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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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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Yet another error message today, this time when trying to send a message to a friend. I first received the message when I tried to reply to a message received. So I canceled out of the message, repeated the process and got the same error message, repeated and got it again for a third time. So I changed what I typed and it went through without a problem. So I tried one last time with the original message and the error came up once more. Maybe it was something I was writing? “what u doing ?” hardly seems like a message to cause problems. The message that did work: “hi”.

After a quick look online I found that some other people were having the same error. They recommended removing the punctuation from the end of the message, and sure enough it worked. To further test this I tried to send another message, “what u playing ?” and once again I got the error message.

To narrow the problem down this is what I think causes the issue. It is not the fact that there is a punctuation at the end of the message. But it is due to there being a space and then the punctuation by itself. “_?” When I remove the space the same message sends without a problem. So you might ask, why is there a space in the first place? When using the prediction that is to the right of the keyboard it will always put a space after the word to prepare for the next. So if your whole message is predicted… what u doing… then it will put a space after “doing”. If you don’t remove the space [square on the controller] before you put the punctuation then it will cause an error.

Update: So I have refined the problem a little further, it is not the fact that there is a space between the last word and a punctuation, but it is due to there being a space between the last work and a punctuation when the space was created due to the word predictor. If you put in a space your self, then it does not trigger the error. But if you use the word predictor and then a punctuation without removing the space, like clock work the error comes up.

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Reading around today I saw that the long anticipated playstation network game “flower” is set to release this Thursday with the normal weekly update of the Playstation Store. (2-12-09). This is another one of the inexpensive (cheap) games you can purchase on the playstation store. The price should only be $9.99 US. There have been several reviews of the game and most of them have all been great. It might just be that quick game you will need to play inbetween breaks of Killzone 2 which is set to realase later this month.

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