Unlocking the Daewoo DHR-8115D DVR

If your Daewoo 8115D DVR is region locked, here is a simple way to unlock it:

* Press the Setup Button on the remote control
* Press the Right Arrow until you get to the System Info
* Press 1-1-0-1
* Then press 0 for region free

For more information on DVD, Blu Ray DVD and HD-DVD region code unlocking, go to http://www.videohelp.com/dvdhacks, and
http://www.dvddemystifiziert.de/codefree_en/codefree.html

Yamaha YSP-4000 - Fixing the Assignable Inputs

Anyone who owns a Yamaha YSP Sound Projector will tell you that trying to connect more than two components to it can be very complicated (or damn near impossible). The problem is that while the unit has two component vieo inputs, 2 HDMI inputs, composite inputs, optical and coaxial digital inputs they seemed to be linked the 'wrong' way.

Basically, the one component video input is linked to analogue audio input, and the composite video input is linked to a digital audio input.

Having struggled with this for a month and even getting the sales person to set it up, I've had no luck.

My last resort was to correspond (read: complain) to Mike Burczak (from Balanced Audio, Yamaha Distributors in South Africa) who has been very helpful.

He's just gotten back to me with feed back from Japan and Yamaha has released a new specification of the YSP-4000 in January 2008 and a firmware update is available for existing units. I will be sending the unit for the firmware upgrade next week and will report back on whether this fixes the problem.

P.S. The Yamaha sound projectors are awesome (and very wife/girlfriend friendly!)

UPDATE:
I've had the unit flashed to the latest version of the firmware and the assignable inputs issue is sorted. The firmware update also fixes the problem where 2 channel analogue sound is output when you use HDMI and certain DVD's/BluRay discs.

Gears of War 2 (Magazine Scans)

There alot of great games on the XBox 360, but one that stands head and shoulders above them all (including Halo 3, IMHO), was Gears of War.

So with the sequel due for release in November 2008, here are some magazine scans that provide a bit of a teaser:

http://www.vitosverdict.com/

PicLens

Well, this is my first post and I thought I'd point you to a very useful browser plugin called "PicLens".

It is a fantastic way of viewing images on websites such as Google Images, Picasa, Flickr, Facebook, PhotoBucket and many more websites.

It supports IE, Firefox (Mac/PC) and Safari (Mac/PC).