Drew Budwin's Blog » Wii http://budw.in A blog about me, the Hokies, or anything Thu, 19 Jan 2012 12:32:46 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v= Review of Blu-Ray Player/Burner http://budw.in/2009/04/19/review-of-blu-ray-playerburner/ http://budw.in/2009/04/19/review-of-blu-ray-playerburner/#comments Sun, 19 Apr 2009 19:06:32 +0000 dbudwin http://budw.in/?p=51

If you’re looking for the perfect Blu-ray player/burner combo, the LG GGW-H20LK is perfect. Newegg currently lists the LG GGW-H20LK at $179.99 with free shipping. I have owned this drive since November and I have had no complaints. True, it isn’t the fastest drive on the market with a Blu-ray BD-ROM read speed of 6x and a BD-RE write speed of 2x, but at this price point it’s the best deal on the market. LG makes quality products and it has stood up to the test I’ve put it through. I have burned, played and copied several disc with no problems. It’s whisper quiet too, so there is no need to raise the volume when the LG GGW-H20LK is in use. The included PowerDVD software is handy too. It took a while to install because it made you go through all of the updates, but this just built the suspense to test the player for the first time. It takes about 45 minutes to copy a movie to my hard drive and about the same amount of time to burn a movie to a BD-R.

LG GGW-H20LK

LG GGW-H20LK

I have only used the RiDATA BDR-252-RD-JC disc to burn and haven’t had any issues. The best part about these BD-R’s is that they are the cheapest on the market at $4.99 a pop. This is currently the one thing that is holding Blu-ray burners from being becoming more popular is the price of blank media. When this price drops, the market for burners will rapidly increased. We have seen this issue resolved before last decade with DVD’s.

The biggest pros of the LG GGW-H20LK are the quality it has been built with, its price and the fact that is just works. There are only some minor cons. I wish it came with a flat black face plate to match my computer better and as with all drives, I wish it had a better, more universal mounting/install system.

]]> http://budw.in/2009/04/19/review-of-blu-ray-playerburner/feed/ 2 Hacking the Wii http://budw.in/2009/04/08/hacking-the-wii/ http://budw.in/2009/04/08/hacking-the-wii/#comments Wed, 08 Apr 2009 19:02:56 +0000 dbudwin http://budw.in/?p=32 One of my favorite activities to do when I have some spare time is hacking the Wii, more specifically, the Wii-motes to interface and work with my computer.  A lot of my inspiration for this comes from Johnny Lee, a professor of HCI at Carnegie Mellon University.  The Wii-mote is an interesting piece of technology.  It is readily available and affordable at about $40 each.  They contain a relatively high powered IR camera along with some accelerometers and a Bluetooth connection.  Plus, they are fairly durable, just ask anyone who has thrown their Wii-mote into their fancy new TV, or just go to YouTube to find out.  Some of my more primitive projects regarding programming the Wii-mote are a basic mouse utility to control the mouse on my computer with the Wii-mote without using IR.  The big problem–control.  The motion of the mouse was strickly based on the readings from the accelerometers which can only determine pitch and roll, not yaw.  This means that movement along the x-axis is controlled by roll, this is an extremely unnatural and counter intuitive to use.  My next project will be to create an IR emitter which can attach to my computer via USB (I don’t have FireWire).  This can be an issue because the voltage output of USB is only 5v compared to FireWire’s 12v output.  Another, simpler project I did was what I commonly referred to as WiiTunes.  A simple program that used the Wii-mote to control iTunes.  The buttons on the Wii-mote correlated to buttons in iTunes so I could be a number of places and still control my iTunes library.  Lastly, another simple project is to use it as a PowerPoint remote to control the flow of a slide show during a presentation, this will get you major geek points.  A good resource to get started with programming your Wii-mote is to head over to WiiLi, a wiki based site filled with great information.  Here is my favorite project by Johnny Lee, it uses head tracking to create a 3D environment.

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