Shamelessly stolen from Richard, make your own Tory poster. I’ve almost got ‘The Fear’ that the Tories might get a big vote tomorrow. Please vote – don’t let Michael win.
Year: 2005
Shattered
Made the most of the holiday weekend and I can safely say that I’m glad to be going back to work tomorrow. The clear-out on Saturday was followed by lot’s of flat pack building. Also cleaned out the rest of the garage and organised what’s left – for the first time since we moved in the garage is looking tidy…for a garage.
The rest of the furniture is all built and in place but it’ll take a few days of tidying to get back to normal. One thing I do regret is I forgot to order a lock and key for a set of office drawers I bought. I foolishly went into Ikea today for it – never again on a bank holiday. The place was mobbed and you could see three types of consumer
Never mind – a lesson has been learnt.
Knackered
Hired a van today and with the help of Graham bought far too much at Ikea and then cleared out my garage. Since we moved in the garage has always niggled at me. 5 windows, a kitchen worktop, some kitchen cabinets and an old decrepit workbench from the 1920’s plus wood and car posters from the sixties had meant I could never get the place organised. Finally it has been.
The council dump was a bit weird though. No vehicles over the height of 1.8 metres is allowed in. The reason I needed a van was the size and weight of the stuff needing dumped. Looks like they want to encourage you to pay the council to take the sizeable rubbish away. Swine’s. Never mind – a good job well done.
Star Wars Revelations
With the news that there is to be a Star Wars TV series (been watching Battlestar George?) and the immenent Episode 3 you may have missed the release of Star Wars Revelations by Panicstruck Productions. This is an independently made 45 minute production that captures all that’s good and bad about Star Wars, namely:
That’s maybe a little harsh as the CGI is amazing for a free film but to ‘star’ in the film it looks like you had to be American, fat, ugly and have facial hair…and that’s just the girls. Seriously though it’s well worth a download at around 250Mb just for the CGI alone – best to grab the torrent though as most of the mirrors aren’t reliable.
E4 on Freeview
By the end of May E4 and also E4+1 will be available on Freeview – the full press release is here. Great news although a bit of a waste to have E4+1 as well. By October More 4 will also have launched on Freeview as well. I’m now more glad that I didn’t move to Sky and also convinced a dual-tuner Freeview PVR is required. Question is, will it be the Topfield or the Inverto? Comparisons with these two plus others can be found here.
Voyeur
Bring out the voyeur in you by typing (including quotes) “ViewerFrame?Mode=” in Google. Network camera’s a plenty. Some don’t work – most do. Enjoy.
XBox 360?
There’s still three weeks before the MTV Xbox 360 announcement but a few sites are saying this is what the 360 will look like. Interesting. Two versions apparently as well with the higher spec one more like an XBMC 360 with a removable hard drive, web browsing, instant messaging, media player/sharing all in one device. Out this year, in Europe too. Time to start saving the pennies. More can be seen on Team Xbox.
Confusion…pity the consumer
After my PlusNet raves it was bound to fly back in my face. PlusNet have now announced that they aren’t going to implement a Fair Usage Policy after all but instead use contention levels to deliver their service and cut down on those who abuse (i.e. continually download). Instead of a 30Gig + unlimited overnight downloads it will be £21.99 for an unlimited but contended service. Contention will be set at 30:1 and unless you go above 5:1 contention that’s it – no speed cuts, no download limits. Good.
The confusion this has caused is massive – 16 pages of posts and counting and two very confusing posts from PlusNet employee’s –
If you mean will shaping apply, then yes, but as I said the amount and type will vary based on the products which haven’t been announced so I’ll say no more.
and on another thread at almost precisely the same time
I can confirm that traffic shaping isn’t being applied across the product range. It will be applied on Broadband Plus, but not across the board on Premier.
While this has totally changed the PlusNet view of the last 3 months they have also announced to compliment this new Premier products, but they felt it would confuse the user if they revealed the specifics – please wait for the 28th of April for more details. Bloody Hell.
Until now I’ve been happy with PlusNet – great service and support and night and day compared to BT Broadband. Their service is still top notch but their communications team need a shake. All they do is confuse the user and dropping little bits of info through forum posts only confuses users more and leads to, ultimately, users drifting off to other providers. I’m more than happy to be paying £21.99 for 2Meg and the heavy users suffering a poorer service however I will not accept traffic shaping of any kind. Time to check out other providers in case I need to change. Where’s the phone number for UK Online?. Their £29.99 for 8Meg is getting more tempting by the day.
Google Local & Maps
Finally a UK version has been launched. Google Maps and Google Local provide high quality maps, directions and addresses for all things local. Here’s my address, how to get to Shakeels and also the essentials in my area. Click and drag the maps to move them around. I really like clicking on the pins in the directions map which gives you a pop-up of the end-point in detail which can also be zoomed and scrolled. Just need the Google browser now.
Gamics
Stumbled on gamics.com at the weekend – comics made from game engines. At first I thought the quality would be fairly poor…typical home-brew type affair but I was wrong. The strips are great, look very cool and some of the writing is far better than I expected. If you like comics it’s worth a try. PHWComics is also worth a try – based on the Half-Life 2 engine so quality is top notch.