At the moment I'm busy sorting my home network. I've now cleared a cupboard in a bedroom here and that has now become my Comms Room... well, a Comms Cupboard and - to be honest - even that may be delusions of grandeur!
OK - so right now I have a firewall system, a Linux machine (which has a DNS service running on it) and a very old 500 MHz PIII which I'm considering turning into some sort of NAS.
More on these another time! :-)
My file server hasn't been put in there yet because a) I'm concerned the wooden shelf in there may not take it's weight and b) I'm also concerned about airflow.
Still, that hasn't stopped me tinkering with it - I've removed 3 old 80GB drives (these will most likely go into my planned NAS - see above) and replaced them with a nice 1TB drive to house all my media files.
Oh - and transferring hundreds of gigs of data over a 100MB LAN connection is a bad idea. 6 hours later and not even 25% done! And yes - I accept that I should have known better. :-P
After a bit of swearing a bit the bullet, cancelled the transfer (which had been running most of the night) and hooked the drive straight to the machine that housed the original files. Got the whole lot transferred in about 2 hours. Lesson learned.
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( 2.6 / 25 )My copy of Streetfighter IV arrived on day of release! :-) I used to love playing Streetfighter II on my SNES back in the 90s and I'm enjoying this new incarnation just as much.
One weird thing - why does Blanka now sound like a pirate?! Did he join the Navy in the years between SFII and SFIV?
Favourite charcter: Bison. At first played with Ryu (good all-rounder from SFII) but after Ryu was flattened by one of the more advanced characters I decided to try Bison. I never owned any of the later editions of SFII so I've never gotten to play as him. I absolutely devastated every character I played - even Seth! Of course, I was playing on the Easy mode so perhaps it wasn't quite so impressive but I'm not a hardcore gamer so cut me some slack!
Hadoken!
- Gord
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( 2.9 / 18 )Wow - haven't posted for while! Unfortunately there is a lot of stuff going on in my life (and career) right now. I can't really give any details but its meant I haven't had much time for anything!
Well... what have I been up to since I last posted? Well, I went to AutoAssembly 2008 and had an... 'interesting' time. I'll post more about it later but let's just say that Google Maps and the dodgy signs in Birmingham are a pretty fatal combination (question to Google: have you ever actually tried following the directions your map system generates - outside of the US, I mean?). So anyway, I'll tell you the whole bitter story later.
Been playing Mass Effect on the XBox 360 - brilliant game and well worth checking out! Also had a bash at GTA IV and must admit I found the experience a little bit underwhelming... perhaps there was just too much hype and I was expecting something more? It's not bad, of course but I dunno... I just expected to be as excited to play it the first time as I was when I first played San Andreas and it didn't feel like that to me. I enjoyed playing Mass Effect a lot more...
Unfortunately I can't say too much about some things I've been involved with for various reasons. I'll be able to tell you about one or two things at a later date but right now I shall have to keep them a secret.
Anyway, I'll post some more later...
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( 3.2 / 23 )Well, after having a nutter trying to attack me at the railway station I'm now back on track - so what could be better than looking at a program designed to eradicate pests from your computer (note to self: must invent equivalent for real life).
I've used AVG for the last 3 or 4 years and have found it be a pretty decent (and free AV). Before that I used Norton AV - yeah, I know! However Norton AV (way back in 2000) was actually pretty good to start with. Then the bloat and useless crap krept in - adding pointless features and seeming determination to arrest control of the PC away from me.
If you're like me, you like to maintain control of your PC. You want to make decisions on what is running and what isn't, how it behaves, etc. I hate software that makes decisions for me!
After the disaster that was Norton Internet Security 2003 (*shivers*) I decided to try some alternative software. I decided to try AVG as it was free and had some pretty good reviews (I'll talk about firewalls, etc. another day). Sure enough it was great - no slow down, no pointless crap built in, no attempt to take control of things away from me - and this has been the case with all subsequent versions. Until version 8.
I want to like version 8 of AVG - I've liked all the others but I have to say that I've been running this for a few weeks now and it's really starting to annoy.
Firstly, was the problem with speed. AVG flew on my system but version 8 has introduced a definite lag, presumably because of the interesting but slightly daft 'link scanning' (more about that in a mo) cra...er.. feature and I suspect it's pre-emptively scanning files too (nice but why the slow down?).
AVG recently released some fixes that have improved the situation somewhat but I'm getting stupid errors when updating. It'll happily download one of two updates and then bitch that it can't download the other as the server is unavailable (yeah, right!). Then I got the legendary 'out of memory' error when trying to update. So 1.5 GB of RAM is insufficient for this update? There was me thinking it couldn't get any more bloated! Of course, this is nonsense. I'll let you know a fix for this when I find it - but it could be a case of removing the junk and trying something else; just like I did with Norton all those years ago.
Now, back to the link scanner: I hate this feature - it's obviously designed for those people who either surf for dodgy stuff (not guilty m'lord!) or those who erm.. like to click links without thinking...? Anyway, the idea is it scans the links on a webpage and reports whether they are safe. It's one of those ideas that sounds great in theory but is a complete bat's arse of an idea in reality.
So... I turn off link scanner. Now I have a nice big exclamation mark in the task tray and an 'alert' in AVG itself whining that there's a problem and my system could be at risk. Fortunately, there's a simple way around this.
AVG 8, being the cheeky little beggar it is, installs a toolbar into the browser(s) you use. Go into the options in your browser and disable the crappy add-ons and you can enable it in AVG and no more whinging from the app!
In Internet Explorer:
Go to 'Tools' then 'Manage Add-Ons', 'Enable and Disable Add-ons' and disable 'AVG Safe Search'.
In Firefox:
Go to 'Tools', 'Add-ons' and disable 'AVG Safe Search'.
You may want to disbale the toolbar as well, if you find it as annoying as I do.
Anyway, I'm still using AVG 8 for the moment but must admit I'm a lot more open to finding a good, light alternative not bogged down by crappy bloat. Oh - the update just installed successfully... better late than never, I guess!
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( 2.8 / 13 )Considering the announcement a few months back that HD DVD was a dead format - it doesn't seem to be doing too bad right now! I saw a poster just the other day at the railway station declaring the release of a major movie on HD DVD the following week, there's still plenty of HD DVDs going at full price (though admittedly there are loads at a bargain prices too).
The hardware's much cheaper (I picked up an HD DVD player for just 50 notes a couple of months back)...
True; support for the format is no longer there but the format doesn't seem so much dead but more of a zombie format - it's dead but it just won't lay down! It'll be interesting to see how long this lasts and it does make you wonder whether it would have been such a knackered cause if they'd managed to pull off these kind of prices sooner... Maybe then it would have been Blu-Ray that would now be shuffling around demanding fresh juicy brains!
For the record: Blu-Ray was always my format of choice - I don't have the hardware (yet) but that extra capacity is sorely needed. Just wish they'd hurry up and get the prices of recordable Blu-Ray media down!
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