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My son is standing in front of the TV, wailing his arms about wildly. The Playstation 2 and the TV are turned on, but he's not holding the controller. He appears to be having some type of epileptic fit, but there's a smile on both of our faces. Of course, he's playing with the new "Eye Toy" from Sony Entertainment. It's a video camera that sits on top of the TV and makes you part of the game. You use your hands (and maybe your head, your hips, and other body parts...) to play games like Dancing, Boxing, Kung Fu, Window Washing and other cutesy games. I had a go at it earlier today, and even I enjoyed playing it while I got some sorely needed exercise.
The camera sits on top of the TV, and can be swiveled and tilted. It has a red light to let you know if your lighting is too dark, but it doesn't warn you when the background items' darkness might interfere with your game play. I'd suggest a lamp somewhere in front of you for optimum performance. Our cherry-wood bookcases at the back of the room really play havoc with some of the games, while other games remain playable. There are 12 games in all on the enclosed DVD, and Sony has already published other titles for the toy. Considering we traded in a bunch of games that no one plays any longer and only paid $7. out of pocket for the thing, thanks to GameStop, I'd say we've gotten a good deal.
Now he's breaking boards with his head on the bonus round of Kung-Fu. I better go make sure he doesn't get any splinters.
I believe I've tracked down the problem with video captures freezing when trying to capture video from my DV Camera/Camcorder. The problem appears to be related to Dynamic Disks. You see, when I added my 200GB HD to my computer, I configured it as a dynamic disk, just in case I wanted to try out software RAID configurations. That means that the partition I created is not on a static partition, but a dynamic partition. Apparently other folks who have had the same problem have reported the situation happening with their RAID-0 and RAID-1 configurations. Well, I tried it without dynamic partitions, and the video capture no longer freezes. Which means the digital video capture drivers seem to not like dynamic disks! Now, this is pure hypothesis, but it seems to fix my problem. I'm going to convert my disk back to a static partition table (once I move all the data off it) and that should fix my problem, but so far, it's worked with both the other disks in my system, even the slow 60GB one.
Dual-monitor support for OpenGL applications in Windows XP seems to switch to software rendering for the OpenGL driver. This can affect applications that use the OpenGL libraries on machines with dual monitors installed. Most recently, this affected me when I was trying to use Blender v2.31 on a dual monitor machine. The software seemed extremely sluggish, and was taking forever to paint menus and draw, even rotating views. It was unusable. Once I removed the second monitor (disabled and disconnected it and rebooted), Blender worked like I remember it.

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