On revision plans and ridiculous names for budget laptops

Once again, I've spent the whole day doing nothing. I could normally justify taking the weekend or even just Sunday off but that would only be possible if I were taking them off from doing something.

My current plan, and I'm absolutely sure I'll follow through on this one, is to do Maths revision tomorrow, Computing on Tuesday and then more Maths on Wednesday. I'll have some time after my Maths prelim on Thursday afternoon to do any last minute stuff I need to do for Computing. Then I'll probably take Saturday off and go from there, working on my Computing project and Physics revision.

It's not a great plan but it seems reasonable.


Nothing much else to say. I was meaning to do a woodle but I haven't got round to that. I might do one for next Saturday but I know there's one I definitely need to do for the Saturday after that, since it needs to stay pretty current.

I'm still playing my way through Mass Effect. I'm starting to get into the swing of things now, having got to that bit that shows up in most games like this where you're pretty much free to wander around and advance the plot at your own pace. Still not quite sure how the biotic combat powers are supposed to work but I'll figure it out.

I'm still working on my Eee, adding software and looking into mods. Oh, and I figured out what I'm going to call it – Eridani. Technically, Eridani, or Eridanus, refers to the constellation, which contains the trinary star system of 40 Eridani. Within that system is 40 Eri B, the first white dwarf star to be discovered.

So Eridani is basically a nickname for my laptop, whose full name is 40 Eridani B.

Interestingly, the 40 Eridani system is also usually thought to be the home system of the Vulcans from Star Trek, although that fact has never been explicitly stated on screen. There's just some corroborating evidence involving distances and some mentions in non-canonical books like tech manuals. But hey, fanon has to start somewhere.


Well, it's getting late and I've said everything I need to.

Have a nice day.

Titles are easier when you have topics

Holy crap. It's just gone past four o'clock and I feel like it should still be the morning. I got up just before noon and had just enough time to turn on my computer and have some lunch before I had to have my shower and go into hospital, wait for about half an hour, have my dressing changed and then come home.

All in all, I didn't get to actually start my day until just after three.


As a consequence, I've done absolutely nothing of any consequence. That's really making me very worried now. Tomorrow, I'm determined to do at least the equivalent of one Maths prelim paper and to look over some of my Computing notes. With any luck, I'll also have time to sort out the design for my Computing project.

That might just be wishful thinking but I've got little else at the moment.


I've no idea why but I'm feeling quite tired. And my neck is still sore. Still, I've got a couple of points to get through before I wrap this up.

First of all, it's more or less official now that Toshiba have killed off the HD-DVD format. This has a number of important repercussions, the most important being that I now owe Sam Stafford a tenner. We made a bet a couple of years ago over which would be the victor – obviously, he supported Blu-Ray while I went with HD-DVD.

The fact that we were planning to settle the bet on January 1st 2010 shows just how much of a surprise the sudden departure of HD-DVD has been. In the last few months, Toshiba's lost many important allies to Sony's format, mostly due to the resurgence of the PS3. I know people who are buying PS3s purely to use them as Blu-Ray players. That'll probably stop once prices of standalone players come down but Sony is probably hoping to have enough of a foothold by then to get by on profit from software sales.


Our second item of news for tonight is that I'm trying to come up with a name for my Eee PC. As you may or (more likely) may not know, Sam and I have a system for naming our computers. Old or second-hand systems are named using jokes, usually puns or funny references. Hence, my seldom-used Linux box called Linus (a reference to Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux) and my Mac LC called Lucy (Sam was originally going to call his LC Lucy but I convinced him to use Luke instead once I realised the potential for a Peanuts reference).

New computers follow a different pattern. Sam names his after moons (his Mac Mini, which he'd just got when we started the system, is called Luna) and I name mine after stars, hence why I occasionally refer to my iMac as Deneb. Moving outwards towards the edge of the solar system, Sam named his Eee after the smallest moon of Mars, Deimos, and I'm currently examining white dwarf stars for mine.

I should have a name by tomorrow.


Bah. That's it for now. You know, when I get my priorities sorted out and start doing these earlier in the day again, I've got a few things I want to wax lyrical about. The current weather, for example. Sort of not quite winter and not quite spring. I like it.

But I need to get to bed. I probably won't because I'm having a discussion about the mysteries in Life on Mars which may drag on but it's the thought that counts.

Have a nice day.

More of all the stuff I usually mention

If my day were a game and hours were the points, Mass Effect would have beaten revision 5-nil.


And now you see why I never use sports metaphors.

I did play a lot of Mass Effect though. Five hours is probably a good estimate, with a little rounding. Sadly, nil is a good estimate for my revision time as well.

On the bright side, I did spot and dig out from under a pile of my other crap some more Maths notes, including my practice prelims and the sheet which tells me what topics are going to be in my exam. It's not exactly pulling an all-nighter but it's progress nonetheless.

I was reassured (mildly) by Sam telling me that he's done no revision at all. I say mildly because a) Sam doesn't take Maths, just its way easier, no-need-to-revise-for-it arch-nemesis, English, and b) he's a lazy git.

Turns out that one of the many reasons he hasn't done any work is that he's got himself an Eee PC as well. He went with the 2 gig version and spent the extra money on an SD card to make up the memory and a DVD rewriter since he needs an optical drive to put Windows on it and he apparently wanted one for his Mac Mini anyway.

All he really loses out on with his version, other than the memory, is a small increase in processor speed and the inbuilt webcam. It seems he was willing to sacrifice those to get it a bit faster (the 4 gig version, of which mine is one, is still out of stock almost everywhere). Last I saw of him, he was copying a cut down version of XP to a thumb drive to try and boot from that. I'll have to ask him how that went.

As I hate being outdone in the general geekiness department, I decided to enable the desktop mode on my Eee while he was doing that. All it required was a few command lines and some package installation and it now has a full desktop GUI, though I may set it to boot up into the simpler one just for convenience.

Now that I can install and access non-default applications, I've also added GIMP (the image editor), Audacity (everyone's favourite open source audio editor) and versions of Bejeweled and Minesweeper (because I have way too much time on my hands).

I'll probably play around with it some more tomorrow, after I get through with (or when I need a break from) doing some actual revision. Now that I have the sheet saying what I need to do, Maths doesn't seem quite so daunting. I figure it'll start being daunting again once I start actually doing the work but I may as well enjoy this brief respite while it lasts.

I also need to get on with my Computing project. As I can't be bothered using my Beaten Up Old Laptop^TM every time I want to work on it, I've decided that I'm going to steal the little Thinkpad that my brother got for university a couple of years ago and which is now only used by my dad for his office connection once every so often.

I could theoretically work on it on another computer but, to be completely honest, I just want to sit at my desk and have two laptops and my iMac in front of me, running all three major operating systems. I'll probably laugh maniacally to myself and pretend I'm some sort of hacker supervillain.

I can but dream.


And that's it for tonight. Nothing much else to say, except that I'll probably have a woodle up tomorrow. Now, I'm off to bed before this headache gets any worse so...

Have a nice day, I suppose.

Much Ado About Macworld

Wow. I really left this post late. It's almost half past midnight.

At least I have an excuse this time. I've been busy pouring over all the details coming out of Macworld. For those of you who don't know, the annual Macworld conference is where Apple reveals all their latest and greatest gadgets, hence the deluge of Mac-related articles all over the media.

I can't be bothered tracking down links to articles and so on so I'm just going to link to the main Apple homepage and let anyone interested browse from there. I've not had time to take it all in myself so I'll just go over the major points of interest and then maybe tidy it up for a MacTake article tomorrow.

As I type this, my iPhone is sitting in its dock, waiting for the latest firmware (1.1.3) to finish downloading and install. It's a relatively minor update, merely adding a few neat features such as a locator function on the Google Maps app and some ability to customise the home page. It's this customisation function that I find most revealing – it's very obviously gearing up for the release of the official software development kit in February. I'm still not quite sure what to expect from that myself but at least the company behind it has confidence.

I should note that by installing this update, I'm basically giving up on hacking it anytime soon. I've been considering getting an iPod Touch purely to fiddle around with the various apps that have sprung up semi-illegally on the internet over the past few months.

Oh, and that's another thing. To update the iPod Touch, adding in a number of functions that come as standard on the iPhone, Apple is expecting customers to pay over £10. I'm a little disappointed by this but I expect it to work out quite profitably for Apple.

Still, we'll see how that works out later.

Another big announcement was the MacBook Air, an ultra-portable being touted as the world's smallest laptop. Looking at photos and the guided tour video on the Apple site, I have no reason whatsoever to doubt this. For all the people who will complain about it being a typical “style-over-substance” Apple gadget, there's no denying that some serious engineering and design skills went into this.

The absence of an in-built optical drive comes as no surprise in such a device but Apple's means of getting around it are ingenious. As the “Air” name implies, there's a large focus on wireless technology. If you're on a wireless network with another computer, PC or Mac, all you have to do is install a small program on said computer and your Air can instantly connect to any available optical drives and use them for its own purposes.

There's also a small, USB-powered optical drive for those who insist on watching movies not rented from the new iTunes movie rental system.

The final big thing is the Time Capsule. A wireless device, no larger than an average router, it is essentially a 500Gb or 1Tb server-grade hard drive with a wireless network connection. Any Mac running Leopard can connect to it using Time Machine, which will automatically back up to it. I don't know much about it but it sounds very impressive and keeps with the whole “wireless” theme Apple's had going this year.


So, in summary and in brief, there's nothing hugely revolutionary. To be honest, given the revelation of the iPhone last year, this year's show was almost guaranteed to have fewer surprises. The same thing happened to the first few E3s and other video game trade shows after all the new consoles had been released – all the secrets were out and it was just a matter of improving things.

Well, that's getting kind of late now and I still need to finish some Computing homework and discuss some of this Macworld news with Sam. I have a feeling Skippy will have a lot to say on all this tomorrow, in one medium or another, as will my other technology-inclined (or, as they are more commonly known, geeky) friends.

I can't think of anything conclusive to say so... Have a nice day.

So much of what I do involves Doctor Who...

Trying to write a bit earlier tonight – it's around seven o'clock.

I've noticed I've been doing a lot of diary style entries recently, probably because they're easy to do and I've been leaving everything very late. I've also noticed that I'm using the word “probably” a lot. It'll have something to do with my deep personal insecurity and low self esteem, probably. Damn.

Oh, and by the way, it's ten to eleven now.

So my earlier plan was to do another entry about my day but there's nothing really special to talk about. In fact, I could do it all in this paragraph. I watched the whole current series of Never Mind the Buzzcocks so far on YouTube with my brother and sister (the latter of whom had got hooked when I showed her an episode last night, when she came in wanting to see this Bill Bailey clip).

Actually, stuff the one paragraph thing. I have a rather verbose writing style and it'd just get unwieldy.

The only other thing of note today was that I finally ordered all the various Christmas presents I've been meaning to buy for my little cousins and Sam. I managed to get Sam something roughly equivalent in price and geekiness to what he got me (which was a Doctor Who DVD and a book examining the physics of Who, so the latter proved tricky) and I picked up various bits and bobs for my cousins.

It's mostly either Doctor Who toys or relatively harmless weaponry. I suspect my aunt's going to hate me for the Airzooka... assuming the sound effects from the laser and sonic screwdrivers (one each, with which to do battle through all of space and time) don't drive her insane first. But I'm confident that the little kids will like them, so there you go.


My other point for tonight is something curious I noticed when looking at the Wikipedia article on the portrayal of Mars in fiction. Don't look at me like that, I had a good reason. I just don't want to tell it to you.

Anyway, the whole thing is divided into two sections – before and after the Mariner 4 spacecraft reached Mars and dispelled various myths about its surface and habitability. Notice under the film and television section (secondary references) the Doctor Who examples.

The Ice Warriors were enemies of the Second and Third Doctors who originated on Mars and appeared repeatedly over that era, in the late 60s to early 70s. Mariner 4 sent back its findings beginning it 1965 and the idea of civilisation on Mars started faltering then and there in the minds of even hopeful scientists. By the early 70s, this perception would have filtered down into the public consciousness, making serious stories about Martians harder and harder to pull off.

Thus, despite Doctor Who's relatively lax attitude to scientific fact compared to other shows, the Ice Warriors were slowly phased out and the last adventure set on Mars was Pyramids of Mars, featuring the Fourth Doctor and Sarah Jane Smith trying to stop Sutekh the Destroyer escaping his prison on Mars – he hadn't come from there originally.

The new series only mentions Mars in passing, as a brief gag. Rumours of the Ice Warriors coming back keep cropping up but it would require either a retcon or a handwave, at least. Or maybe they'll go the The War of the Worlds route – the original book and many early adaptations had the aliens coming from Mars, a dried up and dying world, as the popular theory was at the time. Later versions usually chose to ignore the aliens' origins altogether.


That's it for now. Let's see if I can get to bed before midnight again. I'll have to try and work my way through some of that to do list tomorrow, assuming I get a good night's sleep and my cold clears up a bit.

Did I mention I have a cold?

I have a cold.

And I'm going to bed. Have a nice day.

Speed Blogging

Okay, bad news, then good news. Bad news is that I still have to do at least some of my Computing homework before I go to bed. Also, I need to do some more Maths revision, including several practice questions. And my toe is infected again. I don't think I've mentioned this here before, but I often fall prone to infection in either of my big toes. It's not a big deal and it mostly goes away if I leave it open to the air and have a few salt foot baths, but it stings like hell when I walk and it's pretty damned inconvenient.

Now, the good news. I've started writing something. I just started thinking about this scene I've had in my head for a good while now and then, all of a sudden, plot elements started clicking into place. I can't promise much, but I do hope to have something to show for it eventually, probably put up on here.

Of course, all that means that I have to get back to work soon so I can only spend about five more minutes on this post. I wonder what I can achieve in five minutes of solid typing.

First up, the new Firefox beta. Keeping up Firefox's well-deserved reputation of being faster and better than Internet Explorer in ever way, the first version 3 beta is out just 13 months after the official launch version 2. Microsoft managed the same feat with Internet Explorer after four years.

There's a whole host of new features being added (as seen here) but you probably won't get to play with any of them. As I said before, this is just the first beta and it's being recommended that no one but experienced testers and web developers play around with it, though there's really nothing stopping you. I just wouldn't recommend it as your primary browser.

Skippy more or less qualifies as a web developer, so I might get him to try running it to see how it works with some of his sites and projects. Personally, I'll wait till something a bit more stable and then try out some of those new features, like the ability to resume downloads, sort my bookmarks in a jillion different ways and... use parental controls. Okay, that last one's not much of a big deal but it should still be awesome.

That's coming up on five minutes now... is their anything else?

I'll take a moment to recommend that you start watching Numb3rs. This show completely passed me by until recently, meaning I now have three seasons worth of episodes to catch up on. And by the time I'm done with that, probably most of the fourth as well. Solving crimes using complex maths may not seem very interesting (it may even sound educational) but, from what I've seen so far, it manages to keep the maths and science believable, unlike certain other shows.

Well, that's my time up. Maybe I'll try some “speed blogging” some other time, since it's been a rather interesting experience. I've got to go do this Computing homework or else my teacher will kill me about, oh, three times. He's already up to twice because I'll be handing it in late and, due to trips (I might talk about that tomorrow but I might not, since it was today and I'll have lost interest in the memories of it by tomorrow) and my surgery, I'll only be having two of my intended five Computing lessons this week.

Don't be surprised if you hear me complaining about my crappy Windows laptop and how I have to do loads of Visual BASIC on it over the next few days.

I had no idea how geeky this entire post was until I re-read it

So, I'm sitting here watching Children in Need while Super Mario Galaxy is sitting downstairs. Why? Simple. A short sketch that may be on sometime in the next hour or two involving both Peter Davison and David Tennant in their roles as their respective Doctors.

Since I don't give a toss about the rest of the Children in Need* and they've just started a segment featuring the Spice Girls, I figure I'll talk a little about my brief experience with Galaxy. So far, I've played it for maybe an hour and a half, tops. And I'm hooked.

It's the first game I've played in a long while when I decide that I'm going to stop, glance at the clock and then do everything in my power to rationalise my decision to grab just one more star. I love this game. It puts a wonderful twist on every trope and formula you've come to expect from the platforming genre, in much the same way as Super Mario 64 did 10 years before it.

I don't know if it'll leave quite as large a stamp on the genre as SM64 did, though. It's not quite that big of a leap from what came before it as that famous wall-jump from 2D to 3D was. It's still an incredible game though and I'd recommend it to anyone who can get their hands on a Wii.

I expect I'll have more to say on the game as a whole once I've played it more. And when I don't have B-list Celebrity Pillock No. 12 crooning away in the background. I don't care about singing or celebrity chefs or dancing news-readers! I want Doctor Who!!!


Okay, just watched Time Crash. Not entirely serious and a few flaws that means that it might be tricky to fit into canon but, hey, timey wimey balls in action.


It's now a few hours later. You know, one of the first things I did after watching Time Crash was discuss it with Sam, one of the few people I know with a knowledge of Doctor Who that's as good as mine, possibly even better.... All right, the only person. Anyway, we were discussing fascinating things, such as how shorting out the time differential between the two incarnations also helps explain Patrick Troughton's aged appearance in The Two Doctors, assuming you don't want to accept the Season 6B theory.

And all the other multi-Doctor specials involved direct intervention by Time Lords, implying that they have a way of circumventing this little anomlay.

Every day, something happens to me to reaffirm my geekiness. It's actually Sam's birthday tomorrow, so I picked up an “I void warranties” t-shirt and some Zelda: Twilight Princess figurines from ThinkGeek and presented them to him at school, where Jimerson also provided him with a Twilight Princess wall-scroll. He seemed to greatly enjoy both and had much fun putting together the figures while he was meant to be doing... well, probably something more school-related.

Every day, something happens to me to reaffirm my friends' geekiness. There are some fairly distinct divides in my year group at school and the lines are drawn roughly along the walls of the common room. The “other” room contains an Xbox and a whole load of people playing FIFA. “My” room contains four consoles from a variety of different decades along with two TVs fitting the same criteria and a whole load of people alternating between Mario Kart, Donkey Kong 64 and co-op Probotector.

There's no real point to any of this ranting. I just find it mildly amusing.

Anyway, my throat's starting to hurt again, as is my head, so that's probably time for me to go to bed. Tomorrow, I'll... wait, I still haven't done last week's woodle, have I? Oh, well. No big deal. It just means I can use the same little Post-It note to remind me.





*Just to clarify, I care about needy children. I just don't like watching celebrities butcher perfectly good songs.

Today was good, tomorrow should be even better

You know what I've decided the best thing about the iPhone is? The internet capability. Sure, it's a great phone and does all kinds of other neat phone-like things (except games, which is the one place that I feel it lets me down), the ability to just pull up any website I want and browse without restriction is incredible.

Take an example from today. I was walking down to the corner shop near the school, as we're allowed to do, with a bunch of my friends. One started talking about his WoW guild* and how everyone hated one particular person, who had recently posted a hilarious photo of themselves on the forums which he wanted to show us so we could mock it.

Ordinarily, this would mean going through the arduous task of waiting until we were back at school with our junk food, going into the common room kitchen, plugging in my USB flash drive, running the browser that lets us get past the filters and then waiting while the page loaded.

Ordinarily.

But, as soon as he started mentioning this possibility, I simply took out my iPhone, punched in the URL and bingo, we were laughing our heads off at some fat and angry-looking Canadian guy that one of us knew from an MMO. If you can think of a better use for instant internet access, then I tip my hat to you, good sir.


So that's my day, so far. There's only half an hour of it left and I intend to spend that doing several things. These are, in rough order of descending importance, Computing revision, Maths homework and Physics homework. The first is the most important simply because Computing is first lesson tomorrow. The latter two are a bit more flexible, though perhaps more important to me personally, since if I can get them done, then I have the whole of tomorrow afternoon off.

And then I come home to play Super Mario Galaxy and watch a multi-Doctor mini-episode of Doctor Who (in the name of charity and all, too).

Tomorrow's going to be awesome. And it starts in 25 minutes... I'm going to post this now, apologies for the brevity.






*Note: anytime I say “a bunch of my friends” you can pretty much just substitute it with “a bunch of geeks” and it still means the same thing.

I have an iPhone. That is all.

The worst part about getting a brand new iPhone? People insisting on calling you on the home phone from downstairs.


Of course, that's more than balanced out by the various great things about it. As it turns out, only abut five or six people were actually queuing up outside the O2 shop in Ayr so there wasn't too much hanging around. I basically just met up with mum after school and then we passed the time by getting something to eat and walking around shops until they started to shut at around half five. Then we just stood around outside the shop in the little crowd that had formed and talked to the people there. Well, my mum talked. I read Doctor Who Magazine.

But, you're not interested in how I got the iPhone. You're interested in what it's like. Well, maybe you're not, considering it's been out elsewhere for ages, but I'll assume that you are only so I can disappoint you by saying that I'm not going to tell you. I will tell you that, so far, it's an excellent little device but I'll save the full write-up/fanboy gushings for a MacTake article some time tomorrow.


On an different topic completely, today was photo day at school. I dislike photo day, in kind of the same way that dodongo dislikes smoke*. Now that I'm in Sixth Year, I got drafted in on all my free periods to either stand in the hall and wait around or be sent off to some classroom to locate some small child whose smaller sibling was having their photo taken.

It also meant that I had to get my photo taken at some point. Now, I'm not exactly photogenic, partly because I can't just sit there and smile. It always seems really forced. If I laugh or I'm genuinely happy, I'll smile slightly. I can't say that sitting on a stool getting my photo taken is much of an enjoyable experience. But, I got it over with and that's the end of it. Well, until they need to take a photo of the whole Sixth Year as they are apparently planning to do. “They” being the school. Did I make that clear? Doesn't matter, really.

That's pretty much it for today. I had some other stuff to mention which I may talk about tomorrow. For now, I've got to go memorise a new phone number then get some sleep. It might be a busy day tomorrow, depending on what I decide to do.






*This is an obscure gaming reference. Don't worry if you don't get it. Actually, you might want to start worrying if you do get it.

Silly Faces and Sillier Legal Propositions

So, they've taken down TV Links. That's certainly a shame, it was a very useful site. I admit that maybe, once or twice (give or take), I used it to catch up on shows or to see some stuff that's never been shown over here. I'll have more to say tomorrow, I think, since I can feel a righteously indignant rant swelling up inside me. And I do love my righteuous indignation, not to mention my ranting.

All I'll say for now is read the articles (the link above is to Google News, there should be at least 5 or 6 stories on it) and leave any comments you want. There seems to be some dispute as to what the legal grounds are – has the arrested man (as yet unnamed but presumably the guy in charge of the site) committed any crimes simply by linking to illegal videos? Would such a ruling have greater repercussions on sites such as search engines? Was any warning issued to him first?

That's partly why I'm holding off judgement. I want to get all the facts, though I have no doubt I'll end up on the side of TV Links. That, and it brings up some other interesting points about the progression of technology and distribution (I'm particularly thinking of music piracy and download systems).


In other news, I finally got round to reading some of Star Trek: The Manga. As I imagined, it was unanimously declared geeky. Fortunately, that doesn't bother me and it didn't much seem to bother anybody whose opinion I actually give a toss about. As for what's actually contained between the covers... well, there are the some funny sound effects (helpfully translated from Japanese by Sam), some bizarre facial expressions and the standard Star Trek plot “twists”.

The twists, as indicated by the speech marks, are fairly predictable, at least thus far. The second story had a decent enough one; it could have done with a bit more build-up but it wasn't given much space and it had some cool concepts, so I'll let it get away with it. The first story (I'm only partway through the third of five, by the way) gave away its twist to any Trekkie fairly early on. And let's face it, if you're reading Star Trek: The Manga, chances are good that you're a Trekkie. Or a Trekker. I forget the difference, but I know that one group doesn't like to be called the other.

And the facial expressions. Sulu smirking as he tells the captain that they're exit route has been cut off by a hull breach made me laugh. I even posed a hypothetical scenario to some friends of mine: “Your ship is under attack, one of your crew is dying and you've just learned that the only way to save yourselves is by destroying an evil cyborg. Of course, you need a blood sample from said cyborg to cure your dying crewman and you can't destroy the space station it's on, because then there would be nothing stopping you from falling into a black hole.”

Now, a question. “Would you have this look on your face?”


Hilarious. But it's not a bad little compilation. The second volume came out recently and I can get it for under a fiver on Amazon so I may buy that.


Further news, still sci-fi related. Peter Davidson is, as rumoured, making a comeback as the Fifth Doctor in the Doctor Who Children in Need special. While it may well be played for comedy and obviously couldn't fit in between the cliffhanger-ish ending of last series and the resolution coming in the Christmas special, previous specials have been in canon. This one's penned by Steven Moffat, a veteran Who writer, and I'm really, really hoping that it's being used as a test for the possibility of more multi-Doctor episodes in the future. I'd certainly kill to see Christopher Eccleston back in the role, and some interplay between the post-Time War Ninth and Tenth Doctors and the unaware Eighth (or even, dare I say it, Seventh) Doctor could make for some very nice drama.

But that's maybe just wishful thinking. Either way, watch out for the scene on Friday 16th November, during Children in Need night.


I think that's it for today. Still need to play more Phantom Hourglass but that'll have to wait. I need to get some Physics homework done tomorrow, which I probably should have done over the holiday and was planning on doing tonight, except I don't know what questions it was. I'd check my prep diary, but Sam (currently going by the name Thomas, after another discussion with Sam Potter, henceforth known as Burns, over who should get to use their name resulted in each going by their middle names) managed to lose it while searching my bag for a sheet of paper. So it's lying in the common room. I'd use his, but it long ago disappeared into the ether.

Where was I? Oh, yeah, wrapping things up. Before I go, I'll just say that this headline put a rather amusing image in my head. Go figure. Now, I'm gonna go lie in bed and find out how the latest woman to flirt with Captain James Tiberius Kirk is going to kick the bucket. Looks to be alien brain-screwing signals.

Those Crafty Gamers

Gamers are a highly resourceful bunch who'll go through a lot of hoops to enjoy their hobby. Never having owned a PlayStation back in its heyday, I only learned about the "turning it upside down to fix the disc reader" thing a couple of days ago. Specifically, Sam was examining the one that came with that retro bundle and thought it might need the trick applied, as his cousins' one had done years before.

I'm sure you're all familiar with the Xbox 360 Red Ring of Death and the many stories that circulate about them (in fact, if you're a regular gamer you probably at least know someone who's had the problem, if you haven't had it yourself). Some of you may have heard of (or even performed) the "towel trick" wherein you wrap your 360 up in towels so that it can heat up to temperatures otherwise found only in the heart of the sun* allowing some stuff to bend and some connections to reform.

Miraculously, this seems to fix bricked consoles, temporarily, as seen here (where I just watched it, having heard about it a while back) allowing a few days of gaming reprieve until you either do it again or finally decide to go Gears of War cold turkey for a couple of weeks while it gets repaired.

I've never actually had to do it myself (I don't think I actually play my 360 enough for it to have come up) but it reminds me of something that I have had to do many times; namely, blowing on cartridges. At the time, the idea (goodness knows where I got it from) was that there was dust or some such on the connectors, which need to be removed by the application of lung power. Sure enough, it got my NES (later N64, though far less often) to work again without a hitch.

Of course, I now know that it was actually the moisture on my breath (maybe with some dust removal for long forgotten cartridges) that made it work and I've had to do it again lately (for the NESi and my rekindled retro gaming hobby) knowing full well that it's doing harm in the long term.

I suspect that the same might be true about the towel trick, hence why I'd never do it. Unless it bricked just before Halo 3 came out, in which case I'd raid the linen cupboard faster than you can say "&*@£!%^ Microsoft!".

Actually, it's kind of funny how such patterns repeat themselves. As much as times have changed since the birth of the NES and rebirth of the video games market as a whole in 1983, there are still hardware faults that plague people and quick fixes to help them, even as the machines become vastly more powerful and complex.

Hmmm.... Someone ought to do some kind of video montage with that theme and stick it on YouTube. And that someone may well be me!


Unless I try using iMovie '08, it seems. I don't want to talk about this too much but since I mentioned its release, I feel like I ought to mention the problems that people have been having with it (link) in comparison to iMovie HD, the previous iteration.

It seems that certain features, most pertaining to themes and the separation of audio and video clips, have been removed from this entirely new program. On one level, I agree that, as part of the iLife studio, iMovie should be a simple and intuitive program, not meant for complex editing. On the other hand, if the previous version of iMovie could do it, why remove the features? Why not just make some advanced features optional and set them to off by default?

Still, the only way to find out is to try it and I guess that I probably will at some point, particularly if it comes as part of OS X Leopard. Hopefully it will have been patched and upgraded by then, otherwise I'll just turn to some other program. If I can find one.


Today has been another exceptionally dull day producing a fairly standard rant blog post, which I suppose is only fair after yesterday's drive-by philosophy session. One thing I think I ought to explain is what certain categories mean, such as "rant" and "musings" which you might see below. "Rants" tend to be more factual in natures, such as today's post. "Musings" are more thoughtful and whimsical. Most of my posts are a combination of the two, though yesterday was certainly musings and today falls pretty squarely into factual "rant" territory.

I don't know why I'm only explaining this now. I guess I only started really using those categories so specifically a while back. Odd.


I've done a Captain's Blog entry for the last couple of Thursdays now but I can't really be bothered tonight and it's normally inspired by (wanting to do better sci-fi comedy than) Hyperdrive, which hasn't come on yet.

Actually, I'm doing this post bizarrely early. It's the evening, yeah, but it's still about 5 hours before I normally start. I guess it must be a part of having something to write about and nothing better to do.

Except test that PSone with the cables that came from eBay today. I'll go do that now, actually.

Also, Skippy posted again (he writes before poking his head out of the window to check for flying pigs).


Later edit: Actually, I retract that earlier implication about Hyperdrive; they won me over with the Street Fighter II reference.


*Please note, some analogies may contain bullshit.

What happens when TWToday and MacTake get fused in a transporter accident:

You know what's weird? I got my exams results this morning and I'm way more interested in writing about all the new Mac gear that's just been announced.

Or maybe I just don't want to write at all, since I'm apparently rubbish at English, judging from my C in that particular subject. Not that I'm hugely concerned since I got all the other grades I expected (all As, I'm very arrogant) and, as long-term readers will know, I have nothing but contempt for that section of the syllabus. And I'll bump it up with an appeal, anyway.

What I would like to know is where exactly I screwed up. English has never been my best subject but I didn't think I did that badly in the exam. I was kind of in a rush to go and buy Pokemon Diamond afterwards but that couldn't possibly have been the reason...

Despite literally minutes of trying, neither Sam nor I can figure out what on Earth the "points" (or maybe "credits" or even "credit points") on our certificates mean. There are a lot of sixes, which is either good, bad or Satanic. No one's really sure.


Still, on to more interesting topics.

I don't think of myself as a Mac fanboy (I base this on the fact that I don't threaten to kill people who find security flaws in OS X) but I have to admit to reading reports of the recent Apple press conference with great excitement.

While I have no intention of buying one, the new iMacs look very impressive, with nothing below a 20-inch screen and a whole lot of complicated acronyms and numbers mentioned in the same sentence as them, including "ATI" and "DX10". Though I expect that we'll have an even newer version by the time I'm next looking to upgrade.

I might consider buying one of the new keyboards, however. They look very impressive and the current one is certainly nothing brilliant. It may look fit slightly better with the look of the current iMac but that transparent bit really can be a pain. For example, I got my iMac last Christmas, at which time I also got a large bar of chocolate. As is prone to happen when one is eating chocolate, some small crumbs came off and fell on the desk. Ordinarily, this would be know problem. But I'm looking through the "Magic Mac Keyboard Window" right now and I can still see pieces of that chocolate.

Depending on the price, it might be worth upgrading iLife, primarily for the new versions of iPhoto and iMovie. I guess I'll find out the price in a little while as the Apple UK store is currently down, indicating that we're getting all the new stuff at the same time as the US. I hope.

[Added later: it's back up now and you can see all the prices and such on the store. I'll have to check that out]


A few other notes. Skippy posted a big long rant about something-or-other down below. Or down under, since I can't stop mocking his nationality.

Spore is apparently going to be playable at the Game Convention in Leipzig. There's no particular reason for this to interest me except that I'm very interested by the game as a whole. One of these days, I'm going to go to one of these conventions. And then they'll pay, they'll all pay!!!! Muhahahaha!!!

Since I'm being all evil and such, now seems like a good time to abuse my power for personal gain by linking to the Axim X3 I'm selling on eBay. One of my readers must be looking for a used PDA with a spare battery and a folding keyboard? Come on, you know you want it. One of you must... neither of you? Seriously?

I just found out that there's a Top Trumps-based game on the BBC website already. Inspiring.

A Doctor Who game? Could be good, if done well. A Doctor Who game based on Top Trumps? Why, God, why?!

But seriously, if there's going to be a Who game, it should be an adventure style one, possibly like the old point-and-click style things that have made a slight comeback on the DS in the shape of Another Code and Hotel Dusk. I wouldn't be completely averse to some other kind of game set in the same universe, possibly an RPG. Torchwood might lend itself well to a shooter or action game of some description.

But Top Trumps? It might not necessarily be bad but I reckon that whatever comes out is going to be a waste of potential behind the licence. The platforms it's going to be on (PS2, mobiles, DS and PC) and the suggested holiday release date suggest something of a cash-in, going for the largest markets, particularly the now last-gen PS2. And something that's announced as one game coming out across such technically disparate systems makes me think that any central gameplay elements are going to be fairly simple.

Which makes sense since it's based on Top freakin' Trumps.

The comment that the game will be "extremely loyal to the Top Trumps brand" also has me worried. When you have the option of those two brands you don't emphasise the children's card game (he writes, unconsciously channeling the spirit of LittleKuriboh) over the award-winning sci-fi series, if only because Doctor Who fans are a thousand times more rabid. And I mean that in the best possible way.

With any luck this'll be a relatively minor budget title and someone will eventually have the idea of getting a veteran writer from the series to come up with something proper that'll tie into the continuity and be well-designed enough to succeed in territories where the Doctor Who brand isn't enough to make little kids instantly buy it.


Still, no sense dwelling on that, though I'll be sure to keep an eye out for any more news.


Nothing much else to say, since it's later now and I thought I had written more about that Doctor Who game. Ho-hum. I still haven't tested the rest of that bundle of consoles, as much as I keep meaning to. Might get it done tomorrow.

I've come up with another idea for a short sketch or even a series of sketches based on some inanimate objects. Actually, I have a few ideas for sketches about inanimate objects but this one only came into being today. I'd promise video but if I can get it scripted tomorrow and shot soon, it'll have to be done with Sam's Hitachivideocamerarecorder. This is a device that was not so much built as it was forged in the fires of the 1980s. So no promises. Unless I finally get round to convincing Erin to spend her money on a decent camcorder. Which I can "borrow".

I probably won't put the script up since it's only really funny because of the props and setting... meh, doesn't really matter.

That's about it. There should be a woodle up tomorrow, possibly a decent quality one of Sam can be made to draw it. I rely on that incompetent buffoon far too much. I also don't use the phrase "incompetent buffoon" nearly often enough.

Also, bring back Ace.

First, a complaint. I have, in my room, one of those light fittings with four bulbs that you can move independently, altering the light in a particular part of the room. They can be very useful for getting the lighting just right and it provides more illumination than a regular light fitting.

It is also im-frakking-possible to get the lights pointing in the direction I want. I have two options: go blind from light shining right in my eyes or go blind from scrabbling around in darkness.


Anyway, on to lighter (pun entirely unintentional) matters. I've just discovered that the character of Donna Noble (played by Catherine Tate) from last year's Christmas special is to be brought back as a regular companion on Doctor Who. I have mixed feelings about this. Catherine Tate is primarily a comedian and I'm not convinced of her acting talent but she did well enough in The Runaway Bride. Donna Noble may certainly be an interesting character with a bit of expansion and I suspect that I'll take Tate more seriously when she doesn't spend the entire episode in a bridal dress.

Martha Jones (Freema Agyeman) will also be appearing in the new series, along with some Torchwood episodes. I think this could be interesting because, other than with Sarah Jane Smith and due to Rose's means of departure, we've yet to see what life is like for a companion after travelling with the Doctor. I guess we'll be getting some of that from Donna as well, but Martha's certainly had the more interesting Time Lord experiences.

There's always a particular view of Doctor Who from the viewing public. A Time Lord (often infuriatingly referred to as "Dr. Who") and his female companion roaming the universe in a police box, fending off aliens with a sonic screwdriver and, when things get to tough, that Time Lord can just regenerate.

Well, about the only part of that that's been true for the series run is the police box. The concept of the Time Lords was not introduced until 6 years into the series run and the sonic screwdriver had only appeared the year before that. Admittedly, in the long run of Doctor Who 6 years isn't all that much time but it's strange how it isn't the origin of the program that has stuck with people.

11 years is a comparatively longer time and that's how long it took for the concept of regeneration to truly take hold, at the transition from Jon Pertwee to Tom Baker. It had happened before but it had never been called "regeneration" and it was only some time after that that the "renewal" of the First Doctor into the Second was explicitly identified as an actual regeneration.

The whole "one female companion" thing is what bugs me. The Doctor started out with three companions. Then, a pattern of two companions was established: a girl to scream and a man to fight and do manly things. That's not even going into the various UNIT characters who hung around during the Third Doctor era. Throughout the series run, the Doctor had several companions at least as often as he had one.

That's something I'd like to see more of in the new series, a group dynamic in the TARDIS. While there have been groups of characters, Mickey Smith and Jackie Tyler with Rose in series 1 being the most obvious, it's always presented as the primary companion and the hangers-on. Jack Harkness shows up to do a variety of bad ass things when needed but he seems to be more of an ally than an assistant.

I would really like to see two companions on an equal footing, joining at more or less the same time, though without knowing each other prior. It would create an interesting dynamic if done well, in my opinion.


This, ladies and gents, is what happens when I have no topic, The Discontinuity Guide lying on my desk and a lack of time for the post. I'll be doing two things for the first time tomorrow, driving a car and watching Genesis of the Daleks (not at the same time, for safety reasons), so I should have something interesting to mention.

Today is a good day to loot!

I spent several hours today fiddling around in the Physics lab with a bunch of friends diagnosing the problem on one old Macintosh (an LC 475, for those interested) and playing SimCity 2000 on another (an old Performa, now the property of one of those friends).

Since we had nothing better to do, four of us (Sam, Skippy, myself and a guy called Garrie), went in there in the morning armed with naught but our wits, an old screwdriver that Sam carries at all times, whatever we could Google on some nearby, working, PCs and far, far too much free time. We tried different monitors, scavenged from near and far, we poked DIP switches, we connected and disconnected hard drives, we argued over different methods of repair, we played Scalextric when we got bored.

In the end, someone searched for it online and we discovered someone with the exact same problem. Turns out, searching again now, that it's a relatively common problem; no battery, no video. I've just found the Apple page on the problem and they recommend that, having tried various things (we tried different monitors and nothing else), you should bring the thing into an authorised Apple repair centre to have the motherboard battery checked and replaced.

Well, we didn't do that. We found out that the battery could be the problem, borrowed a multimeter (an advantage of working in a Physics lab), discovered we were only getting a few fractions of a volt from the little thing and promptly went on eBay to buy a new one. With any luck, it should arrive by Monday along with some CD caddies so that I can finally get the thing working.

All present at the time of our discovery agreed that there was something wonderful about solving an elusive technical problem. Sure, it turned out to be nothing tricky, but it had been annoying us no end and the thing had been declared dead by the school. We found a way to give it life. Of course, in true techie fashion, we didn't want to just leave the matter there, but the lack of a soldering iron prevented the hooking up of several AAs we had.

No one else we talked to could understand our fascination with getting this old piece of junk to work. I'd be lying if I said that I fully understood it. Perhaps it was the thrill of doing something that others had said couldn't be done. Maybe, once we had started, we spent so long on it that finally finding a solution was like getting to the end of a long journey. It's possible that it was just a way to prove the geek credentials of which we are all so proud. Either way, we had set ourselves a challenge and we had completed it. And it felt good.

The rest of the day went by in a blur of half-understood card games played with Advanced Higher Chemistry students and conversations on Time Lords while games of rounders, which we may have been outside to watch, were played in the background. The day ended with my friends and I carrying out yet more bundles of old computer equipment. All in all, it was a good day.