Well I have managed my first review in a very long time here on Kainzy.org. It’s obviously been long overdue but with real life work commitments, it is so hard to spare the free time. Anyway, I have written a short ‘review’ if you will on Apple’s latest iPhone. The device is already a heavily controversial one, but at the same time it is a device  feature packed with great hardware. As always, you can find it in the reviews section.

This is why I worry about the education of todays children growing up in good old England, run under a decaying government. At the risk of sounding somewhat ego-driven here given that I am a fussy bastard, I truly worry for this nations children when my 14-15 year old neice sends me the following email. After a single split second glance I returned the email stating pretty much what the above picture states. Continue to speak like a twat, and you’ll end up failing everything – including life.

dude can you send me the pictures where your pg teddies have holes in them
or what not!!!
pleaseee!!
the one you have at work!!
you they had gun shots in emm!!
an wahh nott!!
pleaseeeeee!!

loll and ahhh ahahaha
omgg guess wahhh the bopizz fingiee has changeedd!
heheheh and my skwll is not that goodd!! but i am trying!!
for my science test i got 23 out of 50 – which is a d!!

sos but fankss!!! and ahhhh i carnt help itt!! loll
wen you coming down and don’t worry i wont let yyour dad near my fish tank!!
so thta aint and excuse!! lollll

Something has been peeving me off lately – and it’s those annoyingly deceptive Apple iPhone 3GS adverts that are currently being sprawled across our UK TV screens. Now upon first viewing it doesn’t seem too bad, until you actually begin to think about it.

This is the new iPhone, and it lets you do some pretty incredible things… You can copy a phone number, and paste it in a text. You can copy an article, and paste it in an email…

Fark me Apple, welcome to the year 2000. My Nokia 6600 could do that, and that was one of the first generation of smartphones. Practically any one of today’s ‘dumb’ phones manage that task. What truly irritates me is that Apple is using Cut & Paste as a selling point. Even worse is the fact that this very feature is rather finicky and intrusive and yet it is marketed to the user as a technology breakthrough. Kind of sad given that Clippy – a third party application available to Jailbroken phones could do the same thing quite a while ago.

The advert ends on an even sillier note:

Copy & Paste on the iPhone 3GS, the most powerful iPhone yet.

Of course it’s the most powerful iPhone yet – it’s just happens to be the latest version, and there have only been TWO before that! I just think the ad is truly deceiving. The next iPhone, due in June 2010 will most likely market a 5mp camera as revolutionary, when the rest of the market are on 12mp variants. For those who have yet to see the advert, it is available on YouTube.

Gerrof my godamn lawn!

Recently I installed some custom night lights our back garden. You know the passive infrared type that detects body heat movement and switches on a lamp for a few minutes blinding you as you walk past some random house on a street. Well not being a DIY person, despite the fact that I am an engineer I went a bit overboard and bought the brightest, most powerful light one could have purchased. Not the cleverest of moves as I soon found out.

Of course now the entire neighbourhood hates us because our garden looks like an aircraft runway at night thanks to bloody cats who love running around triggering the lighting. If it’s not cats then its frogs, and if its not frogs then its a flamin hedgehog who seems to have cloaking technology because I’m buggered if I can find him after I run out into the garden searching for the wee beast that triggered the lights. Well I think it’s a hedgehog anyway.

So guaranteed by the time I am just dozing off to sleep at midnight, my bedroom is lit up like a Christmas tree for about 4 minutes as my bedroom overlooks the garden. The room is already lit up bright blue by a PC, which is switched 24/7 and armed with 3 blue neon strobe lights and no less than 5 blue illuminated hard drive caddies at the front so I tend to sleep in blue lit room. When the garden floodlights get triggered I instantly wake up thinking its 4am, and time to get ready for work!

Of course the answer is simple – turn down the brightness on the lamp, or lower its activated duration so it stays on for say 30 seconds. Now I could do this….if the damn unit wasn’t pre-programmed with it’s own settings to ‘ease installation’. Buggery. Now I’ll really have the neighbours coming at me with pitchforks tomorrow.

Silence from Creative after customer revolt

Picture the following scenario. Imagine if you had gone out and purchased a Creative Labs Soundblaster of some kind, there’s loads of them around but the most popular ones would be their Audigy and XFI series cards. Now imagine smiling when you saw that ‘Vista Compatible’ logo on the box, meaning that the card would work on Microsoft Vista. So you purchase it, take it home and install it into your PC. You would then either:

• Install the drivers from the included CD
• OR simply get and install the latest drivers from the Creative website

You would now have a fully working card right? You should be able to use all its capabilities given that it is ‘Vista Compatible’. What would you do if you found out that it wasn’t really ‘Vista Compatible’ ? This is what thousands of creative soundcard owners have been asking themselves for years now. Creative’s soundcard drivers have always been laughably poor, even back when I used them on my Audigy 2 in Windows XP, but it turns out that their new XFI drivers are just as bad. There are no decent working drivers in Vista at present I am led to believe. Because the Creative ‘Soundblaster’ moniker is such a powerful one – your average joe public just assumes that the product adds high quality sound to your PC, and will then go out and purchase one without knowing all this.

A driver modder known as Daniel_K decided to come up with his own modified drivers that restored functionality to these cards – everyone was happy, well except for Creative. One would think that they’d embrace his skills and maybe hire him, but instead they decided to do him for copyright issues! Daniel_K was warned on the Creative forums to cease activity, and what then followed was a backlash that I have never seen before. The forums were filled with thousands of unhappy gamers/soundblaster owners ranting and mocking Creative for ignorance. For a corporate company as big as Creative, they should be able to afford driver engineers to develop the best drivers possible but no. Instead they just rehash and rebox card after card to make even more money – and it works.

Since Windows Vista arrived on the scene, driver vendors have struggled to come up with decent functionality with their drivers as they have to work with new API’s they aren’t used to. As I have stated in the past, Creative were one of those companies that ended up admitting that their Audigy 2 and XFI drivers were poor in the first place. Nebula Electronics who made the once extremely popular Nebula TV Tuners have all but gone silent on customers with regards to their Vista drivers since the release of the operating system in 2007. Despite it having the best TV software around, I have stopped using mine, and so has PR because they are just incomplete and flaky in Vista for well over a year now. Even their forums have dried up with no Nebula feedback.

Back to Creative though. I am a huge admirer of them and their products, well mainly their portable music and peripherals rather than their soundcards, which I have stated have always been top notch build and spec wise, but useless driver wise. They started the whole thing off, they brought music to the very early PC’s, just simple beeps from a soundchip embedded on a bit of PCB back in early 1987. It all went pear shaped as they branched out and kept rehashing soundcards to keep a foothold on the market. However the tide has changed, and they are suffering.

Built in sound capabilities on PC motherboards have already reached the point where they require little system resources and sound superb. Other soundcard manufacturers have been rising over the past year and are building far superior products. Auzentech, Asus, Razer to name a few, and they all work fine in Vista. There is no doubt that Creative are about to feel a backlash that they’re not used to. Lately they have failed to deliver a good sucessor to the Creative Zen Vision:M – their once flagship audio player. They have now seemingly focused on developing peripherals for the Apple iPod – their very own competitors. If this wasn’t enough to be concerned about, I would also be concerned about this, not that it means much to the company as a whole.

Yesterday, Creative via one of their forum moderators stated that they have listened to the feedback (feedback? you sure?) and decided to work with Daniel_K in supporting their driver development programme. Is this a case of way too little, too late? To be truthful, I hope he tells them to shove it. I truly respect, and admire what you’ve done Mr.K. I gave up on Creative cards a long time ago and have never had an XFI so I have no idea how bad it’s drivers were, but poor Creative drivers was why I went out and bought an Auzentech Meridian, a truly awesome bit of kit. Good luck with Creative.

You can read Daniel_K’s full story Here.
Full Creative/Daniel_K story Here.

Clocks go back 1 Hour

1 Hour less sleep…what tart came up with this idea then eh? I already get 4 Hours of sleep time and now that’s going to be cut short! Ta! I suppose the lovely ladies roaming our town centres in short skirts and low cut tops are a positive factor in all this.

I mean, look! It’s already 22:31 and that’s my bedtime! Bring the darkness back for the love of god! This is not typical British weather…

    OR 

The study, specially commissioned by UKTV Gold, tested the nation on its historical knowledge by asking 3,000 people a series of questions relating to famous factual and fictional characters.

I have a partially finished Assassin’s Creed review, and was hugely looking forward to writing about Mass Effect, which in my opinion is now the best game on the 360. For weeks now, I’ve been trying to find the time to write but have always been side tracked, so bugger it.. I will however, continue writing various hardware reviews after the new year when I go crazy on spending!

Possibly the dullest place in town

The Post Office should be a lovely friendly place. A place to drop off a letter to a distant relative, to send a birthday card to a friend, or perhaps to simply send a parcel. Most of the time you will end up being served by an old lady or gentleman who would most likely remind you of your grandparents.

Sadly due to huge cost cutting measures over the years most Post Offices have now insisted on becoming much more than what they originally were. They now sell Insurance, Credit Cards, Personal Loads, Travel Insurance and so much more that it’s enough to make you realise how hard times have hit them.

I had exactly 20 minutes during my lunchtime to send off two parcels – two Xbox 360 titles, which I had sold to some gamers. Whenever I visit this particular Post Office, there is always a queue a mile bloody long extending out into the street – all being served by two cashiers who look like they’ve been spoon-fed lead. Now this is what happens when your once superb Post Office service because a ‘Do it all’ service.

After 10 minutes, I’m no where near the front of the queue and I am gradually getting pissed as it were. This branch now has a TV! To stop customers from rioting, they’ve brought in a TV, which shows ‘funny’ adverts – sadly these are Royal Mail based ads and they just infuriate customers even more.

I eventually work my way to the front of the queue with exactly 8 minutes to spare. I figured it would take me 5 minutes to make it back to the office – if I sprint like an illegal immigrant running after a train. I approach the counter and go through the motions of weighing my parcel and asking for First Class delivery, which is where my rant begins.

Me: "I’d like to send both by first class please love"
Female Cashier: "Sir, would you like it guaranteed by tomorrow? If so you can <cutoff>"
Me: "First class will do thanks"
Female Cashier: "Ok sir, I just wanted to say that your parcel can reach there quicker if you <cutoff>"
Me: "I just need first class for these parcels as I know they’ll reach their intended destination by the end of the week"
Female Cashier: "Ok sir, do you have a credit card?"
Me: "Uhm, I’m paying by cash"
Female Cashier: "Sir, may I interest you in a Post Office credit card? I’ll just go and get a form hold on!"
I turn around and look at the queue with a ‘wtf’ look on my face. They all seem to have been through this ritual before from the looks I received.
Female Cashier: "Ah, now sir as you can see our rates are very low"
Me: "I have about 5 minutes to get back to my office, I just want to pay for my parcels and leave"
Female Cashier: "This form will take just 2 minutes sir"
Me: "How can I kindly state that I do not wish to have yet another credit card as I have three!"
Female Cashier: "Would sir wish to come back after work hours? I can arrange for someone to stay behind after 4pm?"
At this point I decide why not? Just to annoy the hell out of them I’ll pretend that I am interested but simply not go.
Me: "Hmm tell you what, how will Friday evening do? I finish work at 16:00 hours"
Female Cashier: "What time is that sir?"
Me: "Er, 4pm…"
Female Cashier: "Great! Why thank you so much for your time. Here’s your form and I myself will stay behind on Friday to give you advice about our new wonderful card"
Me: "Righto! See you on Friday!" <I grab form and leave>

Now I know this little lady was doing her job and it isn’t her fault that she was trained to irritate the arse out of customers – a key thing that no business should do at all, but it’s hard not to simply let anger take over at a certain point. It’s the Post Office pen pushers at HQ to blame for this fiasco. All they’re doing is creating escalating queues and thus angered customers. They should know that a lot of customers who visit the post office during their lunchbreak and only have limited time to do so, so we don’t have half a bloody day to talk to cashiers whilst people in the queue behind me begin to rapidly age and decompose.

Come 4pm Friday I’m going to walk past the post office and casually glance inside before getting on the bus. Waste my time, I waste yours.