Random hobby number 2,435 - Model Railways!
Yes, I’ve decided to get back into playing with trains. Why? Well, I wandered down to a model rail exhibition the other week, and came home full of ideas adamant I’d try my hand at it again.
Anyway, because I’m a web 2.0 kind of guy, there’s an obligatory blog, all about it too:
http://www.returntomodelrailways.co.uk/
So there you go!
YouTube - T-Mobile SING-FULL SONG.
OK, now this is pretty cool. Made the hairs on the back of my neck stand up!
The power of music! Ahhhhhhh.
This is why you should ALWAYS wear the wrist strap when using your Wiimote.
If the Wii came out about10 years ago, when most people had CRTs still, they’d probably just bounce off, no harm done, but LCD and Plasma screens are made of very thin, fragile sheets of glass and plastic. Doesn’t take much to bust one.
As you can see from the widget on the right, I’m using Twitter these days to spout all sorts of random nonsense. Twitter is a wonderful thing, and I’ve found it useful, and quite entertaining.
Thing is, I see something of a major flaw with it, and it extends outside of Twitter. Due to the fact ‘tweets’ have to be 140 characters long, if you want to post a URL (link) to something, people will often shorten them using one of the many services such as TinyUrl, Tr.im, Bit.ly, or Is.gd. The end result being that your original URL, turns from this:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/8026736.stm
to this:
We now have a considerably shorter URL to post, which saves a lot of space in the tweet.
My problem with it, is that the URL could link to anything! In this instance, it does link to the article above. But it could go anywhere! Any how else would I know until I click it.
TinyURL thought of that particular problem and introduced a preview feature, so the URL http://preview.tinyurl.com/cakpdn actually takes you to a TinyURL page which tells you where the link goes to. You can turn on a cookie to always make it go there, then you choose to click through if you trust the domain. But not all the providers do that. Bit.ly don’t seem to and besides, it relies on the person posting the link using the preview URL, or the person visiting the link having the cookie enabled, both of which rarely happen.
We also end up with URL blindness, and people will just click on them regardless, and end up at a plethora of sites. Most of the links I see go past in my Twitter feed are shortened somehow, and without the context of the tweet are mostly meaningless. How long before they are accepted entirely, and start appearing in Phishing emails and the like? We could end up with shortened URLs firing people off to all sorts of sites.
There have been suggestions by some for the domains hosting the content to provide their own URLs. Personally, I think this is by far the best method, as it means you can instantly see which domain the link goes to and know with a better level of certainty that you’re going to end up where you expect to. Trouble is, it relies on the domain owners implementing something themselves, which they might be reluctant to do, seeing services like twitter as a flash in the pan (I don’t think it is).
A short-term solution might be for the short-URL providers to send short URLs to a landing page, so you can see where the link goes, and if it is malicious or not what it said, flag it as such (although they could be open to abuse as well).
It’s a tricky subject really. Just click carefully!
YouTube - T-Mobile Sing-a-long in Trafalgar Square.
T-Mobile did another flashmob event and organised a sing-along in Trafalgar Square yesterday evening.
You know, like you do…
Finding Simcity 4 crashing on you? Got a dual or quad core processor? Then you need ImageCFG!
Basically, SC4 was written before multiple-core CPUs, so most of us had a single core, and possibly hyperthreading. Unfortunately, because of this, SC4 doesn’t handle those extra cores properly and has a tendency to crash in a giggling heap after a while.
The way around it is to use something called ‘processor affinity’ - basically making the program always use a particular core. That way it doesn’t go splitting its tasks up and falling over when things go out of order. The above link tells you how to use it, and it’s fairly easy to do.
I’m pretty sure I blogged this before, but I can’t find it…
Just watching the G20 protests outside of RBS on TV, and thought ‘I know, I’ll look it up on Streeview!’
After a bit of searching, I found it, but I also spotted something odd:
Obviously an April Fool’s day thing, but still, quite funny.
I was in the market for some new computer speakers recently. My then current set, some Creative 5.1 something-or-the-others had developed a couple of faults. Firstly, if there was a loud sound which stopped relatively suddenly, I could hear a high-pitched whine which would start loudly, then slowly peter out. This was a liveable thing. The second issue was with the volume control – it’s a couple of dials on a wire, one for volume, another for bass, plus headphone outputs and aux inputs. The volume dial had screwed up, so it would take a very careful touch to adjust the volume. Anything else and it would suddenly jump to super-sonic levels, or just not do anything.
I started looking elsewhere, and decided to forego a surround speaker set. Having surround sound was nice, but not a necessity. All my music is stereo, so anything else is done in hardware to make it pseudo-surround. Granted, some CDs do seem to utilise some sort of Pro-Logic encoding, but for the most part, it’s best to have things in ‘proper’ stereo. The only things I ever have in stereo are DVDs, and I watch those on the TV or projector with the decent surround system, so surround speakers on the PC seemed a bit redundant. Also, I no longer have a high-end sound card in the PC. I’m using the onboard card, so it wasn’t like I’d be losing anything there.
So for a while I briefly courted the notion of something like the Bose surround speakers, but the price put me off. Creative also did a similar set, but they used USB for the connection (i.e. the speakers are the sound card). Plus they had a silly-massive subwoofer, which didn’t seem great to me. I don’t really like subwoofers much as they send all their sound through the floor, thus annoying others. What I needed was a set of speakers which were able to produce their own bass. The speakers on my TV are a Sony set I got with a Hi-Fi system I bought some years ago. I have no sub there, but the speakers are very big, and produce plenty of bass on their own. I figured if I could get something similar for the PC I’d be onto a winner, as it would mean no sub, less cabling, and better sound.
So I managed to find these:
These are the GigaWorks T40 Series II. I found them in PCWorld, and the first thing that struck me was a) how big the box was, and b) how much it weighed. I’ve found that light, small speakers often produce a sound that is, well, light and small. But these had some bulk to them. They are of a big size, and so I settled on them.
I’ve been using them about a week now, and I’m really quite happy with them. The sound is quite well defined and very broad – I certainly felt like I was hearing everything. They’re not too bassy, and the highs don’t seem lost. The mids sometimes seem to go walkabout, but that’s something that can be tweaked. I’ve turned down the bass a little bit, and they sound pretty good now. They look and feel like proper, decent speakers, and to be honest I think they are. PC speakers have always been something of an also ran, so if you listen to a lot of music on your PC (like I do) then you can often find them somewhat lacking. These tick all the right boxes for me, so I’m quite impressed with them.
I just realised something.
American Dad is now doing jokes and storylines similar to those The Simpsons was doing around Seasons 5-10 (or thereabouts). The Simpsons are now doing jokes and storylines more like those Family Guy was doing in the early seasons. And Family Guy – well, I’m not entirely sure what they’re doing, but it’s still funny.
For Me, American Dad has been getting funnier, and the storylines have always been very coherent. They have purposely avoided non sequiturs and cutaways (those were Family Guy’s domain anyway), so they had to make good storylines, and good jokes often arise from that.
The Simpsons is a mixed bag. Yes the animation on the first few seasons may have been awful, but the stories were good, so I’ve learned to see beyond that. I’ve found myself really enjoying mid-series seasons as, like American Dad, they had good storylines, and were interesting to watch. The latter seasons have just veered off into total randomness. Bart has gone from being a brat to being plain evil at times, Homer lurches between being dumb and being vaguely intelligent, and Lisa would in real-life probably be heading towards a nervous breakdown. Marge seems to have mellowed a lot though, whilst Maggie has suddenly gotten very intelligent (almost aping Stewie from Family Guy in some respects).
As for Family Guy, I think the last couple of seasons have consisted of mostly excellent episode, then some horribly structured, somewhat pointless episodes, with gags which felt more like filler than something dragged out for comedic value. The cutaways to Conway Twitty are pointless now. It was funny at first, now it just feels like a bit of an up-yours. Then again, the Star Wars special episode was spot-on, and the episode where Peter has a stroke was too funny.
But then again, comedy is very subjective. I don’t find Southpark funny, and others I know do, so maybe some of these things I don’t find funny have others rolling in laughter.
Who knows!
Powered by WordPress | Based on Aeros Theme | TheBuckmaker.com WordPress Themes
