Last week I read on SlickDeals that InvisibleSHIELD had a 50% off sale and free shipping promotion going on. I’ve heard many positive reviews on this product and decided to give it a try. Hey, for $12 shipped you can’t go wrong. 
I’ve been getting tired of my military grade Sprint case because of its bulk. After installing it I must say this product is impressive so far. It’s nice not having to worry about scratching up my shiny new phone anymore. The film is very thick and looks impenetrable by anything other than a knife. Installation took over an hour and wasn’t easy because of the small peices. Apparently over the next few days the film will get tighter and I’ve already noticed the micro air bubbles slowly going away. Check out my install pics below: Read more…
After about 18 months of use, my stock Sony VAIO SZ460N battery started showing signs of wear. To Sony’s credit, I am very impressed as the wear is very minimal – maybe 5 – 10% less capacity. I was browsing ebay and found a 7200mah extended battery for $55.61 plus $12.99 shipping, which is incredible considering the OEM version of this same battery sells for $265 on Amazon. It was an obvious decision. Read more…
Those complaining about a laggy interface on their HTC Touch Pro / Fuze will be delighted to know that there is a fix that will make it feel much snappier (especially TF3D). Apparently by default the device is set not to use hardware acceleration through the built in ATI Imageon processor. Instead it uses the normal CPU for these types of processes. Enabling the ATI hardware is as easy as modifying a registry entry to point to the ATI driver and rebooting, or you can install the cab over at xda-developers.com.
According to the thread, this cab makes the following registry modification:
HKLM/System/D3DM/Drivers/LocalHook
Replace the original value 'D3DMXSx50PB.dll" to "d3dm_ati.dll"
The best way to test if the driver is working is to use the Diamond VR Hologram App on the first page of the thread. A successful install will yield 20 – 25 FPS in the app.
UPDATE 1/7/09: For those looking for the CAB install file, I have uploaded it here:
diamond-ati-d3d-driver.cab
(save to your phone and open with File Explorer to install.)
If you have any questions, please post in here and I will try my best to help!
It feels like only yesterday when the nVidia 8800GT was making headlines and breaking all sorts of records as the most insane card ever. At $300 for the XFX OC’ed edition, I was lucky to even get my hands on one back then. Now a year later, the 8800GT is old news and is really only desired for SLI applications. Albeit, while it’s still blazing fast, it’s eclipse by the new GTX series by nVidia. Read more…
As of late I’ve been researching BD players (again) and going down the “PS3 or X/Y/Z standalone player?” road. A year ago the no-IR problem really irked me so I stopped looking at the PS3 since my whole home theater is controlled via Harmony. This week I started researching the PS3 in depth again and found a few reliable IR solutions for those with universal remotes. Coupled with the latest firmware, you can now do pretty much everything but turn the unit on from a $20 IR USB receiver. What led me back to the PS3 was that standalone BD players are STILL overpriced and under-equipped. I have a 1.5 year old AV receiver that does not decode DTS-HD, DTS-MA, DD True-HD. Finding a standalone BD player that decodes and sends it via LPCM is still an expensive proposition. Only a few do it and they are all ~$600 – $1500. After all this time, the PS3 is still the smartest choice for a BD player on the wallet. It’s also the most future proof. It would suck to have been one of the guys that pent $600 of a BD player only to now have to buy a new one to support BD Live. All these future features are only a firmware update away on the PS3 – even new sound codecs can be added via firmware since it decodes and sends them via PCM.
The way I look at it, for the price, the PS3 is the best BD player around that also gives you a free gaming console.