Journals

At my Grandma's in New York City, not much going on, except an earthquake. Interesting.

My newest acquisition? Asus Xonar DS 7.1
The problem? I almost regret buying it, I think I have wasted 60$ for nothing. I am quite desperate with the problems it presents. I am just going to copy paste what I posted on the Asus support forums.

[EDIT]{ I resolved the major problems.

-flashplayer doesn't crash anymore
-I now have FrontPanel access, yay! The front panel has a pre-amp, and the headset sounds a lot better. The best part is that I don't have to plug and unplug anymore, I can just switch between 5.1 and FrontPanel from the Asus panel. That's a massive plus.

Minor problems still left:

-I must activate FlexBass when I switch to 5.1 to be able to get low frequencies, I mean BASS. Without that option activated there is no trace of subwoofer activity...
-I must accomodate myself with the Asus panel, in the windows sound options I'm only controlling a "Master" volume from now on
-I have to do a ton of fine tuning to make the 5.1 system sound how I want. That's not necessarily a problem.
-sometimes windows won't boot the first time, I have to restart and select "Start Windows Normally"....
}

[/EDIT

Let me start by saying that I own Gigabyte GA-P965-S3 motherboard, the only hardware part that has been left without upgrade through the years. The onboard audio broke, and it's not chip-related but mostly connector related. They probably worn out after so much plugging and unplugging.

I decided to buy a PCI audio card, and I thought I should invest a bit more money since I'm doing this anyway, to obtain more sound fidelity.
After some research, I finally stumbled upon the Xonar DS 7.1 and thought this was the choice.

When it arrived, I was prepared for some misc failures, like a boot failuter or something. And indeed the computer failed to boot the first time, don't know what was that all about :).

Anyway, I proceeded to install the audio card. Downloaded the latest driver from the ASUS site for Win7 x64 because it's not provided on the CD. At that moment I was wearing my Plantronics Gamecom headset( modest, but I can't afford expensive things really). I noticed the improvement in sound quality. But I was to be soon disappointed. I wanted to check a song on youtube, and the flashplayer crashes. Firefox, Chrome.. doesn't matter. I tried on Vimeo: the same thing.
Soon I discovered that not even the 5.1 system works. The LF were nonexistent. Even though it was set to 5.1 in the windows playback devices panel, somehow every sound got mixed in the front channel.

Now to ensure that there will be no conflict with the 2 audio cards ( Asus and the onboard Realtek one), I completed these steps:

-I disabled the onboard audio in BIOS
-I uninstalled the Realtek drivers
-I uninstalled the Asus drivers
-I deleted every track of sound drivers with drivers sweeper and then run a registry cleaner(ASC)
-after rebooting, I reinstalled the Asus drivers
-rebooted

The results are the same. Fortunately playing games doesn't provoke a BSOD( well, I only tried a League of Legends match).

Ok here are my main 2 problems, for those of you with TL;DR

1. I can't watch flash videos(Youtube, for ex.) since I installed the Asus Xonar DS. YES I AM SURE it is ITS fault, because right before installing it I watched some videos.

2. Going to "Playback Devices", "Asus Xonar Audio Device" and clicking properties I see no Jack I/O information. Similarly, there are no level controls for each of the channel. The onboard sound card didn't have this problem.

Yes I have the Xonar DS Audio Center, but it is useless if windows doesn't itself recognize the audio features. Because of this there all kinds of problems spawning, like the desired sound functionality is next to impossible to achieve.

I have heard that it might be the driver itself responsible, and there are modded drivers that should work but I'm afraid of doing something wrong.

Can somebody please help me?

Well, I turned 19 today (on the 21st, I know we're not all in the same time zone.) Seems to be the month of members' birthdays around here.

Don't come here a lot anymore except to browse but I guess I don't really have the time. Life's taken its turns and I've ended up deserting the mapping world for the past two years or so. I might come back to the hobby someday when spare time permits, maybe by then we won't even be using the Source engine anymore.

Moved 200 miles down to San Diego last weekend and I'm getting settled into my new home.

College starts tomorrow for me, and a lot of other people. It's just City College but I'm still nervous. Hell, I was born nervous.

Anyway, stay classy TWHL!

EDIT: Just realized it's been exactly one year since my last journal post. Lawl.

23, yesterday.

First day of WWZ filming.
Up at 04:00 to get into Glasgow city centre for a 05:00 call time. Filming will continue until 19:00 and this schedule repeats for the next 4 days. Hnng.

I really wish I could show you photos - it's incredibly odd seeing American road signs, car license plates and posters all over the city centre right next to regular UK road signs and cars and posters.
They even have those weird American traffic lights.

"All cameras including phone cameras are strictly prohibited from any sets."
I think they'll find it difficult to film WWZ without a camera. (trollface.gif)

edit:
Found a photo from when they were first cordoning off the area. There are a lot more changes since this was taken, but I thought I'd put together a comparison with the google earth image.Can you guess which one is which?

edit2:

I totally forgot, George Square has a live webcam feed. I don't know if it'll be disabled during filming, but it's still live now (05:07)
http://www.glasgow.gov.uk/en/aboutglasgow/webcams/

100 points if you can spot me during the day

Rimrook's in the Hospital

Hey Guys, this is Lyssa Rimrook's Fiance.
He is currently in the Hospital attempting to pass a kidney stone.
He called me this morning in a lot of pain, so I took him to the ER and after much poking and Prodding and a lovely CT scan, they told us he has a 6mm Kidney stone (1 MM more and he would have had to have surgery)
They have given him pain meds and hooked him up to an IV, they are hoping he will pass it sometime today or tomorrow with no issues. So when he gets home I am SURE he will write to you about his adventure (aka the male equivalent of childbirth) If you want me to send him any well wishes or kind words I will check this later on before I go back over.

Thanks Guys!
-Lyssa

Does anybody know a GOOD Free or OpenSource OCR software, or maybe even a commercial one that has a trial period?

I'm mentioning that in the scanning process there are mathematical symbols or equations involved, and it's printed, not handwriting.

Well, I'm royally pissed off right now. I decided to resume an old map that I last did anything with about a year ago. It was the only map I'd ever made that stood any chance of being completed. It was a remake of an old TWHL map, so my weakest points, general level design and concept were already taken care of. I found the rmf, but it seems to have reverted to an old version where only a bit of one room is completed. I can't seem to find any more complete versions, but I will keep looking.
Not really any journal worthy content, I just needed to let of some steam. I'm not too happy at the moment.

This story has to be one of the cleverest things I've ever read. Ingenius idea.

My favorite part is that they actually managed to get the group to sell the t-shirts at the concerts themselves. ha.

Don't want to move to Brazil? Don't deserve it? Worry not! I have a place for you in Argentina.

Hey, I return with some good and bad news.

I'm still working for Beatnik Games only I've been doing so from home as their company needs money and the office is small so the people that were needed went in while the rest stayed at home.

So I've been working on some Plain Sight levels and shared some ideas to greatly improve the game. They've listened, too well in fact and they've decided to not only use my ideas but they're planning something big with my levels and something else I won't say just yet but I believe it will bring life back to the game.

The sad news is I just found out today my mothers paypal was teh hacked. Not sure how...he took 700 quid and I even have his hotmail. I'll refrain from sharing until paypal are finished their investigation but we're getting the money back, the password has been changed to something big and long and her email password as well.

It's never fun knowing you've been robbed, even worse when you don't know how. That's the thing with Paypal, it says the balance is 0 so it shouldn't let people use it unless the balance is filled.

Oh yeah and I've been playing a fuck tonne of Mincraft

edit: Something else, my harddrive was replaced by Dell and I stupidly forgot about it as I was enjoying a chat with them and they took it with them...doubtful but would they be corrupt and sold it? My account is fine so far.

17 today, yay I guess?

I'm contemplating making a crossfire remake map for halflife one. Such a small simple but fun map. Of course this would be another project amongst many as always for me.

Well, it's certainly been a while since I was here last. I haven't built any more HLDM maps in the last couple of years - way too much other stuff on my plate - but I'm starting to think about getting back into it...

Maybe...

Of course, all that other stuff is still on my plate, so thinking may never turn into doing...