Monthly Archive for January, 2008

AV Setup Complete

Published on 26 January, 2008 in Life and Technology. 0 Comments

It’s all done!

TV has been wall mounted, shelf has been put up and Sky HD has been installed.

Overall I am very happy, the TV is great and produces a superb picture with the Sky HD box and PS3. The Sky HD is good quality but there are not enough HD channels but I suppose the only way is up with them. The box looks sexy as and goes well with the PS3 and TV, for half price I cannot complain.

Watched SuperBad on BluRay and the picture just blew me away, so clear, same with the Sky HD, the BBC HD channel shows a HD Preview all day and the crispness of that is amazing, you can see all the imperfections on people faces and everything.

Here is a picture of the complete setup:
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Samsung LE32R88BD, Sky HD and Sony PS3!

Published on 22 January, 2008 in Life and Technology. 0 Comments

Samsung

Yip, I bit the bullet today after seeing a BlueRay trailer to upgrade my home cinema. I went to Currys for a look and it was either the Samsung or the Sony Bravia 32″, they were both side by side on display and the Samsung had the better picture and could actually produce black whereas the Sony done a weird grey colour and it wasn’t settings either as I had a muck about with them and couldn’t make it any better. Plus the Samsung looked incredibly sexy with it’s Pebble design and the cool touch sensitive controls (exclusive to the Currys group) whereas the Sony Bravia looked shite like al Bravia’s do with it’s plain square border.

The inputs are great, 3 HDMI, 1 Component and the usual SD ports after that.

Was looking at an xBox 360 but not really a gaming person but wanted something that could play BlueRays as it’s quite clear that this format is doing better for itself. There was a standalone Samsung BlueRay DVD Player but it was £900 (GBP) so opted for the PS3 instead as this done what I wanted and had a HDD to transfer content from the computer to it (which works fine with a Mac by the way), and also was a games console so was pretty pleased with that!

When I got to the till they said they were doing a deal on Sky HD if bought with any HD TV, instead of the box costing £300 (GBP) it would be half price and only cost £149.99 (GBP) so I also took this offer to truly complete my home cinema.

I got home and set this up on the Kitchen table just to make sure everything was working OK and it was all OK, set up the TV and Jamie set the correct settings from a forum somewhere and the picture looked great. I loaded the BlueRay trailer that had made me want this from the Mac to the PS3 HDD and it worked fine. Played it back with the PS3 and the picture simply blew me away, looks fantastic and the TV can actually do black which makes viewing a totally enjoyable experience!

Packed everything away again. Want this TV up on the wall so I have purchased a bracket which only cost me £42 (GBP) which was a bargain and very good quality!

Current schedule is:

Wednesday = Accept delivery of the new bracket for the TV.
Thursday = Uncle is coming down to install this since he knows what he’s doing, I hope!
Saturday = Going to IKEA for some shelves to sit the PS3 and Sky HD box under the TV.
Monday = Sky is coming out to install my Sky HD, this will be funny as our quad LNB is full, they better not charge me more for an octo LNB.

Once everything is in place I will post some pictures, incase there is some confusion, this is all in my room and is not the main TV / Sky etc in the house.
Tesco Name

Also start my job at Tesco as a checkout assistant on Thursday, went to my training today which was very interesting!

Microsoft Office 2008!

Published on 16 January, 2008 in Technology. 0 Comments

It’s finally here after that very long wait!

Firstly I would like to say that it’s very nice and a vast improvement over the 2004 version. For all you people that have not yet seen the final version’s look and sexy new dock icons, here is a screen-shot, it also shows activity monitor running with the Microsoft Word process highlighted for people wanting to know how much RAM it’s using etc.

Microsoft Word 2008

It still uses too much virtual RAM but that’s not too much of a problem considering the speed it now runs at compared to the 2004 version, remember the long start up? Well that’s now gone. I haven’t had much time to play about with it but what I have seen and played with is very nice and the UI is now perfect and looks the part under Leopard. When you click buttons to open a sub menu it’s flawlessly fades in and becomes transparent until it fades away, all this is bloat sure, but very very nice bloat it is.

Overall I would recommend this software both to people new to Mac’s and also to people that have been using the 2004 version, this is a huge improvement and you wont be disappointed. It’s even better than the 2007 version on the Windows platform!

New Job!

Published on 14 January, 2008 in Life. 2 Comments

YAY! As you may know or will know by reading the post below this one, I had applied for a job of Customer Assistant at Tesco’s. Today I received my letter from them telling me that I was successful and that I started on Monday next week (21st January), this is only the introduction day where I meet the manager of the store and the rest of the people I will be working with. I then get shown around and exactly what I will be doing etc, this will last for 6 hours and then I go to my normal hours of Saturday, 15.30-20.15 and Sunday 11.00-18.15.

Hopefully this goes well and it will be a good place to work, then awaiting the important day, PAYDAY!!! ;)

Job Interview!

Published on 11 January, 2008 in Life and Technology. 1 Comment

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No guesses where!

Had a job interview for Tesco’s today as a customer adviser which basically means working on the check outs and supervising the self scan machines so quite a good and interesting job if you ask me.

Wage is good and the interview seemed to go well but will not know until Monday how I got on when I receive my letter from Tesco alerting me of the outcome. Fingers crossed.

New iPod arrived unfortunately with 1.1.2 firmware, luckily I had backup up my old iPod’s firmware and restored the image onto the new without any problems and then ran the JailBreak program and installed all my custom applications/skins/settings etc and I have to say I am very pleased with it as I have my whole music collection on it and have 4GB to spare although don’t think it will take that long to get filled.

Haven’t really used it yet as I am waiting on my new earphones as said below and also don’t want to carry it about unprotected, hopefully invisibleSHEILD should come tomorrow or Monday at the latest so I can finally get this thing to school and get the music pumping in my ears!

Will let you know what the outcome of the interview was as soon as I know!

Birthday!

Published on 10 January, 2008 in Life and Technology. 0 Comments

YAY! That’s me 16 now, had a great birthday and received some cool stuff, thanks to Jamie I received a mini fridge which I had been wanting, it’s working great (I am actually drinking a bottle of water from that the now and it’s really cold). From everyone else I received money except from my parents which bought me a new Belkin Tool Kit and a new pair of Black ER-6i earphones to go with my new 16GB (LOL, a GB per year I have been alive) iPod Touch that’s arriving tomorrow.

ER6i

Had a great birthday so thanks everyone who donated to the Declan fund. Need to wait for my iPod Touch, ER-6i Earphones, 4GB SanDisk Cruzer Micro Flash Drive and invisibleSHEILD.

Also received my 15 Minute Energizer Charger, it comes with 2200 batteries and is great for my digital camera. It is true 15 minutes which is weird as I have never seen batteries charging that fast but makes a nice change. Due to the high current used it gets very hot and even has a cooling fan on the back which gets quite loud when the batteries have been charging for 10 minutes, once you remove the batteries you have to let it run the cooling cycle run which is very loud and takes about 5 minutes which is a bit of a pain but is better than waiting all day for the batteries to charge.

Goodbye 8GB, Hello 16GB!

Published on 9 January, 2008 in Technology. 0 Comments

I have just sold my 8GB iPod Touch due to me running out of space for all my music, I had some spare money so I have sold the old one for £155 and put £100 towards it and bought a 16GB one. Partly the reason for this is the official SDK coming out in January/February which may be better than Jail-Breaking your iPod but I severely doubt it thanks to the wide range of applications available via Installer.

What I did notice with my use of the 8GB model is that the chrome backing can get scratched very very easily, even just touching it seems to scratch it. To prevent this I have purchased an invisibleSHEILD thanks to Fr3d’s recommendation on his blog when he got his iPod Touch. I have got the full body version which only cost £12 GBP which I think is great given the reviews of the product I read, hopefully this keep’s the iPod looking brand new for a good time to come.

Will blog again and post pictures of the un-boxing once it arrives which hopefully will be Friday or Monday at the latest.

LastFM Mobile Scrobbler

Published on 8 January, 2008 in Life and Technology. 2 Comments

Yip, that is LastFM music scrobbler for the iPod Touch & iPhone.

It’s quite buggy but good enough to use, runs in the background and scrobbles the song, it’s pretty cool and allows you to listen to the LastFM radio and play lists etc. It scrobbled all the test tracks I threw at it, hopefully they make it more stable and it will be a good bit of software. Unfortunately it’s only through the 3rd party software due to my iPod Touch being JailBroken. Hopefully once Apple release the SDK for the iPod Touch/iPhone they will produce some sort of official client which I imagine will work better, but thanks to the people that made this one possible as it’s great!

Here are some screen shots. (The little music icon beside the battery is the scrobbler running in the background.)

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Birthday In 5 Days!

Published on 5 January, 2008 in Life, School, Technology and Website. 0 Comments

Well people, just thought I would give you a reminder of the birthday date so you can send all your presents in time!

Next Thursday I am hoping to get some cool stuff and then treat people close to me to a nice meal.

Will post nearer the time, now back to my English homework. :(

Added Browser and Operating System detection to the comments system, can’t decide wither I like it with the icons or not but I have left them on for now, comments are welcome both to test the system and to have your thoughts on the icons. It is due an update soon though as it has troubles detecting the PS3 whereas the 360 and Wii work just fine. Also when using Safari on Windows it likes to report your operating system as OS X but apart from that it’s pretty accurate.

First Post Of 2008!

Published on 1 January, 2008 in Life, School, Technology and Website. 0 Comments

Well that’s it people, it’s now 2008 here in the UK! If it is not 2008 in your local time zone you won’t have long left.

This year I hope to finish up some school things and maybe take college or further courses at school to get closer to my goal of network administrator.

Right now I am being a tad anti-social, I am currently at a party celebrating the new year and enjoying myself although it’s getting late but who cares eh?! So going to leave this blog and go back to my party! So where ever you are and what ever your doing enjoy the new year and all the best for 2008!

On a sad note, FreeLeech on HDBits has ended thus my ratio is now back in action. This is annoying as the rest of the episodes in Prison Break Season 3 will be coming out and downloading them will ruin my ratio. During the FreeLeech session I managed to download 103GB of stuff. :) Uploaded just over 12GB which isn’t bad considering my upload speed is only 512kb/s the site doesn’t count download because of FreeLeech but my download folder was empty before starting and is now 103.4GB so that’s what I have downloaded, and give it to my Mac, it has been downloading torrents for 5 days 24/7 and it has been fine, handled all errors with minimum fuss. Also thanks to Sky whom’s download limit is 40GB a month and I have done double this over a couple of days and have not given me any trouble and never throttled my connection at any time peak time or not so all that for a fiver a month I am very very happy!