Archive for September, 2006
Cereal
I’m constantly being surprised by the low cost of PC’s and PC components. Whenever I see the price of things on Overclockers, usually because I’m there buying more hard disks, I wonder how long it’s going to be before PC’s are being given away with cereal packets (although it’s obvious they’ll be giving away DVD players first).
But when it actually comes to putting together a new machine, the costs quickly mount up and all of a sudden things don’t seem so cheap anymore. For a new WOPR, my video server, which I’d also like to give PVR support to (via MythTV probably), the costs are almost up to £700. I’m not even buying the best parts available, there are far better CPU, motherboard and graphics combinations I could put in there, but it’s still far more than I expected it would be.
So don’t be fooled. PC’s may be getting cheaper, but Tony the Tiger isn’t going to be swapping his decoder rings for them any time soon.
Firmware
I almost bought a new wireless router yesterday. I say almost because what I actually did was walk into the evil that is PC World, see the silly prices they were charging for them, and walk back out again. Today I decided to check whether or not new firmware was available on the Netgear website and despite me being pretty sure I had done this before, there was. I downloaded it and ran through the installation instructions, which are essentially just uploading the file to the router via the web interface and then waiting for it to reboot. So I did that and waited. And waited. And waited. And after 15 minutes of waiting I switched the router off, and with almost no hint of surprise, it didn’t come back on again afterwards.
I started this process because my wireless connection kept dropping off all the time, so I suppose now that it didn’t work at all I’d kinda solved that problem. There was no way it was going to come and go now.
At this stage I almost just got in the car and drove to PC World to buy a new one, but first I went through all my cupboards to find my spare ADSL router so I could get onto the Netgear website again and download the fix tool. Unfortunately despite going through every box I could find, it was nowhere to be seen. I did find a universal remote though, that might come in handy later. Anyway, after a lot of scrabbling around I remembered I had my Nokia, and it had a web-browser, perhaps I could get on the Netgear website using it, download the tool and transfer it to my PC so I could run it.
Nope.
I could get online and to the Netgear website, but it just wouldn’t download it. I’d click and click and click that link, but it didn’t even start the transfer. But I wasn’t foiled yet, the E61 has bluetooth, my Mac has bluetooth… maybe something here could work. After screwing around for a bit I managed to get my Mac to dial up to a Pipex account via the E61, a Pipex dial-up account our office used almost 9 years ago that not only still works, but which I could still remember the details for. So I got onto the Netgear website and managed to download the fix, which thankfully was only around 600k, because I was doing it at 1k per second.
So then I transferred it from my Mac to the laptop and plugged the laptop directly in the router and ran it. And you know what, it still didn’t work. It just errored, some strange error about the network card. So I copied it onto my main PC, crawled around on the floor some more and ran a cable directly from it to the router. This time I was more successful and the router sprang back to life again, complete with the latest firmware.
By this point I was tired and annoyed, but that may just have been withdrawal symptoms from having no net connection for almost three hours, rather than all the crawling around.
Oh and if you’re wondering, I haven’t lost signal since.
Underneath
I rushed home from work to watch the Shuttle launch and you know, they didn’t even bother. Didn’t they get my message? Didn’t they know I was coming home to watch it, looking forward to the giant explosion underneath that would propel them upwards at incredible forces and speeds? I mean, I know I’m not that important and all, but they could have at least sent me a text message on the way home to say sorry.
Is that too much to ask?
Arrogant
I like watching Sony make mistakes. I like watching them fail. They’re arrogant, overly confident, spend most of their time lying, and neither of their consoles have excited me in any way. Hundreds of games, but almost none of which I want to play. I don’t understand the people out there who are going to rush out any buy a PS3 on day one. For what? I still haven’t seen anything that makes me think it’s worth buying, especially at an insane $600. Why not just buy an Xbox 360? The same games, for less, plus a front end and online integration that Sony are going to come absolutely nowhere near. Why are you waiting? Next-gen is here already.
So when Sony announced today that the European delay of the PS3 has been delayed until next March, I just laughed. And then they said only 400,000 for the US and 100,000 for Japan on day one. And I laughed even harder. I hope they fall on their face.
Behemoth
My 17″ iMac doesn’t have a screen that seems small. It’s widescreen and doesn’t feel measurably smaller than my PC’s 19″ LCD. The 20″ would therefore be a big screen, and having seen one of those I can say that yes, it would be pretty sweet having that on my desk.
Well today Apple announced the release of a 24″ iMac which surely is some sort of behemoth. That would be an excellent addition to any desk. Not only that but the prices of all three models are very competitive, especially since that 24″ screen on it’s own would cost around £700 (the iMac 24″ is £1349).
If they’re announcing these today, on a Wednesday no less, then there must be a few things to announce next week at their media event. I still think I’d want a Mac Pro though, I want to be able to put more hard disks in there.
Droids
I’ve tried more than once to write a proper review of the book Droidmaker for whatentertainment, but I’ve just been finding it hard to critically evaluate something which is non-fiction.
The book is the very interesting story of how George Lucas has done so much to introduce technology to Hollywood over the past 25 years, all to meet his own goal of being independent from that very place. From editing to sound to computer graphics to special effects, Lucasfilm has been involved in it all. Did you know they pretty much invented the MMO? Learn facts like that, as well as be surprised by the sheer number of things they were connected with, by buying this book.
Yes, that’s the best I could do. See why I’m publishing it here?
Jiggery
With all the new content going into whatentertainment I made some changes today to make accessing it all a bit easier. Just some design jiggery pokery, like making the homepage more search engine friendly by having the two main article titles non-graphical and putting a menu down the left hand side so you can always jump to somewhere else without always having to go back to the homepage.
I had the idea in my head before I started, so there wasn’t too much time spent messing around. But as always the real-world browser didn’t exactly match the browser in my head, so some tweaking was still on the cards. Equally common was my difficulty in getting it all working in IE as well as it did in Firefox, but that does somewhat come with the territory as any web-designer will know.
Go check it out, and remember, tell your friends. I need some readers.
Warranty
I tried to switch on my Xbox 360 this morning to download one of the demos off Marketplace and it didn’t come on. I press the button on the front of the console and nothing happens, no ring of light, no fans, nothing. I’ve tried using the remote control and pressing the eject button in case it was the physical power button that had a problem, but that makes no difference either. The power supply is getting power, it’s got a red light on the front, so it doesn’t appear to be something wrong with that. Must be the console itself.
It’s still under warranty, so it’s not too bad. But I’m not exactly enamoured with the fact that I’m going to have to pack this up and send it back somewhere, whether that be Amazon or Microsoft.
Billionaire
As mentioned early in August, there’s a website called Pimp That Snack and I said I was interested in doing one. Well me and Andrea did just that. We made BILLIONAIRE Shortbread (she came up with that clever name, I’m afraid I can’t claim that for myself). It didn’t go 100% plan because the caramel didn’t set, and I felt pretty sick after eating it (although it was ultimately finished by other people, meaning it was still edible), but I think it went well considering.
Here’s a photo of the final result before the caramel covered the worktop, with a normal sized bit of Millionaire Shortbread for comparison (or Caramel Shortcake, if you prefer).
