Supersword.com

Yup. This blog just got it’s third home. I have been using GoDaddy for the last year. Yeah…… not doing that again.

I don’t know what it is about the service that I actually like. The system used for setting up e-mails is just stupid and they generally dont do much that makes me want to go back and use their service. I usually don’t bother with the “tell us why you are leaving” questionaires but I actually filled in one for GoDaddy and let them know what was wrong. I wasn’t rude about it, I just said what really bugged me about it.

So I am now using BlueHost who offer a really nice package around the price I am willing to pay. My transfers have gone smoothly (I just didnt have the time to sort the website content out) and everything is nice.

Good ol’ cPanel.

Google seems to be the source of everything wonderful sometimes. Have you ever wanted to get a review on a product and found that everything is positive? I have. For the most part, I will take the word of the people reviewing the product if I am planning on buying it. However, sometimes it’s always nice to see the other side, if there is one.

For example, I use PayPal when buying online (I feel safe paying through that than some other third party online system). The other day, I wanted to see bad press about PayPal and doing what I have done quite often, I googled “PayPal Sucks”. Wow. PayPal really pissed someone off.

It’s kind of cool to see someone go off on a rant about something. I wonder when my blog is gonna reach the front page when you search “Virgin Media Suck”. Heres a little list of things that suck.

Virgin Media

I hate stupid changes. Don’t get me wrong, everyone makes them and I am not saying that change is bad. I just hate things that change for no real reason or things that change to make something better, but never really does.

I just bought a new graphics card. I have wanted to do so for AGES and have needed to. My old card sucked so bad and would crap out on me all the time. I decided to bite the bullet and buy a BFG 8800 GT 512mb OC2 card at the current price. Now I was reluctant enough to go with another BFG card due to the fact that I know they are good, even if my last experience wasnt so great. The best thing is, if you are in the EU you get a 10 year warranty (not lifetime like the US, stupid EU regulations). I bought a cheap card last time because I was waiting for the 8 series cards but never had money when they came out. Now I was a bit more happy to buy something nice. Just don’t tell my Mum the price. So much for saving my money. lol.

So I have Vista Home Premium on a dual boot with XP. I was definatly not prepared to move over completely and for good reason. Vista hasnt exactly has it’s best time in the news and the general consensus (atleast from the people I know) is that Vista sucks.

Well. I have got to agree who heartidly. It’s not so much a stability issue for me but an issue of change. Example, my USB headset works fine in XP and the volume is very manageable. In Vista, the person that decided to add a digital mixer needs to be shot. I have Windows Media Player on 1% and the total volume on 4% just have it bearable to hear Ventrillo. If I turn it up anymore, the music will kill me and other sounds are very distorted. C’mon….

I am installing Flight Sim X right now and I’m gonna go and grab Crysis tomorrow. I am behind on alot of games because I just couldn’t play them. Bioshock, Fear, Crysis to name a few.

Overall though, I am very happy with the card and running it on XP still looks sweet. I just hope everything doesn’t die when I install games and try and play. Vista is going to be a DX10 only O/S. Im not doing anythign else on it. That’s why XP is there.

And for the record…. try before you buy. Not buy and cry over the crappyness.

I never knew how desperate people are to get to the sales….. the day after Christmas. Not only Christmas but New Years Day. In my mind, people should be recovering from the night before.

I would have killed to be in bed at 10am on New Years Day, yet some people do not share the same wish. I recently boosted my hours at work, just for the holidays, so I could get a bit more cash and to be honest, the place I work at needed the staff. I have one more day of extra hours, then it’s over. I am so tired, I have sold so much stuff and I am really bored of saying the same things over and over again.

As you may have guessed from my lack of activity anywhere (here, modsonline, GAMES!!!, sleep), I havn’t really had much time to get things done. I try to post here atleast once a month and since April 06, I managed it. I had absolutly no will to write anything here. You know when your mind has so much going through at once you cant organise your thoughts, well I was like that. To some extent I am still trying to organise what I need to do (i.e. college work that is still not in) as well as work and other bits and pieces. Manic anyone?

Also, I hope the 4 people that actually read this blog (I have to include the account named Dad) had a great Christmas and have a good 2008. Screw political correctness.

Ontop of all this, I have a HUGE rant coming soon. You don’t understand how royally fucked off I am with Sky. I’m probably going to take a few hours to get it just right. Oh boy. Something to look forward to. lol.

So I am still alive, to some extent. Ciao.

Wow. 2 posts in one day. I’m getting good.

OK so I ordered a hoody from CafePress on the 16th and finally got it today. International shipping.. I can’t complain. I took it out of the bag and tried it on. 14 days… and it was too big. I really wasn’t that annoyed because I wasn’t sure what to go for. I ordered a Medium for the height (I’m 6ft, so not amazingly tall) but the rest of it was huge. If you’ve ever seen Austin Powers, it’s the sort of the size that Fat Bastard would have.

I jumped on to Cafepress.com and filed for an RMA so I could get an exchange. Within 2 hours I got an email saying that they were dealing with it, and then after 1 hour, I got my response from a representative. They told me that they are ordering a replacement, smaller size and shipping it to me, free of charge. I’m also allowed to keep the one that doesn’t fit for free, they don’t want it back.

AWESOME!

5* for customer satisfaction from me. I’m so impressed.

56k - 128k - 512k - 1MB - 2MB - 16MB. Oh yeeeaah!

My house is finally getting a decent line put in which gives us Great TV, Great Broadband and Phone (I never use it, but it’s in the package). We’re ditching Virgin Media for Sky, all provided through an ADSL. The digital TV is so nice, so nice that I am forking out a bit of cash so I can get an extra box in my room. We actually got a Sky + box for free because we were invited by a friend. Thanks Kieran

The Sky + (Sky Plus) box allows you to get all of the normal TV channels that you subscribe to, but also has extra features that the standard, free, Sky box does not. For example, you are able to record anything you want to the built in HDD and a click of a button, pause and rewind live TV, set it up so a whole series of programming is recorded along with some other fancy doo-dahs. A really nice thing about it is that you can set this all up from home with the remote, an SMS text service or by logging into their website and scheduling it like that. Awesome.

The Broadband we are getting is also going to destroy the connection we have now. My biggest issue with my current cable connection is that it just drops for no reason, slows right down during peak times which change whenever they feel like and that the upload speed is horrible. I upload files at around 20kbp/s and download at 200-215kbp/s which is ok if it’s small files, but large files take forever. When I was uploading audio for MODSonair, it would take forever to upload. With the new connection, I’ll upload at around 750 depending on how close I am to the exchange.

So yeah… no more internet troubles for me.. I hope.

Also, if you have heard ‘Chocolate Rain’ (what do you mean you havn’t?), you should check out ‘Cherry Chocolate Rain‘, the Dr Pepper advert for their new product. The ultimate sell out…… brb, going to get Dr Pepper.

Read the rest of this entry »

Gadgets rock. I don’t know what it is about them, I just love messing wth stuff that I don’t know about and even stuff I do know about still entertain me. My problem is, I don’t read the manuals that come with them. I’ll just mess around and fiddle with them and try and teach myself. I did it with a PC, why not with other stuff.

I was checking out the iPhone today during my lunch at college. I was skeptical about it, thinking it was just another “iThing to have” by Apple. To some extent, it’s all tarted up with stuff to drag people in but it performs pretty well. I didn’t get much time to mess with it but with time I did have to play with it, I was very very impressed. It’s so….. expensive. And with price you normally get quality. I think the thing that really pulls me in is the touch interface. Granted that it is actually nothing new, touch screens arn’t new at all. It’s just the way you utilize it with the whole phone.

I not one of those poeple who supports one brand though. I recommend brands that have products that work for me. When I bought my iPod Nano, 6 months after it’s release, I was told that the screen would break soon and that it would just not work once the battery dies out after a year. It’s still playing as I type this and I use it everyday for atleast 3 hours. Some things are only as good as the care you give them. I put mine in a good looking case and that was that. The screen has slowly scratched over time, but I can’t complain. I use it alot and it’s not noticable when it’s on.

When I get more time to check it out, I will probably write something better, but I really had fun messing with it today. Maybe next time I will see another side and end up hating it. The only thign that bugs me about it is that it’s all on contract for the moment. I doubt that will change for some time to come. I want a Pay As You Go phone because I don’t use it as much. The reason the iPhone has my attention is because I wouldn’t mind getting rid of this ipod and using the phone as the player instead.

I’m waiting out on Guitar Hero 3 for PC. I havn’t got a Xbox 360 and I don’t want to buy it for the PS2. I don’t know if it’s out in the US yet but it comes out on November 30th here in the UK.

And as for the title, I have about 4 draft posts on this site at the moment that I never finished. I got bored with the subject.

Compression can suck. I have been through different types of video format to upload to YouTube.com in order to let you guys see the quality of this camera but time after time it just deteriorates due to compression. In all fairness, YouTube caters for alot of people so I can’t complain. It’s free and very handy. YouTube is my replacement for the crap they show on TV here. lol.

I have found, for uploading videos to YouTube, that the following settings are very good:

That will give you a video like this:

It’s still not perfect but I partly put that down to being zoomed in quite alot already.If I was closer, I think the quality would show up better. In it’s original state however, the quality looks fine.

Those houses I zoomed into are quite far away aswell.

Nothing can ever be quite that simple, can it?

I just hate when you think you have everything sorted, everything organised and prepared for whatever you need to do, then you find out that you’re completely wrong. I bought a really cheap, new, but cheap, Sony HDR-HC3 camera which I recieved today. It takes Mini DV tapes, records absolutly stunning footage in amazing detail and can take high (for a camcorder anyway) res stills.

I got to the point where I wanted to upload my footage onto my computer and realise.. oh crap, I have no idea how to do this. Now at this point, you could put it down to bad research on my part, but I knew there would be a manual that comes with the camera. So I flick through the pages, looking for information about uploading. I find the page. Ta daah!

What a load of garbage! The POS manual couldnt be any less helpful when it comes down to explaining how you actually do somethign with the footage. I’m told that I need an iLink cable. Luckily, I know that it’s like a 4pin - (x)pin cables which will connect to a firewire port. What I didn’t realise is, that a simpleton that resides in my house threw away all of my computer attachments, warantees etc by accident during a clean up session sometime after February.

So at this point I am pretty pissed. I knew the stuff was lost but I had forgotten about it until now. Needing the hardware and being the usual impatient person I am (hehe), I went into town to get the 1394 adapter and the cable I needed. I spent £20 more than I should have if the hardware wasn’t thrown away.

(At this point, I just realised that I don’t have the XP disc anymore. I’ll just put it on the tab )

I get home and attempt to fit the adapter. After spending ages trying to get the damn thing in without breaking anything (the expansion port covers are welding on. STUPID IDEA!) I managedto get it on.

I’m ready to go. I have my footage, I have my hardware, I have my camera (gotta have that), I want to upload. Next question strikes. How? I’ve only ever worked with HDD and DVD cameras when uploading to a computer and that’s easy. I’m still researching up but it seems that Video Studio from Ulead is a recommended product. This camera is HD so I want to upload in a hgh definition format. Vegas is an option, im just looking at the moment.

It just bugs me that I thought I had it all covered, then I findout I didn’t. I’d be alot more pissed off if I didn’t think it was worth it. The quality really is nice. I’ll stick it up on YouTube once I get it on here.

Update:
It is very important that both ends of the firewire cable are plugged in to enable data transfer. But you already knew that didn’t you…… I forgot about the other end after I insatlled the hardware. lol.

This is just something I stumbled accross today. Radiohead have got something pretty cool going on for their new album, ‘In Rainbows‘. Basically, they are giving you the choice on how much you want to spend to download the album.

You add it to the basket, then when you view it, you are presented with two text boxes. You can enter 00 00 in both, then just get charged the $1 transaction fee. It’s weird, I havn’t seen this before. It’s really up to you. They want you to tell them what their music is worth. Although you get this choice, something tells me that they arn’t going to loose a hell of alot of money. Most people who don’t download their music illegally clearly don’t mind paying what they pay.