Category: general

Blindly navigating the PS3 XMB

I move my Playstation 3 between my SD family television and an old 20″ IBM monitor in my office at 1080p (connected via one of these). When moving to the TV, I can do the “long press on the power button” to get to the right resolution, which is simple enough.  Even if it does reset any theme settings.  Setting up the PS3 with the monitor is a bit trickier as it does not support 480i or 576i, so I need to pull out an old 34cm TV I have sitting around, and need to do a cable shuffle and it’s all a lot more hassle than I’m interested in.

To avoid that, here is the combination of controller presses to get to 1080p without being able to see what you’re doing.  It is easiest when you have working audio, so you can hear the clicks as you navigate the menus.

These are done with PS3 firmware 2.70.  It may change in later versions.  You follow these instructions at your own risk.

Pause between each press, particularly X presses as there is often a little delay involved in the screen updating.

To blindly change the resolution :

Turn on the PS3
Press the PS button on controller
All the way up (to the top of the Games menu)
All the way left
1 step right (to the Settings menu)
All the way down (bottom of the Settings menu)
4 steps up (Display Settings)
X (select Display Settings)
X (select Video Output Settings)
1 step up (In my case, select Component / D-Terminal output. 2 steps up for HDMI,  no steps for Composite / S Video, 1 step down for AV MULTI / SCART)
X (select connector type)
X (confirm connector change)
1 step left
X (confirm that it works)
All down (select 1080p.  Back up one for 1080i, up two for 720p, three for 576p)
X (select the desired resolution)
1 step right (move to next screen – all going well, the screen should be working from this point)
1 step left
X (to confirm that it works)

At that stage, you should be able to see what you’re doing :)   If not, turn off the PS3 and start again, hoping you haven’t reformatted the HDD along the way :p

The other circumstance I find myself wanting to navigate the XMB blindly is to get into OtherOS without having to change the resolution first.  This will only work if you have already installed a bootloader (otheros.bld).

To blindly boot into the OtherOS:

Turn on the PS3
Press the PS button on controller
All the way up
All the way left
1 step right
5 steps down
X
All the way down
3 steps up
X
1 step down
X
1 step left
X

Passion, Lessig and Adam Smith

I was inspired by this post of Larry Lessig’s today – it conveys some delightful passion. I also particularly enjoyed this post – Lessig style makes even this self-described “rant” of his a most enjoyable (and educational) read.

In the second post, Lessig quotes Nicholas Gruen who quotes Adam Smith, which brought to my mind a C. S. Lewis quote that I’ve blogged here (yeah, there’s a lot of quoting going on).  From Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments :

The man of system. . . is often so enamoured with the supposed beauty of his own ideal plan of government, that he cannot suffer the smallest deviation from any part of it. . . . He seems to imagine that he can arrange the different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the different pieces upon a chess-board. He does not consider that the pieces upon the chess-board have no other principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them; but that, in the great chess-board of human society, every single piece has a principle of motion of its own, altogether different from that which the legislature might chuse to impress upon it. If those two principles coincide and act in the same direction, the game of human society will go on easily and harmoniously, and is very likely to be happy and successful. If they are opposite or different, the game will go on miserably, and the society must be at all times in the highest degree of disorder.

It’s a beautiful piece of writing (it reads wonderfully aloud) and is, I think, profoundly insightful and worthy of further consideration.  C. S. Lewis’ perspective addresses the same problem, that of ‘well-intentioned’ control (or, rather coercsion), from moral rather than idealistic grounds.

Recently, I’ve come to appreciate some of the limitations of governance through overt coercion, so Lessig’s comments have been particularly timely for me.  As to what he has to say about what is or isn’t socialism, I’m not so sure.  There’s more for me to chew over.

Relocated

Now with self hosted wordpress!

I’ll need to set up a link/redirect from the old site to here, and while this theme is a good foundation, there’s a lot of little changes I’d like to make.

Time, that’s all it will take.