Bye Bye Mini Mac..

Well I suppose I should have seen it coming.... the mini mac was way to slow to play WoW and so I've bought myself a nice Dell Vostro 1700 laptop with very nice NVidia graphics, sweet!

Hopefully I'll remember to put up a little review of the laptop once I've broken it in.

The utlimate keyboard...

No normal keys for this keyboard, every key is a mini LCD screen shoqing the letter/function assigned to it!

Wow!

Mark, this is definite birthday present material

I finally got round to moving to 802.11G tonight and thought I may as well use all the features and go for WPA2 encryption, after all my router supports it andmy nice shiny mac mini supports it. So i plug it in, conifgure it and hey preto on the internet!

Sadly the signal strength of 802.11G is way lower than 802.11B in Linksys kit... bad as my house is not wireless friendly anyway... so what to do? Well theres some nice guys at hyperwap who do a funky firmware for my WAP to boost the signa strength up to 10x its original strength... so I flashed the wap and it works! My transfer speeds went from about 2Mbps to 16Mbps

Next challenge was to get my Windows laptop on the wireless, I thought this would be easy... how wrong was I! After 20 mins of scratching my head when it wouldn't connect I found out that Windows XP needs a bloody hotfix to WPA2, WTF??!??!?! What happened to Windows XP SP2 being a modern OS??? Anyway, it also turns out my bridge can't do WPA2 either so I had to downgrade to WPA2/WPA1 mixed mode, not so good but better than the WEP I was running!

Anyway, enough of my networking moaning, time for some Halo 3 beta multiplayer fun

Farewell Fred Fish...

For all of you with an Amiga background, heres a sad piece of news... Mr Fred fish himself has passed away at the age of 54

If you don't know who he was you certainly never owned an Amiga...

Speaking of Amigas... two new models will be released this summer in the USA and possibly Europe, the entry model is about $500:

• Flex-ATX form factor motherboard based on the Freescale MPC8349E SoC. (400MHz to 667MHz depending on requirements and price target)
• 1 (one) DDR2 DIMM slot expandable to 1GB using unregistered DIMMs.
• 1 (one) 66MHz PCI slot for use with readily available graphics cards.
• 2 (two) 33MHz PCI slots for additional expansion.
• 2 (two) 10/100/1Gb Ethernet Ports.
• 4 (four) Hi Speed USB ports.
• 2 (two) serial ports.
• 4 (four) SATA ports provided by a Silicon Image Sil3114 controller.
• Onboard sound provided by a C-Media CMI8738.
• Socketed EEPROM for U-Boot firmware.
• Atmel ATC2408A serial EEPROM (1 kb of non-volatile storage)
• Dallas DS1339 RTC with battery holder.
• Standard ATX power supply connector.

The power user model is about $1500 and is:

• Based on the P.A. Semi PWRficient PA6T-1682M dual core 64 bit CPUs clocked at 2GHz.
• RoHS compliant ATX form factor.
• Four (4) DDR2 DIMM slots.
• One (1) PCI Express x16 slot for high performance graphics cards.
• One (1) PCI Express x2 slot for high performance I/O cards.
• One (1) PCI Express x1 slot for standard I/O cards.
• One (1) PCI 32 bit slot for legacy cards.
• Six (6) USB 2.0 ports.
• Two (2) Gb Ethernet ports.
• Two (2) UART ports for serial connectivity and debug.
• One 8Mb Flash EEPROM containing U-Boot firmware.
• Four (4) SATA II ports based on the Silicon Image SiI3132 (x2) .

Neother model includes a monitor, keyboard or mouse and no one knows what OS will work on these, besides the obvious Linux.

Should be an interesting summer in the world of archaic platforms!

I've gone to the white side...

After 9 months of indecision I finally bought myself a Mac on the weekend, a Mac Mini to be precise, and my Windows XP machine is currently being gutted ready to be sold on or stripped down for parts and sold. Considering the CPU is 4 years old its not done bad really!

The Mac is a breath of fresh air, bein gUnix based helps a lot given my liking (and career experience) of Linux and other Unixes. It feels very slick, very responsive when compared to Windows. Its also nice and quiet and very low power compared to my 550W beast of a PC which sounds a bit like Concorde on take off if its working hard!

So far (only 3 days in) I'm very very happy and glad to see the back of windows

The lesser of two evils???

Interesting piece here from Canada... we're all rushing to use low energy lightbulbs to reduce pollution and wasted energy, yet those very same bulbs are toxic to us and in many places if you break one you have to get the government in to clean up the mess... read more here.

The happiest day...

Well! One week ago to the very hour myself, Naomi and about 70 of our family and closest friends were partying hard after our wedding. The wedding went off perfectly, no family arguments, no forgotten rings, just a slight mix up with the flowers for the parents. The ceremony was beautiful, as was Naomi. The speeches went down very well, raising tears and smiles in all the right places, though the best man was surprsingly nice to me! Though I'll get him back for mentioning the upside down camera thing...The food was stunning and everyone seemed to enjoy it, they certainly enjoyed the booze! The party afterwards turned into one long karaoke song, though I should have realised the quality would be varied when Rick started off with American Pie (Full length version...). Rick then spent the whole night cleaning someones, who will remain nameless, tonsils... The Gold star for amazing karaoke goes to Rick and Mikey. If anyone out there needs to hire a rip roaringly funny cabaret act let me know and I'll give you their email address.

Theres just a few pictures here.

Thank you to everyone who came for making the day an amazing success for us, we couldn't have asked for more from anyone.

Gears of War (GoW)

Well what to say! The new patch came out this morning with the new game type : Annexe : in it so. I've just spent the past two hours playing it and to be honest its not that great... the rounds now last too long so 100% of games see at least 2 players drop out by half time. The endless action is good but its never ever stops which can be a bit much after a while. So really I have to say warzone still rules with annex way down the list.

Keyboard at last!

Microsoft has finally seen sense and stated they will release a keyboard for the xbox 360 in the summer, yay! It;ll be a weird clip on thumboard for the controller with a new style headset. Should be good and reading between the lines its only a matter of time before there a version of IE for the 360

For news on the may update and the keybaord go here.

Blogs, trolls and hateful entries...

For those of you not active in the blogging world of web 2.0, heres a little insight into the darker side of it all... Kathy is the respectable author of a few programming books, an A list blogger and a well known public speaker. Her blog is high traffic and high visibility. It seems in the past few weeks or so shes attracted some "trolls" as they used to be called in usenet. Except that these have gone beyond the usual white line of acceptability and trespassed into threats of violence and assault...the link is Kathy explaining all about what happened and what eefect its had on her.

An interesting set of feedback to this from the the slashdot crowd is here.

In some ways I go with the general consenus at Slashdot, trolls are part of life on the internet if you stick your head above the crowd and say "oi come and read this" or voice any kind of opinion, but I also think they went too far in this case with the pictures and with the extremity of the comments and content of those comments.

What do you think? If you have a blog should you expect trouble from the trolls????

WORMS!

The long wait is over at last, Worms will be taking over Xbox live on March 7th. Yay!

http://www.xbox.com/en-GB/games/w/wormsxboxlivearcade/

The KKK...

A very interesting piece here from a black American journalist who points out, seemingly rightly so, that the black population in America has gotten rid of the old white KKK and replaced them with a black KKK created by the black community themselves. You can see this reflected in London with the volume of black-on-black violence and the ever growing problems with gangs who seem intent on shooting each other, again seemingly predominantly black members in those gangs. A short quote as a taster:

"The Black Ku Klux Klan shows up in full force and does its best to ruin our good time. Instead of wearing white robes and white hoods, the new KKK has now taken to wearing white Ts and calling themselves gangsta rappers, gangbangers and posse members."

Read the full article here.

Beans, beans are good for the heart...

A funny little piece here all about flatulence... click here.

Space... the ultimate rubbish dump

Sad sad story about how bad our littering in space has become. Maybe someone should invent a space sized hoover to attach to the space shuttle. The story is here.

Windows sucks and heres why...

Came across a nice piece of techie writing which illustrates quite graphicallsy why windows is so shabby compared to Linux... read it here.

Bye Bye Windows...

One for all the Windows/Microsoft/BIll Gates haters here. A user (read non-geek) friendly way to install Linux onto any PC... go here to see it.

Basically you download a Windows installer type program that sets up Linux for you, Debian in this case, dead easy, even a wookie could do it

Its dead.....

Well, my poor little Xbox 360 is dead. I turned it on to play a little online Gears and it flashed up the 3 nasty red lights... its all over

Its going to take 2 weeks to get it fixed as well, shocking!

Anyone care to donate me a 360?

Wanna be Robocop?

Get a load of this guy!

I guess he wanted to be Robocop or Master Chief more than the rest of us!

Who ya gonna call?

It seems a new ghostbusters game is in the works, even better its for the Xbox 360 Sadly, theres some stupid licencing issue holding it up, but from the sample footage available here it looks great! Can't wait

UPdate : Better videos here.

Extra extra extra!

Spent a nice relaxing day at the movies today, which is good as the flu is still killing me. Heres a short review of each of them just for you

Deja Vu... Interesting movie, but predicatable but entertaining enough. Not one to buy on DVD methinks!

Employee of the month.... Nice, trashy fun. Absoutley zilch cerebral entertainment, but it raised a few belly laughs andkept a smile on the face.

Pans Labirynth... Slightly surreal, very weird and hugely entertaining, shame I don't speak Spanish, but worth seeing none-the-less.

Right, its late so off to bed we go, g'night!

Viva!

Well its one day into the new year and I've already got a new addiction! Viva Pinata on the Xbox 360

On paper it sounds a bit crap, but once you play it, you find its addictive just like Simcity or CIV was in previous years. I can me losing may days to this game... oh well! Makes a change from killing people in Gears of War (which I'm almost finished playing on Casual...)

One other thing to note, if anyone wants ideas for presents for me (hint!) theres now a link to my amazon wishlist on the left of this page... get those credit cards out!