New gadget: Playstation 3

As I happen to be a gadget-lover (Am I? 3 x Nokia N810, 5 x Nokia N800, 5 x Nokia Nokia 770, (okay, most of those aren’t mine but they are Kate’s or actually Nokia’s in the end) couple of computers, cameras, all kinds of stuff), I am happy to announce that we have a new gadget in our household, new gadget now and then keeps one happy:

We were celebrating something (a personal thing that don’t interest you) yesterday with Kate and I had been thought that I would like to have a Blu-Ray player in our home theater to upgrade it to the Full-HD -era from the media source side, so I went and purchased the Playstation 3.

Setting up the device was fairly simple and in few moments it was connected to the video projector through a remote-controlled HDMI-switch and to the home theater amplifier (the older black beast Yamaha DSP-A1 because currently some power amp stages are broken on the DSP-AX1) with optical cable. No problems and the display resolution auto-configured itself on the PS3. Now I plan to go to buy some more Blu-Ray movies today and a second controller for games.

This is the 40GB model of the PS3, but I have a spare 80GB hard drive from my Macbook, that I plan to put to the PS3 (and thus it will become a 80GB model). With 80GB on board, I should be able to put Ubuntu Linux on it as well, would be interesting to see how it runs on the PS3 and if it can take any advantage of the multi-core processor.

I tried yesterday also a DVD in the PS3, and it was interesting to see how much better it looked like with the up-scaler of the PS3 than on the ordinary DVD-player or when played in xine in Linux-based HTPC. Somehow the video scaler was able to invent some missing pixels to the low resolution DVD source (the projector is high definition, so I consider nowadays DVD being a low resolution source which looks dull and unimpressive usually) so that it was almost made to look like a high definition video, some more life for the old DVD-videos too then.

Now I am thinking hard which games should I buy. Call of duty 4 would look quite pretty, but on the other hand, I am not a big fan of shooting/violence/war games. But I might get it just for the graphics. Uncharted: Drake’s fortune looks promising. According to the videos from gamespot.com it looks like a game I might like, but unfortunately it is not yet available and I need to wait for some time.

Our now upgraded kitchen is by the way still without furniture, it has a new floor now, but some finishing touches is missing before the furniture plus new refrigerator can be reinstalled/installed. But that is a good excuse to go out for some Chinese or Thai food!