePass, in which case, you can use Dropbox to sync the password manager across computers, essentially acting as a single sign on application. Another option along the same lines is to use VeriSign's Personal Identity Portal, where you sign in to just the PIP and then it sign you in to all your websites.

I am off to Sultanpur National Park tomorrow, pix soon :) Lets hope getting there is easy... Also, I just found out (from an ad on MapMyIndia of all places!) that people in India can "pre-book" a Nokia 5800 here :)

Lstly, while we are talking about security and stuff, this shows how easy it is to bypass country based IP filters...

Desktop Customization Guide

I am a hardcore Windows XP user. While I have quite a bit of knowledge of Linux, compared to Linux, XP "just works". However, the OS's UI looks rather dated. While there is a Royale Noir theme you can download to make eveything look dark (and Office 2007 can also be made to use a dark theme), its still just some colors added on top of an otherwise bland OS.

For quite some time I have used WindowsBlinds along with Vista Transformation Pack to make my XP machine look like Vista. However, now there are quite a few new options.Also, thanks to the now dead Alky project, it is possible to install the Vista sidebar in Windows XP.

I have two monitors set up on my machine; well I have a LCD TV that acts like a monitor :) I actually don't generally use multi-monitor wallpaper. Instead, I grab images from APOD and set one as background and add the other one as a web item on the desktop - another thing removed from Vista... However, there are some good places on the web to find multi-monitor wallpaper (socwall's my favorite) BTW, any wallpaper or image you download is not going to look good unless your monitor is properly caliberated. I suggest Calibrize or Online Monitor Test. Also, I would recommend turning on Firefox's color management setting.

Lastly, some weird stuff - it seems cutting a white ping pong ball in half, covering your eyes with it and playing white noise on headphones will make you hallucinate :)

Christmas and Gaming

Merry Christmas everyone! Well I have had a very nice Christmas - for some reason, today of all days, the crazy guys at Pallika agreed to swap three old games for three new ones for just Rs. 900/- (I swapped out Assassin's Creed, The Darkness and Devil May Cry 4 for Siren: Blood Curses, Dead Space and Ninja Gaiden Sigma)

I am planning to buy an XBox sometime, but with the new Jasper motherboards just out, having 256 MB of onboard storage and a much lower power usage, buying the old 20/40 GB Falcon (or god forbid is it Zephyr?) model XBoxes that Pallika people are selling right now seems like a bad idea. Also, the ones they are selling dont have NXE installed on them. NXE allows XBox games to be fully installed to HDD. Here is a list of the advantages this brings to some games and how much space is required. This does mean I will lose out on M$'s "Buy an XBox Live Gold membership before Jan 1, get a free game" offer... BTW, did you know the 360 can write its own blog?

Square has released a (not) Final Fantasy game for the iPhone - Crystal Defenders, basically a tower defense game with characters from different FF games in place of actual towers. Its ok if you like that kind of game, not for me though (definitely not at 8 USD). Not that there is a dearth of good games on the iPhone.

I stumbled upon an Indian gaming community recently; its really nice to see fellow desis talk about gaming :) Also, Nokia's N-Gage platform seems to have somehow produced a winner - Reset Generation (also playable in-browser for free) Alas - there is no N-Gage on the 5800

My office is shut down till the 5th, so I will probably have a lot of free time on my hands :) I am off to Dharamsala in early Jan, will probably go to some places nearby/in Delhi before that.

Update 12/26/2008 - Kotaku has just released (via MTV. via Metacritic) the 10 best and worst games of 2008. In a strange dichotomy, 7 of the best games are Playstation games (but not exclusives) and 7 of the worst games are Wii exclusives (ya, I know its wrong to club PS2/PS3/PSP and not club Wii and DS, but hey - this is not a ranking :) )

Ultimate MPlayer Config

MPlayer is an extremely versatile and powerful player that can be used to play just about any type of file. What many people don't know is that it also has a lot of other configuration settings that can be used to improve the playback experience a lot.

So here is a list of settings that I have found to be useful with MPlayer (Only for Windows). Edit the file <mplayer folder>\mplayer\config to use these. Anything after # is a comment

idx=yes            # Index broken files
vo=directx        # Render Via DirectX
double=yes        # Enable Double Buffering
dr=yes            # Enable Direct Rendering
ao=dsound        # Audio out via Directsound, earlier was win32
fixed-vo=yes        # Attempts to prevent reopening a windows for each file
quiet=yes        # Shuts Up Mplayer :) Windows Console is slow, so needed
really-quiet=yes    # Even quiter
#ffactor=10        # Draw outline around the OSD font   
subfont-autoscale=1    # Scale font as per movie height and not as per diagonal
subfont-text-scale=10    # Use 10% of movie size for subtitles
#osdlevel=1        # By default start with Volume and Seek OSD enabled
priority=abovenormal    # Start mplayer with abovenormal priority
framedrop=yes        # Drop frames in case of heavy CPU
autoq=100        # Automatically turn off pp filters at high CPU
vf=eq,pp=de/-al,hqdn3d    # eq = Brightness and Contrast
        # pp=de/-al Default postprocessing without Brightness/Contrast
        # High quality denoise filter
af=volume=10        # Make sounds louder. This is in dB
        # Max 60 dB = 1000 times the normal sound level
autosync=30        # Use if movie has framerate issues due to A/V sync
mc=0.2            # Maximum A/V sync corrections per fame
a52drc=1        # Adjust volume differences
dvd-device=d:        # Device from which DVD movies play
monitoraspect="4:3"    # Sets the aspect ratio of the monitor.
        # "85:48" For 1360:768 (~16:9)
        # Setting to 4:3 forces "square" movies to stretch and fill the screen
#adapter=0        # Sets which monitor to show the video on. 0 = current default
        # This is useful for multi-monitor systems where one montor is default
        # and want the video to show on the other one.
sid=0            # Subtitles to use
#aid=1            # Audio to use - useful in files with multiple audio sources

Additionally, the file input.conf in the same folder is useful to set up keyboard shortcuts. For e.g, I like using the [ and ] keys for small movements in the movie forward and backward. This is done by adding the following to input.conf:

] seek +3
[ seek -3

Once you start using MPlayer's shortcuts, any other player feels really kludgy. BTW, while mplayer also comes with a built in encoding utility (mencoder), I would recommend you use the tips given here to use VLC to do a lot of interesting things with your media.

Sony Shares Drop - Outlook Bleak

Looks like the fallout from Sony's November sales figures is not yet done. CNN Money out saying that the PS3 and Blu-Ray are a sinking ship. This was followed by Credit Suisse and Deutsche Bank lowering Sony's rating, causing a drop in shares. Sony is going to lay off approximately 16000 employees this year, 8000 regular staffers and 8000 contractors and part time. While some news outlets did support Sony, overall outlook looks bleak.

The PS3 has been something of a tragedy for Sony - managing to wipe out its dominance of the gaming console market and severely eroding consumer confidence in the company. A look at the comments here on this same news item is indicative of people's mood towards the company.

I myself am a RPG gamer. Considering the PlayStation brand's traditional strength in RPGs, I bought a PS3 and faced a continous string of disappointments. In the end exclusives sell consoles; the PS3 seems to excel at losing them. What's even more disturbing is that when Sony does release exclusives, even high profile ones, the sales are disappointing. Sony seems to have lost the will to succeed; they need to overcome this hubris and get their act together.

I recently bought a couple of games from retailers outside India and had them shipped in - Valkyria Chronicles from ShopTo.net and Disgaea 3 from Play-Asia.com. Amazingly, it was cheaper to buy them from abroad than to buy them in India. Sellers on EBay sell them for as much as Rs 4000 each while you can get them from UK/Hong Kong for around Rs 2500 each. The experience wasnt very smooth - ShopTo delivered the game in 7 days while Play-Asia lived up to the notoriety it has earned of late and took 21 days for delivery.

When you buy a PS3 the Pallika bazaar people will tell you that you can swap a game for Rs 500. When you go to swap it, they will say your game has fallen in value while the new one costs Rs 4000 and ask for Rs 3000 to swap a game that can be shipped form UK for Rs. 2500

Sony provides lackluster support, refuses to repair imported consoles and doesnt bring most games to India at all. There is no Indian PSN store and due to Sony's agreements with MPAA they continue to make it nearly impossible for people to buy games from other region PSN stores while giving ridiculous excuses such as that internet speed in India is too low.

If you go to buy a Blu Ray movie, you will soon realise that Blu Ray movies are region coded and the PS3 is also region locked for movies. Meaning if you buy a Blu Ray movie in India, it will not play on your imported console. Of course, with the Blu Ray of the Dark Knight costing thrice as much as the DVD, I am not sure why I would buy it in the first place. DVDs look good enough on my 32 inch LCD; I am sure many other people feel the same - ergo Blu Ray's lackluster sales.

I strongly advise people to stay away from PS3 if you live in India. Meanwhile I have been told that I can sell the PS3 back in Pallika for 12k. I am tempted to do that, lets see... I am defnintely buying an Xbox soon...

iTunes tips and tricks

I recently bought a second generation iPod Touch, mainly for the app store or rather, the games in it :) Check out a list of the better ones here... I already bought a copy of Vay and have 40 or so downloaded applications (all free ones though) Some apps (Google Earth) are only on the US iTunes store (also you cant download Album Art or use Genius Playlists from the India store) Its not hard to get into the US iTunes store though...

This is a 2nd Generation iPod Touch, so can't be used with third part tools, cant be jailbroken but has an internal speaker, external volume controls, microphone capability and a faster processor.

Over the years, I have gathered a fairly large collection of music, most (all?) of which has no id3 tags, is unsorted and has no album art. Now this doesn't seem to work well with iTunes at all, which for some reason refuses to display folders. So, some tips:

1. Tag as much of your library and sort it out into folder by artist. One of the best tools for this is MusicBrainz Picard. This amazing app can group your tracks into an album using what little information is available, identify your tracks using their accoustic fingerprinting if all else fails and even download cover art using plugins.
2. The iPod touch can be used to rate songs in album view mode. If you have your iPod set to manual synch, your ratings will not get copied over to your iTunes library. You can download a nice script to do this for you here.
3. Use smart playlists judiciously (there is a nice sample set here). I suggest creating one on the iPod Touch to contain all your unrated songs. Then at synch time, use the recently played playlist to rate the songs on your iPod from iTunes itself.
4. You can set the play order of the songs in a genius playlist to match the sort order in iTunes using the "Copy to Play Order" command.
5. Pressing Home and Power together will take a screenshot
   

Check out some other tricks here. BTW, if you ever need to move your iTunes libray (to say another machine), there are a few guides here and there but the best one I found till now is here.

I have just seen Rab Ne Bana Di Jodi, and the movie, while good, is something of an exercise in sado-masochism (sort of helpless masochism for Shahrukh's character and sadism to us for watching and enjoying it)

Update 12/24/2008: Here's a guide on how to turn any MP3 into a iTunes Audiobook

Configuring port forwarding for your PS3

I have a WRT54g v7 and using it with a PS3 is a pain - the router restarts every time you show the XMB, exit a game or for just about any other reason. The only solution is to disable UPnP; since the PS3 needs incoming connections on certain ports, this seems to cause some probems for it. Until recently, I used a horrible ISP that had a transparent proxy in front of my internet connection - meaning I couldnt get any incoming connections in the first place. Also, I use the excellent Ps3 Proxy Server to download games/demos to my computer and then install them on the PS3 via the LAN; till date I have yet to run into any problems with the PS3's network connection

Now however, I have switched to Airtel Broadband, which means, port forwarding is actually useful. So I made my Wireless Router a DMZ machine in the ADSL modem. Then I decided to find out the ports that PS3 needs.

The list is massive and seemingly publisher dependent.

All games published by Sony Computer Entertainment America (SCEA)may use the following ports for communication with the game servers:

• TCP Ports: 80, 443, 5223, and 10070 - 10080
• UDP Ports: 3478, 3479, 3658, and 10070

For the PLAYSTATION®Network:

• TCP Ports: 80, 443, 5223

• UDP Ports: 3478, 3479, 3658

PLAYSTATION®3 Remote Play (via the Internet) requires:
• If the router in use supports UPnP, enable the router’s UPnP function.
• If the router does not support UPnP, you must set the router’s port forwarding to allow communications to the PLAYSTATION®3 computer entertainment system from the Internet.
• The port number that is used by remote play is TCP Port: 9293

For headset operation, such as USB or BluetoothTM headsets:

SOCOM and SOCOM II U.S. Navy SEALs, along with some other 1st party online sports titles require the following ports for voice chat:
• UDP Ports: 6000 - 6999, 10070

SOCOM 3: U.S. Navy SEALs requires the following ports:
• TCP Port: 80
• UDP Ports: 6000 - 7000, 50000

Syphon Filter: The Omega Strain uses the following port to connect to the game server:
• TCP Port: 3658

PlayOnline and Final Fantasy XI uses the following ports for various functions:
• TCP Ports: 25, 80, 110, 443, and 50000 - 65535
• UDP Ports: 50000 - 65535

Note: Please make sure to enable these TCP/UDP ports in BOTH directions.

Jeez! Port 80 AND 443 incoming? What are you guys doing? One guy on the internet recommended his internet settings

These should work, either that or I put the PS3 in a DMZ on my Wireless router.

BTW, do you know those Airtel ADSL modems are running Linux and you can telnet into them? Also, its surprisingly easy to spoof your MAC address on Windows, meaning you shouldnt rely on MAC filtering for security. The registry hack BTW, (HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Class\{4D36E972-E325-11CE-BFC1-08002BE10318}) works even on devices which seeming dont expose the MAC spoofing option...

Washington Times Swinging at Sony

M$ recently dropped the price of its console to $199. Sony of course, has announced they have no plans to drop price anytime soon - they have to think of their shareholders...

In the current economy, this is hara-kiri. Sales figures support this - in November M$ sold more than twice as many Xbox 360s as Sony sold PS3s. What is even more disturbing is that out of all 3 consoles, it is the only one which showed a decrease in sales since last year.

This of course goes to prove that placing customers behind shareholders never works as a strategy; alas Sony as a company seems too arrogant, stupid or maybe lacking the will to do what it takes to make their brand a success.

These particular numbers seem to have drawn interesting reactions out of - the Washington Post. (Yes, that says "Sabotaging the Sony Playstation 3 market?") Some excerpts:

XBox 360 has made serious inroads by dropping the price of its core system to $199. So how did Sony respond?

By releasing a new version of the PS3 ... that's $100 more expensive. Yes, it comes with a game, and yes, it has more hard-drive space, to which I respond: Who cares? Was the marketplace clamoring for more memory from the PS3? Is that why its market penetration is so low compared to its predecessors and competition? What were the Sony execs thinking?

Ouch - that's gotta hurt. Read some comments here.

Yahoo Launchcast to Shut Down

I have been a Yahoo Launch subscriber for 4 years. Over the years, my station has grown to 1000+ artists and 5000+ songs. It has helped me find new artists (it seems I am a big fan of celtic music) although for some reason, just saying country music is OK leads to it playing more and more country music... sigh. There were also other annoyances - it wouldn't play in Firefox because of weird 1990s era code...

Now it seems it is going to shut down. The service will nominally still be there, but the paid Launchcast Plus with customized stations will go away. Sigh... so now its off to Last.FM or possibly I am going to discover music on another social music site and download it to my new iPod Touch. I am not sure if I really want to listen to streaming music anymore - particularly with Yahoo threatening to shut down without providing me with any way download my 8000+ ratings. This is one of the risks of storing your data in the cloud - the company associated may shut down or just decide to lock you out of your own data, with a heavily one-sided EULA leaving you little hope of getting any access to it.

Whether this had anything to do with the recent SoundExchange decision is unknown but its highly likely Sony and its cohorts have managed to trample on another popular service for the sake of shareholders.

I used four Yahoo services - Flickr, Yahoo Mail, Yahoo 360 and Yahoo Launch. Two of them - Launch and 360 are shutting down. I had given up on Yahoo 360 long ago (seen my public page's URL in the link above? brilliant... sheerly brilliant... and they expected people to use that URL to share that page with their friends) and moved, first to JRoller and then to here.

Flickr is basically useless with a free account (most people that I know who are not serious photographers no longer use it to share photos - they use Picasa instead) and I would be rid of Yahoo mail ASAP if it would let me POP mail. I still use the classic user interface (a webapp should act like a webapp, not do faux AJAX stuff that brings the browser to its knees) and no I am NOT paying you to be rid of you.

I wonder what that says about Yahoo as a company...

Gadget Problems

I am facing a couple of strange problems with my gadgets - first of all my newly bought iPod Touch is refusing to update play counts of songs. A fix has been suggested, but I don't have the heart to reset all my settings just so that "Recently Played" can start working. Funny thing is, songs on the iPod show up with the correctl play time in iTunes (when I sync) but when I look at the same thing in the iPod, its off. Here's to hoping Apple fixes this in a firmware upgrade soon...

My second problem is with the PS3 - having finally found something worth buying on PSN, I promptly find that my money is not good enough for Sony - they refuse to take your credit card if you live outside the US. Earlier they used to take Entropay cards, but since they launched the movie store they have started blocking it... No way the MPAA is going to let a bunch of filthy non-Americans get their hands on their IP!

In all fairness, M$ also does this on their XBox store, but they actually have an Indian XBox online store so you can still buy games - currently as far Indians are concerned, Sony's PSN is as good as saying "Live in India? Bought a PS3? Ha Ha! Sucker!!" (Ya - me!) India has always sucked if you are a gamer, but this is the first time I have ever been made to feel a resident of a 3rd world country by a company - "No Sir! Your kind can't buy my goods - No way, no how!" Its OK Sony - lesson learnt; if you don't want my money, I am just going to spend it elsewhere...

There are still some options - buy a $20 PSN card for $25 on EBay for example and hope nothing goes wrong... Of course they may still start looking at the console region before letting you log in to PSN or use a PSN card... Sony has to think of their shareholders you see...

Youtube to get full length movies and TV episodes

A couple of nice announcements: Youtube is set to get free full length episodes of Star Trek (the original series) and full length movies from MGM (bulletproof monk anyone? anyone?)

Not sure if these will be region locked like just about every other online multimedia site that hosts licensed content - but hopefully, Google will be able to resist the MPAA/RIAA clowns... at least, Youtube still shows music videos to everyone...

There are some workarounds for that too of course :) (BTW, there's a rant coming on this related to my favorite consumer electronic goods company soon... I was just so angry last weekend that I am waiting to cool down a bit before I end up sounding like a raving lunatic)

HTTPS Indicator in Firefox 3

A lot of people have complained about Firefox 3's address bar no longer being yellow when HTTPS is being used.

Some have even posted workarounds using GreaseMonkey or by modifying userChrome.css

I am sure you have noticed the brilliant green color which comes on when viewing certain HTTPS sites for one example see here. This is used to identify sites that have gone in for Extended Validation - i.e. someone has verified that the company which owns the site actually exists. Only companies/organizations can get this certification.

If you look carefully at the HTTPS version compared with a non-https site, you can see that the Favicon (the small icon next to the URL with the site's logo) has a blue border when compared with a non-https site. (Non-HTTPS below, see the first image for a HTTPS favicon)

This of course is not much of an indicator and indeed, can be easily spoofed. However, in typical Firefox fashion, there is a setting that can be enabled - browser.identity.ssl_domain_display, which will make Firefox show HTTPS based sites very differently.
With a value of 1, it will show the site's top level domain name (mozilla.org out of addons.mozilla.org) highlighted.

With a value of 2, it will show the full domain name (addons.mozilla.org) highlighted.

I feel the value of 2 takes up too much screen space. But with the value set to 1, this is absolutely awesome. Supposedly, it was not turned on in Firefox 3 by default as it looks to similar to EV (particularly to color blind people) but I still feel a visual indicator such as this is a must have...

Adding to my tweak guide too!

Sony on PS3 - We have to think of shareholders not customers

Wow... Just wow... I am left speechless with this one...

Why No PS3 Holiday Price Cut? Sony Running A Business, Thinking of Shareholders

"Well the pressure comes from the consumers obviously and so therefore there's always pressure on price, but you know we have a business to run, and we have to make sure we're doing the right thing for the shareholders as well... At the moment there's a marketplace for PS3 and I think for this particular Christmas, with the kind of quality of games we're seeing coming out this Christmas, I don't think the price of the console is going to be an issue at all."

Well... I always thought normal business sense says you should think of customers, but of course, Sony is special. (This started my ranting, BTW) With the economy in the state it is, I doubt Sony will be beating even the Xbox this christmas... They seem to have totally given up now...

In other news, I just updated my PS3 to firmware 2.50. I also got my first trophy and if you see my portable ID, you can ... oh wait you cant... forget it.

Trip to Karnataka

Pix from my trip to Karnataka - Bangalore, Mysore and nearby places are now up. Here's a slideshow...

Xbox India Buying Guide

The Rs. 14990/- Xbox offer is finally on. For this, you get a Xbox 360 Core and 2 free games - Viva Pinata and Forza Motorsport. Since the import duty on consoles in India is 33% - 50%, it seems M$ is getting rid of the old backlog stock and setting the stage for introducing the Arcade version in India ($200 + 50% ~ Rs. 14,500/- at current rates) to replace Core which has been discontinued all over the rest of the world.

I went out this weekend to buy an Xbox and came back empty handed. The deal breaker was the hard disk. The cheaper version (Core - Rs. 15k) doesn't have it and I was not mentally prepared to buy the more expensive version (Premium - Rs. 24k) considering its price. So why exactly do we need a Xbox hard disk?

Firstly, the upcoming New Xbox Experience will require at least 128 MB of storage space, meaning the 64 MB memory cards currently being sold will not be enough to even support the update. On the other hand, the price of a 256 MB memory card (which is not even sold in India) is I am sure going to be quite high enough that it would better if you bought the hard disk model, considering the other free stuff that comes with it. (64 MB sells for Rs. 2k+ and 20 GB HDD for 6k+)

Secondly, Microsoft themselves have a list put up which (indirectly) shows the advantages of a hard disk. In a nutshell, you need storage for:

1. Saving games :)
   
2. Play original Xbox games (needs HDD - not Memory Card)
3. Saving media, music, downloaded games etc to the console
4. Play online with Xbox Live - Gold or Silver
   
5. Voice chat etc
   

With all these features using storage space, add NXE and suddenly the hard disk seems much more valuable.

Additionally, right now there is a hilarious situation with several retailers where they have Core consoles but no memory cards - meaning if you take the console home, you cant save games on it! I asked one dealer (EZone at Hometown in Great India Place, Noida) about this and he says, "yes sir, you cannot turn off the power"...

In fact, even the Pro versions currently being sold in India do not have an HDMI port, so they are still selling the older motherboards here - not surprising considering the pathetic sales here :) If you see try to call the official Xbox dealer list (for India), half of them have stopped selling Xbox anymore...

Yet if you go to Palika Bazaar, you can see Xboxes (and games) being sold left and right. I dont know what %age of them are modchipped, but considering that the modchipped version is cheaper and does have the HDMI port, I imagine its quite high. Its an interesting quandary where the console grey market is concerned for Xbox and PS3. PS3 has no modchip, so there is little other than immediate gain in buying a grey market piece. Xbox does have a modchip but the thingie fails so frequently that you would be insance to get one without a warranty. Although, grey market dealers do claim they can repair both PS3 and Xbox :)

Overall, my advice, if you are willing to take a bit of risk, the grey market one is a good option. Buy it soon before the Rupee falls against the Dollar any more. If you want an original one, wait a while till the Arcade version and the Pro ones with the new motherboards (with HDMI ports) are launched. The value for money is much more with that...

On the PS3 front, here's something interesting - Sony which was earlier claiming that PS3 will have a 10 year life span, is now seemingly getting prepared to throw in the towel for this generation and launch the PS4 in 2011. Also, another website has published an analysis of the RPG situation for PS3 vis-a-vis Xbox so I am definitely not the only one facing this issue :)

Ubiquity and Firefox

I have recently found an extremely cool extension for Firefox, called Ubiquity. This is like Launchy for Firefox - select something and you can mail it, translate it, map it - a whole lot of stuff. Just open the control window and you do quick Google/Wikipedia searches, find definitions of unknown terms, all without losing context of the page you have open.

New commands can be found from the herd. Lifeacker seems to have fallen in love with this - every few days, there is another tutorial on what you can do with Ubiquity.

Head over to the Ubiquity User Tutorial to install it. Word of advice - its still a bit buggy, occasionally throwing up an error message that is always on top and requires you to kill the browser from the task manager to get rid of it (which means that when you next open Firefox, it force reloads ALL tabs)(Fixed in 0.1.1). An updated version (0.1.1) is available, you may have to check for updates in Add-Ons to find it after installing the base version (0.1)...

However, once you see the sheer value Ubiquity provides, I dont think you will be able to live without it :)

By the way, Tab Mix Plus has gone stable and can now be downloaded from AMO. However, if you are using Widefox, you will still need to update the jar to make it work with 0.3.7...

Trip to Jim Corbett

The pix are now up :)

Here's a slideshow...

PS3 vs Xbox 360 - The RPG Shootout

Wow... Its been a month since my last post. I have had a busy month at work, and went to Jim Corbett National Park over one weekend (pix up soon, you can see some here)

In the meantime, Diwali is coming up and I am awaiting M$'s offers if any on the XBox 360. Meanwhile I have finished DMC 4 on my PS3 and having gotten a little annoyed with the all the action games which seem to be the only thing available for the system, decided to look a bit into the state of RPGs on the PS3

The result of this research is the table below. Sorted by release date, the table below shows both released and announced (i.e. yet to be released) RPG games color coded by console (information courtesy GameSpot - take the review scores with a pinch of salt accordingly). Green - PS3 exclusive. Red - XBox 360 Exclusive. Black - Both

Title	Release Date	Score
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion	20-Mar-06	9.6
Enchanted Arms	29-Aug-06	7.1
Marvel: Ultimate Alliance	24-Oct-06	8.3
Phantasy Star Universe	25-Oct-06	6.8
Untold Legends: Dark Kingdom	13-Nov-06	6
Diario: Rebirth Moon Legend	8-Feb-07
The Elder Scrolls IV: Shivering Isles	26-Mar-07	8.6
Absolute: Blazing Infinity	29-Mar-07
Two Worlds	23-Aug-07	7
Blue Dragon	28-Aug-07	6
The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion - Game of the Year Edition	10-Sep-07
Eternal Sonata	17-Sep-07	8.5
Mass Effect	20-Nov-07	8.5
Phantasy Star Universe: Ambition of the Illuminus	20-Nov-07
Kingdom Under Fire: Circle of Doom	8-Jan-08	6
Alpha Protocol	9-Feb-08
Lost Odyssey	12-Feb-08	7.5
Tales of Vesperia	26-Aug-08	8.5
Infinite Undiscovery	2-Sep-08	6.5
Cross Edge	25-Sep-08
Fable II	21-Oct-08
Fallout 3	28-Oct-08
Sacred 2: Fallen Angel	8-Nov
Valkyria Chronicles	11-Nov-08
The Last Remnant	20-Nov-08
Monster Hunter 3	Canceled
Dragon Age: Origins	Q1 2009
Dungeon Hero	Q1 2009
Rise of the Argonauts	Q1 2009
Divinity 2 - Ego Draconis	Q2 2009
Two Worlds: The Temptation	Q2 2009
Dungeon Lords 2 (working title)	Q3 2009
Aliens RPG (working title)	TBA
Angel Rings (working title)	TBA
Big Huge Games RPG (working title)	TBA
Bumpy Trot 2	TBA
Cry On	TBA
Dark RPG (working title)	TBA
Dungeon Explorer	TBA
Elveon	TBA
Far East of Eden Ziria	TBA
Final Fantasy Versus XIII	TBA
Magna Carta 2	TBA
Makai Wars (working title)	TBA
Marvel Ultimate Alliance II: Fusion	TBA
Mass Effect 2 (working title)	TBA
Master Project (working title)	TBA
Omikron 2 (working title)	TBA
Project D	TBA
Shin Megami Tensei (working title)	TBA
The Lord of the Rings, The White Council	TBA
Untitled Obsidian/Sega RPG	TBA
White Knight Story	TBA 2008
Final Fantasy XIII	TBA 2009
Star Ocean: The Last Hope	TBA 2009
Venetica	TBA 2009

The results are shocking - well maybe not so much.
PS3 Exclusives - 13 (14 - 1 : Cancelled)
XBox 360 Exclusives - 22
Non-Exclusive Games - 18 (20 - 2 : Oblivion Editions)

However, lets remove the list of TBA/Q? 200? games and CrossEdge, which is JP only. Now the results are even more telling. This means games with a definite release date by end of this year.
PS3 Exclusives - 2
XBox 360 Exclusives - 12
Non-Exclusive Games - 8 (10 - 2 : Oblivion Editions)

BTW, of the Non-Exclusive Games, Oblivion is listed thrice so I have reduced the number by 2. FF13 VS is currently a PS3 exclusive. How many people want to bet that the big news at E3 next year will be that FF13 VS is coming to XBox 360? Also worth noting is that many of the Non-Exclusive games were released much later on the PS3, some as long as a year later.

No wonder XBox 360 is outselling the PS3 even in Japan... Japan is traditionally an RPG market and even has its own genre - JRPG :) From an RPG gamer perspective, its perfectly clear which console you should be buying :) (Wow I feel good having bought the wrong one!)

p.s. Yes, I know the layout is too narrow. I am using rounders3, but I have customized it - a LOT. I will switch to rounders2 when I get some time!