Super bargain power!

Play Asia have a sale on at the moment, offering 20% off, well, pretty much everything it seems. Which is ace. I can personally recommend these huge bargains: Crackdown (360) – ¬¨¬£15Prey (360) – ¬¨¬£10Gears of War (360) – ¬¨¬£18 Phoenix Wright 2 (DS) – ¬¨¬£12Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow (DS) – ¬¨¬£10 More here!

I am bestest in the world!

Ph33r me and my 1337 Missile Command skillz! I’m top of the Xbox Live leaderboard, on just my second go. Uh, however… The thing is, the game isn’t out yet. Not until Wednesday. Some glitch seems to have allowed me and (currently) 13 other people access to it. So I’m best in the world. It’s just a somewhat small world, consisting of 14 Missile Command players who got the game by accident.

Tyred?

It seems I have a slow puncture. Not only that, but I have a tracking problem causing wear (and possibly the puncture) on both front tyres. So here I am at Kwik-Fit whilst Davey gets some new wheels. I don’t think he likes being up in the air like that, but at least he knows there’s something in it for him…

Setup is formatting… Still…

Why does formatting a new (super-fast SATA) hard drive take FOREVER? So far, it’s been going for about an hour. I wiped and reinstalled Tiger on an old G4 Mac mini last week in less time than this is taking just to format, and the mini has a slooooow 4200rpm laptop IDE drive in it. Yeah, I could do a quick format, but since this drive arrived in the smashed up box from yesterday’s post, I thought I’d best do …

City Link are Crap

City Link is a well known courier company. Infamous, in fact, mainly because of how crap they are. I order a fair amount of stuff over the internet, and have yet to deal with a courier company who isn’t crap, but of all of them City Link stands proud as the Worst of the Worst. I won’t go into the problems I’ve had with them in the past, but will say that I’ve had things incorrectly delivered, lost, broken, and …

Safari – on Windows

Today was Apple’s WWDC ’07 keynote. I don’t normally get interested in these things, but I found myself reading a transcript of the event earlier. And the thing that stood out most? No, not Leopard’s new features. Or the fact that it’s only US$129 (or as Steve Jobs put it, “Leopard shipping in October. Basic version, $129. Premium version, $129. Business version, $129, Enterprise version $129. Ultimate version, $129.”). It wasn’t the iPhone either (no keyboard, so useless to me). …

More gadget wantage

A while ago, I found out about the HTC Athena (eventually sold as the HTC Advantage). It’s a large PDA with a mini-laptop air about it. There was no way I was going to buy one, as they were ¬¨¬£750 or something. But now, I’ve seen the Asus EeePC.It’s a thing of wonder and beauty. Yes, it’s a little larger than the HTC, and no, it’s not a phone as well. But it is a lovely 7″-screened, DS Lite-alike mini-laptop. …

ugvm – remember that?

On the 4th of March 2001, I posted this message to uk.games.video.misc: I had a thought today. After seeing the new issue of Zzap!64, and being a reader of www.ys3.co.uk, I wondered if a load of bods from ugvm fancied doing a multiformat web-based magazine. Maybe every few months – you know, some reviews, some news, some letters, etc? Well, it was just a thought. Show Edge/IGN/GamesRadar/etc how to do it properly? I’m not suggesting I “take the reins”, but …

RIP James Langmead

James Langmead (or Jim, jimlang, or jil depending on how you knew him) was a regular poster on the newsgroup comp.sys.sinclair, World of Spectrum, assorted other retro gaming forums, and chatter on IRC Spectrum channels. He also set up and maintained Speccy Spoilers (currently down), a site which archived Spectrum game endings for people too crap to complete the games themselves. Or something. I’ve known him, as much as you know anyone online, for almost 10 years, mainly through comp.sys.sinclair …

UK Internet Register scam

One of the 8723875234 jobs I’m responsible for at work is the running and upkeep of the website. So, it came as no surprise to get a letter today about the renewal of the domain name. After all, it’s up for renewal soon. However, I was confused to get the letter from a company called UK Internet Register rather than 1&1 (the host), or Nominet. And here it is: Even more surprising, was the money they wanted for this renewal …