grantdickins.co.uk

I love TF2

Actually, this is almost true for the HTC Desire too (except for the 4G) But it still is better than the iPhone 4.

Bloody iSheep fucktards…

Buy this for me now!

“Do you remember the old days when your NES wasn’t working and you had to blow into the cartridge like it was a harmonica?  Well now you can blow into a real harmonica built into a classic NES cartridge!”

[Link]

This is just amazing.

http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/481

I’ve never really watched any TED Talks but…wow!
Fair enough, walking around with such a device would make you look like a complete looser… But I already am. YAY!

wtf is this shit?

If I can’t mock myself, I can’t mock others.
Enjoy!

On 5th May,  Microsoft made public the Release Candidate for Windows 7 (Build 7100)

Hearing nothing but good things about this version of Windows I jumped at the chance to download and test.
Having recently rebuilt my PC due to the PSU fuckup, I didn’t have much to loose by rebuilding again.

So, rebuild done – rocking Win7 RC 7100 (64-bit) happily. Only one or two glitches but nothing devastating. I’m absolutely loving the experience. So much is working much better than in Vista, I couldn’t be more impressed (Well maybe I could)

However, as there have been some glitches and constant updates on this RC front, I’ve been checking forums pretty much daily seeing what problems other people are having, if anything is similar to what i’ve had. How to tweak certain things.

But the majority of these forums are cursed by people complaining, moaning and whining about some feature that isn’t the same as it was in XP/2000/ME/98.

Seriously? No shit Sherlock!

Its TWO releases ahead of XP. There are gonna be huge changes. If you don’t like it, don’t frikken use it, no-body is making you!
Or has Bill come round to your house and held a gun to your head telling you to install Win7 or else?
I don’t think so.

What would be the point of releasing a new OS if there wasn’t changes? It wouldn’t make any sense to keep updating XP, patch after patch after patch.

In the IT world, you can’t dislike change! Its happening every millisecond!

OK, rant over. Win7 FTW! Final Release December 2009.

So I figure, now the initial “buzz” of twitter has calmed down a bit, I’d see what all this new shite was about.
I understand the “microblogging” idea. Basically, when your attention span drops to sub atomic levels as this day and age has come to cherish, and no-one can be bothered to write out an actual informative post on their blog. (or in my case complete drivel!)

I signed up yesterday having no idea wtf I was doing. When you begin, it does the friendly “enter your email address and passwords so I can steal all your contacts and spam the hell out of them” but at least gives a relatively obvious button to skip that step. Unfortunately, its probably not obvious enough for all the braindead web-kiddies destroying the net with their facebooks and myspaces.
The next step suggests people you might be interested in “following”. Which I don’t quite understand because I have no interest in following “Sockamillion – Jason Scott’s Cat”. Or for that matter, “10 Downing Street” (Yes #10 has a twitter profile…WTF?!)
It seems more like these profiles are most popular rather than picking people who you ACTUALLY might be interested in.

However, again, its a skippable step and you can get into searching for the people/organisations/etc you want. I found one or two people I know and also the twitter profiles of some celebs like Mr Stephen Fry, Kevin Smith and… Neil Gaiman!!

Its quite interesting following celebs as you get to see a more personal front of them rather than a media bastardisation of their persona.
Johnathan Woss tending to his sick wife, Neil looking after his son with a broken leg.

I’ve also added a “friend” called ‘playtwivia’ which a member of Neowin.net coded which pops up a trivia question every 3-4 hours and you earn points for answering correctly. Its quite smart, but the internet being what it is, every answer is googleable.

(I realised I have coined many new words on this blog post. Or at least words which aren’t technically true words. But hey, its my Blog!)

Twitter can also be used as a News Aggregator;  a sort of RSS feed mixed into it. So I get the lastest news posts from Neowin.net and also the latest lolcats from icanhascheezburger.com

All in all, its maybe something I’ll keep up with alongside this blog.  Sure i’m not going to ‘tweet’ things like, “I’m in work, its boring” or, “woke up, had breakfast, i’m tired” –At least not constantly. No-one is interested in that crap. I can develop it into something somewhat interesting such as my tweet:

Just made Haggis Neeps and Tatties for first time myself – all i can say is: http://tinyurl.com/arotcm

The tinyurl points to an excellent video on youtube. I suggest you play it with volume UP!

So, if you want to be depressed by my inane ramblings more, follow me on http://twitter.com/grantdickins

It was obviously so universally unbelievable that Kal was going to do ironing that as soon as he turned the iron on, it tripped ALL the sockets in the flat.

All the computers turn off, the cooker and microwave off (Damn having to set the clock on them again) and of course the iron doesn’t turn on.

But damn! hate when power cuts happen… so just power the pc’s back up and get on with the morning.
Kal’s pc back on. Even the server comes up fine – and its flakey at the best of times.
But my PC, doesn’t come back

We figure, some power supplies have a feature which puts it on a timeout untill any surges are over. So we left it for 10min but still doesn’t come back on.

I’m fucking gutted. Bad case: Power supply is gone. thats £70. but its got 5 year warranty.
Worse case: its fried my power supply, motherboard and CPU.
Even worse: Fried PSU, Mobo, CPU, and hard drives…

Kal went up to his parents at lunch time that day to dig out his old power supply so I could test my machine to find out what was broke.

That evening, rip out my duff PSU and try Kal’s one in it. All plugged in and ready to go… nothing.

DAMMIT! that means the motherboard is fried. My baby is dead
Dunno if CPU is gone, can’t test that yet. So now I’m hooked up with our mediabox, case ripped off and a stack of harddrives sitting on top with a tangle of cables hooked in. So at least my hard drives still work

Will see about returning the PSU under warranty, but i’m gonna have to get new motherboard and see about CPU. oh and RAM! fuck