Author Archives: Ian

Rocksmith fun and games

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One of my favorite things to do is play my guitar. When I play, I usually play a video game from UbiSoft called Rocksmith.

This is not an ordinary video game, for starters it uses a real guitar. Essentially you plug your guitar in to the computer using a special “realtone” cable. This takes my analog guitar sound and turns it into a signal that the computer can read.

The game is very full featured, it has several ways to learn and play guitar and bass. The learn a song part is similar to the Guitar Hero presentation. There is a note highway that send down notes for you to play, if you play them all on time you are playing the song (lead or rhythm). The ingenious part of this, it uses a thing called dynamic difficulty. It will present a subset of the notes from that song to you the first time through. Depending how well you do with that it will start to give you more notes and based on your score it will continue to make it more difficult until you are playing the whole song. – A brilliant way to coach you through learning a song without having a real live teacher.

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Vizio TV remote stopped working

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I have had my Vizio VW37L HDTV40A for a long time but don’t really watch it much as it’s in the bedroom.

With no warning what so ever it decided that the remote would not work. – I thought that was odd so I immediately changed the batteries and confirmed that there was nothing in the way of the IR receiver on the TV itself.

I noticed that I could still change the channels from the TV but nothing would work with the remote. I tried installing a universal remote on my phone and tried all the suggested models still nothing. It makes me think that the TV IR receiver may have stopped working.

I tried to reset the TV, that made no difference so I went into the setup wizard, it started but then requires a remote to get to the next screen so now I was stuck with no remote and my TV in the setup wizard. – That’s a little frustrating. I researched online and someone suggested powering on the TV with the button on the side of the TV then immediately hitting the menu button and holding it until the screen comes on. This gets me back to be able to watch TV with no remote control. However, every time I switch the TV on I have to go through this same procedure or it defaults into the set up wizard and I am stuck again.

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