Doing my usual weekly shop in Tesco and spotted what I photographed below. Click the thumbnail to show the big image. What you will see is an advertising board about saving energy with some leaflets about how to reduce your carbon footprint - it’s standing right next to a huge pile of BBQ coal briquettes. Ah the irony…
I downloaded the Bourne Conspiracy demo tonight from Xbox Live. I really do not like the gamelay style at all. Seems okay as an action game but they have tried to interlink the action with cinematic events. I do not mean cutscenes, but you can be fighting someone and all of a sudden it changes to a cinematic mode and they take over the controls for a while while you execute the moves. It is hard to explain to be honest. But these cinematic events I feel get in the way of my action and are interrupting the game.
The other thing I find quite annoying is the QTE (quick time events) in the game (where you press a certain button which flashes up on the screen, it seems to be the trendy thing nowadays), these QTE’s are too quick and in some situations you have just a split nanosecond to press the button or you fail. It took me 3-4 tries just to press a single button to slide under a closing gate. Each time when I was a nanosecond too slow it was end game and I had to reload. All in all it was a very frustrating experience and if the whole game is like this then I think it will end up a disappointment. I do not mind QTE events but they have to be fair and in context. To have a split second to press a random button I think is unfair and will lead inevitably to people getting too frustrated with the controls.
I will be watching this game with interest to see if others feel the same.
Bebo, Facebook, Myspace, plus many more types of social networking sites, I just don’t get them. Why would anybody want to share their heart and soul with the world?
I recently had to open a facebook account so I could request removal of content on one of their pages on behalf of a friend who did not know how to use the internet. The author gladly obliged and apologised not realising the implications of what they had written. But of course since signing up I have received friends requests, requests to install applications and scarily, have noted an old school class photo with me in it!!
So I look around some facebooks and see some people post up their whole lives up their. Not just likes and dislikes, but what they are doing that day, where they work, date of birth and whole life history. Surely these are ID thefts waiting to happen?
And what’s with Twitter? Why would anyone want to know what I am doing at any given moment? Are they interested in when I am eating? Or when I am in the toilet?
So what is next for social networking? How about a chip embedded in a persons arm which uploads periodically every movement of their body with GPS so they do not even have to be at a PC? People will then know you are in the pub or flexing your bottom muscles in the toilet.
Please, nobody send me any more invites to social networking sites. If I want a life blog I will create one 
At the weekend I decided to get an Asus Eeepc. It was not a totally on the spot purchase, I had been thinking of getting one for a while but never had the money before but now I do, so I did
If you have not heard of an Eeepc before, it is a very small laptop with a 7″ screen (unit itself is a little bigger than a DVD case), 4GB hard drive, wifi and the usual ports plus an SDHC card slot if you need extra storage. Right from the get-go I knew I would not like the provided operating system - a tabbed version of linux. I have never liked Linux no matter hard I try, so the plan was to buy and install Windows XP home on it. Asus do support the installation of XP onto the system, they even put handy instructions in the manual on how to do it. It was not hard but with the lack of optical drive in the Eeepc, you do need some form of external storage to install it from. I did also purchase a slim USB DVD writer which was perfect for the job.
The installation went smoothly with no problems at all. The Eeepc is not a beefy laptop, with a 900mhz processor (clocked to just under 700) and 512mb ram it has ample power for the provided linux, but as we all know, XP is a bit more power hungry. So I have ordered a 1GB ram stick from crucial at the cost of an additional £18. I have also ordered an 8GB SDHC card for extra storage as after the installation of XP, there is little over 2GB left over. You can reduce the space taken up and the performance of XP but following this fantastic guide on XP with the Eeepc - http://www.i64x.com/eeexp.php
So the breakdown of cost so far:
Asus Eeepc - £249
External DVD writer - £79.99
Windows XP home - £55
1GB ram - £18
SDHC 8GB - £18
That is a grand total of around £420. Now I am sure many will say I could have got a beefier laptop than that including vista home premium for the money, but I could not get one for this size and the fact that it is so light. Actually that is a small lie, I could have got the Packard Bell Easynote or the Everest, (which are the same but slightly re-branded) but I saw the Packard Bell one in a store and the screen looked horrible and it had the worst touchpad ever in the history of touchpads. I kid you not, this touchpad was about 1cm x 1cm above the keyboard. Terrible.
But anyway, back to the Asus, fantastic little machine but do make sure if you want Windows XP on it you get yourself one of the models which allows for upgrading the ram otherwise it will be a little on the slow side.
UPDATE: The 1GB ram stick arrived this morning and now XP is very zippy, definitely worth the upgrade if someone is considering putting XP on an eeepc.
After 39 hours of gaming in just over one week I have finally finished the main storyline of Grand Theft Auto 4. It has been a long slog and I have been playing it at every opportunity because it has been so addictive.
I would imagine most people who play the game muck about and do side missions before trying the main story, however I find it hard to do that. I do the reverse and play the main story first. The GTA series has never been known for its great storylines with most of the games having a mediocre-been-done-before plot. But I felt this storyline was much stronger than before. It was not about rising up the ranks of some mafia-style family, the game is all about survival and revenge and there are no ranks to climb. Niko Bellic the main character has a dark past. He comes from Eastern Europe somewhere and had a harsh time during “the war”. They do not state which war, this is down to the imagination of the gamer.
I had to make some decisions during the game. I will not go into what these decisions are as they may spoil it for you. Needless to say, some decisions were easy and others were quite hard to decide on a path.
Visually this game is very impressive. It looks good, there is some amazing detail and it is very much the next (current) generation that I expect. There were some graphical issues like texture load and occasional slowdown sometimes but I enjoyed the game so much that these issues did not distract from the game at all.
Apart from the new hiding-behind-cover system and the unarmed combat, GTA4 did not bring a lot of new things to the table, but what it did do was improve on previous GTA games. My only complaint was the unarmed combat. This in my opinion was the worst aspect of the game. It was slow and cumbersome and whilst it was supposed to improve on the unarmed combat I felt it just made things far worse.
A fantastic game which I am sure have many more hours of fun and I await the downloadable content mission pack due in the Summer.
As for a score, well I do not think this game deserves a 10/10 like the majority of reviews out there have awarded it. I think maybe some reviewers got caught up in the hype and ignored the fact that this game is not perfect.
This is of course not a review but based on my experience with the game I think it deserves a solid 9/10. As far as I am concerned it loses a point for its horrible unarmed combat and the few graphical issues it has, even if they are minor issues.
P.S. This was the Xbox 360 version I played.
For the past couple of weeks I have been battling serious wireless issues with my O2 router. I am a new customer of O2 broadband so the router is only about 2 months old. Since joining, the router has worked fine but for a few weeks it has been dropping the connection.
Last week it just packed up completely. Vista could see the SSID but failed to connect at all. It wasn’t just Vista, my phone could not connect and nor could my PS3. After several reboots, resets and several hours trying to resolve the issue I ended up phoning O2 support who were very helpful. They tried all sorts of resets but absolutely no connection would work - btw connecting with an ethernet cable worked just fine, it was just faulty wireless. After about half an hour of talking to the chap on the phone, the wifi suddenly sprang into life and it has worked all week without issue.
Yesterday the same happened after again after a few hours of trying to resolve it, I phoned O2 support who concluded the router was faulty and ordered me a new one. I put the phone down to them and decided to go to town and get a new ethernet cable, one that would actually fit across the room. Came back from a few hours shopping and low and behold the wifi was working normally. Perplexed, I just left it and it worked fine all day.
Today the new router arrived and its a Mark II O2 router, smaller and nicer to look at. Seeing as my connection was fine I ummed and arred for a bit but decided to try the new router. Plugged it all in, and surprise surprise, no wireless at all. I plugged in the old router, it worked first time but kept dropping the connection. WTF was going on?
Back onto O2 support who were equally perplexed as I was. We ran through possible causes of interference - phone line, electrical cables, cordless phone and so on. All were possible, but unlikely because they had always been there yet the wireless died recently.
Finally we changed wireless channels from 11 to 6 and bingo! new router works fine and has done all night. Now of course the question is, why would a router suddenly stop working on its channel when it has worked fine for 2 months or so and I have no new devices in that time which could conflict?
Well the new PS3 firmware 2.3 is out so I duly downloaded it. Didn’t take too long.
The new firmware is a redesign of the PS Store. Instead of using the clunky web browser it is built into the PS3 dashboard instead to make it faster and more usable.
I like the new store. It is indeed a lot faster to start up and navigate and sections are all laid out much better for easier viewing. BUT it is still sluggish. If you go to a section it is still slow to load images for each item. If you move over each item the information is there quickly, but thumbnails for the items are very slow.
Definitely still room for improvement, but the new design is a massive step forward in usability.
