Another ear worm...

Click here to hear a great new ear worm called Milk and Cereal.

Within a couple of days everyone you work with should be singing and whistling it.... enjoy.

Try some good old fashioned weirdness then instead. Be warned it may make you hungry...




I dare you not to know the words to this.

Gmail

Well I was just invited to try the new Gmail service from Google. Not really a big deal for me, but it will be interesting how the mega storage amount works out... Could just be a place where uber amounts of spam sit for eternity, but lets not get too negative about it at such an early stage.

I don't rely on out of office/house email at all, but this might change all that!

Here are the rather generous stats..
Nine months until the account is scraped out and recycled.
ONE GIGABYTE, of storage, for a free webmail account. Ahem! Wake up Hotmail, and Yahoo, I think you have some shuffling to do here. They only have from 2 to 4 MB for storage.



Gmail, does it really NEED this much room?!
For those that are not sure of the amount of room given. Hotmail gives you 2MB until it cannot fit any more messages into it's account. Gmail is 1000MB big! GAWSH!

Shameless Plug

Here I should give a quick mention to someone who has just birthed their very first web page.

Go take a look at Leonie Naughton's information and wonder at it's depth and insight!


Lenonie Naughton, she writes....

My images!

Look chaps I do have images, but my image host is terrible (free). A breakthrough in modern technology (red tape) next month, means I can go for uber hosting. Bandwidth is our friend.


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No Image

Robocop the game (again)

It seems that Titus Games have gotten down to their previously low standards yet again. This time it's murdering the once popular Robocop license.

I had seen nothing of this at all, but proceeded to the site. I remember the first time I saw the poster for the Robocop movie, and just NEEDED to see that movie. It was great in it's day and I could watch it over and over.

The Robocop game on the other hand, is total kak. Terrible graphics, awful animation and just plain boring. It's a first person shooter, and with our dear Robocop being mostly computer, you could put a ton of front end presentation in there for no good reason other than to make it look good. You know what I am going to say..

The game presentation looks like a mid-nineties computer demo, or a corporate presentation of the same period. What hell is that?!? To be stuck with the same operating system for life! I mean, could he update his kernel? Could he upgrade to RobocopXP? What about a fresh install? It looks like he is all command line, but perhaps he wants to keep SCO off his back by not going completely over to Linux? It doesn't look like he has a media player of any sort, and forget wireless.

How sad, but on the bright side he never seems to crash. Unless dipped in electrified gunk by the latest evil-doer. I bet his battery life sucks too, and what about storage? No USB thumb drives for him, no interface. Just that huge spike thing that came out of his hand, and I haven't seen many of them on the desktops in Best Buy just lately either!

The only good thing to come out of this was that in my research for this piece I found a site called Ruined Endings, where you can see what happened at the end of all those movies you just cannot watch, no matter how great your trailer park, mullet wearing, laughs at those battery operated singing fish, buddies, tells you it is.



Trapped in a machine, and Titus Interactive's game licensing deal!


P.S. You cannot mention Robocop without giving a nod to his all time drinking buddy ED-209.

Hellboy the movie

Hellboy was a good movie, although one of my only geek areas I don't tend to be into is the comic book thing. But even without knowing that Hellboy existed before now, you could just tell it looked a lot like the source. It's one of those amazingly action packed romps that seems to be the thing these days. If there is nothing else to see then this would not dissapoint I am sure. Hellboy is an unexpected effect of trying to harness some evil forces for those chaps who stomped Europe during that second world war. But this horny chap is on the side of good, right?

Good fighting evil, and boy getting girl, stuff here folks, you can relax into the effects.

Ron Pearlman plays Hellboy, and does it rather well in fact. If I had not seen the previews to this movie I would never have known about it at all! It's good and could be worth getting when it's out to buy on DVD at a reduced price too, for one of those times when you want to watch a certain type of movie thats simple fun. If you have some preteens that you need to keep entertained then this would be ideal for them. I have no idea how the fanboys took this thing... and to be honest I don't care...



Ron Pearlman as Hellboy, horny jokes ahoy!

Darling, did you hear that noise?

Managed to capture a little piece of life when out and about yesterday. Saw what at first I thought was an open topped truck, full of trash. Then it quickly dawned on me that it was indeed the truck itself! There was a bridge nearby which might have been too low for it, and as it was a rental (OH NO!) perhaps the driver just did not realise! Now do you think insurance is a good idea?



You can just make out the top all ripped open, and the right side all hanging out.

Unreal Tournament 2004

Perhaps you found this article hoping you would find the link to the demo, so HERE it is.

It is familliar to anyone who has played any of the unreal games. It does however seem a LOT faster! You can drive various vehicles too which adds quite a lot to the game. My favorite is the tank which lumbers around and then spits out instant death! Slow but you don't want to be around when it sees you. I think I am going to have to buy it soon.



Shooty blam blam

For anyone who doesn't know, this game is referred to as a first person shooter. You see out of the eyes of your gun toting hero, and are supposed to stomp around the play area (mostly) shooting the opposing team, or in the case of a Deathmatch, EVERYONE else. You move the mouse to aim your gun, the keyboard to move about, and clicking the mouse buttons dishes out your style of justice! Heart stopping stuff indeed! It's like paintball, but a lot more satisfying. The current fashion is to play online with lots of people, but there are games which allow you to play single player mission type games. Imagine an action movie, where you are the central character, and the action (for the most part) never lets up. They even have crappy acting in the cut scenes most of the time too!

Ati Radeon 9600 XT

Ok so after the monitor I was not exactly in a position to get another high end piece of kit, so I opted for the ATI Radeon 9600 XT, which has come down from the stratospheric price, to a range mere humans can comprehend. So I popped it into my baby and set to work with it.

Using 3DMark 2001 and 2003, I finally got to see all the demos, as this card has what it needs in it, to be able to run them all. You can go to FutureMark and see other numbers, and so all I have to say is that my original Nvidia 440MX was giving me numbers around 50fps, and the new card in excess of 200fps



Where's my tissues, I seem to have gotten a little over excited!

FPS = Frames Per Second. A term used in gaming circles to (hopefully) ensure a smooth look to a game, so there is less time moaning that something appeared out of nowhere due to lag on screen, and more time just watching the smooth arc of death smokily coming straight for you. The higher the number, the smoother the game is. Anything above 30 is nice enough to play any game.

Mag LT976 19 inch LCD Monitor

The Mag LT976 19 inch LCD monitor, is very nice indeed!
Having used the Mag LT576 15 inch LCD for quite a while and found that to be nice and crisp. As well as recently using eleven (yes 11) Mag LT776 17 inch LCD's to build a lab, I can say nothing bad about them!

They all have built in speakers, which was one reason to put them in a lab and eliminate the phenomenon of about three sets of speakers chasing you like excited puppies, at the nanosecond you realise it is about to happen, because you have swept up the speaker cables in your brisk sojourn past the desk.

The 19 inch version differs from the others in that it has more on screen display features. The menu is more involved and a handy little icon shows up each time you change resolutions showing you which feed into it, is currently used, as well as the resolution itself and the refresh rate!

The display is rock solid, with no streaks and only a minimal amount of trails during gaming. All this while attached to a KVM switch too! Nice to have that screen size with the native 1280*1024 in front of me now. I don't think I will be going back to CRT for a LONG while yet. All this started because my free Compaq MV7500 monitor (which I cannot link to, as nobody makes it anymore) began the day with a rather incontinent looking yellow stain to the whole screen. It took longer and longer to return to normal each day, and it was probably only a matter of time before it stopped working altogether.



So now I have two of these on my desk, life just keeps getting better!

XX and XY chromosomes

Listen to these two high brow opposing views, which I happened across at Radmillas place.

One for the ladies, and one for the gents. Listen carefully and just KNOW that all the lyrics are true.... I can say that lads as I am merely text on a webpage... ha!



Eternal battle rages on

Major construction

You know how you may have always wanted to do something if money and sense were no object. Well I find myself in my lucky life, being able to do a few of those things. Of late I have been extremely busy with building a computer lab.

It went from wire hell, to flat panels on the walls, and the smell of Enterprise Bridge. (Note the flat panels too)

It went full circle. From mindless drooling over specs, to napkin sketch, 3D model, and finally, back to drooling, with a little more hushed awe thrown in!

I am not sure how much I can go into here except to say that another dream of mine became a reality and it looked good, and the people seem to want another, I can't wait!!



Behold just a little of it's majesty!

Samsung A610 Mobile Phone

One of my new toys has been the Samsung A610 camera phone. It's very nice and is a complete change to my old Kyocera 2235.

The thing I noticed first about the Samsung A610 was how bright the screen was. It looks very clear and my first thought was that it would drain the battery fast. But the first few days of messing with the camera portion, proved me wrong on that one. I probably don't use my phone as much as most people do, but I found it to (as yet) never leave the fully charged stage. Although this could point towards a wildly innacurate battery meter... time (and probably an emergency) will tell.

The whole camera thing was why I got it. I see a ton of stuff out and about I want to snap. The digital camera is not something I readily keep to hand, and so this is ideal. I can at last use a lot more of my own images on this here blog.

One BIG issue before you rush out and get that swanky new phone you have been promising yourself, is that by design on Verizon's part, you cannot simply attach the phone to your computer and suck all the pictures out. You have to send it to your email, or your online album for a price! There is no other way of doing it. I looked into this unholy crime and found a little thing called GAGIN.

You see the phone (as I use it here in the states) has what is called by my provider "Get it Now" which sort of translates into downloading ringtones, or games, for an unbelievable amount of money each time! Come on chaps, isn't there nothing that they will not tempt the kiddies with these days? You have to incur airtime while browsing a selection of goodies to download to your little phone. GAGIN stands for Get Around Get it Now. Clever stuff eh, which seems to be a way of attaching a cable to your phone and having the software to browse the phone, and replace files as you want to. From what I gather it works well with ringtones and images, however games are entirely different. I will let you know how this goes as soon as I find the elusive USB connecting cable to go with the software I already managed to grab.

The rest of the phone works wonderfully well. Polyphonic ringtones, and selectable niceness on the screen. One thing that I used to use my Axim and digicam for, was to take images of things I needed to the stores, so I could show the people there what it was, my strange Aussie/Brit accent couldn't quite get across. Now I simply snap with the phone, and show them when I get there. The Axim is good if it's something I don't currently have, but a few trips lately to Home Depot have been revolutionized by my little Samsung A610.

One difference I can compare to the Kyocera 2235 as it had so few features in comparison, is that the text entry is totally different, and much easier to get into. I also have the good fortune of having a Kyocera SE47 to mess with also. This looks great, but retains the ancient style of text input so I am glad it's not my primary phone! And it has that Captain Kirk thing going on with it's slideyness.

The Samsung A610 is one of those flip phones, which I am not a big fan of. But the phone itself is apparently chunkier than most (chunkier than a molecule!?) so I should not have too much trouble locating it with my fat digits. The camera is mounted on the hinge, and the screen actually swivels and closes again all tablet PC stylee. (OOooOO)
All the usual things are great with this. Nothing simple was annoying, like button fiddlyness, or audio quality, and couple it with Verizons seemingly rock solid coverage, you never have to worry about missing any of your call at all!


All in all I give it 5 out of 5 tivo's




Guess which one is me?
When I can be bothered, I will post some comparison images here to show the quality of the lens of this miniature marvel.

Final hamster takes final journey

The final hamster, which was older than Yoda, finally passed away. Quietly deflated in it's deluxe hideaway.



Bye teeny