Category: Techno Geek

Minecraft plus Studio Ghibli plus time = brilliance

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So you have to be a nerds nerd to really appreciate this but man, if you fit the bill, this is fantastic. This:

Is the worlds imagined by Studio Ghibli as recreated by a bunch of folks using the Minecraft engine.

If you’re unfamiliar with Studio Ghibli, stop what you’re doing and go watch Laputa, Castle in the Sky, or Grave of the Fireflies, or Porco Rosso, or, well, anything they’ve done, but especially those. Shorthand explanation would be that they’re a Japanese analog to Walt Disney.

If you’re unfamiliar with Minecraft, and you have a computer that’s less than 6-7 years old that can run Java, go spend the $15 or so to register. It’s a 3d lego toolkit with world generation, multiplayer, and zombies, plus a whole lot more, but that should be enough right there. Plus it’s absolutely brilliant.

No audio over hdmi on windows 7? Solution:

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I bought a new monitor and am replacing my 5.1 speaker set with speakers built into the monitor – basically I’m reducing clutter on my desk and am going to use headphones when I want quality audio from the computer. Having a baby changes your priorities 😉

The problem was, when I got everything wired up, I had no audio coming from the computer. Ultimately this boiled down to a driver issue that’s related to the fact that when you’re using HDMI, your video card is responsible for delivering the audio to your output device. I had to update my realtek audio drivers, disable all devices, then restart the machine and reconfigure, before I could get audio out. I found this forum thread helpful, as well as this image illustrating the three places you need to make changes to your system configuration in order to get audio out.

While this is a driver issue ultimately I blame Microsoft for this – it’s hard to imagine making something as simple as ‘I want sound from my computer’ more complex.

Posting this in case it’s helpful to others.

Video shrunken/ not fullscreen using an HDMI cable? Solution:

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I bought a new monitor and connected it to my video card via HDMI. The video output was shrunken, with ~1″ black borders all around the screen. At first I thought the monitor was defective but I tested using a DVI cable and the display was fine. Much googling later, I figured out it’s an issue with ATI/AMD’s catalyst control center. Basically you have to set overscan to 0% in the catalyst control center to rid yourself of this issue, something that’s not at all intuitive – even finding where to change that setting is a chore. This post on aoclarkejr.com was super helpful and has pictures of each step you need to take. I found that via this forum thread. Posting this just in case it helps others solve this issue.