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

Passion of Christ

The Passions of the Christ, small review because I am sure nobody else is doing one.

Weeeeellllllll. I am never one to go see a religious movie, and this one wasn't really one. So I didn't break any of my own personal commandments this time. However as I have degenerated into my urine smelling, bone-grindingly old age, I prefer not to watch needless suffering and/or pain.

This movie was pointless. Not one message, which seems fantasticly stupid, as this was arguably the biggest message any single event, or person, gave to the human race.

I think I can safely go into a little detail as there are not too many people unaware of the story here....

The entire thing is about the torture, Jesus went through just before his death. And it's not easy to watch. All those out there thinking, "Awesome dude, they never get detailed enough in most movies, like you totally NEVER see the spikes going through eyeballs.....etc etc", think again! This movie is WAAAY OUT there when it comes to the violence and sheer disturbing scenes within it.

If you called the central character "John" and it was a story of how he was detained by hateful people, tortured, and then killed, it would be exactly the same movie. The flashbacks that Jesus has, could well be, just our new John thinking of how he remembered the good times, and knew he was near death.

I am sure Jesus did not go through all this just for people to sit around and suck their teeth at how painful his last couple of days were.

One great character was Satan, ooooo I liked that one.


Passion of Christ
(0 out of 10)

Slow?

I am sure you know people who move this way...

The Iguana departs

After a couple of days of obvious quiet, the iquana decided to peacefully move onto pastures new....


See you around JJ

She joins one of the cats and a couple of hamsters, where ever it is these go, when they er... go...

GameShark Media Player Crack

It seems I am getting a lot of people coming here for the GameShark Media Player Crack. I have no idea why, and what on earth could the crack actually do?

If someone would like to leave an anonymous comment as to the function of it (or what someone THINKS it is) I would very much like to know. I would be your bestest buddy for ever and ever and ever and ever.

You can read my original article on it here.

Until then, here's a pointless Star Trek link....



Poor chap in red, they always get it!
Is that Steven Segal?

Bye!

DON'T LOOK AT THIS. It will make you laugh and then you will feel REALLY guilty!


Now do you feel guilty?

Mag Innovision LT576s 15 inch Flat Panel monitor

Well after the success of messing about with a Mag LT776s Flat Panel Monitor I broke down and got a Mag LT576s 15 inch flat panel monitor which now keeps an underused PC company elsewhere in the lair.

It fit into the space just perfectly, and with a little care and attention, it means all you see is a keyboard, mouse, and monitor. No wires to worry about or get in the way.

This thing is just so nice, and there is no issue what so ever with the image quality. The more Mag products I get to try, the more and more I like them. It's one of those brand names I now tend to notice in the computery stores no matter what I am actually looking for.



Mag LT576s, nice and trim.

CRT - Cathode Ray Tube
LCD - Liquid Crystal Display
Flat Panel Monitor - Same as LCD but for people with more money than God.
Second monitor on a laptop - Just plug a normal desktop monitor, into the monitor socket on the back of your laptop, and switch on.

How to check for Mydoom infection

Here is a little tip in case you were worrying about the latest and baddest worm to come out of some idiots head, for the rest of the world to have to deal with...

Look for the following file

ctfmon.dll

If you have it, congratulations, you are one of the infected unclean.

You can visit the Microsoft Security "What You Should Know About the Mydoom Worm" page and see for yourself. It details the ways in which these things get hold of you, and how you can minimize further exploitation from the nerdy non-girlfriended types out there.

So remember folks, ALWAYS have virus protection running and keep it up to date. Getting an email from someone you don't know is a no brainer, just delete it. Even if you get something that APPEARS to be from someone you DO know, if you did not specifically ask for, or expect it, then delete it. As they can quite easily send it again. They may not have even sent it, it could be the virus sending out emails to everyone in their address book.

It's good information chaps, read it!


Mydoom information from Symantec


Basic fact stuff

Viruses and worms are quite often delivered to the user in email attachments. You know when someone sends you a picture or another file, that is attached to the message? Well in some cases that attachment is infected with the virus, and as soon as you open it (by selecting open, view, or how ever your email program lets you see attached files) it goes to work behind the scenes messing up your computer, and in a lot of cases, thousands of others too!

To avoid being part of the problem, make sure you scan all incoming email with your virus scanner, and delete anything you did not expect or ask for. Most of that is called spam you know.

DOS or Denial of service attack - Someone repeatedly requests things from someone else's server, to bring it to a complete halt. In this case the worm will make infected machines send lots of requests to specific servers to try and flood them with requests and bring them to a grinding halt. Naughty

WORM - More naughtyness!

One final note. Viruses are ALWAYS man made. There is no natural source of computer illness anywhere. Some idiot with more time and acne, than brain cells has decided to ruin a lot of users days.