Random Fact

Hitler was a vegetarian.

As this fact has been challanged, some clarification is needed. In 1931 Hitler's Doctor put him on a vegetarian diet to cure him of flatulence and a chronic stomach disorder (1). So indeed not a principled vegetarian, but he still eat like a vegetarian for a time. Thus he was a vegetarian.

Winner of Best Unreleased MOD of 2005 Wins Best Unreleased MOD of 2006!

Turns out the winner of Best Unreleased mod 05 took the same prize for 06 as well. And the mod is Black Mesa previously known as Black Mesa Source. Yes that is the one where some natters are recreating the original Half Life in the Half Life 2 engine. From what I seen when they started the project they have moved a long way. The Official Site has loads of exceptional music on the front page that is much better than what Valve included in Half Life and they have released a new trailer that just looks stunning, short, but stunning. You can get the trailer from FileFront and FilePlanet.

Poopsockers

A lot of people have been talking about World of Warcraft the Burning Crusade and I have learned a new word!

You know how there are those people who for some reason when they are playing games feel they have to have a bottle next to their computer to wee in because they can't bare to walk away from their computer to go the toilet. And I have been there, I have considered on a few occasions using something like that just to avoid a bathroom break, but I won't permit myself to cross that line and I know that if I am quick the whole operation can be done in less than a minuet or less if I don't mind a little bit of leakage (that's a joke), but what to do if you need to take a crap!?

Well it turns out that a few players have started to keep next to their empty bottles, a sock. Thus the term poopsocking. I pitty anybody who actually does that because there might be some people like truck drivers that have to pee in a bottle to keep on schedule or maybe if you where lost in a really big house and couldn't find a bathroom you might resort to that, but pooing in a sock is just unforgivable, anybody with any decency would would just say sorry to whoever they are playing with because they have to poo or at least use a bucket, have a little class people.

Crackdown Demo

Been playing the Crackdown demo off of XBox Marketplace and the game is a lot of fun. I want to buy it, but I don't know wither it is £39.99 fun. Might wait for the price to drop below the £30 as I normally do.

LiveVideo

And so the first competitor to YouTube has emerged in the form of LiveVideo.com. The picture quality seems to be slightly better, but the sound quality is much better. And the whole site seems a little less clunky even through the search isn't as good as YouTube.

Below is an embedded sample video. This is from Naruto episode 133, the one where Naruto and Sasuke fight, best fight sequence in the whole Anime thus far. The track playing in the background is Darude's Sandstorm.


Naruto- Sandstorm

Additional: Found the same video on YouTube and thought it would be a good idea to post that too so you could see a direct comparison. The YouTube video has significantly more artifacting. But you can decide for yourself now.

XNA Game Programming in Paperback

The book is Professional XNA Game Programming by Benjamin Nitschke (ISBN 0470126779).

This is the first book that will be released (May time) that covers XNA programming. Won't teach you how to program C#, but if you can do that and want to get a book that then teaches you how to do XNA then this is the very first one that will do just that. Written by the same guy who did Rocket Commander and XNA Racer (see YouTube video).

Top of the Limeware Torrents

FreeLimewire for some reason and somehow been tracking the Torrents people have been using to download stuff. And have produced a Top Torrents of 2006 list.

As you go down checkout the number of downloads per torrent, number two is over two million, number one is way over one bllion downloads and number one proves that the internet does have taste after all.

And The Winner is HD-DVD What a Surprise!

Apparently there is a format war going on between HD-DVD and Blue-Ray, but with the wide selection of HD-DVD players on the market and the cheaper price, superior features that HD-DVD has I was betting on that winning, but then I read This and that just confirms it.

Essentially there will be no Porn on Blue-Ray. All the Porn film distributors are being forced by Sony to use HD-DVD as their format. To clean minded people this might sound like a none issue, but Porn is big business and people with dirty minds want their Porn.

I can think of a few business decisions that are probably worse, but they where all made thorough mostly negligence or naivety. So whoever at Sony made this call deserves to be credited as making the worst business decision ever.

Geometry Wars on CRT and VGA

I realised earlier that in the last post I could have shown the difference between playing a game (in this case Geometry Wars) on a standard CRT screen and said game on a monitor with the VGA cable. And yes the VGA looks even better when moving and not being a photo.

CRT


VGA

360 VGA Cable

Currently the best thing I have bought for my 360 is a VGA cable so I can connect it upto a monitor. Now the funny thing is that I keep stealing my Dad's LCD screen from his computer, but his monitor is 14" and the portable TV that I used to play on is also 14". Yet everything still looks 100% better with the VGA cable.

Only problem I have had so far is that some games have strange aspect ratios in some of the higher resolutions on the cable, but like Gears of War a patch has been released to fix this and Gears looks especially nice on an LCD.

So if you have a monitor you can use, but don't have a HD-TV I would highly recommend spending £20 to get the VGA cable.

Quest for Air Conditioning

Recently I have been trying to buy an Air Conditioning unit because last summer was too hot. July 2006 was the hottest summer ever recorded in Britain and predictions are that this year will be no better. So I have set a target of having air conditioning by the end of February (that is next month).

My requirements for an Air Conditioning unit are:

1. Be Just Air Conditioning Unit
   I am not settling for anything that circulates water around a fan, water sprayer or any other device like a humidifier. And then there are a lot of units that do extra stuff like HEPA Filtering which seems conflicts with point three. So I want just an air conditioner solely for air conditioning purposes.
   
   
2. Have Thermostat
   I do not want to be playing around with dials or a remote control all the time, plus having a thermostat will reduce the unit's power consumption down to only what is necessary.
   
   
3. Be Cheap (under £300)
   I only intend on using the unit for a few weeks in the hottest month of the year (July) so obviously I do not wish to pay for a permanent unit to be installed in the house. And having a crappy air conditioning unit is still going to be much better than having no air conditioning unit. So even if it only just has enough power to bring the temperature of one room down to near 24'C then I will be very happy.

These requirements might not seem extreme, but trying to find anywhere that sells one has been very hard. Nobody seems to have anything in stock. I assume this is because of the weather being cold right now.

For the past six years in a row I have been considering getting air conditioning every year during the hottest two weeks of the year, but last year was the first year I made a concerted effort to find something. Even then everywhere was out of stock, but obviously for another reason so this year will be different.

iPhone Delightful, but Missing One Feature

So I finished watching the Apple Presentation where Steve unveiled the iPhone and I was concerned that they wouldn't have the multi-touch LCD that devices needed to make a screen keyboards really work, but they have, so I think indeed they are five years ahead of everybody else, but where is the built-in GPS!?

There is a section of the iPhone presentation where Steve is showing the web browsing and Google Maps feature, which means that the phone has not just England's citys and roads (like my TomTom-GPS has), but the whole WORLD! And it can tell you where all the Starbucks, McDonalds, Burger Kings, Hospitals, Taxi Companies, Cinemas etc are in relation to wherever you are viewing and tell you their phone numbers, so you can phone them up wherever you are (quite a useful feature to have on a phone I think you will agree). BUT! The phone doesn't know where IT, IS, because it doesn't have built-in GPS. I am sure Apple will fix this slight issue in the next version, but for me I want GPS in my phone because that means that I will never ever have to face the minor inconvenience of being lost ever again.

Nodought Apple's competitors in the form of Nokia and Sony Ericsson will try and get there first, but I do believe the iPhone is indeed one of those Milestone devices in history. And is yet another device that is better than it was envisioned in Star Trek as looking at it now the DataPad looks old.

And I will happily buy one, when it supports GPS or Better.

Internet ON!

Ok back now, and I can tell you that I did not like my three week off-the-grid exsperiance at all. On onehand I rearlised the ammount of time I wasted checking my email and RSS (I will be removing some RSS feeds), but I wasn't exspecting to miss Wikipedia as much as I did. I even have a list of things that I want to read about.

And just for the record I have 226 unread messages in my inbox and my SPAM folder has the number 2069 next to it.