What happens when you mix hip hop and gaming? You get The Hip Hop Gamer. The passionate, dedicated, self-made journalist-meets-rap-star was one of the musical acts at the Shifted 2 Reality party and I had the opportunity to speak with him after bumping into him practically everywhere during the convention week.

The Hip Hop Gamer’s performance at the event was absolutely great. Part of the greatness around it was that his music is exactly what you would expect it to be: hip hop mixed with lyrics about gaming. The other part of the greatness was that I was able to save the show, as he didn’t have a microphone following the performance of a previous act. No worries, our trusty mic we use on camera was obviously ready and available to fulfill its duties to save yet another production and the show went on!

During our short chat, we learned about his career in music, his show and publication which now is hosted through EGM and also about his future possible appearance in a video game. Want to check out the full scoop? You don’t want to miss how animated he gets during the interview! Oh yeah, and I get to hold his championship belt.

Interview by Nicholas DiMeo of F5 Live for the TechPodcast Network.

Every gamer has watched gameplay footage of their favorite game, or funny footage as we are in the studio this evening. There is only one way to capture that footage, and that is with a capture card. AVerMedia is here to make that capability available to the masses with their offering of computer-based and stand-alone capture devices.

If you are recording on computer games, they have an internal, PCIe-powered, capture device that allows you to capture and live-stream your computer screen over the Internet, called Game Broadcaster HD. It even gives the ability to incorporate commentary into the stream, making it a full, self-contained component for the hardcore PC gamer. If you want to record your console play, the company offers something for that, too. With their external capture device, Game Capture HD you can hook up any console, including the Wii, via component cable, and record either to the internal memory, or almost any external storage you may have.

If you have been looking for a good way to capture, stream and commentary your gaming, look no further than AVerMedia.

Interview by Scott Ertz of F5 Live for the TechPodcast Network.

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Sometimes at events like ShowStoppers! at E3 2012 you are surprised by what products you find. Now, we all know about Augmented Reality (AR) – Sony even showed off their own implementation in the Wonderbook. So far, however, it has mostly been a toy and not really used for anything productive – until now.

Enter Aurasma. Their goal is to bridge the physical and virtual worlds, all through your phone or tablet. This system allows you to take a physical image and turn it into an interactive element. For example, if you use their free software and aim it at the Mona Lisa, you will be treated to a moving version of the image, talking to you. It is done entirely without ugly QR codes, which have become like modern day modem noise, keeping an advertisement or brochure entirely clean and professional. Companies have already used their product for Despicable Me, soccer teams and even Marvel has recently gotten involved to bring your comic book characters to life.

This is one of the coolest technologies I have interacted with, and it is great to see someone trying to eliminate the scourge that are QR codes. You can get the free app in either the Android or iTunes marketplaces right now.

Interview by Scott Ertz of F5 Live for the TechPodcast Network.

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Only Kingston Technology, home of high-quality memory products, could show up at an E3 2012 ShowStoppers! party and bring with them an uber-powerful gaming computer. What do I mean when I say uber-powerful? How about 64GB of HyperX RAM, a $1,000 12-core processor and dual SSDs. One SSD is setup for the operating system and applications and one is setup for an Adobe scratch disk.

This computer is so powerful that rendering full HD video only takes about 7% of the processor. How do they do it? By loading all of the video into RAM, meaning no disk seek times, plus using an SSD as a scratch disk. With no seek time, the video is capable of rendering faster and smoother than the average editing rig. This simulates a lot of how videogames work. In general, the area you are in is loaded into memory and rendered on the fly. A rig like this could make any game run smoother, even at the highest video settings.

Interview by Scott Ertz of F5 Live for the TechPodcast Network.

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