deKay’s Blog

The most dangerous job in the world.  Or something.

I just won on the dogs! All five and bit pounds! AMAZE!

Fo some reason, my XP Pro install in Parallels on my iMac lost internet access a few weeks ago. I wasn’t bothered as I hardly use it for anything. Today, however, I needed it as part of the install of Amiga Forever 2008, which only really works in Windows due to there not being a decent Intel port of UAE for the Mac. But I digress.

Having tried all the settings in Parallels, resinstalling the Parallels Tools in Windows, rebooting Windows, and repairing connections, I was still getting nothing. Supposedly an update to Leopard (10.5.3, I believe) can cause the Mac OS firewall to block DHCP requests from Parallels hosted OSes, but the firewall was turned off and XP could get an IP easily enough.

There has also been a recent XP update that can cause HTTP access to seemingly die, particularly if you have ZoneAlarm installed. However, I haven’t installed this update, and don’t have ZoneAlarm on the XP install. Besides, I’ve had no internet access on XP for a while longer than the update has been around.

Eventually, I found an almost-fix. Almost in that Internet Explorer on XP now works, and I can ping addresses, but for some reason Firefox still can’t see the internet. Anyway, it’ll do for now.

This post here provided the answer, which, if you can’t be bothered clicking, basically requires you to type this into your Mac’s terminal:

sudo killall -HUP pvsnatd

At some point this week (I’m not sure when), Virgin Media kindly upgraded my broadband package for free! So instead of the never-made-full-use-of-it 4Mb I had previously, I now have probably-still-won’t-make-full-use-of-it 10Mb instead!

I was expecting this to be very similar to 28 Days Later. I wasn’t far wrong. A seemingly empty city, actually filled with “infected” humans. The story differs, however - in 28 Days Later, a few survivors band together to escape to a safe haven. Here, one man and his dog remain in the city, trying to find a cure.

The shots of the overgrown city are very well done, but would have been more believeable if the streets were jammed with taxis and other traffic. After all, New York is shown, in a flashback, being evacuated in a hurry. Where did all the cars go? Yeah, there are a few filled roads, but some are surprisingly empty. Are we to expect that Neville (played by Will Smith) spent three years clearing the way?

But it isn’t a major thing. The story is (generally) stong and the set pieces impressive. As the film progresses, you can see that Neville is actually starting to lose the plot, although it’s a shame more isn’t made of it. The “god has a reason for everything” undertones should have been lost instead, as far as I’m concerned.

I won’t go into too much more of the story, as there are two (or three) unexpected happenings and I’d spoil it if you’ve not yet seen it, but the ending was unnecessarily twee and righteous. Neville does something near the end, for completely no reason. It didn’t make sense!

However, for all of its faults, I Am Legend was still very watchable and enjoyable. Just don’t try to analyse it too much.

Verdict: 4/5

I’ve had a HP laptop in several times in the last week, suffering from severe audio stuttering - in Media Player, VLC, when playing DVDs, and even just playing the Windows start-up jingle. It’s almost like when I had a nasty 16-bit ISA soundcard in my ancient PC and tried to play Half-Life.

We tried all sorts - scanning for viruses, defragging, reinstalling drivers, reducing the hardware acceleration, adding more memory, changing the volume… everything. But it still kept doing it.

I did notice that in Task Manager, whilst playing MP3s in Media Player, svchost was spiking at around 80% CPU usage, and Media Player itself flicked between 30-odd to 80. Playing the MP3s in other media players showed a similar thing. It was all very strange.

Thankfully, the ever amazing internet and some carefully chosen search terms married up to provide a solution. It would appear that some HP laptops of similar age to this one, as well as other machines (notably Sony Viaos) are prone to suffering from audio stutter. The reason? A mis-detected hard drive mode!  It seems that XP is seeing them as PIO rather than DMA drives. You can change the setting manually, but after a time, XP forgets and the cracked sound returns.

This forum topic explains it a bit more, but, more importantly, is what led me to this page - complete with a VBS script to fix the problem once and for all!

We ordered an MSI Wind laptop (rebadged and sold in the UK as a PC World Advent 4211 Netbook) for work recently, and it arrived yesterday so I’ve had a chance to have a play with it.

My very first impressions were quite poor. It looked very nice, is small, light and seems reasonably well built. However, it wouldn’t power up. Every time it tried to boot past the POST screen, the hard drive squealed and it switched itself off. Even after fully charging the battery, it still refused to boot.  I thought it was DOA, but then, it finally started up properly and has been fine since. Very odd.

After the usual Windows setup stuff (it comes with XP Home), there was about 15 minutes of “Tech Guys” automatic customisation, no doubt adding nonsense to the machine I don’t need. Not that it matters, as Home is going to be replaced with Pro anyway.

Once properly up and running, I was able to give it a test run. It seems very quick (although has no bloat on it yet), and the keyboard is pretty good to type on. The trackpad is a little small, and the area on the right for scrolling isn’t marked - and the “scroll sensitive” area seems very narrow making it awkward to scroll. The trackpad button is very stiff and rather small too, and would benefit from protruding above the case rather than sitting flush.

Comparing it to an EeePC 701, the Wind would seem to be the better machine. It’s 1024×600 screen is both larger (10″) and higher resolution than the Eee’s, the keyboard is superior, and the unit isn’t actually much bigger. In fact, it’s slightly thinner, and appears to be a little lighter too. It has all the same ports as the Eee - VGA, three USB, audio, ethernet and an SD card slot. In addition, and unlike the Eee, it has bluetooth built in.

The 80GB hard drive is acres more space than the Eee’s 4GB, but it isn’t flash which may impact on battery life (which I haven’t tested) or resilience to knocks. The Wind has a built-in webcam, but its quality is rather poor compared to the Eee.

In terms of price, we paid just under £240 for the Wind, whereas the EeePC 701 set us back about £185. Is the extra £55 worth it? When you consider that a copy of XP is around £55, then you could argue yes - especially if you were going to put XP on your Eee anyway. Here’s where to get one.

Everyone likes to know about places they can’t go, don’t they? It’s normal curiosity. That’s why kids explore empty houses and caves and wells and stuff, isn’t it? North Korea is one of those places. I know very little about it, apart from that it’s The Evil Half Of Korea. Or so I thought.

Thanks to a random post on a forum I read, I was made aware of this fascinating set of videos. A US journalist gets into the country, and illegally films his time there.  Here’s the first part, with the rest on the Vice Magazine site.

So my most excellent wife and I went to see the midwife today, and all the results from previous tests are fine and everything seems great. Then we got to hear the baby’s heartbeat through a device that looked like it was designed for detecting pipes in walls. It was very exciting!

What I didn’t expect, was that inside my wife is an actual game of Pac-man. I imagined the heartbeat noise would be sort of badumbadumbadumbadum, but in reality it was WAKAWAKAWAKAWAKA. Amazing!