Sidewaysgravity Blog

I just finished a quick look around with the new system update to version 3.0. As always, I think it is easier to see what’s wrong and the bugs than to see the benfits. One item that I immediatly love is that the battery indicator no longer covers the clock. One thing I hate is the “what’s new” news ticker that shows up below the clock. They have moved where you go to disable it, it’s now under the system settings but apparently they forgot to make it work. You can set it to on or off and it makes no difference. Hopefully they will patch it soon.

The only other change I was not thrilled about was how clunky the buddy list seems now. I have yet to find a way to slim it down. It seems like the older version seemed a little cleaner. The new one seems more cluttered although I didn’t see any major updates to that area.

I do like that you can now access your recieved messages by buddy instead of having to view them all throught the recieved folder. There are a couple more features that have been included as well, such as a greater integration of the playstation store into the XMB, but I am still not sure how I feel about that. I can already see my XMB becoming the next ad space for Sony, and it is starting with 3.0. Overall I have mixed feelings about this update with some features I love and others I will have to live with and hope they address at a future date.

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For one of the larger projects that I work on, I use phpThumb, which will create a thumbnail of the requested image and cache it for fast downloads. This is great when you have a large number of images that will be viewed at various sizes and you dont want to export all the various sizes.

One of the problems I ran into recently is setting a default image that will appear if for some reason your source file cannot be located. When you are pulling images from a separate provider, this can become a concern.

PhpThumb has made this easy as their is a setting in the config file as shown below.

All you have to do is add the local path to the file you want as a default into the config and then to test it you can set phpThumb to attempt to load a bad source file and it should display your image. If you are having issues seeing the file, make sure that the names match up, and that you have a forward slash before the path. You can also try doing an absolute path with the entire url to the image.

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This post is a continuation of a previous post about the (8002AB0B) error that I received when trying to install almost any game downloaded over the PSN.

Last night I think I finnaly found the source of the error code that has plagued me the past few months. It came down to an Ethernet cable, once replaced everything worked great. The playstation website along with there customer service had never mentioned this as a possible issue, but if you are having this same error message I would suggest trying the following.

• Change the way you connect, if you are using a wireless connection, try hooking up through a direct connection.
• If you are wired through a router, bypass it by plugging directly into the cable modem.
• Try switching your ethernet cable for a different one.

For me, I hooked up the ps3 directly into the cable modem first and used a different ethernet cable. I was able to download five games and install without issues. I noticed that the games that gave me the errors were the larger 1GB + games. Once I saw it worked hooked directly to the modem, I reconnected to through the router but with the new ethernet and downloaded a couple more games. So far all are working great now. The interesting thing is I could still connect and play online games fine with the bad cable, but it must have been corrupting the download data to cause the error.

Unfortunately the main reason to get this fixed was to play the new Uncharted 2 multiplayer beta which I had a key for. I got it installed only to see that the time period had expired.

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