Archive for the 'Babble' Category

The Apple iPad Lands

iPad Image
So Apple’s Conference just ended with announcement of the much fabled Apple Tablet, named the iPad. I’ll keep this short  and sweet as I hadn’t set my expectations high unlike most people out there. I knew exactly what I expected of the device but have been surprised by a few things. Firstly I’m a major gadget geek, but instead of looking at the usability of devices I tend to be more interested in the hardware side of things, the internal components. That said, these was my predicted specs for the tablet prior to it’s announcement.

Two Tablet models:

Tablet 1:

  • 10″ LED Backlit TN Panel Widescreen feat a touch display and a resolution of 1024 x 768
  • 3GS style Oleophobic coating to be present on the screen
  • Wifi N ONLY wireless connectivity
  • Bluetooth 2.1 with EDR Tech
  • Assisted GPS (same as iPhone 3G/3Gs)
  • 16, 32GB storage ability
  • Dual Cortex A9 Tegra 2 SoC
  • 2x USB ports
  • Twin speakers and a Microphone
  • 3.5″ Headphone connector
  • Accelerometer
  • Runs Mobile OSX (the same OS that is present on the iPhone’s and iPod Touch)

Tablet 2: All of the above with the following additions.

  • 10″ OLED Widescreen display featuring the same details as Tablet 1.
  • Built in iSight web camera
  • Wifi N & 3G wireless connectivity
  • 64, and 128GB storage capacities

Continue reading ‘The Apple iPad Lands’

Bill Gates Joins Twitter…

Bill Gates Twitter

Some 8hrs after joining, Twitter is down...

About twelve hours ago, Microsoft founder Bill Gates joined Twitter. I am somewhat happy to say that I was amongst his first 1000 followers! :D

An hour after following him I went over to check his profile and he had 23,000 followers, expanding to 55,000 just half an hour later! Word of Mr.Gates arrival spread like wildfire thanks to the twitter trends, and as I type this the following day having just woken up – Twitter has been down for a full hour! Has the worlds most popular and richest man brought Twitter to it’s knee’s just by joining?

I have a feeling Mr.Gates will amass the largest follower count we have yet to see on the service and it’s great to see him online. “Hello World” indeed.
Bring on the Faaaaaail Whaaaaaaaale!

Update from Twitter: We are experiencing an outage due to an extremely high number of whales.  Our on-call team is working on a fix.
Update:
(5:18a): We are recovering from this incident. A sudden failure coupled with problems in switching to a backup system produced a high number of errors for around 90 minutes. This made the site largely inaccessible. No data was lost or compromised during this outage.

Hello WordPress 2.8.5

Yes this blog has been ignored for far too long now in favour of Twitter but I don’t plan on leaving it in the dust just yet. I have some ideas for 2010 that could bring this place back to to life!

Today I took the time to do something I had been dreading for some time. Upgrading this blog from WordPress 2.6 to the latest 2.8.5 version was always going to be a major pain in the you know what. The upgrade went moderately well and only my sidebar took the most damage. At the moment I can’t get WP Quotes to read from the quotes engine properly and I have only just managed to get FlickrRSS working properly. Anyway, enough of that! Back to Forza Motorsports 3!

Recent Movie Round Up!

Awww. Do you want to see a grown man cry? Well, if that be the case, take one to watch Marley & Me. In my case, it was my friend Ayesha taking me to see this film, which I knew I would regret.

The film, loosely based on the book stars Jennifer Aniston and Owen Wilson as Jennifer and John Grogan – an everyday couple who are on the verge of starting a family. With Jennifer following her ‘life’s rulebook’ to a tee. Her next step in life is to have a child, much to the horror of John who feels that he just isn’t ready for such a step. To ween her off the idea he decides to get her a dog – but not any old dog, oh no. They purchase a lovable puppy and name him Marley. It quickly becomes obvious that this dog is a potential nightmare in the making, as he is hyperactive, eats anything and pretty much drives everyone mad.

The film also heavily focuses on the couple as they raise a family, with John obtaining ever more promising positions at work granting them a valuable opportunity to move homes to a better area. As their family blossoms Marley never changes and remains a constant (see troublemaker) in their family.  With Marley pretty much destroying everything he touches, he remains an integral part of their lives and is essentially their ‘first child’. The film never gets too cute and funny and maintains a serious edge mid-way through the film with the ending being enough to bring grown men and women to tears. Don’t watch this film with make-up on ladies.

Twitter killed the Blog?

<–hurhur

Ok, admit it. How many of you lot have begun ignoring your blogs in favour of Twitter? Since returning to the fast growing service in February 2009 I am pretty much guilty of this as I have indeed ignored this blog, something I never thought I would do.

I suppose it is a multitude of things though. Yes Twitter is to blame, but aside from that I have been focusing on my working life pretty much 100% since the year began. I had enough distractions towards the end of 2008 and wanted to start the year fresh – and have done. So, work goes incredibly well. Too well infact and I am almost struggling to cope with some of the things now bestowed onto me.

I think Mr.Wud stated what I’ve had on my mind for a while now. I have noticed that a lot of bloggers since moving to Twitter have just let their blogs slowly gather dust, as it were. Blogging takes some thought, time and planning in some cases before one publishes a post. Twittering is limited to 140 characters a ‘tweet’ (message) so you can jibber-jabber about anything without a care in the world.

Does that mean my blog is pretty much stagnant i.e dead? Well no. I’ve put a lot of work into it, but time is precious, and after coming home from a long day at work I pretty much crash out on the bed/sofa. Twittering on the move is simple and quick, blogging isn’t so and that is my problem right there. I will continue to add reviews, and thoughts that cannot be twittered though but I predict things will be rather quiet for the most part.

Anyway, I’m pretty much looking forward to this summer. I had plans to visit Australia, NSW this April-May as I understand the weather isn’t hot at this time of the year. Heat=baad, Cold/Rain = Good. However as usual, those plans have gone tits up thanks to my parents who don’t want to go.

This summer see’s the arrival of the third iteration of Apple’s iPhone (the plodphone). I am excited as hell, even more-so with the new OS 3.0 that will be launched alongside it. My current Jailbroken iPhone is such a strong part of my everyday life that it’s hard as hell to live without it. I just can’t wait for the next version.

Windows 7 Release Candidate (Build 7100) was leaked onto the interwebs just a week ago and my, it is good enough to ship retail in it’s current state. I’ve presently got it sitting on my Samsung NC10 netbook and it quite literally flies in comparison to XP SP3, that was on there. I await soundcard drivers for my Auzentech Meridian er soundcard so I can install the RC release on my main desktop rig though. Oh, and we can now uninstall that heap of gobshite known as Internets Explorer!! How cool is that?

I had written a ‘short’ story over the past few months based on the Fallout universe and my adventures since discovering the game late during December 2008. However it has ballooned to such a size that I’ve no idea how to get it onto the blog! It was about my adventures in the game basically with a nice bit of fiction about my lone quest to get to Rivet City, and then to find ‘Dad’. Most people who know me know that I can pretty much sprout A4 paragraphs in minutes, so trust me – it is large!

Hmm, I gotta get out more!