Noooo, NOOOOOOOOO!! Not my Rock Band drums! Anything but THAT!!!

Alas, it is true. Last night while pounding out the new Boston tracks on Hard, I noticed a weird shadow on my yellow drum pad. That shadow was actually the rubber cover folding in slightly because the underlying plastic of the head had cracked from one side to the other.

It still responds, but I’m understandably reluctant to pound upon it further. I’ve taken a two step approach to fixing the situation: filed an RMA with EA; ordered a new set of drums from WalMart.com (they have them for $54). At worst, EA will refuse to replace the drums and I’ll just play on my newly purchased ones. At best, EA will replace the drums and I’ll have two drum kits for drum duels.

Now all I need are friends for the duels.

I have no doubt that the DiNovo Mini is brilliant with a PC. As soon as it arrived at my office, I had it up and running in XP without any more effort than plugging in the Bluetooth receiver. Mouse control, character entry, menu use, et cetera were all great.

Unfortunately, I bought this for my PS3.

I primarily wanted the DiNovo Mini for PS3 browser use. Browsing with a virtual keyboard is intensely annoying, so a keyboard is the only option for extended use. As a character entry and mouse control device, the Mini works great with the PS3. There are button mappings for the cross and circle buttons, allowing for basic selection and cancellation controls.

Where the Mini fails, however, is that it does not seem to have anything mapped to the triangle [new info - see Update below], square, and Start controls. Triangle is used to access menus all over the PS3 interface, including the PS3 browser menu. Want to access your bookmarks with the Mini? What you’ll need to do is grab a PS3 controller to do it. Want to type in a URL? Pick up a PS3 controller, press Start, and then pick up the Mini and do your typing.

Outside of the browser, the Mini also fails as a Blu-Ray playback controller. To access menus during playback, one must use the square button. Again, not on the Mini so grab a controller to pull up that menu. Want to skip to the next chapter? The controls on the Mini do forward and reverse seek only when used with a PS3. Grab a controller and use L1/R2.

There are so many occasions when you’re reaching for a controller that it makes the Mini near useless. For $150, I expected a lot more from a device that has a PS3 mode. I would have been better off buying a cheap little controller mounted keypad.

I think the keyboard itself is fantastic. Great form factor, loved the lighting schemes, and it controls a PC like a champ. But if your intended use is as an input for a PS3, do not buy it unless you’re okay juggling both a controller and the Mini.

UPDATE: An anonymous commenter on my mirror of this entry on LiveJournal left a tip that the right mouse button is often used to emulate triangle button functionality. Using that info, I went back to the Mini and figured out how to do right mouse button - hold down the Function key and press the OK button. This does, indeed, act as a triangle button trigger. This will give you access to the menus in the browser and the overlay menu during Blu-Ray playback. Using these menus, you can get to the functions that would otherwise be more easily access using square and Start, but at least they are accessible. The Mini isn’t nearly so bad now.

I held off purchasing the PS3 for a long time because it didn’t have a library that appealed to me. Two things changed my mind and compelled me to jump in: HD-DVD went away; Remote Play promised to give my PSP new life. Since I wanted to start watching HD movies, the PS3 was the natural choice as a player, but I got some other benefits as well. Here’s how to maximize your use of the PS3 for stuff other than games.

1. Replace the hard drive - It’s commonly known by now that the PS3 hard drive is not quite as locked down as the 360 drives, which is interesting since the 360 drives are portable and the PS3 drive is inserted into the system. For just over $100, you can plug a 2.5″ 250GB SATA150 drive into the PS3, format it, and be up and running in mere minutes. Might as well do it right away to save you the minor hassle of backing up and restoring files (plug in USB HD, copy, put in new hard drive, copy back).

2. Get an external drive enclosure for the drive you took out of the PS3 - These can be had for $10-15 and will provide you with an external drive for extra data or PS3 backups.

3. Have a media server? Get TVersity - You can certainly use Windows Media Sharing, Media Center, et cetera to stream content to your PS3, but TVersity handles on the fly transcoding for a wide range of formats while being smart enough to not transcode natively PS3 supported formats and also allows streaming of pod/vodcasts. Want to catch up with the 1Up Show? Zero Punctuation? SModcast? Pull it up in the PS3’s XMB via TVersity and have at it. Pair up TVersity with uXM and uSirius to stream audio from XM and Sirius radio to your PS3. It works great, though you won’t get current song/artist info. Of course, TVersity isn’t the only option. There are lots of other DLNA compatible servers out there that will work just as well.

4. Take everything off screen - If you have a PSP, adding a PS3 to your life can be a rather liberating experience. Recent firmware revisions for both devices introduced Remote Play - essentially, remote desktop for the PS3. Any of your streamed media can be played wirelessly on the PSP through the PS3. The limitations are that you can’t play Blu-Ray discs or most games through Remote Play (PixelJunk Monsters and Lair both work), but you can play your stored or streamed audio/video and play PS1 games via RP, both downloaded and off the disc!

5. Use RP way remotely - Access to the PS3 XMB also means access to the Playstation Network Store. When new demos, trailers, and other content arrives, you can pull out your PSP from any spot with open wifi, connect to your PS3 at home, pull up the Store, and queue up all your downloads. Later on, you can log back in and do any installs of demos you might have grabbed so that you can get right to playing when you arrive home. The PS3 now has a form of wake-on-LAN so that it does not have to be left on to allow for this remote functionality.

6. Let your PSP control your PS3 jukebox - Later this month, PS3 firmware update 2.20 will add an “Audio Output Device” option for Remote Play, allowing you to specify that all audio should be played via the PS3 instead of being piped to the PSP. This will allow you to play all your music from your home theater speaker system without having to turn on your display (a major bonus for those of us on projectors who are sensitive to bulb life).

7. Install another OS, stream your games to it - Yep, if you want, you can go about installing Yellow Dog Linux and set up the PS3 to dual boot. Why would you want to do this? Geek factor, mostly, but once you have Linux up and running you can also install StreamMyGame to “play” your PC games on your PS3. I have not tried this yet, so I can’t speak to how well it actually works, but it’s an interesting idea. And yes, since you’re in Linux, you can use your mouse and keyboard as inputs.

That pretty much covers what I’m doing with my PS3 when I’m not playing games or watching Blu-Ray. The upside in my life is that I’m a lot more in contact with all of my media. The downside is that I haven’t finished a book in a month.