note

|

Away from the stressful bit of the day…

My order from Performance-PC’s arrived today (the custom PSU, plus some fan grills, a custom floppy drive and new CPU/gfx card coolers). Everything arrived in top notch condition. The PSU was a breeze to install, as was the CPU cooler. The fan grills took a bit longer than they should have, due to them being a bit bigger than normal 80mm grills. The two on the front intake fans actually overlap each other. Ah well. Didn’t fit the new gfx cooler, cos a) I couldn’t be arsed and b) I think it might be better to mount it on the Northbridge chip anyway. Will need to get some thermal epoxy for that.

The PSU is fantastic. The braiding on the cables is top quality. Everything now looks a bit neater. Some cabling still needs tidying up, but that’s mainly minor stuff. As wierd as it may sound, all the LEDs in the case seem a bit brighter since installing the new PSU… could be just my imagination though!

The CPU cooler (a Coolermaster X-Dream) is also great. Spinning the fan at full power makes it a better cooler than my Thermalright SLK-800 (the king of heatsinks) and 80mm fan combo. Looks a lot better as well, even with the stock fan grill (which I’ve swapped for one of my new ones). Unfortunately, it’s loud.

The floppy drive has a black, anodised aluminium face plate, so it matches the finish of my case. Other than that, it’s a standard floppy – nothing exciting. It’s only there for the times when I need to flash the BIOS, personally, I’d consign all FDD’s to the scrapheap, if it wasn’t for their amazing ability to get you out’ve trouble when your machine fails… I do need to get a 3mm bl00 LED for it though. I will not tolerate non-bl00ness in my case!

All this new stuff means that there are only a few bits and bobs I need to do, before my PC is finished.

  • match the CD drive to my case
  • sort the lighting
  • tidy the wires at the bottom of my case (the front panel connector stuff and the LCD wire)
  • Replace the top mounted “blow-hole” fan, to match the other case fans

and that’s pretty much it! All the hard work will be done and I’ll have one sexhay PC

note

|

Got a Net MD? Sick and tired of OpenMG Jukebox? I know I am – it sucks… half my tracks don’t convert properly, so are just however many minutes of silence. Plus, it doesn’t properly support any form of MP3 and has that annoying “Check-In/Out” feature.

Anyway, I was searching around for an alternative method to OpenMG and stumbled across this little gem. You’ll need Nero Burning Rom + the Imagedrive function and Sony Simple Burner (should come with your Net MD). To enjoy a simple method of transferring MP3s or other music files onto your Net MD, follow these steps…

  1. Open Nero, select Audio CD from the presets and drag all the MP3’s you want into it. Nero is far less picky about formats and sample rates. I found this method foolproof.
  2. Save or ‘Burn’ your CD to your hard drive (not your burner). Nero will give you a default filename of ‘image.nrg’
  3. Use Nero’s Imagedrive (bundled with Nero) to mount the .nrg (CD-image) you just created. Lets say Drive ‘F’ for this example.
  4. Select your ‘virtual F’ CD drive in Simple Burner and burn it to Minidisc. When you are done, trash the large .nrg file sitting on your desktop.

Advantages of this Method:

  • You are using reliable software.
  • Check-in/check-out is avoided.
  • Unlike OpenMG, files aren’t left all over your hard drive.
  • You can delete and re-arrange the downloaded tracks on your MD without having to resort to connecting it back to your PC.
  • It is faster and doesn’t thrash your hard drive.

There you go… you should now be on the way to Net MD bliss…

note
|

My GeForce 4 Ti 4800 also arrived today. Unreal Tournament never looked so good! 1280*1024, with all detail levels set to highest… and it never once dropped below 38fps during an intense 12 bot deathmatch.

On the down-side, adding it to my case has pushed the average ambient temperature up 3-5 degrees, to about 35 degrees celcius…

note
|

Heard the new Metallica single, “St Anger”, last night. Loads of people had told me that it was crap, prior to me hearing, but I actually quite like it. It’s different, for Metallica.

The riff reminds me of “Blind” by Korn, which is probably where some are drawing the nu-metal comparison from. Plus the fact that there’s no solo…

It’s not as good as their “old stuff”, but it was never going to be. I think people’s expectations were that when they (Metallica) said they were going back to their roots, they were going to write Master of Pupperts part 2 or something… Sorry, it was never going to happen.

I learned a while back not to have any preconceived expectations about what Metallica will do next… Over their 20 year career, they have strived to always stay on top, to always change it up and stay fresh. Yet people always seem to expect – almost demand – a generic thrash album from them. Why? Do you want a band that “plays it safe”, musically? Do you want to listen to the same things regurgitated over several albums? Or do you want some variety in a bands discography? Don’t you want some contrast? Something that says “this band aren’t afraid to take risks”?

Personally, whatever the new album/its musical direction sounds like, I’d rather have that over a cash-in on former glories in a rehash of Kill ‘Em All or something similar…

Sticking with the music theme, I’ll turn my attention to Evanesence. I dunno what to make of this band. When I first heard their single “Bring Me to Life”, I wasn’t too sure about it. “Sure, the girl’s got a good voice and it’s quite catchy”, I thought to myself, “but the double-vocals with the guy sound a little too much like bog-standard nu-metal pap…”

Thankfully, it turns out that the guy that sings on that single, is only a guest vocalist (he’s from a band called “12 Stone” or something like that). I’ll also admit that the single’s been growing on me quite a lot since I first heard it. As a result, I checked out a couple of other songs (“Lies” and “My Immortal” ) and I was quite impressed. Neither song sounded anything like the others and showed some promise.

There’s still something about them that makes me a little unsure though… I may buy the album anyway, just to ease my curiosity, if nothing else. If it’s good then that’s a bonus, I guess. I can always take it back if it sucks…

article

|

I’m in mourning. My DVD player decided to blow itself up last night 🙁 . One minute, my girlfriend is watching “Miss Congeniality”, the next minute there’s a few funny noises, some popping, a bang and a burning smell. At first I thought it was the speaker system – I’d thought there was something wrong with them for months now and I was still recieving a picture, but upon noticing the garbage that the players LCD was spewing out and that the burnt smell was coming from the player, I had to conclude that something had blown inside the player unit itself. So it was a case of power off and unplug, before anything caught fire.

It was less than 6 months old.

I suppose it’s possibly a case of “you get what you pay for”. It was a cheapo Bush brand player, bought as bundle with the speakers, for £99 just after Christmas. Still, you would expect it to last more than 5 and three quarter months…

Personally, I blame the crap film for all this trouble 😉

So why am I not tearing down the walls of the Curry’s store that I bought it from? Well, cos quite frankly they suck at customer care. All the major high-street electronics retailers do. I would take the entire system – player + speakers – back to them (fully repackaged, as per their requirements), along with the reciept and warranty slips. I’d then explain several times what happenerd. After a few attempts to explain what happened, I’d either be told that:
a) it’s not eligable to be repaired;
-or-
b) it is eligable, but it might cost a fair bit
After that (if they take it), it’ll take a number of weeks – possibly months – to get returned to me. Most likely, it’ll fail again within 5 months.

For a £99 system, the hassle just isn’t worth it, IMO. If the customer care was decent, I might consider it… but I know it’s not. I’ve heard too many horror stories (here’s a now famous example…), and have had a few iffy experiences with high street electronics retailers myself. Instead, I’ll mutter under my breath, grumble a bit, then buy a decent player to replace the dead one. I’ve got my eye on one of these, which I’ve been told are the dogs wotsits.

Ah, modern technology… can’t live with it, can’t live without it…

note

|

A piece of internet history has been discovered – the first known use of a smiley (emoticon) has been found.

taken from The Register:

The original smiley, or emoticon, invented in 1982 by Scott Fahlman but subsequently lost, has been retrieved through the efforts of Microsoft researcher Mike Jones and facilities staff at Carnegie Mellon University. And isn’t it a blessing to find Microsoft Research staff keeping themselves profitably occupied like this, when they could be posing a threat to world freedom instead?

Jones describes the process of unearthing the smiley here. Fahlman hadn’t kept a copy of his original post, and had assumed it had been lost. But he was able to help narrow down the likely dates, and extensive CMU trawls through old backup tapes finally nailed the posting down to 19th September 1982, so we’re just in time for the 20th anniversary next Thursday.. It has now been restored in all its glory here, and the full thread from whence it came can be viewed here.

Note that Fahlman’s post didn’t come out of the blue – the CMU people had been working hard on a mechanism for signifying jokes for some time, and among the rejected proposals were & and #. Nor did 🙂 win immediate and universal acceptance. On the 20th a poster identified only as Not Sharon Burks mounted a fight-back on behalf of the “gandalf vax” and its favoured emoticon. But ultimately, Fahlman triumphed, and the research team could go back to discussing Star Trek.

use the link below to view the first ever use of a smiley http://research.microsoft.com/~mbj/Smiley/Smiley.html

note

|

I’m in quite a good mood today (0_0) despite having to get up horrendously early (well, 8:30am) to get to work…

Gawd, from next week, I’ve got to do it every week day for the rest of my working life. Oh dear.

Anyway… Yeah, my weekend was rather spiffy.

First up was a gig at Lava – Black Atom, supporting Pantellica who are a Pantera/Metallica tribute band from London. Atom were ace. They got a fantastic reception, had a brilliant sound, and were generally very ace. Pantellica… hmmm. The musicianship was all there. Shame the singer wasn’t that great a metal singer. He wasn’t a bad singer by any means, he just didn’t suit metal. Especially not Metallica or Pantera. But ach well, it was fun anyway. Couldn’t help but feel a little peeved that a tribute band get to play for 1 1/2 hours, while decent “proper” bands get 45 minutes or so, and the local bands get even less time.

Saturday was a blast. It was another gig, this time at Dr Drakes, featuring Hot Mangu & Black Atom (again). Also making some noise, was yours truely, making my DJ debut (well, if you don’t count the AUBL radio show…). There was also the Elizium goth night afterwards. Despite a little confusion between me and the Elizium guys as to who was playing when, everything went pretty smoothly. I had great fun. Played a bit of everything, from Metallica/Iron Maiden etc, to A/Green Day etc. Played a few local things too – Quik, Sirius, Contra and We Become Less.

Sunday night was the radio show (AUBL on MeFM – 105.8fm 8 till 10 Sundays, 7-9 Wednesdays. Plug plug). We had Contra live in session, which was great, cos Contra are ace. Unfortunately, we didn’t have a sound engineer for this show, so I ended up doing most of the “production”, trying to get the levels right and stuff. It was all an ace laugh anyway, and the show went pretty well really. Only 3 more shows left I think… oh well, it’s been fun.

Anyway, suppose I’d better go and get some work done…

note
|

So what have I been up to? The usual really. Been to some absolutely fantastic gigs. Got some photo’s of some of them too. I’ll put them up soon(ish).

Other than that, it’s been exam time. Fun…

Also been working a little. Start full-time work on the 3rd of June 🙂

Other than the above, I’ve just basically been going out, having a laugh, etc. I’m waiting on the new Star Wars film to come out. It’s gonna be ace!

Also been buying lots of Transformers related stuff recently. Getting back to my youth kinda thing really…