The Intrepid Ibex is out, which should be good. It looks like they've replaced the network manager, which has got to be a good thing. The old one was total crap and was such a bitch to use with wireless networks. Unfortunately it's still very brown, although the default wallpaper is rather nice.
I'm installing it on the Inspirons original hard drive, which contained the VIsta Ultimate install that the machine shipped with. I backed up some data on it and blew it away without much regret since the main hard drive contains XP which runs better on the machine.
I don't know what it is with Vista, but I can't get on with it. I like the look of it but when I start to use it, its as if I'm fighting against it to get things done. It's probably because I am so used to XP and Linux. It's a shame Mac OS X had so many broken things on the Inspiron.
Friday, 31 October 2008
Bigamy for Dummies
1) Marry two or more people of either gender.
2) Impregnate those capable of it.
3) Blatantly shag anyone else who is interested.
4) Should both/all your spouses meet and realise the situation, simply resolve the dispute with a drawn out protracted fart.
5) Repeat step 4 as necessary.
2) Impregnate those capable of it.
3) Blatantly shag anyone else who is interested.
4) Should both/all your spouses meet and realise the situation, simply resolve the dispute with a drawn out protracted fart.
5) Repeat step 4 as necessary.
Wednesday, 29 October 2008
Random things
Picked up Fable 2 on Monday. The first one passed me by but I really liked the look of the second one when I saw it at Will's on Saturday. It's good fun, and I really like the open ended nature of the game. I completely ignored the first quest on Monday evening, instead taking a job at the blacksmith, and using the money to buy houses to rent out. I also got married to the blacksmith because you get a discount on the weapons that way. My character is apparently rather attractive as he keeps getting complimented on his looks by pretty much everyone.
Spent yesterday evening at Rob and Em's where we ate stinky cheese gnocchi and watched Stephen Fry trace the Mississippi to it's source. Very cool. I think people often forget that behind the stereotypes, America is a really nice place to visit. Had a go on the X-men game that Rob had picked up, which was good fun.
Today was yet more Fable 2, where I actually went and did a quest. The combat in it is kind of simple but in a way it makes it really satisfying and the controls are really responsive. Also it's very forgiving when you die, and you basically just get up and keep going. This sounds like it could be too easy but it makes it much more relaxed and enjoyable. Fortunately I only got knocked out once so my character didn't pick up too many scars.
The phone battery gave up again and so it was back to the bling phone. I guess I could order a brand new battery from Nokia or perhaps look at a different phone.
Spent yesterday evening at Rob and Em's where we ate stinky cheese gnocchi and watched Stephen Fry trace the Mississippi to it's source. Very cool. I think people often forget that behind the stereotypes, America is a really nice place to visit. Had a go on the X-men game that Rob had picked up, which was good fun.
Today was yet more Fable 2, where I actually went and did a quest. The combat in it is kind of simple but in a way it makes it really satisfying and the controls are really responsive. Also it's very forgiving when you die, and you basically just get up and keep going. This sounds like it could be too easy but it makes it much more relaxed and enjoyable. Fortunately I only got knocked out once so my character didn't pick up too many scars.
The phone battery gave up again and so it was back to the bling phone. I guess I could order a brand new battery from Nokia or perhaps look at a different phone.
Sunday, 26 October 2008
Virtualisation, Bass Surgery and violence.
Spent a quiet lazy day not doing anything after the overtime yesterday. Two main things I did were to play with virtualisation and swap the necks on my two main basses.
Perhaps I'm easily pleased, but I still think there's something slightly magical about virtualisation. To be able to run several operating systems at the same time and flip between them with a keystroke is still rather a novelty. Right now I have a laptop running a minimalist Ubuntu install, and on top of that it's running Windows 2000 and Windows 2000 Server at the same time (I know, but it's only got 1gb RAM). Both are running full-screen and you can flip between them using the multiple workspaces of the Ubuntu desktop. It's also really good for playing with network applications since you can have the virtual machines on their own private network. I've used it before to experiment with things like DHCP and network booting which could cause chaos on a real network.
In a fit of experimentation today, I swapped the necks on my main two basses, the Squier Precision Bass and the Squier fretless Jazz Bass. Mainly because I was curious to see how the Jazz would sound with a fretted neck. The answer was pretty good, and I prefer the ergonomics of the Jazz body. The Precision sounds rather interesting with the fretless neck, due to the upgraded Quarter-Pounder pickups. Actually swapping the necks was trivial and took less than ten minutes as they are exactly the same other than the fingerboards. The only irritation is a fair bit of hum from the Jazz so it needs some shielding added (cheap) and the pickups raised (also cheap). Ideally I'd like to get some stacked hum-cancelling pickups for it but they are £55 each, so no chance.
Also fired up the 360 and had a look for some game demos. Downloaded the trial version of the first Soul Calibur, which a few years ago was THE game of choice for hardcore gaming sessions in my flat. We spent many happy hours playing it on the Dreamcast, and led to us all getting Soul Calibur II on various platforms. It is probably still the only fighting game that I at all enjoy. Also played Duke Nukem 3D, which is good fun and some stupid racing game called Grid. An interesting feature in Duke Nukem is that it records your progress through the level and when you die, you can rewind it and choose when you want to respawn.
I'm actually tempted to get some Microsoft points for the first time.
Perhaps I'm easily pleased, but I still think there's something slightly magical about virtualisation. To be able to run several operating systems at the same time and flip between them with a keystroke is still rather a novelty. Right now I have a laptop running a minimalist Ubuntu install, and on top of that it's running Windows 2000 and Windows 2000 Server at the same time (I know, but it's only got 1gb RAM). Both are running full-screen and you can flip between them using the multiple workspaces of the Ubuntu desktop. It's also really good for playing with network applications since you can have the virtual machines on their own private network. I've used it before to experiment with things like DHCP and network booting which could cause chaos on a real network.
In a fit of experimentation today, I swapped the necks on my main two basses, the Squier Precision Bass and the Squier fretless Jazz Bass. Mainly because I was curious to see how the Jazz would sound with a fretted neck. The answer was pretty good, and I prefer the ergonomics of the Jazz body. The Precision sounds rather interesting with the fretless neck, due to the upgraded Quarter-Pounder pickups. Actually swapping the necks was trivial and took less than ten minutes as they are exactly the same other than the fingerboards. The only irritation is a fair bit of hum from the Jazz so it needs some shielding added (cheap) and the pickups raised (also cheap). Ideally I'd like to get some stacked hum-cancelling pickups for it but they are £55 each, so no chance.
Also fired up the 360 and had a look for some game demos. Downloaded the trial version of the first Soul Calibur, which a few years ago was THE game of choice for hardcore gaming sessions in my flat. We spent many happy hours playing it on the Dreamcast, and led to us all getting Soul Calibur II on various platforms. It is probably still the only fighting game that I at all enjoy. Also played Duke Nukem 3D, which is good fun and some stupid racing game called Grid. An interesting feature in Duke Nukem is that it records your progress through the level and when you die, you can rewind it and choose when you want to respawn.
I'm actually tempted to get some Microsoft points for the first time.
Farting is fun!
Yesterday was spent doing overtime in work. What with one thing and another it took far longer than anyone expected, so we basically did a full working day. The first thing I got involved in was repatching an entire cabinet after new switches were installed. It was supposed to have been done but hadn't, and it looked like a vast waterfall of green spaghetti forming a coiled mass on the floor. It took myself and a colleague three hours to repatch it all, but oddly enough it was a very satisfying task. The rest of the day was spent doing much less interesting things like printer and PC configurations, which unfortunately took a long time due to various hiccups.
After that met up with Will and had a Chinese before having a game of co-op Fable 2. It's pretty good fun and we started a new game with the sole intention of becoming pure evil. Surprisingly the fart gesture is apparently fun, not evil, but we were rather suprised when one woman gasped 'How romantic!' after a protracted fart in her general direction.
Is there any particular reason why a simple IM client should want 1.8gb RAM? If so, I'm not aware of it. Pidgin on my machine just decided that it did and caused the machine to grind to a complete halt. I had a lot of other stuff running and the final straw was firing up my Windows XP virtual machine. The memory and swap filled up and the system went into a thrashing state, and it was only when I had a look at the running processes that I realised why. How annoying.
After that met up with Will and had a Chinese before having a game of co-op Fable 2. It's pretty good fun and we started a new game with the sole intention of becoming pure evil. Surprisingly the fart gesture is apparently fun, not evil, but we were rather suprised when one woman gasped 'How romantic!' after a protracted fart in her general direction.
Is there any particular reason why a simple IM client should want 1.8gb RAM? If so, I'm not aware of it. Pidgin on my machine just decided that it did and caused the machine to grind to a complete halt. I had a lot of other stuff running and the final straw was firing up my Windows XP virtual machine. The memory and swap filled up and the system went into a thrashing state, and it was only when I had a look at the running processes that I realised why. How annoying.
Thursday, 23 October 2008
Wretched weather and bling-bling phone
My N93 had a flat battery this morning and I had no way to charge it up at work so I had to leave it at home on charge. I did however have the tasteless gold D&G V3i charged up for some reason so I popped my SIM card into it and took that instead. The size is great, it's so small and slim.
Using the damn thing is a pain though. I don't know if it's because I'm so used to Nokia but finding anything in the icons and menus was near impossible and texting on it was horrendous. I always use predictive text but on this it drove me potty and I had to revert to the old style input. Also the gold paint that covers the exterior and the gold keypad are so tacky that I felt embarassed to bring it out in public.
Not sure what's going on with the N93. It seems to go from a few bars of battery to dead remarkably quickly and without any warning. Rob and I even swapped the battery with his old phone and it seemed better but it's still not great. Annoying because apart from that and the sheer bulk of it, I really like the N93.
The weather is awful tonight. It's blowing a gale and raining like anything, so once again I'm not going to badminton. I'm just not happy driving the AX in these conditions unless I really have to.
Using the damn thing is a pain though. I don't know if it's because I'm so used to Nokia but finding anything in the icons and menus was near impossible and texting on it was horrendous. I always use predictive text but on this it drove me potty and I had to revert to the old style input. Also the gold paint that covers the exterior and the gold keypad are so tacky that I felt embarassed to bring it out in public.
Not sure what's going on with the N93. It seems to go from a few bars of battery to dead remarkably quickly and without any warning. Rob and I even swapped the battery with his old phone and it seemed better but it's still not great. Annoying because apart from that and the sheer bulk of it, I really like the N93.
The weather is awful tonight. It's blowing a gale and raining like anything, so once again I'm not going to badminton. I'm just not happy driving the AX in these conditions unless I really have to.
Wednesday, 22 October 2008
WTF?!
This makes my eyes hurt. I admit I once built something fairly similar, but I can't see how you're supposed to play this thing. Also, good luck finding strings for a 12-string guitar which are long enough to reach those machine heads at the far end of that ludicrous headstock.
The Sims
Talking about the Sims with Will, and we remembered the good times you could have with the game.
1) Filling a house with 8 bisexual people in various relationships with each other and watching them cry and shout at each other.
2) Walling people up with food but no toilet.
3) Making people swim and then taking the ladders away.
4) Creating a house that hovered by building it on pillars and then removing them.
5) Using the money cheat and making an enormous house with one slobby guy who would watch TV all day.
Quite how they expect to make a film about the Sims is an interesting question, but since it's going to be produced by the guy who did Norbit and Eragon, it's not really worth worrying about as it'll be shit and disappear without a trace.
Also the first Spore expansion pack has been announced, showing that there'll probably be the same flood of expansions that the Sims series has had.
1) Filling a house with 8 bisexual people in various relationships with each other and watching them cry and shout at each other.
2) Walling people up with food but no toilet.
3) Making people swim and then taking the ladders away.
4) Creating a house that hovered by building it on pillars and then removing them.
5) Using the money cheat and making an enormous house with one slobby guy who would watch TV all day.
Quite how they expect to make a film about the Sims is an interesting question, but since it's going to be produced by the guy who did Norbit and Eragon, it's not really worth worrying about as it'll be shit and disappear without a trace.
Also the first Spore expansion pack has been announced, showing that there'll probably be the same flood of expansions that the Sims series has had.
Brisk
I rather like walking the dog in cold weather. It's fun to be all wrapped up nice and warm and have a cold face and then come home to the nice warm house. Not too keen on the dark though, especially when sheep cough at you from behind hedges.
The AX is grumbling and farting again, the blow from the back end of the exhaust has suddenly grown louder. At least it's not the balls out roar of a completely broken exhaust. It needs a few other things too, mainly oil and coolant changes and the brakes are juddering slightly. Bah.
The AX is grumbling and farting again, the blow from the back end of the exhaust has suddenly grown louder. At least it's not the balls out roar of a completely broken exhaust. It needs a few other things too, mainly oil and coolant changes and the brakes are juddering slightly. Bah.
Monday, 20 October 2008
Crampy claptrap
Saturday was spent hanging out with Andy, Rob, Em and Will. We headed off on a walk around Denbigh, which took in the castle, the old mental hospital and a load of fields. It would have taken in the old railway bridge and a couple of other things except we went the wrong way. After that it was up to the pub for rugby and then back to Andy's with a Chinese. This was followed by the X-factor spoof by Peter Kay which was actually quite good.
Didn't do much on Sunday at all. Today was just basically a typical work day except for clearing out the server room of all the old 14" CRT monitors that had somehow accumulated in there and some other crap.
Got the new AC/DC album today. It's pretty good. You always know what you're getting when you get one of their albums, but in this one they do try a few different things.
Didn't do much on Sunday at all. Today was just basically a typical work day except for clearing out the server room of all the old 14" CRT monitors that had somehow accumulated in there and some other crap.
Got the new AC/DC album today. It's pretty good. You always know what you're getting when you get one of their albums, but in this one they do try a few different things.
Saturday, 18 October 2008
Inspiron fan adventures
Downloaded a program called i8kfangui, which is written for Dell laptops. It connects to the power management system and lets you monitor and control the fans, and also shows the temperature of the various components. I found that with the default BIOS settings, even when idle, the GPU temperature crept up to 78 degrees, at which point the fan would cut in and the temperature would drop. I've used the program to override the settings and run the GPU fan at low speeds all the time which keeps the temperature down to 47-50 degrees. Anything more than 50 and the fan runs at maximum. I haven't run Spore yet but Second Life is quite hard on the system and the video never rose above 60 degrees.
This obviously puts more wear on the fans but they are much cheaper to replace than the expensive processor or graphics card. Also if you want to, the program can just set the fans to run at full speed, which is noisy but at least the machine's got some beefy speakers...
It's apparently quite easy to upgrade this machine to a Core 2 Duo which is more efficient and can also run 64-bit operating systems. Not much point in that though because the motherboard has some limitations so that if you put 4gb RAM in, it'll only see 3.25gb regardless of the CPU or operating system.
This obviously puts more wear on the fans but they are much cheaper to replace than the expensive processor or graphics card. Also if you want to, the program can just set the fans to run at full speed, which is noisy but at least the machine's got some beefy speakers...
It's apparently quite easy to upgrade this machine to a Core 2 Duo which is more efficient and can also run 64-bit operating systems. Not much point in that though because the motherboard has some limitations so that if you put 4gb RAM in, it'll only see 3.25gb regardless of the CPU or operating system.
Friday, 17 October 2008
It lives!
The graphics card from the Inspiron came back from being repaired today and works fine. I've made sure to update the BIOS to the latest version which has modifications to run the fans more so the video card is less likely to overheat.
Wednesday, 15 October 2008
Apocalyptica
I never realised how cool cellos could be before now. These guys do Metallica and Pantera covers and other things, but this is a particularly nice track. There's also a faster live version which is interesting because sometimes they play a little flat, but it's still good.
Tinfoil keyboard mod
Spent some of the evening applying a modification to the Eee. One of the things that can be a problem is that the keyboard is quite flexible, so it bounces when you type, which inevitably leads to missed characters. Someone modified his Eee with a few layers of tin foil under the keyboard. This improved the responsiveness of the keyboard and as a side effect improved the cooling as more heat was picked up by it. I've just tried it on mine and it's made a huge, huge difference to the keyboard.
Received an e-mail from the laptop place saying my graphics card is fixed and should be on the way back soon, which is good news.
Firefox is pissing me off at the moment on the main PC, it constantly hammers both CPUs and takes up shitloads of memory. Also I've decided that the single process per tab feature in Chrome and IE8 is a great idea.
Received an e-mail from the laptop place saying my graphics card is fixed and should be on the way back soon, which is good news.
Firefox is pissing me off at the moment on the main PC, it constantly hammers both CPUs and takes up shitloads of memory. Also I've decided that the single process per tab feature in Chrome and IE8 is a great idea.
Tuesday, 14 October 2008
MacBooks
New MacBooks and once again the UK is completely screwed over with pricing. These look really nice and the glass buttonless trackpad is an interesting quirk, and it's nice that you can get real graphics cards in the ordinary MacBook now.
Gimpy
The most hideous guitar of all time?Crappy day today, rain, cold and generally miserable. I went to the post office to post the graphics card and on the way back was lured into the chippy for chips. Oh well.
Monday, 13 October 2008
Many screws
Saturday was spent not doing much, until the evening when it was a work colleague's birthday party. All good fun, lots of people from work to talk to, lots of good food and plenty of gossip and things.
Sunday was again a lazy day, although I took the dog for a walk and went on a rampage in the garden, which was tiring and stressful but rewarding. Hacked down a stupid apple tree which has never been healthy and insisted on growing sideways out of the ground for some reason.
Spent this evening sorting out my box of documents, which needed to be done. It was full of old crap which I didn't need and lots of stuff I did need but wasn't sorted out.
Also removed the graphics card from the Inspiron to send it back to the people I bought it off who have offered a discounted repair to the card itself. The Inspiron is constructed in pretty much the same way as the Latitudes in work, just bigger, so it was pretty easy to get it all dismantled and back together, but did involve undoing a lot of screws. It was interesting to see the different circuit traces on the motherboard where the integrated graphics would have gone if it hadn't got a graphics card slot.
Sunday was again a lazy day, although I took the dog for a walk and went on a rampage in the garden, which was tiring and stressful but rewarding. Hacked down a stupid apple tree which has never been healthy and insisted on growing sideways out of the ground for some reason.
Spent this evening sorting out my box of documents, which needed to be done. It was full of old crap which I didn't need and lots of stuff I did need but wasn't sorted out.
Also removed the graphics card from the Inspiron to send it back to the people I bought it off who have offered a discounted repair to the card itself. The Inspiron is constructed in pretty much the same way as the Latitudes in work, just bigger, so it was pretty easy to get it all dismantled and back together, but did involve undoing a lot of screws. It was interesting to see the different circuit traces on the motherboard where the integrated graphics would have gone if it hadn't got a graphics card slot.
Friday, 10 October 2008
Vale of Clwyd Railway
Just done something I've never thought of doing before and looking at Google Maps to follow the old railway from Rhyl to Ruthin. Most of it is clearly visible. Shame there aren't any pictures of it anywhere except these ones of Denbigh railway station. It's a shame it was a casualty of the massive closures in the 60s.
Hand pain
My hand has been twinging all day from last night so I'm not going to badminton in case it makes it worse. It's a good excuse to have a quiet evening in as well.
I've dragged the Inspiron out of the naughty corner where it was banished the other night and it's currently running the onboard diagnostics to make sure everything is still working other than the graphics card. So far it's looking fairly conclusive and I've seen pictures on the Internet of failed machines that show identical display corruption to mine.
Intrigued by the Apple announcement coming up any minute now - could a Mac Eee be on the way?
I've dragged the Inspiron out of the naughty corner where it was banished the other night and it's currently running the onboard diagnostics to make sure everything is still working other than the graphics card. So far it's looking fairly conclusive and I've seen pictures on the Internet of failed machines that show identical display corruption to mine.
Intrigued by the Apple announcement coming up any minute now - could a Mac Eee be on the way?
Thursday, 9 October 2008
Badminton joy
Today wasn't shaping up well at all. I was still annoyed at the failure of the Inspiron last night, and work wasn't inspiring. Fortunately Rob suggested going to his for food before badminton this evening as Em had a match on. I hoped that this would prevent an evening of moping over the Inspiron. The day didn't improve though as I somehow trapped my hand in the car door on the way out, causing much pain.
Fortunately a rather nice pasta dish made by Em which was followed by Wispas cured some of the grumps and this was followed by probably one of the best badminton evenings I have ever had. It's not often I come away feeling that I played really well but tonight I was kicking bottom and taking names. One of the things I've always had difficulty with is working out where to be on the court. I had a game with Marge who has knee issues and now foot problems and so she can't get around the court as well as she used to. Somehow this suddenly made it very clear what I had to do and I found myself hurtling around the court returning all sorts of shots that I usually miss. The next game went pretty well and even though I was paired with She Who Is Not Nice, we actually won the game. Hopefully it isn't a fluke. It's evenings like this when I get all inspired and decide that exercise is a good thing, but usually that feeling is gone the next day. I was worried about my hand but it seems OK.
Investigated options for the Inspiron during my lunch break. Apparently it's not Dells fault. Nvidia made a whole load of crappily made graphics chips that overheat and fail after a certain amount of time. The so-called 'fix' was to release a BIOS version that runs the fans more. It's too late for mine though, it's definitely fried. A replacement card is a possibility but it's expensive for a new one. However the place I bought it from actually offers a repair service so that might be worth a look. Either way I can't afford to do anything about it for a while yet, so it'll have to sit in the corner in disgrace. The other option is to either sell it for spares on Ebay or part it out, neither of which really appeals because I really like it as a machine.
And if anyone says I should have bought a Mac, then get this: I bought a brand new iBook back in 2002 and the hard drive failed in it in 2005. So Macs aren't perfect either. And that wasn't Apple's fault either, it had one of those ultra crap IBM Travelstar hard drives in it which were notorious for failing. Luckily I knew it was going so I had a backup, and the dead original 20gb drive was replaced under warranty with a 40gb, so it was all good in the end.
Fortunately a rather nice pasta dish made by Em which was followed by Wispas cured some of the grumps and this was followed by probably one of the best badminton evenings I have ever had. It's not often I come away feeling that I played really well but tonight I was kicking bottom and taking names. One of the things I've always had difficulty with is working out where to be on the court. I had a game with Marge who has knee issues and now foot problems and so she can't get around the court as well as she used to. Somehow this suddenly made it very clear what I had to do and I found myself hurtling around the court returning all sorts of shots that I usually miss. The next game went pretty well and even though I was paired with She Who Is Not Nice, we actually won the game. Hopefully it isn't a fluke. It's evenings like this when I get all inspired and decide that exercise is a good thing, but usually that feeling is gone the next day. I was worried about my hand but it seems OK.
Investigated options for the Inspiron during my lunch break. Apparently it's not Dells fault. Nvidia made a whole load of crappily made graphics chips that overheat and fail after a certain amount of time. The so-called 'fix' was to release a BIOS version that runs the fans more. It's too late for mine though, it's definitely fried. A replacement card is a possibility but it's expensive for a new one. However the place I bought it from actually offers a repair service so that might be worth a look. Either way I can't afford to do anything about it for a while yet, so it'll have to sit in the corner in disgrace. The other option is to either sell it for spares on Ebay or part it out, neither of which really appeals because I really like it as a machine.
And if anyone says I should have bought a Mac, then get this: I bought a brand new iBook back in 2002 and the hard drive failed in it in 2005. So Macs aren't perfect either. And that wasn't Apple's fault either, it had one of those ultra crap IBM Travelstar hard drives in it which were notorious for failing. Luckily I knew it was going so I had a backup, and the dead original 20gb drive was replaced under warranty with a 40gb, so it was all good in the end.
Wednesday, 8 October 2008
FUCK!
The Inspirons graphics card just failed. I was playing Spore and noticed some strange graphical corruption. Before I could do anything, the machine locked up. Now, the display is corrupted, even in the BIOS. Windows won't boot up in normal mode.At least the graphics card is separate from the motherboard and should be easily replaced but that's something I can't afford right now.
Again, FUCK.
Fun with Linux
Spent some time in work today building a new Linux server for imaging PCs and things as the old one has hard drives on the way out. The original machine was an ancient scrap Compaq fitted with a 120gb hard drive and unexpectedly became a very useful machine. The replacement is a decommissioned IBM Xseries server with actual SCSI hard drives, although the built-in SCSI controller only supports RAID 1 in hardware, which is a bit shit really.Unfortunately this required setting up Samba, which I detest with a passion. It seems to have the most illogical configuration file ever and it never, ever works the way I think it does. Eventually I got it working and reverse engineering the DHCP and PXE boot system that one of my colleagues set up three years ago was trivial by comparison.
Fired up the Wii this evening for the first time in quite a while. Had a go on Wario Ware but that got boring quickly. I need something new to play as I'm bored of everything I've got on the Wii and 360. Lego Batman is getting OK reviews and I really had fun with Lego Star Wars so that might be worth a look. Also loaded up GTA IV but all the reasons why I hate it came flooding back pretty much immediately. I don't think I've ever been let down by a game so much.
AC/DC is one of those bands that somehow manage to get away without changing much about their music even over 15 albums, but somehow it works. Back in Black was the first album I properly listened to that wasn't Michael Jackson and though my innocent 9 year old self completely missed the less salubrious aspects of some tracks, the music completely blew my mind. The track that plays on their website from the new album sounds basically the same, but it's really good. Might treat myself to it when it comes out, conveniently near payday.
The Monstrosity 2 definitely has a use - to learn to play an unlined fretless. It's all well and good having lines but it would be nice to be able to play a completely blank fingerboard.
Tuesday, 7 October 2008
New Look Monstrosity
Here's the Monstrosity 2 having been reassembled after the paint job. It looks better in real life than the picture as there's more black than it looks like in the picture. There's a few lumps and things but it's not too bad considering the paint is Hammerite and meant for cars. Amazingly it plays and sounds just like it did before. It has a really nice sound to it, I think partly because the action is so high. I'm not really happy with the shoddy electrics though and might rewire it with a better pickup, preferably a black one to match the nice black knobs that didn't fit the Telecaster.
Saturday, 4 October 2008
A fun day
Spent the morning with Will going to a market/car boot thing and taking photographs. The car boot was a bit crap and the only thing interesting was watching a load of people being brainwashed by one of those peculiar auction type things. We watched for at least 15 minutes but had no idea what was going on.
After that we went to Talacre beach to take photographs. Will had a spare tripod which I tried out as I'd never used one before. It was really handy but as it and the camera were quite light, it kept getting blown over by the rather high winds. It did however let me do a decent HDR picture of the beach, composed of several images at different exposure values and then combined in Qtpfsgui.
This is another one. The shots for this one were a bit all over the place but the program has an auto-align feature which actually works. After that we went and looked at Prestatyn from up high before finishing the trip with pizza.
I spent the afternoon watching yet more Red Dwarf while dismantling the Monstrosity 2 and starting to give it a black and silver paint job. It's been a long time since I've painted a bass or anything. I'm not expecting the body to look any good because of all the crap left on it from my attempt at stripping the old finish. I decided to paint the headstock to match but I took the slightly unusual step of painting the fretless fingerboard as well. The whole thing is a bit of an experiment. If it works, great, if not, no real loss as the body and neck were fairly cheap and crappy anyway. It would be easy enough to build another, all it takes is a Strat body and a fretless bass neck, both available cheaply on Ebay.
Something that struck me about Red Dwarf VIII is that they put absolute tons of references in to older series, so much that it's really noticable. To be honest, series VII and VIII weren't great but they do have their moments that make them watchable.
Friday, 3 October 2008
Thursday, 2 October 2008
Stupid weather
The weather has been truly stupid today. Rain one minute, blazing sunshine the next. All day. It's been really annoying.
Not slept well the last two nights, feeling tired and crappy. I was going to go to badminton tonight but I didn't really feel like going, and then there was ridiculous rain and I know the roads round here can become quite nasty in rain like that so I gave that idea up.
On the way home I saw the Vale of Clwyd lit up in bright sunshine, with the distant hills hidden in the shadow of huge clouds. The contrast between them was stunning and to top it off there was a huge vivid rainbow. Unfortunately the phone didn't capture any of it at all really.
Nintendo has announced the DSi with larger screens and a camera.
Not slept well the last two nights, feeling tired and crappy. I was going to go to badminton tonight but I didn't really feel like going, and then there was ridiculous rain and I know the roads round here can become quite nasty in rain like that so I gave that idea up.
On the way home I saw the Vale of Clwyd lit up in bright sunshine, with the distant hills hidden in the shadow of huge clouds. The contrast between them was stunning and to top it off there was a huge vivid rainbow. Unfortunately the phone didn't capture any of it at all really.
Nintendo has announced the DSi with larger screens and a camera.
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