Monthly Archive for October, 2008

Do Not Buy These Games

Published on 31 October, 2008. Closed Tags: , , , , .

Do not buy Saints Row 2 or Midnight Club LA. I have purchased both of them in the past week, Saints Row 2 today, and I’ve had MCLA on pre-order since February, and, well, they both suck.

Firstly, Midnight Club LA. I got this on the assumption that, being a Rockstar title, it would be extremely good and similar to GTAIV. It’s not. The handling sucks, you can do a turn at 90 miles an hour without crashing. The rest of the game is…weird. I kindof like it but I also hate it. It doesn’t come NEAR the superb GTAIV, that’s for sure.

Finally, Saints Row 2. I purchased this today, after seeing Zero Puncuation’s review of it. Well, he said it was somewhat better then GTAIV. It’s not. It SUCKS. I played it for an hour and I already hate it. The graphics are meh, the handling of cars is stupidly bad, the game is crap, the controls suck…actually, the controls feel like they were developed by a drunk five year old dosed up on crack while hanging upside down off the Golden Gate Bridge.

Give both titles a miss. After having them both for under a week, I’m tempted to trade them in for LittleBigPlanet next week, maybe that will actually be a worthwhile title…

Almost a week with the new MacBook

Published on 30 October, 2008. View Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

MacBook

On Saturday the 25th of October, I took a train ride down to Birmingham New Street to pick up the new Late 2008 Aluminum MacBook, from the Apple Store in the Bullring. As always, upon going into the Apple store I was greeted by one of Apple’s staff, and asked if I needed any assistance, so I said yes, and asked for the new MacBook. 10 minutes later, I walked out the store with a rather heavy box containing the MacBook, and a Mini DisplayPort to DVI adaptor (which was £20 – ouch!).

Itching to open it, I arrived home, took it out the box, took a few photos, and turned it on. Instantly, I was greeted by the Apple setup wizard on the lovely bright display. I must say, after using this for a week, I’m very happy with it. It’s a much better display then any other laptop I’ve had, however, it does still fail to display blacks as vividly as the iMac did, or my Dell 2407WFP-HC does. In fact, overall, it seems a little off on several colours, but it’s not that bad – I’ve gotten used to it so far. If you’re seriously into graphic design, get the Pro. But if you just use it as a general day-to-day machine, it’s fine.

The design of the notebook itself is fantastic. The curvy edges when it’s closed make it feel thinner then it is, and the whole notebook feels very strong – much stronger then the old Vaio laptop that I’ve had (but not used for the past two years+). Whereas the Vaio felt like the screen was going to snap at any moment, the MacBook feels nice and strong. The overall design is nice too, I like having all the ports on the one side (and it’s the left, too – I hate it when the ports are on the right side, where I usually put a mouse and mousepad). However, I do have one complaint so far. When I’m typing, if I put my wrists on the edge of the laptop, the edge is actually pretty sharp – you don’t notice it if you have a jumper on or anything but if you’re just wearing a T-Shirt or something, and your wrists / arm are rubbing against the edge, I can imagine it would get irrating after a while. However, it hasn’t annoyed me that much yet.

In terms of the software, well, it’s OS X. Same as using my iMac. No real difference there, apart from the speed. Dropping down from my iMac’s 2.8GHz to the MacBook’s 2.4GHz isn’t that noticable – Photoshop and H264 HD video playback seems slightly slower, but not that much – both are still perfectly usable. Again, I think Photoshop would be much better with 4GB of RAM, versus 2GB. However, that’s another topic for another day. :P

Another thing that I love about the hardware itself, which is a very small feature, but it’s great nonetheless – if you plug the iPhone earphones into the audio out jack, you can use them for audio, but, and here’s the good part – you can use the microphone, too! I’ve been using it for the past week with Skype (calling my dad, in the Netherlands), and it’s pretty much perfect to replace my large and bulky headphones – the audio quality, according to him, is very good. As for the built in speakers, they’re very very good for a laptop, some of the best I’ve heard, but, of course, I’ll stick to using my speakers for music. They sound a hell of a lot better. ;)

I’ve not yet installed XP on here to play any games yet, but I plan on doing so in the next week or so.

Now – the bad points. So far, I have a few issues.

Firstly, the trackpad is great, it’s huge, it feels good to use, however, it’s loud if you click. Seriously, if you’re in a quite place, like a library, and you click, I’m guessing everyone would look up and stare at you. The trackpad is just loud.

Secondly, and this seems to have been reported by other people – the function keys seem to all be slightly tilted to one side – the left is lower, and the right is raised.

Finally – and this one annoys me a lot – well, take a read for yourself: Apple Support – Discussions (I know it says MBP and the Cinema Display, but it’s happening to me too, on my 2407WFP-HC).

Other then those few issues, I think it’s been well worth switching from the iMac, and I’m very happy with my purchase. I just hope Apple can fix the issue I’ve been having with the external monitor issue, and soon, because it’s annoying.

I think that covers everything. :D

Windows Live Spam IMs?

Published on 27 October, 2008. View Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

Has anyone else, recently, been getting a TON of IMs from various random addresses in the past week or two? It’s really annoying me, basically, it’s an address such as “ziopxmngeotcrwno@live.com” and the message usually has something like this:

Hey William
I would like to chat with you but I this is my friends msn.
You you can send me a msn chat request here sillyval1984@live.com
Hope we can chat

However, the messages are always:

  1. From different addresses – I’ve so far had about 50 different accounts, all from @live.com or @hotmail.com.
  2. Very similar messages – the only thing that changes is the address (like you can see above), and some of them have URLs instead.
  3. The one above is an example – there are several others I’ve been getting such as “this is my work account, can you add my personal account and we can chat?”

I have no idea how to stop them, either, which is bloody annoying.

Any ideas?

It’s…beautiful!

Published on 26 October, 2008. View Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

MacBook

…and it’s mine! 2.4GHz model. More pics here, review (well, a post about it) soon too. ;)

Eagle Eye

Published on 21 October, 2008. Closed Tags: , , , , , .

I went down to Birmingham today to the IMAX, to see Eagle Eye. I must say, I went to see it not expecting much, however I was greatly surprised – overall, it’s a fantastic movie and the huge IMAX screen really brings it to life – the initial chase scene is pretty amazing, and you really need to be awake when you watch it to notice everything. :D

The plot is pretty simple, however there are plenty of bits nicked from other films. If you’ve seen War Games, xXx 2: State of the Union, or Die Hard 4, some parts of the film will be familar. ;)

Overall, it’s definitly worth a watch, so if you can, see it at the cinema!

(Trailer)

PS3 Lives Again!

Published on 20 October, 2008. Closed Tags: , , , , .

Well, not mine. I just got off the phone with a nice woman on the PS3 customer support line, and she asked me a few questions about who I was (name, phone numbers, email and postal address), and a few questions about the PS3 (has it been bumped, is it in a well ventilated area, what were you doing before it broke, what does it do when you turn it on now), and after about 10 minutes on the phone (of which about 4 of that was holding), they’re sending me a new (albeit refurbished model) PlayStation 3 this Thursday.

Same model, so it’ll be the 60GB one that I already have. The courier is bringing the new one on Thursday, and I have to swap mine with the new one, and it’s all done. Easy! :)

Sadly, though, I have to 1) redownload all the game demos, games, videos, and so on, that I had on the old PS3, and 2) I’ve lost several video clips that I only had a copy of on the PS3, and 3) no game saves or anything. I’m annoyed at this because I now have to replay GTAIV from scratch, plus Burnout Paradise, plus Colin McRae – I had a pretty built up portfolio on all three titles, which is quite annoying, especially considering how hard the games are at some points of the story. Needless to say, I’m going to find dad’s old 100GB Maxtor USB HDD, which isn’t being used, and backup the whole PS3 monthly.

Still, at least I’ll have a working PS3 again. :D

Also, off topic but I’m going to start tagging my posts from now on. 1) It’s better for searching, 2) It’ll make the fancy tag cloud in my sidebar work. I might tag all the other posts someday too, if I’m bored, but don’t count on it. And, of course, if you’re not already following me on Twitter, or, as of yesterday, Tumblr, please do. :)

One More Reason To Vote For Obama

Published on 16 October, 2008. View Comments Tags: , , , , .

Source: Western Standard.

PS3 Died :(

Published on 10 October, 2008. View Comments Tags: , , , , .

My PS3 has died. If I try turning it on, the power light goes green, then quickly changes to yellow, then quickly changes to red, and blinks.

I was playing GTAIV today for about 4 hours or so, then I quit that, put Folding at Home on, and left the lounge…I just went downstairs about half an hour ago and noticed it had died. Great.

According to the flame-war-based PS3 forums, it should work if you power cycle it a few times, otherwise most people say call Sony. Sony’s FAQ suggests that it needs a service: http://tinyurl.com/ps3-b0rked

Anyway, since I’m going to London tomorrow,I’m going to leave it, and try again on Wednesday when I get back – if it still doesn’t work, I’ll see if Game can replace it (it’s only just within the year’s warranty – I purchased it on the 30th of October last year), and if not, I’ll give Sony a call. I just hope I can get my game saves back (I had loads of stuff on the HDD, including a lot of trailers), and my GTAIV disc is also stuck inside it. Argh!

Tomato

Published on 8 October, 2008. View Comments

As I recently switched to Be Unlimited, as my ISP, I decided that I’d like to monitor my bandwidth usage more carefully then I did with BT – when I was on BT, I was pretty much downloading as much as I could and not taking any note of how much I downloaded. However, I’d like to keep a better eye on it, and, if I get to about 200-250GB or so, for that specific month, I plan on probably slowing down a little.

Anyway, to do this, I had several options:

1) Guess.
2) Install bandwidth monitoring software on all the PCs in the house.
3) Monitor it via the router.

Point one, of course, would be very inaccurate. Point two would be okay, but it would be a hassle to setup on all the PCs in my house, two of which (my dad’s laptops) are not used on my network in the week, so, of course, it would have to only count data on the weekend. Plus, I can’t exactly install software like that on my PlayStation 3, can I? Overall, not a very easy solution.

This leaves option 3 – monitor bandwidth usage via a router. Sadly, not many routers do this by default that I know of, and if they do, it’s usually 1) reset when you reboot the router, and 2) very basic, eg, a simple “10GB” for your entire network. Sure, it tells you you’ve downloaded 10GB, but that’s it.

The Thompson box that Be provide you with (the “Be Box”) can tell you how much you’ve done, however I found that it seemed to either drop the connection or reboot every 24 hours or so, which was irritating. Of course, when it did this, it lost the figure. Plus the interface is, well…horrific, and it lacks any advanced features at all. In fact, I was suprised that it actually could connect to the internet… Anyway, my old Linksys router that I used with BT didn’t have any such bandwidth figure either, in fact, I don’t think any of Linksys’ routers actually have any sort of bandwidth monitor in them, which is a pity.

Also, the reason I didn’t upgrade my old Linksys WAG200G, is because it’s not based on a Broadcom chip, so it can’t run all these different firmware packages, which is a pity. However, I’m still using it, but only as the modem at the moment.

So, I decided to purchase a router with the intention of loading DD-WRT onto it. Having previously owned a Linksys WRT54G in Australia, and running DD-WRT on it, I did a little research. Sadly, Linksys have revised the WRT54G since I got mine several years ago and according to DD-WRT’s Wiki, the newer revisions are a bit iffy. So, I decided to get the WRT54GL. It’s basically the 4th revision of the WRT54G, but designed specificially for Linux-based 3rd party firmware, if you so wish to. Of course, it comes with a Linksys firmware by default but it can easily run 3rd party firmware if you so wish.

Anyway, I went ahead and got the WRT54GL from Overclockers UK, and it arrived on Monday. I unpacked it, plugged it in, and flashed it with DD-WRT v24. However, after poking around a little, DD-WRT seems to be lacking any decent bandwidth monitoring options, and, v24 seems to be a total pig compared to what I remember v23 being on my old router. So, as a few people had scorned me in Be’s IRC channel, I decided to download and install Tomato, which is another firmware for the WRT54GL (and others) that is apperantly very light. However, what most impressed me is that I had seen a demo of the bandwidth features on an episode of Systm.

So, I installed Tomato, and, what a difference. The whole interface seems much more polished then DD-WRT is, it’s a lot snappier and more responsive, and the bandwidth monitoring is great, and from poking around it quite a bit, I like it much more then DD-WRT. Another thing that I simply love is that you can setup “static DHCP” based on a device’s MAC address. Don’t know what that is? Well, you can have it so that all your devices connect via DHCP (which is easier), however Tomato will *always* hand out a specific IP that you choose to that device. For example, I’ve set it up so my devices will always have these IP addresses:

192.168.1.1: Router
192.168.1.2: AirPort Express
192.168.1.3: La Fonera Router
192.168.1.4: Thecus NAS
192.168.1.5: iMac
192.168.1.6: iPhone
192.168.1.7: PS3
192.168.1.8: Chumby
192.168.1.9: HDDVD Player

…but any additional devices that try and connect will be handed out a standard IP from the DHCP range, in my case, 192.168.1.100 and up. This is very handy if you can’t be bothered changing the settings on each seperate device, as it puts the control it one central location.

This of course is only a small selection of the features, and there are plenty more. One annoyance I’ve found with Tomato is there’s no built in manual or help or anything – for example, both the Linksys firmware and DD-WRT used to have a help section on the right, which was handy. Tomato has no such thing. However, there is a handy guide located here, which is nice for beginners. :)

Overall, Tomato has a very nice look, is very light, and still has plenty of features. If you have a WRT54GL, or another supported router, I highly recommend upgrading it.

Couple of screenshots:

As you can see, too, Tomato includes a small selection of templates so you can change the colours and so on. Plus, if you want to, you can make your own.

New Theme!

Published on 4 October, 2008. View Comments

After Peppery showing me his neat little Last.fm widget for WordPress earlier, I decided to install it. But I hit a snag. My old theme didn’t support widgets so I decided to become a sheep and switch to K2. Yay!

However, I didn’t want K2′s blinding white, so I said…well…read it yourself:

(02:56:53) <@Peppery> William: www.peppery.net.nz/projects :D
(02:57:55) <&William> Peppery: Should I use that?
(02:58:06) <@Peppery> William: up to you
(02:58:11) <@Peppery> :D
(02:58:19) <&William> SHOULD I OR SHOULD I NOT?!
(02:58:21) <&William> DAMNIT.
(02:58:22) <yum9me> YES
(02:58:24) <yum9me> FFS!
(02:58:26) <&William> OKAY COOL.
(02:58:33) <@Peppery> :D
(02:58:39) <&William> wait
(02:58:46) <&William> where the (censored) do I upload the php file?
(02:58:53) <@Peppery> wp-content/plugins
(02:58:56) <yum9me> >><<
(02:59:09) <&William> okay.
(02:59:12) <@Peppery> should probably write that on the page
(03:04:16) <&William> No Sidebars Defined
(03:04:16) <&William> You are seeing this message because the theme you are currently using isn’t widget-aware, meaning that it has no sidebars that you are able to change. For information on making your theme widget-aware, please follow these instructions.
(03:04:33) <@Peppery> aww
(03:04:53) <&William> Such a pity.
(03:05:05) * &William ponders using a K2 variant.
(03:05:21) <&William> What’s a good version of K2 that’s a darker colour?
(03:05:48) <@Peppery> William: http://rcboyce.com/design/k2/stormy-horizon/ ?
(03:05:58) <@Peppery> I <3 K2
(03:06:01) <&William> Nice.
(03:06:03) <&William> *uses*

Anyway, so, here I am. I quite like K2, and it’s overall pretty easy to use and has a very nice “clean” feel to it. I made only one modification to the theme, and that is the header. I’ve replaced it with a photograph of Hong Kong. The building on the left is the one seen in The Dark Knight. Yes, it’s 420KB in size. If you’re going to complain about that, shut up and upgrade to broadband. This is my blog and I can do whatever the hell I want to it. :P

Finally, a word on the sidebar widgets – firstly, I will be replacing the Twitter one soon with a smaller text-based one that Peppery is coding, and, hopefully, Wakoopa will add the promised colour support for their widgets. The white clashes horribly with my theme now. :(

Also, my contact page seems to have broken. Oh well. Tough.

Oh and finally, as you can see in the top right of my sidebar, approx 17-20ish people read my blog via a feed reader. I’m sure more of you actually read it without the use of a feed reader. If you do read my blog, COMMENT AND TELL ME WHO YOU ARE! I’m curious who reads it. Oh, and tell me if you like the theme too. :)

And on an unrelated note, I need to get a new hard drive for my PlayStation 3. The current 60GB drive is getting very full, and I want to perhaps get this one: Samsung 160GB SpinPoint M5.

And on another unrelated note, I’m off to London next weekend! I’m leaving on Saturday the 11th, and going down by train, and I’ll be back on Wednesday the 15th. Reason – I’m going to see James Blunt, live, at The O2 Arena, on the 14th. You can find more info here (The O2) or here (Last.fm).

That’s all for now. Don’t forget to comment. :P