Sigh – the website is being hit with comment spam more than ever. I’ve employed wp-blacklist and it gets most of the spam but every so often some of the crap slips through. Hey-ho…not to worry. If you use WordPress the Weblog Tools Collection site is well worth a visit. Looks like some new comment moderation software is in development. Cool.
Category: Blog
Judgement Day
Tomorrow is voting day in the American elections. From afar it’s hard not to feel that Kerry is the better choice. However his comments on Afghanistan have been rather sobering and it does make you wonder what choice the American voter really has. Bush is nothing but a liar and a warmonger but he seems to be able to convince enough Americans that his way is the right way. More than ever they have a real arrogance about what they can and cannot do when it comes to world politics. It’s Iraq now but where would it stop….Iran? North Korea? Probably Iran – part of the Axis of Evil and fourth on the list of most oil reserves.
In many ways tomorrows election has a bigger effect on the UK and the world at large than our own election next year will. I for one don’t want another four years of Bush logic driving US & UK foreign policy. I hope Kerry will make a difference. I hope he gets the chance.
XBMC
I’ve mentioned Xbox Media Center (XBMC) before but the new updates are top smart. First up is a new web radio interface. Makes browsing through hundreds of Internet radio stations a breeze. Second is a link into Apple’s movie trailer site which means you can stream and watch trailers on the TV with ease. Finally there’s a link to game trailers at Microsoft.
Linking into the pc is easy and means I can browse the all my music (and album art finally works well) and select play lists at will. Can then easily switch to movies stored on the media server pc, the Xbox itself or slap in a dvd. If you are into home entertainment in any way, a chipped Xbox and XBMC really are worth investigating.
iPod Photo
New iPod Photo announced. 40 & 60Gb versions and for not too shabby a price. Looks good and would be a definite buy if I didn’t have an iPod already. Main issue for me is that Apple’s support of existing users is pretty shabby. I love my iPod but some fairly basic updates wouldn’t have gone amiss – heck – I can’t even play back tracks without any gaps between them. These kind of features should be in as a basic minimum. Good to see battery life quoted at 15 hours though. Don’t know if I would get much mileage out of viewing photo’s on the screen…a more practical screen will probably be found in the next version due in March. I would however love to see the album art while my mp3’s are playing. Very cool. Still…won’t be upgrading. Also odd to see the new U2 special edition iPod more prominent on the Apple website over the new iPod Photo.
Finally, iTunes 4.7 is now available. Probably with updates for new iPods only….hey-ho.
John Peel
Shocked and saddened at the news that John Peel passed away on holiday yesterday. I’ve never been an avid fan that listened to all his shows but the ones that I did catch, mostly while revising during the Uni years, were great. He always struck me as a man with integrity and a real passion for his job. He will be missed.
Quiet PC
After a bit of thought I’ve finally decided to get the old pc up and running as a server. The first task was to make it quieter. The fans on it were quite loud….cue visit to Quiet PC. I’d always liked the look of the Zalman Flower so I gave into temptation and made the purchase. At the same time I was convinced that the power supply also was a bit too loud so I picked up a quiet one of those too.
Delivery for once really was next day so ii got round to installing them both today. The verdict – the flower cooler is definitely quiet and keeps the cpu (it is an ageing 1GHz Athlon) cool. It’s heavy though and is only suitable for certain motherboards and chips. The power supply was disappointing . At first it seemed very quiet but listening from a different angle you could hear a very deep hum. Tried the old power supply and it was quieter. Some you win, some you lose. So I’ll be returning the power supply back to Quiet PC – hopefully their returns policy is as good as the rest of their store had been up to now.
Once I get windows on it I hope to run it as a server with the main pc and xbox using it as a media storage device. It will also have a webserver which I can access from anywhere (work firewall permitting :-() and ultimately I may host this website from it. That’s a long way off though.
GTA San Andreas
Rockstar have added a radio player to their site which gives a taster of the music that will be available. Nice.
*Update* – full list from Gamespot.
Want to join Google?
Was looking through the Google Blog (what else is there to do when you’ve played Halo 2 all night….oops) and stumbled across a test which you can complete and send to Google. The prize? A job at Google Labs.
Google Desktop
Beta now launched and can be downloaded from the Google Desktop site. First impressions are good. Quick to index my files using less system resources than Windows in-built indexing and search results are fast. Also searches Outlook . Option to integrate with Google web searches which is nice. Finally its as quick to find my files as it is to find others peoples files on the web.
*Update* Couple of alternatives for searching. One is Filehand which also searches mp3’s and pdf’s and the other is Copernic Desktop Search. Both are standalone search engines – I’ll give them a whirl over the weekend.
What the hell am I doing here?
Great find from Gordon. A flash animation set to the acoustic version of one of Radiohead’s best songs. Enjoy.
The weird thing is I’ve spent the afternoon listening to The Bends and OK Computer. Yes – it was a bad day.