Year: 2005

HMV – Never again

I’d posted about my bargain buy of Pro Evo from HMV. Ha. They must be laughing now. The day after making the order I got the following e-mail:

As I am sure you are aware, this item was mispriced on the HMV web site at £14.99 for a short period of time. Under the notified terms and conditions on the web site, HMV are entitled to withdraw from any contract in the case of obvious errors or inaccuracies regarding the goods appearing on our web site.

However, as a gesture of goodwill, on this occasion only, we are going to honour order placed for the item, but will be restricting this offer to one per customer.

Excellent – they are honouring their mistake although I didn’t realise it was a mistake. Yesterday was release day and there was still no shipping note. I was becoming suspicious and then this e-mail dropped into my inbox:

Due to stock limitations, we are currently unable to fulfil this order. We have contacted the suppliers, and they have informed us that the initial supply of the Xbox version has been scaled back across the UK, and we are unlikely to receive further stock for at least 4 weeks after launch.

Guff – this has been sent to only those that got the £14.99 price. I would rather they had just said it was an error and we weren’t getting the game for the original price. Instead they pretend they will honour it then delay sending it out knowing most will cancel and pick up the game elsewhere like I did yesterday. Swines. Checking their website shows they expect 7 days delivery, not 4 weeks.

Not only have they lost the sale but they have lost my custom. Maybe an over reaction but I will no longer buy anything from HMV. That’s what they get for trying to save £14.99. Well done HMV.

360 Titbits

Now that the 360 launch is just over 6 weeks away (for which I didn’t pre-order which makes chances of picking one up slim) there is some nice details coming out about the features we’ll see. My Xbox will launch in the next couple of weeks. For the stat whores and just plain nosey this will allow you to see and compare your friends progress in games, what they are playing and their achievements throughout all their games. Some downtime for Live on Monday 24th will see the upgrades take place – we’ll then see just how good the website integration with the Live service is. This is where MS have a big advantage over Sony – it will be interesting to see just how much they push the web and online gaming features over the coming months.

The 360 pad has had great previews so far. What I’d missed until today is that it connects via a standard USB port. Therefore to use it on Windows you just need to download the correct drivers and you’ll instantly have a great pad for the PC. At last.

Finally – gaming servers. The Live service on the Xbox has been good apart from on thing – no server support. This has meant 16 players games as a max, and more than usual only 8 before lag kicks in. Compare that to PC games where 32-64 player games are more the norm thanks to the games being hosted on servers. The 360 looked to be changing that with Call of Duty 2 rumoured to have 64 player support. Alas, it’s 8 player although they won’t stop you hosting more if your connection can take it. Hopefully Perfect Dark Zero will allow for more…even if you have to pay slightly more for the service I would at least like to have the option.

Video Treats

These have all probably done the rounds but they are new to me so I thought I would share.

First up are High Speed Video clips. Sounds pretty dull and the web page is very 90’s but the content is superb. Highly recommended are the face slaps and punches. The jello clip is also eye opening and the paintball shot proves just how sore these shots can be.

Next up is Sabine who spends her time driving folk around the Nurburgring. The video shows just how fast she goes and also how lucky the Scottish passenger is. Dog.

And finally – set phasers tae malky. Enjoy.

Broadband Update

It’s been three days since my 8Meg line was switched on. So far the speed performance has been very impressive – I still can’t get over just how fast my downloads are. Files really are just taking seconds to grab. Mail speed is also excellent and the DNS issues have settled down.

Not so good is that on Thursday and Saturday between 6 & 8pm I got disconnected a couple of times. After some investigating I’m putting it down to the condition of my line and not F2S or the LLU provider Easynet. The key factor is that as the speeds of broadband increase the quality of your line becomes all the more important.
Continue reading “Broadband Update”

Tidy up time

Got into the garden over the weekend – hedge cut, borders tidied and grass cut. Even cleared out the garage of some of the mess thats built up over the last six months and took it to the dump. I’m determined to keep it clear and not let it build up again.

Since the work we had done I hadn’t taken any pictures – that’s now rectified with the results up on Flickr. The surprise wasn’t the difference we’ve made in the last two years but the fact we’ve got a second skylight that we hadn’t noticed before. If it wasn’t for West Wing I’d be in the attic investigating but that can keep for another night.

Whooooosh

After a week without broadband F2S and Easynet finally got their act together today and I’m now back getting my bb rush. My connection speed seems a bit ‘floaty’ at the moment but a download speeds between 6 & 7Meg is not to be sniffed at – ADSLGuide test results. Upload speed is nice at over 600k – be interesting to see how that affects my Xbox hosting abilities.

F2S DNS servers seem less than rock solid so I’ve moved to a different providers but apart from that there is nothing bad to report. Downloads from newsgroups were topping out at around 650k/sec. The LLU line seems more susceptible to MTU & RWIN tweaking. I managed to get close to 7Meg but then got greedy and saw the connection drop to around 3.5Meg.

However it’s great to have broadband back. Dial-up was amazingly slow – so many sites are now set-up for fast users it made most unusable. Even e-mails took a long time to download. Maybe I’m just looking back through rose tinted specs, maybe I’m to used to the fast speeds but I’m sure when I used dial-up all the time it was slow but not that slow. When iTunes 6 came out last night I chuckled at the thought of downloading 30Meg – it would have taken forever. Today it took less than a minute.

X05

The big Xbox 360 event has been and gone. Initially I felt pretty flat about the whole thing but some of the games and screenshots really have impressed. After slagging off Perfect Dark Zero the last video I watched showed co-op off really well – who cares if the graphics are a bit current gen and slightly rough – the gameplay looked superb and the fact that co-op is online bodes well.

PGR3 still looks jaw dropping as does Kameo. One worry was just what games would be available at launch – the following are semi-confirmed as launch day (and not launch window)

  • Project Gotham Racing 3
  • Kameo
  • Perfect Dark Zero
  • Madden Nfl 06
  • Nba Live 06
  • Tiger Woods Pga Tour 06
  • Need For Speed Most Wanted
  • Fifa 06: Road To Fifa World Cup
  • Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion
  • Call Of Duty 2
  • Dead Or Alive 4

plus a few more to be confirmed. I’ve not pre ordered the 360 and I think I’m too late now. I’ll just wait until launch day (2nd December) and see what I can pick up. Looking forward to it once again. Visit Xboxyde to see some of the media from X05.

PSP Homebrew Update

Feeling brave?

Fed up with having a version 2.0 firmware and missing out on all the homebrew, emulators and piracy that could be down with 1.5 firmware?

Visit PSP Updates and follow the instructions in how to downgrade your PSP from 2.0 to 1.5. Over 500 comments with nearly 100% working. Need to download some files and there are torrents available to help spread the load. I’ll stick to 2.0 for the time being. If your up for it a guide with pictures is probably of more use.

Site Stats

I’ve been wanting to have some sort of site monitor tool for a while. One that will tell me who’s visiting the site and when and some other bits and pieces about their visit. Over the last 3 weeks I’ve been trying two out – Delineate and Mint. The most obvious difference is that Delineate is free (for the moment – it is in beta) and Mint costs $30.

Delineate Visitor LocationsDelineate is accessed remotely from your webspace. The information is presented clearly and with a lot of depth. For example you can see all the visitors to your site, the browser and OS they used and which specific page they visited. The site also makes good use of Google Maps to try and map their location. A nice feature is the last 100 visitors to your site mapped – good to see it really is a world wide web. If you wonder why they visit you can also see the search terms used to find your site. I really like this app although I’m not so sure about accessing another web app remotely – would prefer to host and see the stats local to my site.

Mint - SparksMint falls into that category. Once you’ve paid your $30 you download the app and install on your host site. One limitation is that the $30 only covers one domain name – if you mange other sites and want to use Mint it’s $30 per site – pretty steep. Once installed and configured the beauty of the website really hits home. Fast and configurable the layout will adapt to whatever browser size you use as long as it’s not IE – Mint doesn’t like IE at all. Out the box Mint has as much information as Delineate. However Mint is expandable via the Pepper API. This allows other dev’s to code small add-ons to Mint, for example Outclicks which monitors outgoing clicks from your site and XXX Strong Mint which displays visitors IP address. Nice.

Although costing $30, Mint wins hands down. I love it’s expandability and the fact that it’s hosted locally. I’m also surprised by some of the results so far. 74% of visitors are still using IE. Most shocking 66% are using a res less than 1280×1024. Nevermind – get Mint – thoroughly recommended. If your not fussed about expandability and hosting remotely then save $30 and go for Delineate instead.