Anxiously Awaiting

I have been spending copius amounts of my free time–and certain relatively short “bathroom breaks” at work–playing with my new toy: a Playstation Portable. Chang hooked me up with the value pack from Target: $169 for a Silver Slim PSP, a game, a Family Guy UMD, and a 1GB memory stick. The game, Daxter, sucks. I like platformers as much as the next guy, but the cheesy lines all throughout the story make it unplayable. Since Daxter sucked and a PSP without any games is basically a paperweight–oh but what a sexy one–I bought Final Fantasy 1 Anniversary edition. It’s a superb remake of the original, and I’ll review it sometime after I’m finished.

The new slim PSP’s have some advantages over the older “big bertha” PSP’s. First off, they are lighter and slimmer. Before you curse me for stating the obvious you must realize exactly how much ligher and slimmer. The answer is, well, a lot! Chang and I compared his old school PSP to mine, and the slim PSP feels 50% lighter* than the old one and is around 5mm slimmer. Next advantage: a TV out port. It needs a proprietary cable, but still a pretty cool feature. Last and most important is battery life. The slim PSP has a handicap in this area because the battery shipped with it is actually smaller than the original PSP battery, but Sony is going to be shipping backplates for those who wish to use the larger PSP battery with the slimmer system.

I’ll probably stick with the regular old battery. If I’m playing this thing longer than 5-6 hours a day then I probably need to lock it away in a drawer and mail the key to Uganda. It charges via USB so I’ll always have a some sort of charger with me since every portable electronic device I own does the same.

The old PSP’s appear to be built a bit sturdier than the slim ones, but I’m not planning on using mine as a hockey puck any time soon. My new toy should also be able to play nicely with my PS3 creating a combination that is composed strictly of 100% WIN. Any compatible games I download on the PS3 can be transfered to the PSP. Looks like I may need a bigger Memory Stick =D.

*The actual specification is 33% lighter, but human hands are never good judges of weight ;).

I’m back in ATL after a short trip to Cincinnati for work. The trip was fun. I mostly worked, but I did have a little time to walk around Cincinnati with a co-worker. My first impression is that the city is like a gigantic version of Athens Georgia. Every person I met was a Bengals fan to the degree that people in Athens are doggiez fans.

I was scheduled to leave on Tuesday, but I got a message from MGT asking me to hang around another day. I had already checked out of my hotel room, but my co-worker who was in town to do some other testing was lucky enough to get a room with two beds, so I just crashed with him. We flew out Wednesday on the 1:30 flight after we finished up our work earlier that morning.

The flight was awesome because I had the entire row of seats to myself. Apparently not many people fly to ATL from Cincinnati on a Wednesday afternoon. Overall it was a good trip. I like flying places I haven’t been before, and Kentucky/Southern Ohio reminded me of Georgia.

Something I have been meaning to do for a while is figure out how to get my machine to email me my IP address. Behold!

w3m http://www.whatismyip.com -dump | grep "Your IP Is" |
gawk '{print $4}' > /tmp/ip;
 
mailx -s "IP Address" jduv@gatech.edu < /tmp/ip

As usual since the format of my blog makes viewing long scripts difficult make sure the first string of commands is on a single line. The first line points a text based WWW browser called w3m to http://www.whatismyip.com and dumps the contents to a grep call for the string “Your IP Is.” That in turn is piped to gawk for formatting and dumped to a file called ip in the /tmp folder.

Then the next line dumps the contents of that file to a mailx call with a subject of “IP Address” and then mails that to my email address. A cron script and simple filter inside Gmail later, and I have daily updates on what my machine’s IP address is. Forget paying 30 bucks a month for a static IP!