Monthly Archive for August, 2007

The New Creative Zen! [Update]

iWant!!

This is the replacement for the Creative Vision:M, considered as the best MP3 player on the market. Recently Creative have stated that the Vision:M is an EoL (End of the line) product so a replacement for their top of the range player is more or less due and boy have they surprised Zen fans with their latest effort.

Yesterday, Creative leaked out photo’s of their new Zen, a super-slim flash based player, which arrives in 4, 8, and 16GB capacities, as well as having a high quality 2.6" display and an SD card expansion slot. If memory serves me correctly it is the first 16GB flash player to hit the market too. People could say that 16GB isn’t enough and a hard disk, which the Vision:M has is a better feature. While I’d agree with that, you have to admit that RAM prices are falling through the floor and if 16GB isn’t enough, then a simple SD card upgrade should suffice. At the end of the day, flash ram is always the best solution, even though it has been expensive in the past. For that reason alone I will be after it and doing an in-depth review!
Continue reading ‘The New Creative Zen! [Update]‘

One’s Cogitations

<Insert something cool here>

It is 02:13 on a Friday morning and I have spent the past hour reflecting on the last month as I walked home.

I’m doing this because in about 8 hours from now, Friday evening to be precise an important project that I’ve been working on at work will finally end. I feel a huge weight has been removed from my shoulders and I feel looser now. See, back in July 2007 I made possibly the worst mistake ever. I agreed to assist on a project at work, a product of ‘Innovation’. Well that had to be completed by August 24th and our team of 13 strong engineers/testers/electrical experts (the best of the best as I call them) ended up working through the whole night getting it ready for that Friday. I came in on Thursday morning at 07:00, and left at 01:45, completely shattered. I was even more annoyed that I’d have to return to work at 05:00, in just 3hrs. I had contemplated sleeping at my desk in the office, but the security guard said "No! Can’t have that cos I’d have to make 30min checks on you to see if you were dead…"

I walked to the bus stop at 01:50. The roads were dead and there was silence in the air, and then came my bus. Figuring that no idiot would be on the bus at this time I quickly ran to the top floor and sat down, I then hesitated and turned to look at the back seat…at three Irish half drunk chaps singing away! After eventually realising that I had no chance in hell of listening to my mp3 player whilst they sang away, I got up and wandered over to sit nearby, normally I wouldn’t but I was so tired that I just couldn’t give a damn. "So what ya all celebrating" I asked, "Ah ere! Brendaaaan here is getting hitched up e pole next week!" he stammered back, "ah married ya mean? Congrats man" I replied back.

They continued singing, and I just had to inquire further "So how’d the stag night go lads?", "ah ere, Eamonn shacked one of the strippers eh? He gat lucky!" I think I got a rough idea of what that meant but needless to say I didn’t want to know any more as they sang all the way home. I jumped off at my town, now devoid of life which felt strange and said goodbye. I was known as "Derren" to these chaps.

A look at the Toshiba HD-E1 HD DVD Player

Red ring ‘o’ death…as if Xbox 360’s weren’t bad enough

It’s no secret that I truly love the startling detail and features that the next generation optical formats give us. It’s also no secret that I have opted for the HD-DVD format rather then Sony’s Blu-Ray. I have done this mainly because all the classics that I truly love are all on HD-DVD, whilst the action popcorn flicks tend to be on Blu-Ray. I also like the fact that the standalone HD-DVD players are coming down price wise at a startling rate, whilst Blu-Ray players remain at a slightly more expensive price.

Given that I already own the Xbox 360’s HD-DVD player, I always wanted a standalone player the moment prices became affordable. Lately the price of the second generation Toshiba HD-E1 player has crashed, most probably due to Toshiba’s recent announcement that their third generation players are on the way. This morning I took delivery of the player, and will detail my experiences with it for the next two days. You can check out my review here.

The Darkness review

Quick update! Just like to add that I’ve put up a much delayed review of The Darkness for the Xbox 360. Oh and thanks to Nokkon for recommending the game to me (he made me put this in!) :P

Transformers

Stupid looking CGI bots ahoy!

When I first heard that the yanks, well Micheal Bay to be precise had bastardised the Transformers film by ‘updating’ it to modern day movie standards I like many fans was less then happy. However to cut a long whining story short, I had to swallow my pride upon seeing the film tonight because even though I said it’ll suck, it was in fact superb. Me and Deena rushed to the cinema to watch this as we were strapped for time. Over in my home town, this sodding film has been booked solid for weeks, hell we couldn’t even get a Saturday late night ticket, so Sunday evening had to suffice.

After munching on Pizza’s, which are strangely becoming a weekly addiction for us two we bounced off towards the cinema. We barely made it in time just as the mysterious Cloverfield trailer was airing before the main film.
Continue reading ‘Transformers’

alt.games.half-life (AGHL Gymnastics Night) June 1999

Got crowbar?

Time for a trip down memory lane, back to the days of 56k modems and ISDN LPB’s, back to the days when we all circulated passwords to various ISP’s with 1hr disconnects, back to the days when online FPS (first person shooters) were in their prime, and skilled gamers were everywhere. Back to the days when fps games were fun gorramit!

alt.games.half-life was where most gamers lurked back then. It was a newsgroup, packed with gamers chatting away about Half Life - one of the most important FPS games to come out for the PC platform, and also one which would soon inspire modders around the world to create some of the best mods ever. Half Life consisted of it’s superb single player element, as well as it’s Deathmatch online element. You could go online on various maps and battle it out with players around the world. I started out here, I was born there.

Anyway, one night during June 1999 some gimp decided that all the regulars on alt.games.half-life (AGHL) should have a mass meet-up on a custom map. A few weeks later, a custom map was created, and chaos albeit laggy chaos was about to ensue… I had to keep the multitude of screenshots off this front page, so I’ve bunged them into the Articles section instead.

Wordpress 2.2.2 Released

I wubs u wp!

This blog has been sitting on Wordpress 2.1.3 for quite sometime now as the latest WP releases just wouldn’t work right with my modded K2 theme. However I have just upgraded from 2.1.3 to 2.2.2 with hardly any side effects, which is a tad odd but great at the same time.

So if anything does look out of place or broken, please give me a shout as I’ve yet to notice anything wrong. As a matter of fact the upgrade went surprisingly smoothly as it used to! Taken from www.wordpress.org

As these releases include only security and minor bugfixes they should not cause any plugin or theme compatibility issues, so you have no good excuse not to upgrade.