You too can be Alex Zane!

Not that you’d want to be though, surely? Could you live with yourself if you were that irritating? MTV are advertising for a new presenter, and because it is impossible to get a job these days without going on a TV talent competition, you have to send in a video of yourself “doing the MTV thing”. This probably requires surgical teeth whitening.

Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune trailer

Hmm. About a year ago, this PS3 game looked really good, and I was a little jealous that it wasn’t coming out on the 360. Having seen lots more of it now, and realising that the “you’re just some average guy” premise is nonsense, it just seems like a cross between Gears of War and Tomb Raider Legend without actually being as good as either. Anyway, here’s a trailer:

Viva Pinata (360)

Another brief stint on this, as someone else was after my remaining animals. My gardens are somewhat bare now, and even more so after I pimped up a Roario, called him “Keith Chegwin” and sent him off to Nils Tanner. I seem to just have whirlms and mothdrops left now!

Need a load of random data?

For my job I often do – testing things in Excel or in a database, providing data for students to work on, that sort of thing.¬¨‚Ć I stumbled across this site this morning when searching for something to create random (but specific) data – and it does exactly that. You just choose fields (such as names, postal codes, email addresses, etc), fill in any specific ranges, and decide how many records you want. It then provides the data for you, …

Super Luigi Galaxy (Wii)

Luigi slides all over the place, jumps higher (and seemingly further) than Mario, and says “Yoshi” every time he uses a launch star. He also makes a noise that sounds like it’s taken straight from Pretty Fly for a White Guy when he gets a power star. Oh, and he looks stupid in a bee suit. Aside from all that, it’s the same so far. Well, except for one thing which I’m not sure if I’m imagining or not: the …

MAKE: Fimo fractals

This is so simple, but makes you wonder why you’ve not seen it done before. Or perhaps you have. I haven’t, and that’s the point. Anyway, it’s a post about how to make Sierpinski Gaskets out of Fimo. Of course, you could also make them out of rock and then eat them.¬¨‚Ć Mmmm, sugarfractals. MAKE: Blog: HOW TO – Make Fimo fractals

Endless Ocean (Wii)

Would you believe it – the Wii’s disc slot actually takes games that aren’t Mario Galaxy! I’m shocked and amazed! Although technically, I suppose, Endless Ocean isn’t a game, as it’s more of a diving simulator. I played it for about an hour, and found around 15 species of fish. Also found a dolphin medal, have acquired a pet penguin, chased a dolphin, took some old bloke for a swim to look for wrasse, and found a bit of a …

Super Mario Galaxy (Wii): COMPLETED! AGAIN!

With the last of the stars collected yesterday, all that was left was to defeat Bowser again. For some reason, I had problems getting to him this time – losing several lives (all regained through mushroom collection) on the way. He was just as easy as before (of course, he was exactly the same, that’s why), and then the end sequence with a bit extra. And then! “You may now play as Luigi!” comes up on the screen, and Luigi …

Super Mario Galaxy (Wii)

120 STARS! Amazing! I came to it today with just four stars remaining – all of which were actually comet stars, it turned out. First up was a Daredevil Comet on the Deep Dark Galaxy (killing the big Magikoopa without getting hit – easy!), and then I braved the Luigi’s Purple Coins star, which drained a good 8 or 9 lives before I nailed it. The last two (another purple coin one, and Fast Foe one) were both waaaaaay easier …

More EeePC pictures

Due to popular demand (that is, one guy on Rllmuk), I’ve taken a few more pictures of the EeePC, in (hopefully) much better quality. And there’s a video of it’s graphical prowess too – a quick clip of it running TuxRacer. Yeah, not the best example… anyway! The photos! And that amazing video: See? Amazing.

Spoke too soon

Because my connection has all gone to pot again. Actually, it was up and down for most of yesterday afternoon.¬¨‚Ć One minute, I was getting 350Kbps upload, the next nothing.¬¨‚Ć At all. I’ve posted a message to the Virgin Media support newsgroup, and it seems that I’m on a congested channel (whatever that entails), at least, judging from the problems other people on there are having anyway.

Super Mario Galaxy (Wii)

So close to the end now, with 116 stars complete. Just three more comet ones left, including what seems to be the hardest of all the stars by seven million miles – Luigi’s Purple Coins. Gah! Oh, and I finally managed to find the hidden star on Deep Dark Galaxy. It turns out it was under the wreck of a boat (well, it wasn’t, but the route to get to it was), where I’m pretty sure I’d looked at least …

Virgin on the ridiculous

With apologies for the rather obvious headline. Since Wednesday, my internet connection (4Mb cable, ex-NTL now Virgin Media) had been playing up.¬¨‚Ć I’d not really had time to look into the fault, but on Friday night with the arrival of some new networking kit (ordered before I started getting problems, ironically) I decided to get to the bottom of it. After some testing with various speedtest sites, it became clear that the problem was my upload speed.¬¨‚Ć On a Virgin …