Archive for the 'Life' Category

2009 Nearly Over

Published on 31 December, 2009 in Life and University. 0 Comments

Well it’s that time of the year again where we are about to move onto another year!

Over all this year has been quite busy for me, I have managed to cram in the following:
+ Got good exam results at school and got accepted into Glasgow Caledonian University
+ Passed both my theory and practical parts of my driving test and I am now a full UK license holder :)
+ Experienced Ibiza, this was probably the best part of the year, the experience was simply amazing, can’t wait to get back!

Probably the best bit of 2010 will be me turning 18! The wait is finally over, after January the 10th I can do what I want! :D

So as I will be partying too hard tonight I will say this just now, hope you have had a good 2009 and have an even better 2010! :D Happy New Year. :)

University So Far

Published on 5 October, 2009 in Life, Technology and University. 0 Comments

Cisco

As you may or may not know I have just started a Bsc in Networking & Systems Support at Glasgow Caledonian University. I have been there about a month now and I am beginning to get a grasp of the routine and getting to grips with the learning routine.

First thing that hit me was the completely different learning environment compared to school. No longer are you taken by the hand and show when and how to do things individually, instead now you are expected to keep up to date and it’s completely up to you when and if you do the course work. If you don’t do it you will fail, it’s as simple as that. The University uses a electronic learning environment called BlackBoard which has to be checked regularly to see notes that lecturers have left and to download course material such as lecture slides. However even although it’s tons more work compared to school it’s still better as you are doing what you want to do and get a real sense of achievement from everything you do as you know you have done it yourself!

The course I am doing is also very interesting. As a first year student the University puts all computer related students through the same first year with introduction modules to all other areas, however your specific course still gets it’s own time, for example as I am doing networking I will have other modules for other subjects however most of my week is taken up with networking. I am currently studying modules in:
• Computer Systems Design
• Computer Architecture
• Networking Technology
• Games Design
• Programming

This means the course is varied and allows you to have an insight into other courses and future career paths, as all first years sit a common first year the university can sometimes allow you to switch between courses meaning that your choice is still flexible for at least a year after starting university.

As for my actual Networking course we are currently studying different networking topology’s and studying basic setup of Cisco routers and switches. I have been enrolled in the Cisco Networking Academy and have began work towards my CCNA (Cisco Certified Network Associate) qualification. Once that has been completed I will move onto CCNP (Cisco Certified Networking Professional) and should hopefully leave university as a Cisco Certified Network Professional. :)

I will also try and blog some more as it’s been pretty much abandoned for a while however I have updated most of the pages and have managed to make this post so hopefully this is the sign of change! :D

TV Review & Holiday!

Published on 18 July, 2009 in Life and Technology. 0 Comments

Sorry for the lack of posts recently, and also for breaking the promise of a quick review of the TV. :)

Samsung Logo

Well let’s start on the TV, that’s over a month I have had the Samsung LED TV for and I have to say it’s been amazing! Since the last blog post it has all been wired up correctly and Sky HD has been added offering it’s first HD source to show what kind of picture it can really produce. Needless to say the results are breathtaking, the LED technology means the picture is bright and crisp meanwhile blacks are truley black. I have not seen this before on a TV/Monitor and I have to say it’s really makes the difference.

As far as connections go you are also sorted, the TV offers 4 HDMI’s, 1 SCART, audio optical out (for surround sound kits), component, DVI, VGA, 3.5MM audio in (for audio from the PC source), USB 2.0 slot and of course the standard arial slot. By far the most intresting is the USB 2.0 slot. Shove in a flash drive with pictures or music on it and it automatically starts Samsung’s version of MCE (Microsoft Media Centre) which looks good but also plays most music and picture formats meaning that you can fill up a 4 or 8GB flash drive and not have to worry about messing about with CD’s etc. However I was hoping this would work with iPod’s but it dosn’t appear to, I tried both my iPhone 3G and my Dad’s iPod Nano. The TV failed to recognise either.

Finally, the actual asthetics of the TV. It is one sexy peice of technology. The thin gloss black bezel fits into any enviroment as does the glass stand. The thickness of the TV is also amazing, thanks to the LED technology it’s about 1 centimeter thick. However there is one major drawback to all the glossyness and that’s dust, the thing attracts it like nothing I have seen before and it will have you going nuts cleaning it every two minutes.

Overall both the picture and build quality of the TV is amazing and I would recommend it to anyone. :D

Amnesia

Next up is my holiday, I had one week in Ibiza a few days back and it was AMAZING! :P

As it was my first holiday by myself I was a bit paranoid incase things went wrong but it was fine and everyone had a great time. We managed to get to a few of the big clubs such as Amnesia & Es Paradise however at €40-50 ticket price to get in this was expensive, what made it even worse was when you actually got in drinks cost €19, yes that’s nineteen Euro’s PER drink. However when big names such as Paul Van Dyke, Eric Prydz & Kelly Llorenna came on stage it was all worth it. :)

The hotel was also very good and the all inclusive deal really made the holiday as during the day at the hotel all food, soft drinks and best of all alcoholic drinks were completely free of charge!

A few nights out the week we went to local bars and to the famous West End where the drink was MUCH cheaper than the clubs and we met some cool people to talk and drink with.

Overall a fantastic holiday that I would like to do again and would recommend it to anyone looking for a holiday simply to club or enjoy the music! :D

New TV, Blog & More

Published on 9 June, 2009 in Life, Technology and Website. 0 Comments

WordPress

Well seeing I have just updated to the latest Wordpress from the old 2.6.x version I thought I better make a post since it’s been a while from my last one!

The upgrade was a disaster because all my plug-ins seemed to break and the theme just didn’t work, I have kind of built a custom theme as I have went along but being me I didn’t document any of the changes in code I had done and didn’t have a clue what was causing the errors in the theme. I ended up just opting to start a fresh, I logged into WHM and terminated my whole account after backing up everything and created a new one, linked all the domains up and set-up the email and filtering things, hence why your emails may have been bounced back the past few days. I downloaded the latest version of the theme, K2 RC7 and set about making it look like the old ones, things like browser identification in the comments were the hardest bits as the theme has both an AJAX and normal version and both needed patched. It’s all seemed to go well after that and the plug-ins were fine once all updated and configured properly.

One thing I was quite unhappy about was the loading time of my blog, I think this was due to everything getting generated when you loaded the page. I have installed and set-up WP-Cache and this has made a massive difference to page loading times so I thoroughly recommend this to anyone having loading problems. It can be tricky and Apache went a bit wonky with the modified .htaccess file and was throwing out 500 Internal Server Error pages but with some tweaking these were resolved.

In real life, not much has been happening, I have finished up at school and am now on holiday until September when I will start my university course if all goes according to plan. So hoping to get overtime at work as I might as-well be earning money than sitting in the house. Went TV shopping today to replace my 32″ Thomson CRT in the living room since it’s picture has started to go wonky, about time we moved over to HDTV downstairs. :P Went and had a look at Comet to see what sets were available and I managed to talk my parents into one of the brand new Samsung 40″ LED TV’s, the picture was absolutely amazing in the shop. Were picking ours up on Tuesday so will write a little review once it’s all unpacked and set-up.

Christmas Presents!

Published on 27 December, 2008 in Life. 1 Comment

Well that’s Christmas all over for another year, hope everyone had a good one. :)

I got great presents, thanks to everyone, hope you liked your presents! :)

Some of the bigger ones:
• Block of 10 driving lessons since I turn 17 on the 10th of January. :) Can’t wait to get out on the road, need to start looking at cars. :P
• Coloursfest tickets for Jamie & I for June 2009, get us warmed up for Ibiza! :D
• Minted G-Shock watch! :) Cheers Jamie!

This should be a great night out, can’t wait, next year feels ages away. :) Starts at 6PM and closes at 4AM, should fit plenty of dancing into that, wanted to go this year but by the time i had made that decision the tickets were sold out. :(

So what did you get for Christmas, be sure to leave comments! :)

iPhone 3G & xBox 360

Published on 24 December, 2008 in Life and Technology. 1 Comment

Well after a long debate and I mean long, I finally decided to give the iPhone 3G a go. On the 15th December I ordered an iPhone 3G White Pay&Go directly from Apple. In true Apple fashion the next day delivery turned into four day delivery, Apple have to get this sorted, 24 hour shipping never ever works in my opinion. If other company’s can manage this a massive company like Apple should.

Anyway back to the iPhone, I received it from the UPS man and removed it from it’s cardboard box, the actual iPhone box was white as was the phone inside. I then removed the cellophane from the iPhone box and opened it, at the top was the actual phone in protective wrapping, I lifted it out and looked and what’s included. Talk about the basics, there was a charger and a pair of earphones, that’s your lot. No dock like the first iPhone, not even a universal dock adaptor, come on Apple, this is the flagship phone, get it sorted.

I just removed my dock adaptor (1st Gen iPod Touch) from my Universal Dock and the iPhone sat in but I had to be careful as it shook about quite a bit as there was no support of an adaptor. I then opened iTunes and just like when setting up an iPod I got the little wizard that sets up your device. I had to put in my account details, name and bank stuff, luckily I had already put all this stuff in due to me having an iTunes account so that saved a bit of time, next I choose my tariff, there is two choices, one for people that talk more and one for people whom text more, I choose the text one and that was it all done.

I thought that would be me ready to use the phone but nope, I then went to take the phone out the dock and on the screen it had a bubble with the text “Waiting for activation…” A good hour and a half later it finally changed to “iPhone is now activated.” and the O2-UK text appeared up the top of the screen. Unfortunately I live in a non 3G area hence I only had an E indicating I had an Edge connection. I tried opening a Safari window but it was so slow I just gave up. Once I had it connected to my AirPort network everything sped up as expected.

The next few days I spent living with the iPhone 3G showed it’s good and bad points:

Good
• The way it groups texts, those speech bubbles are just genius.
• It’s interface, really Apple have the market cornered with the beautiful interface of mobile OS X.
• The standard audio jack, really every phone should have this, using your own earphones is so easy when this is in place, instead of using stupid adaptors and stuff.
• GPS, this thing gets a GPS fix faster than my TomTom Go 520 which is a bonus, it’s pretty accurate outside and the Google Maps application is a joy to use however software like TomTom Navigation would make this a thousand times more useful.

Bad
• The fingerprint issues, this isn’t exclusive to the iPhone, any touch screen devices suffer from this, but I have OCD making sure the screen is clean, maybe it’s just me but this drives me mad. :)
• The speed of the internet when on the mobile network, even with 3G signal it’s still really, really slow to load pages, when using Google Maps in a moving vehicle it cannot keep up with feeding images of maps making it appear you are in a brown field of nothing.
• The camera, the must have device of the year should really have more than a 2 megapixel camera, Nokia and Sony Ericsson have been using 5 megapixel for ages, what gives Apple?
• The one network situation, what’s with this, like every other phone it should be available on more than one network, what happens if you don’t get O2 signal where you live? Luckily I like O2 and take all my mobile business to them however I know other people that would like to use other networks, however this should soon be solved with the iPhone Dev team releasing their unlock in the new year.
• The price, for what you get it is overpriced on Pay&Go, it should be around £200 and free on contracts like every other similar phone on the market, Apple are really having a laugh with pricing on everything they sell.

Unfortunately the high price tag and bad points got to me and I found the iPhone quite un-enjoyable to use, this went to the point where I told Apple to stuff it and took it back for a refund, I have now went back to my Sony Ericsson W880i which is a much better phone in both looks and features and only cost £40-60, I have an upgrade on my contract due on February 2009 and will have a look at what is available on the market at that point.


Photo: Jamie McCall on Flickr.

A few days ago, I was in Tesco getting the last of my Christmas shopping and noticed they were doing a deal on xBox 360’s, It was £110 with a free game. This is a great deal as it’s the 60GB Pro version which retails at about £169. I purchased one and chose the new 007 Quantum Of Solace game. That came to £110, handed over my staff discount card and it brought it down to £100 which is an amazing price. Got it home and setup, pretty nice looking console, looks better than the PS3 in my opinion. My xBox 360 gamertag is “Declan Jewell” if you have a 360 and want to add me. :) The new dashboard is much better than the previous version however it’s still not as good as the PS3 XMB.

Overall a great purchase, just waiting on some more games and the HD-DVD drive attachment arriving which cost pennies now that HD-DVD is dead, however as I am still receiving HD-DVD titles from my LoveFiLM subscription it will come in handy. I will need to get some pictures up on Flickr so keep an eye out for them. :D

Merry Christmas Everyone! :)

University, Here I Come

Published on 15 December, 2008 in Life and School. 0 Comments

Woo! Having been in education for 13 years so far, and let me tell you it’s not been easy. :P I had applied to Glasgow Caledonian University for a Honours Degree in Networking & Systems Support, I got up this morning and had received and email from UCAS (Universities & Colleges Admissions Service), I logged into my application progress page and was over the moon to find that I had been accepted for the course, all I had to do was finish up school and I would start University in September 2009. :)

Going to be quite a busy year with all the schooling getting cleared up and also Jamie and I going to Ibiza for his 18th. :P

Can’t wait to get started and hopefully get a decent job after the five years there, quite scary to think I have been in education from 4 and won’t escape until I am 22 but hopefully it will all be worth it. :)

NFS:Underground & LittleBigPlanet

Published on 28 November, 2008 in Life and Technology. 0 Comments

Those are the best PS3 games ever! :)

Bought LittleBigPlanet first thinking it would be a bit of a laugh as it’s clearly designed for younger children, but maybe just because I am childish, I find it great! :) The fact that more or less the whole game is user generated content makes it exciting, sure there is built in levels that you can work up on if you don’t have online access but once you have signed in to PSN all the other user designed levels show up and you can play and even edit them yourself. If you wish you can choose to start with a blank canvas and create you own level, this can be played alone, shared with only friends or shared to the whole world if you wish. It so creative and you can spend hours just playing around with it. Totally recommend the game! :D

My Audi TT in NFS:Underground.

Secondly I pre-ordered Need For Speed Underground from Tesco with my staff discount, it came last Friday and since then I haven’t been able to put it down. It’s the most addictive game I have played to date. It’s a basic story line that you are an undercover cop that is trying to take out a network of smugglers. You take part in events and races to gain their trust but ultimately you have to take them down. The amount of car modifications you can make is dazzling and every car can truly be your own, it’s much better than the previous NFS (ProStreet). Physics also seems a lot better with cars actually moving them in the way you expect rather than tapping the control and you car goes flying into the nearest wall. Races and such are rewarding and you get cars and other points that gets you discount on parts. Overall a very good and addictive game, I have only been playing it for a week and I am at 70% complete already.

MacBook

Published on 7 November, 2008 in Life and Technology. 4 Comments

Got my new MacBook on Monday, have been using it almost non stop for the past 4 days and I have to say it’s a good laptop that seems to be built well however there are a few issues with it.

First the good points:

The looks, as usual it looks great, the aluminium is a great material and the way it’s manufactured (UniBody) makes for a sturdy laptop that can be picked up from the edge with the laptops weight placed on that edge and there is no flex at all, same with the display, it’s really thin thanks to the LED technology and has no flex as it’s all one block of aluminium.

The power, thanks to the 2.4Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo processor and 4GB of DDR3 RAM the laptop is nippy and does everything quickly. The new 9400M means that it also plays 1080p without any hassle which was a no go on the old MacBook with stuttering and stuff.

The trackpad, this thing is great, although it’s made of glass don’t be put off, it feels nothing like glass and is nice and big. There is plenty of space to move around in and this makes Drop ‘N’ Drag easy to do with one finger. There is also no button as the whole trackpad is a button, personally I never used the buttons anyway preferring to tap to click so this hasn’t really affected me so cannot comment how it feels to people that have always used the button. Right click is much better to as it can be assigned to the right hand corner meaning that you simply click or tap where the right hand button should be and it works rather than the unusual two finger tap like the old MacBook’s had. However under Bootcamp the trackpad is a disaster and multi-touch is not supported, right click is also nearly impossible. This seems to be a driver issue that Apple hopefully resolves sometimes soon.

Now on to the bad:

The screen, this is quite disappointing considering the price, I was expecting it to have the same screen as the MacBook Air which by the way is excellent. Unfortunately this is not the case, they have put in an LG screen which doesn’t have good viewing angles and out the box looks washed out, when this has been calibrated it does look much better and is defiantly usable but for the price I was expecting better and it can be done as it’s clearly done in the MacBook Air. However I didn’t get any dead pixels so I was quite happy about that aspect of the screen.

The keyboard, the black keyboard on the aluminium body looks the part and the backlighting is nice, the white is a good choice of colour unlike some tacky keyboards that use colours that are dull and useless. The backlighting is quite bright and is spread evenly with no bright or dull patches, the ambient light sensor is also quite good as it adjusts the screen and backlight brightness to make it look best in the current light. However the keyboard also has two major problems, all the F (F2,F4 for example) are slanted to the left with the right slightly raised, this is really annoying and shows to me that Apple just don’t have decent quality control. Also the spacebar squeaks from time to time which can be annoying when typing in a quiet environment, it appears that it is rubbing against the aluminium body, this may cause long term ware of they key but that will have to be checked in the future.

Overall the MacBook is a decent laptop and I would say even with it’s few problems that is still worth the slightly higher price, the new aluminium body seems more stable and resilient than the old plastic MacBook’s. However the slanted keys and the not up to par screen is annoying for a laptop the price of the new MacBook, I chose the highest model and added 4GB RAM which brought the price very close to the Pro range which apparently have a much better screen but still not as good as the Air, as the Air is a 13.3″ display I don’t see why Apple didn’t use it in the new MacBook. I am happy with my laptop and it ticks all the right boxes for what I use it for.

Would be happy to hear from any one that has the new MacBook to see if my problems are universal or wither I got the dodgy laptop. Hope this review helps people that are looking to purchase the new MacBook, best advice to anyone that is, try and get to a retail outlet and have a look at it before purchasing it.

New MacBook!

Published on 19 October, 2008 in Life and Technology. 3 Comments

Well resisting the temptation went well, I have placed my order for a new MacBook! Read on to find out more! :D

I choose the flagship MacBook and added choose the 4GB RAM option, that should make it snappy. Was up at the Apple shop ordering it and it looked really nice, if you are thinking the thing was ugly (like I was) believe me it’s just the pictures, in real life it’s much smaller and thinner than you expect and the backlight keyboard is really nice, also comparing my old MacBook the screen is 100000x better, gone are the weird gradient issues and uneven backlighting, the screen on the new one is very, very bright and good quality.

While I was up at the Apple store I also bought an AirPort Express, this is to create a Wireless N network for my Mac devices and also to share the printer with Windows clients, what a pain to, it fried my first printer (no, really) and I had to acquire an E setup pson R300 which works well but Jamie & I tracked the problem down to Vista, all went well until we tried to print from Vista and then the printer suddenly powered down and when we powered it back on it had fried the chips on two ink cartridges meaning the printer didn’t even think they were inserted. We tried the new R300 with Vista and although it didn’t fry the printer it caused it to display the “Paper Jam” error even although it hadn’t even took the paper in yet! :(

So now we have removed Vista from the equation and shared the already shared printer (confusing eh?!) from my sister’s PC that is running XP, so when the Vista laptop prints it goes to sister’s PC which then sends it to the AirPort then to the printer, this is working fine even although it is a tad complicated.

Unfortunately since I bought the MacBook at University to receive the HE discount which you cannot get in-store I will not receive my MacBook until the 5th of November so better start the waiting game, will promise some unboxing pictures and a mini review once received. :)