This is especially true for websites which add a huge leaderboard ad to the very top of the website before their head content, thus pushing their entire website down by about 100 pixels. Or those that have an annoying ad placed right in the middle of their site’s main content, like halfway through a news post, breaking up the flow of the article.

The main unfortunate side-effect of this mass-blocking is that non-intrusive advertising gets blacked out also. Now I’m not a complete Nazi towards online advertising, I don’t mind the banner ads, small boxes etc. that sit off to the side or the bottom of the site, especially when the site owner puts them there knowing full well that they are most likely to only get revenue from impressions as opposed to clicks.

Nor do I mind advertising that isn’t completely corporate driven, this particular example being Project Wonderful. They are one ad network I’ve expressly allowed to show in my filters, along with a bunch of other sites I either don’t mind supporting, that I know don’t have intrusive advertising, or (unfortunately) that don’t work when you turn off the ads – several site video players are notorious for that.

I know several site owners who do expressly ask – and always in an off-the-cuff sort of passing mention, never specifically pushing people to do so – to whitelist their site in AdBlock for the revenue, and in most cases I’m cool with that particularly if I’m an avid reader and like what they’re doing. Sites/comics like Real Life Comics, Nerd Junkies, Manly Guys Doing Manly Things I keep AdBlock off as I both enjoy their content and they don’t run intrusive advertising.

One aspect that I really hate though, is when people specifically ask for ad clicks. Especially when it’s always against the ToS of whatever ad network you’re in to game the system in any way or to ask people to submit invalid clicks.

AdBlock and YouTube

You may be starting to call out things such as “You’re stealing from site owners”, “People depend on that revenue” etc. Yea, I’m well aware of that. You might also call me a hypocrite for the fact that I have a small 180×150 ad in my sidebar, or the fact that I do submit some of my YouTube videos for revenue sharing and do enable the pre-roll ads for longer ones. To those critics I will say this: Why don’t you just block them? If you do, then it’s pretty much even on possible denied revenue.

I’m not one of those WingsofRedemption or FPSKyle (aka FPSRussia back before he got massively YouTube famous and was still doing game commentaries) people blocking their videos from being viewed on mobile devices since mobile YouTube doesn’t (yet) support advertising. Nor do I go around chopping very long videos up into small 10-minute chunks – even if it means cutting off in the middle of a sentence – solely to increase views and ad impressions (*cough* MW2Joe’s Q&A sessions *cough*).

If you’re serving up ads yourself though, you also need to keep an eye out. Especially if you’re someone who comes across and not having enough money – this being the Internet, people will do stupid things even if they think it’s in their best interests to do whatever to help by say, clicking your ads on your partnered YouTube channel over and over to try earn you money. Monitoring your CTR is something you need to do at least once a day so that you can report the invalid clicks and not have your ad account shut down for what they would see as gaming the system…

As you probably know, I interact on Facebook through two primary methods: my own personal profile, and my Page. I initially made my page after a few… instances where people who were following me for all of my gaming and YouTube related stuff started getting a little too keen on my profile on Facebook. This then spurred me to create a second Twitter account and a Facebook page to handle the people who only knew me from my dealings on the Internet.

At that point, it was the best course of action since I didn’t want to start opening up my personal profile and everything I might say, to people I didn’t really fully know or trust enough. Of course, that’s not to say that everything I post is completely private, in fact most of the time I will post the same thing to my main Twitter and my Facebook profile simultaneously with TweetDeck, but it helps to have that individual post privacy selector on Facebook to keep things only to people who I know.

However, not long after that I started to realise that gaming and YouTube related stuff actually constituted quite an amount of my overall activities, and as such my personal Twitter has a lot less going on now than it used to. It kinda shows in my gaming Twitter as I’ve made over 1500 Tweets from that account since I started it in December last year while my main account has dropped from around 300 Tweets a month to just 100 a month.

So, this new subscribe functionality on Facebook is making me think about whether I should delete my secondary accounts and use just the one once again. Everyone could continue to follow me on Twitter, and those who I don’t fully know could just subscribe to my Facebook rather than having to add me as a friend. This would then enable a fair bit more functionality that I’ve had to stop using recently, or find a workaround for, since some Facebook tools don’t work with Pages, including YouTube Autoshare, Raptr’s connections, and others.

The main benefactors from this change that I know would be higher-profile YouTubers who are well-known for who they are, rather than their online persona. Two who immediately come to my mind would be Jory Caron and Jonny Paula from the old “Is It a Good Idea to Microwave This?” YouTube show, but it could also be of use to some other smaller people like MegaGWolf, and to some extent (and I can’t believe I’m actually saying her name) ssskinner.

Right now I’m still debating what to do. The main things I have against merging them would be the fact that my second accounts are already too well-established to really just pull the plug on them, and they are helping me to keep my two “audiences” separate.

I suppose it’s something that would have to be thought of over the next while, I’d say it would all depend on the uptake of the new subscription functionality.

Firstly, FRAPS is a CPU hog. It does a lot of processing to get your game recorded, converted, compressed and saved. It’s about 40% or so on my Core i5-750 (OC’d to 3.2Ghz), which is a fairly hefty chunk. Because of this, it tends to drag down the framerate of the game I’m playing all the way down to 30, even though I’m telling it to record at 60. However, the end result is good, albeit at a rate of 4GB for about two minutes. All those individual files are quite annoying for editing purposes, and which the audio mixing it offers is helpful, it can be annoying having to set levels before recording to ensure the game doesn’t completely drown out my microphone.

Dxtory on the other hand, from what I can tell, is a hard drive hog. And not just space-wise, it also demands a lot out of the write speed of your hard drive. For me, this isn’t good, as tests showed that my recording hard drives – which are both WD Caviar Green 1.5TB 7200rpm – only manage about 50MB/s. This seems to be enough for FRAPS, but for Dxtory on “out-of-the-box” settings, it was worthless given my 1080p screen size. Given the multitude of options available, I ended up having to fiddle around for a while to come up with my current solution, which offers good recording quality, while maintaining that I can still play the game at normal speed with no slowdown:

Dxtory codec, medium (YUV420) quality, uncompressed, 30FPS, RawCap spread over two hard drives both running 50Mb/s.

The upsides to this setup:

• No game slowdown. Well, I mean minimal slowdown. Normal FPS in the test I did was 120, while recording it was between 60-80, while only recording at 30. FRAPS would reduce my FPS to 30 no matter what.
• No large amount of individual 4GB files. This was something that irked me about FRAPS, especially as when I used Xfire in the past ages ago, even it could record into one large file. Although separate files does have it’s benefits when you happen to have a power-cut during recording…
• Separate audio tracks in the file for game sound and my microphone, meaning no need to play about with levels before recording, it can be done in post editing.
• The ability to use it as a virtual camera to stream with, at a better framerate than XSplit Gamesource offers.

Another major downside, to me, compared to FRAPS is the inability to record the dekstop. This is a big thing for me given that I play a fair amount of emulated GBA and DS games. It’s also a good backup for when I’m playing a game that isn’t DirectX or OpenGL, like Rollercoaster Tycoon.

This pretty much means I’ll be using both programs in the future, both for different purposes.

But, if you’ve come here looking for my opinion of which of the two to take, solely for game recording purposes, I’d take Dxtory. It may be more expensive at ¥3,600 (converted to €33.50 when I bought it) as opposed to €27 (I bought it at $37 ages ago), but the increase in functionality is very worth it. However, do make sure that you have a fairly decent hard drive, and ideally have several hard drives available to record onto.

Upon the page loading, I noticed that it had been given a little facelift, with a nice fresher-looking login screen.

After getting in, I noticed a myriad of new links on the left-hand side, and one which piqued my interest long enough to delay me sending my text for a while, was this “My Usage” tab. Inside was basically a breakdown of all my calls and texts, similar to what you would get on a bill. It definitely reaffirmed the fact that I don’t actually use my phone very much!

However, I began to notice the charges in my usage history were not adding up too well with the advertised 29c a minute anytime to any network or landline plan I’m supposedly on.

Looking through this history, firstly I was confused by all the ex-VAT numbers. All the text charges worked out (€0.0992 = 12c with VAT), all of the call charges did not. Particularly the two and three second calls – where I hit voicemail and hung up immediately (I don’t do voicemail) – in which I was charged 10c on both occasions.

So, it was off to Twitter (@Meteor_Mobile) and it was confirmed that I am apparently charged a 9c connection fee for every single chargeable call.

Nine fucking cent? Particularly when the call per minute is only 29c, a text is only 12c, and I get charged it every single time I connect, even if it’s straight to voicemail? That’s a lot of bollocks right there.

And yet a Google search for this indicates that all three major networks charge this connection fee for their PAYG customers, and Meteor had only increased the charge from 5c just a few months ago!

This is a load of bullshit, in the future I’m just going to continue to send texts since it’s only 3c more than the connection fee, and I’ll probably be able to say more than I can in 6 seconds on the phone!

NGame, flagged...?

When the bloody fuck did that happen? I had been watching the site without any problems 3 hours before that and got nothing in my way. A quick look on Twitter shows that other had been experiencing the issue too. Since I have faith in Avast, I went ahead anyway and had no issues at all.

I will point out that at this point in time, the Safe Browsing diagnostic page for NGame was completely clean, nothing mentioned.

Fast-forward to about an hour ago, and…

Say wha?

Jesus, where the hell did that come from. But on further reading I notice something else – IT’S CLAIMING MY SITE IS INFECTED NOW TOO?!?!?!

Sure enough, I go to visit my own website, and I’m greeted by the exact same big red error page. And the diagnostic for me:

...for fuck's sake.

Upon checking my Google Webmaster Tools, I was told that the page on my site in which I embed my NGame channel page was what had caused my site to be flagged also – bearing in mind they said nothing about just the physical stream video itself on my homepage – so I went to go file for a malware review after privatisation of that page until this issue blows over…

EXCEPT THERE’S NO FUCKING LINK ANYWHERE TO BE FOUND.

As they claim: “Very rarely, it can take up to a day for malware warnings (and links to the malware review request form) to be visible in Webmaster Tools after your search has been flagged in search results. If you don’t see a warning in Webmaster Tools, but your site is flagged, please check back later.”

Searching around for other instance like this show that this is the complete opposite of “very rare”, rather it’s more of a “happens all the fucking time”.

Moral of the story? Google is shit. Go disable this stuff in Options -> Under the Bonnet -> Privacy -> Uncheck “Enable phishing and malware protection”. And then go download Avast, which has been a hell of a lot more use than this browser “feature” has.

Can I just have a social media program that has the power of TweetDeck, has user streams, uploads stuff to Twitpic properly – as in with the tweet as a caption, and what adds the image preview on the Facebook status – with Seesmic’s speed, fluidity, plugin feature, and the “Home” column which shows everything…?

Why is it that at the moment I have to pick one over the other as both TweetDeck and Seesmic Desktop 2 have a single failing about them that means I’d rather not use them:

• TweetDeck runs on AIR, which is not good for my system and makes it slow and liable to crash. Also it takes a while to initialise and populate the columns. And most importantly it doesn’t have an all-encompassing “Home” column.
• Seesmic doesn’t upload images properly to Twitpic, it has to upload the image first before getting the URL to add to the tweet, and Silverlight isn’t great for my system either. Also, the way Facebook is shown in the client is confusing as well, especially in the account selection, as I have to go into a sub-menu to toggle my personal account and the bear’s account.

I switched back to SD2 a little while back as it was much quicker than TD. But now I’ve just had to switch back again as SD2 was not uploading stuff to Twitpic with the caption the way TweetDeck does. Now though I really want to go back to SD2 because I don’t have a “Home” column featuring everything…

Argh, why cant I have the best of both worlds

Now though, I’m maybe thinking it wasn’t such a great idea to choose to do this so soon, mainly because of a few niggling issues I’ve had with the transition, primarily from my point of view that my Google Apps account was created for my sole personal use, and that my conflicting Google account also used the same e-mail addresses as what was in my Google account.

Google Reader

Unfortunately, one of the horrible downsides is the lack of support for migrating Google Reader data. The Google help files stated as the way to transfer the data was simply to export the subscriptions as an OPML file and import them in the transitioned account. All well and good for some, except this means I would lose all my unread items, all my sharing friends, and all my Reader trends and stats. Which means that the last 200 unread items I never got around to were just marked as read, and my trends have started from scratch and I couldn’t carry over my total read of 18,532 items

YouTube

Simply put, YouTube is not yet supported by the new accounts system. Which is a big blow for me, given my massive heavy usage of YouTube. For the moment though thankfully it can just sit in Chrome’s incognito window and be used there, but I think that there’s going to be a lot of confusion soon when more service e-mails from YouTube come through and I try clicking on them outside of incognito and get the massive cookie hassle again.

Speaking of that:

Massive cookie hassle

Yea, Chrome was filled with cookies of my old Google account being signed into stuff, so going there on my newly transitioned account meant it tried to sign in as my old account and bring up the conflicted accounts screen, causing me to be logged out of my transitioned account, and take quite a few refreshes and sign-ins before my transitioned account would be properly signed in again. As such, I’ve had to clear all my cookies, not just for Google sites, to be on the safe side. Now to do the arduous process of signing back into everything again…

Association with the conflicting account

For a while as well, I couldn’t sign in anywhere with my new account without being given the conflicting account screen, mainly as my e-mails were still associated with my conflicting account, thus causing even more conflicts.

Hopefully by now I’ve managed to fix everything properly and get everything set back up again. It does make me wonder why Google didn’t have this sort of infrastructure in the first place for Google Apps rather than making it all completely separate…

Ah well, back to reading Reader items and watching YouTube videos.

Found on The Oatmeal.

Thankfully, I upgraded from my first e-mail, which was a Hotmail account back in 2007, to my own domain. Yes, I have been massively computer literate for that long

It wasn’t just my videos that I noticed this. Partner videos, or videos in general that had revenue sharing enabled on them also didn’t have a right-click context menu available to use. I decided to have a look and see what the main issue was, and what it was that was stopping these videos from using the new features.

For this test, I used my Eirtakon 09 Smash Bros. finale video, as I shot that in full HD and uploaded the raw file directly onto YouTube without any editing.

The view for me in IE, logged in:

Since I thought it would be a browser issue, I then tried it in Chrome, logged out obviously:

Just in case it wasn’t a browser issue, I went ahead and tried it again in an InPrivate window in IE:

So what is it that’s stopping us from being able to view this info on our own videos while logged in? I can understand why it wouldn’t work on videos with revenue sharing enabled and that have an ad laid on top of the video, but for your own uploads is just a pain…

To take an example, Friday night I was going to bed and I set my computer (main machine) to go to sleep. Getting up in the morning, I turned it back on again and went through the day not doing much, however I did not notice my feeds updating with new items despite the fact that I know some feeds ALWAYS update during the night. Sure enough none of the feeds had been updated since last night. Now this was perplexing since I have it set so that my feeds update every 15 minutes (I follow a few heavy-duty feeds, mostly involving cats and food porn). Sure enough, with a manual refresh of the feeds they would start updating every 15 minutes again.

So after it happening to me again this morning, I decided to do a bit of investigating. Checking in Scheduled Tasks, I noticed the feed updating task – User_Feed_Synchronization-{whatever} – was there, but was only set to go off once a day, which is odd as I set feeds to update way more often that that. I checked the time associate with it and it was set to trigger off after midnight TONIGHT. Nearly another full day without feed updating.

I edited the task so that after it is triggered it would repeat every hour, and thought all was fine, until I thought that I may need to set the setting in Internet Options to update every hour as well, which I did. However, I then went back to Scheduled Tasks to find that the task had been changed and set to go off in an hour. Going back and changing the update frequency also changed the time the task would trigger at. This I found to be very odd. After a manual refresh of the feeds, I went back to the task again and noticed that it had been changed so that it would trigger again in another 15 minutes. Now it was clear to me what the story was.

Now since this was only really happening with my desktop and not my laptop, since I always put that into Hibernate, rather than sleep, I went and checked it as well. Looking at the task, I can see it still has the same daily trigger as my main machine set to go off at 1am every day, but it also had a one-time trigger set to go off 15 minutes after the last update. Whether it was this one-time trigger that made it go off and update after I turned my computer back on from Hibernate, I’m not sure.

I’m not sure if it’s a fault in the way the sync program sets up the next sync in the scheduled tasks, a fault in the way the task is set to trigger, or just a fault in the fact I put my computer to sleep at night rather than having it run constantly. I do know though, that it’s fucking annoying.

• My main machine runs Windows 7 Professional RTM on 64-bit, with IE8 32-bit, and Windows Live Mail.
• My laptop runs the Windows 7 RC 32-bit, with IE8 and Windows Live Mail.

Hopefully someone in the proper know will read this and provide a better explanation and why it still does this…

So, the overall aim of this is to create a bit of a home media center, consisting mainly of the PC and my 360 (or possibly a new one if I decide not to bother repairing this shit). While it may seem simple though, I have a few plans in mind which make it fairly complex. While I normally like complications, when said complications can dictate what bits I need to buy, then it gets iffy.

So, first off is my build. You can find it on Komplett here. The majority of it is obviously for the computer itself, but the extras are to deal with the fancy bits I’m about to go into excruciating detail over. Because I am that sad, and the fact that I like to go into details. You can kill the tab now if you want, I won’t mind…

…

…

…

Still here? Good.

Some of the main omissions you may be waiting to scold me about would be the keyboard, mouse and monitor – but I’m already sorted for those with my G15, G9, and some crummy 19" widescreen thing with speakers. And I’m good for an OS for the moment since I can get Windows 7 Professional from college via the MSDNAA thingy. Or if all else fails, I still have my USB stick with the RC on it.

Anyway, my main plan is to have the PC and 360 both plugged into the one monitor I have which I can switch between much easier than having to unplug a VGA cable and plug in the other one, which is solved by the video switch. Ironically it seems to be the same type of switch that was used however long ago in the café I used to work in for the one station that had both a PC and the 360 on it… The 360 will go into the monitor’s shitty in-built speakers for the time being, while I can listen to the PC via headphones, or maybe some external speakers. Or something similar.

Here’s where it starts to get a little complicated though. For the purposes of LP’s or gameplay streams, I’d like to be able to send my 360′s output to both my monitor and an input on my computer simultaneously, so that I can play and record at the same time without having to go via the computer per se, and deal with lag and increased response time in-game. For that, I can only assume that I’d need some sort of video/audio splitter, except I have no idea what I’d need to get to sort that out…

With that sorted the mish-mash of VGA and audio cables in the back would look something like this:

• PC VGA cable -> video switch
• 360 VGA cable –> video/audio splitter
• Video/audio splitter video –> video switch
• Video/audio splitter audio –> monitor
• Video/audio splitter video/audio–> PC
• Video switch –> monitor

Also, with the house here in Dunboyne, there are Ethernet ports everywhere to hook into the Magnet fibre line. Except that there is only one port in the room nearby where I want all this stuff to be. Also, I want my PC and 360 to be on the same network so they can sync and do Media Center and all that other shit. As well, I need wireless access for my laptop in the house, y’know, just for the handiness of being able to use it anywhere in the house if needed. Plus the fact my mom likes to keep the wireless key to herself for some unknown reason. Not sure though if a normal router would do, or if I’d need an actual network switch.

All this stuff is confusing me quite a bit, which is why I’m looking for a little clarity and help from people who do know what I’m talking about as to what else I’d need to get to make this dream a reality.

Also, it can’t really be much more expensive than what it already is. I may have a good chunk in the savings account, but I’m not that well off.

Anyone?

My laptop has been upgraded quite a bit from the bog-standard, college-provided, college-locked, college-restricted etc. thing. First big change was the obvious removal of all the college pre-installed tools I’d never use, and all the protocols that were on it, such as Novell login (why on earth would I ever need that). Once I had “liberated” my machine from that, it was onto adding more RAM to make it somewhat usable (from a single pathetic gig to three). And now the latest change is to add a brand-new hard drive to it.

If you are wondering why I’d felt the need to upgrade the hard drive, it’s really because the one that came with it was a paltry 60GB that ran at 5400rpm. And also the way it was partitioned, it had 40GB for the system, programs and everything – and only 20GB for all the Documents and Settings. Which was shite given how much crap I tend to have. At one point I had about 15GB free on the system drive, and was rapidly running out of room on the data drive. De-partitioning wasn’t an option as that would have required a complete wipe…

That’s where my external hard drive came in. I started using it to install space-heavy things such as some games, my HD video source files, and other things I generally didn’t use all that much. It worked fine, except for some reason my computer suddenly stopped utilising USB2.0 speeds for it, making it much slower to use, and more of a pain than a benefit.

Which is where my new internal hard drive comes in. A new WD Scorpio Black Edition 320GB 7200rpm from Komplett to be precise. I now have both plenty of space and speed to enjoy using. Being a brand-new hard drive though, meant that everything I wanted to be on it had to be thrown on from scratch. Enter the Windows 7 RC.

Now getting Win 7 onto the drive was a pain in itself, but to get to the point, I eventually managed to hack a USB stick I had to be bootable, then put the mounted Win 7 iso files onto it and booted into the installer. Plain sailing from there, and now my computer is essentially brand new with a new drive and OS to play with.

What was this (very messy desktop, I know…)

Is now this (still a way to go, a few more programs to re-download!)

Unfortunately, one side-effect of this means I have to re-subscribe to all the feeds I had before, since I’m using IE8/Windows Live Mail to deal with feeds. I only wish the Windows Live Toolbar could also sync my feed with SkyDrive as well as my favourites… So if it looks as if I haven’t been paying much attention to your site recently, just gimme a little nudge and I’ll get you back into my feeds list

In case there are more than one of you around (which I highly doubt), I’ll need to be a bit specific. The one I’m thanking is the owner of the Netopia router Model no. 2247-02, serial number 130375633424, MAC address 00:1e:5a:fe:4a:10, running software version 7.8.0r2, whose warranty expired on the 26th of August last year, on eircom’s shit 2Mb package. Your inability to have some common sense when it comes to wireless network allowed to to enjoy performing my usual Internet tasks with less stress than the old connection my landlady gave to me.

However, I do need to point out a serious flaw in your setup. One time while randomly browsing, your broadband went down and I was sent to the home page of your router. Usually, people shouldn’t be able to get here without knowing the direct IP of the machine, and even more so they should not be able to gain access without some sort of password. Obviously, you never set one, hence the ease at which I got in.

Now from here I was considering whether to just count my blessings that I was lucky to have the connection at all, or attempt to punish you for your mistake. I decided to be lenient and merely put an admin password on your router and forced a login before you could access the router’s menu. Obviously that didn’t affect you as the uptime of the connection was as solid as before. However, several times while trying to stream web shows, or buffer YouTube videos, the connection speed degraded rather badly, and I was tempted to start adding advanced options to your router, such as password protecting the connection, or restricting connections based on MAC addresses. However, luckily they sorted themselves out before long.

But tonight, while trying to watch the latest showing of Live Time with Jon and Jory, the connection speed was unbearably slow, and the connection to the live web show was severely impacted, so much so that I missed half the show through buffering. At that point I was angry and restricted access to your router to only the MAC address of my computer. But obviously that caused some issues with you, as what was obviously your machine, connecting from the .14 IP of the subnet, was disallowed access and you began to restart the router several times over, impacting my own ability to use the Internet.

As such I relented and removed the MAC restriction on your router, and now everything seems fine again as it appears you have put that problem down to your router or broadband merely acting up. However, impacting my surfing has made me slightly annoyed and unless I find something fun on the Internet (like Total Wipeout on YouTube!) to calm me down, I will completely sabotage your router before I no longer have any more need for your connection.

I may add a connection WPA key, I may enable multiple SSIDs all unprotected, I may restrict access to all computers that don’t have a MAC address I specify, or I may just out and out balls up your router. I think that for the best relations between yourself and myself, that you just disconnect for the next 24 hours or so, and position the router so that it is as close as possible to my machine, so I can get the most out of it until I no longer have any need for it.

Maybe this will teach you to be smart with your broadband and your router in future.

Many thanks,

TheChrisD

The annoying thing about this is that it’s almost impossible to find a solution to this online… I press the power button, the main power light, num lock, scroll lock, caps lock light up for about four seconds before dying. That’s all that happens. No sounds on things trying to initialize, nothiing on the screen, no response from the DVD drive or anything.

Now it doesn’t appear to be the end of the story. I went to the Dell site to try and get some live chat tech support (using the Clubs and Socs computer) and am told to enter my Service Tag…? My wha… Trying to open the “Why do I need my Service Tag” or something like that, and I get a window telling me it doesn’t work in anything other than Internet Explorer (these comps run Firefox on ubuntu). When I eventually do find it, I get told “We do not offer support for your product”. W…T…F…?

So now not only is my computer fucked, but apparently Dell don’t give much of a shit about it. I now have to wait until I get home bbefore I can get some screwdrivers to tear this piece of crap apart and figure out what the problem really is…

Not the best way to be spending Day 4 of RAG week – sitting in a room, typing up this thing on my N810 (excuse any shitty spelling – keyboard is tiny), wondering when I’m going to be back to full operating status again…

Note: I originally had something really good here, but then I went onto a site that caused an infinite loop of tabs opening, so I had to kill IE – and for some fucking reason WP didn’t save a draft in the meantime, meaning I’ve lost nearly the entire post! I’m not rewriting it all, I’m just going to post what it did save.

The Baby Bear Wall

I did tell you I was going to get pictures of people with Baby Bear. And I didn’t lie to you (the Rick O’Shea one is from a while before, but I’m adding it anyway!). See who got caught with Baby Bear!

1326|2801280|2801332|2801287|2801338|2801305|2801299|2801293|2801335|2801302|2801290|2801308|2801320|2801329|2801296|2801311|2801323|2801317|2801314|2801284|280

The Links

The cuts at Dublin Bus have started… Well now I most definitely cannot miss the 2320 back home weekdays…

RTÉ.ie has a Web Slice! It’s a pity it’s just for the Lotto resutls, but in all fairness it’s the first mainstream website I’ve seen to offer one! Before you start asking “WTF?”, it’s an IE8 only thing

Big Liam from Games Soc has set up an Irish traditional gaming podcast with a couple of other guys – The Adventuring Party. Oisín sounds very familiar to me though… Was he the guy running the Little Wars game at Gaelcon last year?

The Pics

I think a cartain Johnathan Paula and Jory Caron would like this case mod!

Sinéad found the perfect house for a first time buyer!

The Vids

Am I sadistic in finding this funny?

The Guild – Season 2 – Episode 10: Socializing Sucks

The Links

Komplett finally take Laser! Provided you’re picking it up from them…

Remember the days when .tk domains were all the rage? Well, John wants them all to go away…

Woo, IE8 is now into the release candidate stage! Although, it’s not as fun as I found out on the BBC News site…

John says his word on the whole Shorty Awards debacle with, what I consider, the worthless stupid blonde cow that is AlohaArleen.

The Pics

…weird.

The Vids

Stephen Fry talks about Twitter and his insane follower base.

The Guild Season 2 – Episode 9: Grouping Up
My favourite bit has to be Vork yelling Bladezz

Codex (Felicia Day) from the Guild helps some American celebrity n00b make a World of Warcraft character. Thus making him even more n00by.

If the season pre-finale is anything to go by, the season finale will be boring

So, what exactly is the problem? Well, the sound records fine, thanks to a very convenient male to male cable that goes from my DS’ headphone port to my computer’s microphone port. Both Windows Movie Maker and Audacity record the audio perfectly fine (although WMM at least allows the DS to play full blast, Audacity only likes half volume…).

The video, as always, is recorded fine with my very delicate setup of camera on bits of LEGO designed to hold it in the right place for recording. Everything imports and saves fine. Everything plays perfectly fine. The only big issue is that nothing seems to want to be in sync…

I add both the movie clip and the audio track to Movie Maker, sync up the start of them, and then play through to check it out. Seems fine, but eventually a noticeable delay builds up between the video and the audio. By the end of the 6 minute video, the audio is off by about two seconds at most. I tried this process twice, once recording using Movie Maker’s Narration function, and once using Audacity. Both were out of sync, with the Audacity recording going out of sync quicker!

That’s exactly what I don’t get. How can the audio and the video be out of sync, when both were recorded simultaneously as they were being played out on my DS? Why is there a very noticeable delay between them? Am I destined to have shitty audio quality, and possibly have to remain a patient person until an emulator comes out that can support sound, behave properly with transparency, and be able to self-record itself?

I have both sets of files on me, as well as the completed fail video of the first set, if anyone wants to try it out for themselves… I’m not uploading them for public downloading, as they’re around half a gig each… I might upload the fail vid to YouTube so you can see/hear for yourselves, if it will ever stop saying there’s an unknown issue with the file…

Case – Thermaltake Black Armour

It’s a case, it really doesn’t make much of a difference what it’s like. I originally set my eyes on this particular one, and haven’t changed since.

Komplett: €138.57
Dabs: €121.27 

Power Supply – Something…

A monster machine that has a case that dosn’t have an in-built power supply means I need to get one. The more wattage the better! Unfortunately, proved to be a case of the uncompareable

Komplett: €143.01 (850W)
Dabs: €163.19 (1000W)

Motherboard – Asus P6T Deluxe+OC Palm

Now, this one did change quickly. Previously I was going for the Asus Striker II NSE, but with the advent of LGA Socket 1366, that changed things a bit. For about half an hour. Then I decided cheap is still good. The other problem was that dabs didn’t have the NSE, only the Extreme, which doesn’t take quad-core. So, had to go find a new one… Which meant going back to the 1366 stuff.

Komplett: €406.00
Dabs: €298.90

Processor – Intel Core i7 Quad Processor i7-920

Well, given I’m moving into Socket-1366, the old Q6600 is useless. Which means I’m now going for the i7-920 – the cheapest of all of them! At 2.66Ghz, it beats the Q6600

Komplett: €282.00
Dabs: €271.29

RAM – OCZ Platinum XTC DDR3 1333MHz 6GB

The i7 processor, means I now need some triple-channel memory, which actually severely limits my options. I can either get Corsair CL9, or OCZ CL7. Which wins? CL7, duh…

Komplett: €165.00
Dabs: €186.39

Hard Drives – Western Digital 1TB Caviar Black 7200rpm 32MB

It’s a hard drive, duh. Although finding one that both places stocked and nearly agreed on the product number was hard…

Komplett: €125.00
Dabs: €107.38

Graphics Card – nVidia GTX 260 of some sort

The main problem with graphics cards are the amount of manufacturers out there making them. As such finding a match was hard. So here’s a comparison of the Gigabyte version (GV-N26OC-896H-B)

Komplett: €264.51
Dabs: €252.36

Monitor – Samsung 24″ Wide SM2443BW

I originally had my eyes on a 22″ version, but decided to go for a 24″ one anyway. This particularone has both VGA and DVI, whereas a cheaper version has only VGA. That’s it really.

Komplett: €289.00
Dabs: €241.16

Optical Drive – LG Electronics 22X DVD-RW/RAM IDE Lightscribe

It’s a DVD writer drive… woo…

Komplett: €29.12
Dabs: €19.44

OS – Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit OEM

It’s Windows. Big surprise there…

Komplett: €194.00
Dabs: €168.98

Delivery

Komplett quotes €60.22
Dabs quotes €34.95

Grand Total

Komplett: €2221.43
Dabs: €1972.21

Dabs works out around €250 cheaper for an ever so slightly more powerful build than Komplett. Some items, such as the graphics card, were very similar in price, while others such as the motherboard had a huge price difference (and yes I did make sure they were the same thing!).

As for delivery, well I can’t say much about either. They’ll both come eventually. Komplett have the niche in that I can get it delivered to near Blanchardstown for €7.50 to be picked up, but in this case that might not be as helpful.

In conclusion, I think we can safely assume that my original bookmark for Komplett has been replaced with one for Dabs.

PS: I hate you, Daniel…

• Wireless router, or failing that, just a router.
• Monster gaming PC rig, with as powerful an nVidia based graphics card as I can get for it.
• Huge (around 24″ or 1920×1200 resolution) widescreen monitor for said gaming rig.
• A smaller widescreen monitor for Xbox 360. Bought 15/1

A 19″ (1440×900 – WSXGA) widescreen monitor with some fairly crappy in-built speakers for my 360. It was €180 in PC World, and although I may have got a better deal online, I wasn’t bothered. :/

• One of those fancy Xbox headsets that play both the console sound and the Xbox Live chat.
• VGA-enabled capture card device for recording 360 using PC.
• Gerwehr-3 AEG Airsoft Rifle, with ACOG scope, suppresor, extra mags and all the other general gun mods
• P228/Desert Eagle Airsoft side arm and etc. etc.
• Companion phone with mobile broadband contract for my N810 Internet tablet.

I suppose that’s all I can think of for now… I may add to this list later on, or even throughout the year, but I highly doubt it