Monthly Archive for December, 2006

Adventures into Remote Control Boating

Published on December 31, 2006 in Personal. 0 Comments

Just when you thought I couldn’t get any more geeky – I’ve taken it to a new level…

Yesterday morning was spent at Bournville Boating Pond, very near to where I live in Weoley Castle, where my brother Paul and myself regressed to childhood with our new Christmas presents… Remote Control Boats!

There is actually a Boating club that regularly meet at the club. Even from an early age I have memories of all these wonderful minature boats moving around the Pond, but have never had the opportunity to have a go myself. Well I must say – it’s sooooo much fun!

The boats Paul and myself used were sub-£100 beginners models that use 7.2v 1000Mah batteries manufacturered by a company called ZFlites. The range of the boat is about 100m (enough for me to get the boat to go 3/4 of the pool without moving from my spot) and they go at a speed of “220mph – Scale” – which was actually quite fast! The only really dissapointing thing was the very poor Battery life. Paul literally got minutes out of his boat on a full charge, myself just a bit longer.

Post-session we immediately went home to investigate boosting Battery power and ended up driving to 
SB Models in Kidderminster where the owner, a very friendly chap called Simon, happily explained to us newbies about battery power and other options in RC Boating.

Paul and myself can now see this becoming a very expensive new form of entertainment for us, as we’ve already both got our eye on more powerful RC boats with better engines and battery life – they cost from £150 upwards!

New Games PC

Published on December 29, 2006 in Computers and Internet. 0 Comments
One of my Christmas pressies to myself this year was a new PC to play games on.

I’m not much of a game player, but even I realised my old AMD Sempron 2600+ based Acer box was lacking in a bit of oomph. In fact, buying a new games PC would open up multiple previous Christmas pressies, as trying to play nearly any game I’d been bought as a pressie over the past two Christmases on my old games PC was impossible!

So it was a choice between building my own unit, buying a ready built games unit, or the third choice – re-using my existing Monitor, Speaker setup, etc. and buying a new ready-built Base Unit.

In years gone by, it would always have been self-build. But my attitude towards self-build, and the ridiculously cheap ready-built options on the market meant that I’d dismissed that choice almost straight away. As for a completely new package, my budget didn’t quite stretch as far as a state of the art Gaming unit, and regular readers of this blog will know how I hate to waste old equipment such as my lovely Samsung SyncMaster 710MP TV/Monitor TFT unit and 5.1 Surround Sound setup.

So it’s option three I went for, and after scouring the web comparing specifications and prices – decided upon the Texas Base Unit from Vantage Computers.

The important specs are:-
  • Processor (CPU)
    Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 64-Bit Dual Core Skt 775 Processor
  • Memory
    1Gb DDR2 533 Memory
  • Hard Drive
    250Gb Serial ATA II 300 7200RPM
  • Graphics Card
    GeForce 7900GS 256Mb PCI Express x16 with VGA and DVI outputs
  • Sound
    Eight channels of audio output will support up to Seven Satellite Speakers with a Subwoofer
  • CD Device(s)
    16x +/- DVD/RW Dual Layer Drive

Now whilst I fully appreciate hard-core gamers will probably snort at some of the specs, coming from a lowly AMD Sempron based games unit – this new unit is a positive beast! Windows Vista Ready and a good price, the real clincher on the above unit was the fact Vantage offered next day delivery, whilst many of it’s competitors couldn’t guarantee delivery before Christmas.

A copy of Windows XP Home was promptly slapped on the machine, and suddenly years worth of Christmas pressies were opened up to me! Age of Empires III looks gorgeous, and even old classics like Counter Strike and Quake III Arena look stunning at high resolution!

But naturally, the first thing I did was install my beloved Age of Mythology – Titans, and play 11 computer opponents on a large map. This sort of scenario had driven my previous Games PC into a nervous wreck, however the Texas dealt with it without breaking a sweat. I know, I know – all that power and I use it to play a game years old.

Hey, Pac Man is going on next!

Enjoy your Christmas Break!

Published on December 27, 2006 in Personal. 0 Comments Tags: , , .
Hope you are all having – or have had in the case of those of you who have had to go back to work today – a relaxing and enjoyable Christmas break.

For myself, I finished work last Friday – dreadfully hungover after a blow-out at my largest customers Christmas Party.

I’m taking the whole Christmas and New Year period off – just doing small bits of admin until January 2nd when I return to work.

In the meantime, I’ve been enjoying some rest and relaxation catching up on my favourite Television shows, Movies, Computer Games, Books and well, let’s be frank, eating and drinking myself into oblivion.

Man Flu and MySpace

Published on December 14, 2006 in Computers and Internet. 1 Comment
I’ve finally succumbed to the seasons first bout of Man Flu (it’s ten times as bad as any other ‘flu you can think of ) and so have retired to my death bed.

The boredom has now set in. So, what does somebody who works with computers all day, every day, do in such a situation? He brings his laptop to bed – naturally!

So in between dozing and pathetically mewling to the GG for cups of tea and drugs (she selfishly denied my suggestion of providing me with either a stick to bang on the bedroom floor with, or a bell to tinkle, to alert her to my next dying request) I’ve decided to have a general mooch around the ‘net.

Catching up on friends and colleagues blogs is a good way to the pass the time, whilst Russell Brands new show on Radio 2 plays via BBC’s "Listen Again" facility in the background.

But then a minor irritation of mine is fanned into a full-blown rage.

Plenty of friends host their blogs on MySpace. Now, even though MySpace reminds me of just about anyones first attempt at a personal home-page on the World Wide Web circa 1993 (a mixture of gaudy icons, jokes and odd coloured text) – I understand the attraction. But what I don’t understand is why, oh why, oh why… do all these pages have to have music tracks that automatically play in the background?

So I want to read some blogs and listen to my own choice of music/radio in the background – but I browse to a MySpace site – and a cacophony of noise drowns out my own choice of listening. Grrr.

I suppose I could always create my own space and have a combination of Rick Astley and A-ha playing in the background?


Mt. Router Growing…

Published on December 6, 2006 in Computers and Internet. 0 Comments
ISP Madasafish have conducted research that has shown there are one million unused Broadband Routers in the UK, reports the BCS.

The issue revolves around the fact that ISP’s lock down Routers to work with their services only, then when a user moves on to another Broadband provider, they are given another router locked to that service, and so on… All those Routers that could be re-used, aren’t, and so new Routers are built and old Routers are land-filled. The environmental aspect of this cycle is obvious.

A neighbour of mine experienced this first hand recently. They were moving their Broadband from BT to TalkTalk. Their ADSL account was moved across rapidly, but the "new" hardware didn’t arrive quickly from TalkTalk. Trying to get their existing BT branded ADSL Router to work with TalkTalk’s service was futile, as it had been coded to BT only (despite no technical different in the service between BT and TalkTalk’s offerings). So they went without ADSL for days until a new Router from TalkTalk arrived. The type of Router? You guessed it – exactly the same as the BT model, but this time branded for and locked down to work only with TalkTalk.

In a world where we are being encouraged to recycle, this is obviously a ridiculous situation. But if you want a lesson in ridiculousness, try telephoning your ISP with a view to returning your old networking equipment so it can be re-deployed! They’ll simple see it as a hassle, not an opportunity, and sadly… you wont get very far!