ACM Queue - Game Development: Harder Than You Think - makes me think writing games shouldn't be too hard, all you need is a really poor ide [and a big plan]

Animals on the Underground

8x dvd 66inc . socket a mobo 16.44inc . palm 3xe 38inc

BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Film | Gibson's Passion overshadows Oscars Gibson admits it's violent. But the interesting thing here is that "Gibson's film has provoked protest..." - there's a picture of people protesting outsite - saying it's fiction etc. You don't get people outside "Knightmare on Elm Street" saying "This film is fiction" etc... so why the big uproar?

Daily papers here in the UK so far have been pretty scathing. The Mirror thinks the film is sick. (way overly violent, with made up extra violent bits), a church is Denver Colorado put up a bit sign saying "Jews killed Jesus Christ" flaming the anti-semistism that the film is accused of...

iPodlounge | All Things iPod they take apart an ipod mini - so you can see the insides, which basically contain a screen, battery, and a 4gb Hitachi microdrive. (doesnt' sound right, I still think it should be called an IBM microdrive)

Financial Freedom Secrets a book you can buy.

There's a new magazine out, currently issue 2 - Retro Gamer. Looked at it in WHSmith, looked cool. subscribe for £35, and get a free namco home arcade games thing (normally £25! only has 5 games so you wouldn't actually want to buy it yourself). Alternatively, do what every other bloke seems to do, and read it in your lunchtime at WHSmith, and play the games on-line. while we're on the subject: WotR - Eugene Jarvis bought me a pint. The History of Llamasoft written by the main man Jeff Minter himself.

Fujifilm Q1 Digitial 2mp, £64 pixmania (who require faxed confirmation of address after you've placed the order - and after they've taken the money before they will post anything to you!!!!) and about half the size of the Fujifilm Q1 is the "Shotz 2600" 2MP (Shotz Imaging - Model Shotz MS-2600 - neat thing about this one apart from it being TINY, is that it does sound with vids) in jessops for £80 (now on their site) and microwarehouse used to have it for £61 inc vat. (like this and this but not marketed as 3mp when it's only 2mp - and not overpriced like those ones) - if you can find a review of either of these cameras anywhere - I'll be very impressed!

WINAMP.COM | Player Winamp 5 is available from winamp.com but I want Winamp 2! :( luckily you can still get it from download.com. Winamp 2 plays AVI files and displays the frame rate whilst you play it, whereas Winamp5 didn't want to play AVI files when I just tried it.

57% and 44% better in dual and single configs respectively HP report shows Opteron servers beat Intel servers.

Fujifilm introduces entry-level FinePix A120 3MP better pictures here. (uses CCD, not superCCD).

Slashdot | MS May Be Forced To Sell Stripped-Down OS In EU..

It's a passionate film. It's also a bloodbath. Brutality engulfs Mel Gibson's vision of the Crucifixion. sounds a bit over the top in violence. (according to this review)
Truth and fiction of 'Passion' / Gibson film goes beyond Bible to tell story of Jesus' crucifixion: "While it's not mentioned in the press handouts, Gibson has told interviewers that he was heavily influenced by a 19th century book of visions, 'The Dolorous Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ,' by Anne Catherine Emmerich, a German nun and mystic. "

Life for Tube platform murderer
I completely misread that headline. Thought he was going to start a new life. Or that they were going to renovate the Tube platform.

Slashdot | US Army Scraps Comanche Helicopter
Quite a surprising move! Just the other day there was some tv proggy on helicopters and the comanche looked pretty advanced as opposed to the black hawk helicopters which are famous for films such as "black hawk down" and for being shot down a fair few times in the most recent iraqi war.

schools: invasion of privacy or legitimate policing? and freedom of expression or 'unsafe' religious beliefs?

Hitachi Deskstar drive 'meows' during drive check don't buy Hitachi hard drives. They make meow noises.

The Passion of the Christ shows the last 12 hours of Jesus' life, and is to be released in the US on Wednesday.

Canon A300 ebay buy now £90 bargain £5 postage. There's others on there for £100 buy now if you don't get this one... (although with less favourable postage charges) cheapest on net new is around £122/125 inc postage. (see dealtime.co.uk) and i can't believe nobody bid on this 1.3mp one which was only £35, which retails for about £70/80 at play/firebox.com

BBC - Music - Dance
ok and if you did happen to win, but can't be bothered with the whole 'using a computer, downloading itunes, install, buy music' thing, these people will go and buy a bit of music from one of their less mainstream artists, where the artist gets a bigger slice of the dollar.

BBC NEWS | Scotland | Asylum seekers stitch up mouths

If you haven't heard, pepsi in America are giving away free itunes tracks, with one in three bottles being a winner.. just find the caps that say 'you win' or whatever. anyway. turns out it's pretty easy to spot the winners before you purchase. search for pepsi tilt for more info. see!

Digital video frees film-makers: "the imaginative use of consumer video cameras could allow more independent film-makers to compete with the big studios for those precious box-office dollars.. With a price tag of just $2,500 apiece, 25 x Panasonic DVX-100 [mini dv] cameras .. film shoot of just 15 days ..

Nutrigrain (feel great) very funny mentalist advert !
smash your pc virtual style.
did i mention this eyegrow game last week? hmm?
this guy wants to teach americans how to make tea.

BBC NEWS | Politics | 'Slow recovery' after race riots: "Conservative leader Michael Howard, in a speech in Burnley, said he wants to confront the British National Party head on and expose their 'bigotry and hatred'. "

joshwaller.tk new photos from the liverpool real ale festival that we went to last night. www.thelittlefoxes.co.uk a new domain that i've bought (only �4.68! for 2 years) watch out for all the little foxes...

Misery continues as rain returns with vengence
.. well perhaps I like my mysery.

Slashdot | Intel 64-bit Announcements at IDF Xeon-class 64-bit server CPUs codenamed Nocona will be coming out the second half of 2004.

foxton famous.

Don't you get a warm fuzzy feeling deep down when you see people from nelson making it into the national news.

Brit awards 2004

British Male Solo Artist - Daniel Bedingfield;
British Female Solo Artist - Dido;
MasterCard British Album - The Darkness, Permission to Land;
British Group - The Darkness;
British Single - Dido, White Flag; British Rock Act - The Darkness;
British Urban Act - Lemar;
British Dance Act - Basement Jaxx;
British Breakthrough Artist - Busted;
Pop Act - Busted;
International Male Solo Artist - Justin Timberlake;
International Female Solo Artist - Beyonce;
International Album - Justin Timberlake, Justified;
International Group - White Stripes;
International Breakthrough Artist - 50 Cent;
Outstanding Contribution to Music - Duran Duran.

--
NME awards 2004:

Best Radio Show: Zane Lowe
Best New Band (supported by Radio 1): Kings Of Leon
Best Video (supported by MTV2): Radiohead - 'There There'
Best Single: The White Stripes - '7 Nation Army'
Best Film: 'Lord Of The Rings - Return Of The King'
Rock And Roll Man Of The Year: Har Mar Superstar
Best Live Band (supported by Carling): Queens Of The Stone Age
Living Legend: Arthur Lee
Philip Hall Radar Award: Franz Ferdinand
Best Event: Glastonbury
The F*ck Me! Award For Innovation: Dizzee Rascal
Best International Band (supported by 4Music): Kings Of Leon
Best TV Show: The Office
Rock 'N' Roll Woman Of The Year: Brody Dalle
Best UK Band (supported by BPI): The Libertines
Best Album (supported by Virgin Megastores): Radiohead - 'Hail To The Thief'
Godlike Genius: Ozzy Osbourne

basement jaxx are quite nice. I think there was some fairly tough competition though.

Prison numbers reach record high : book now, only 600 places remaining.
"Last year the Prison Reform Trust said tough sentencing by judges, rather than a rise in crime, had led to the record prison population. "
"It [almost??] emerged last year that the proportion of people in prison in England and Wales was the highest in the whole of western Europe.
Home Office figures showed that for every 100,000 people, some 139 are imprisoned - which is more than in Libya, Malaysia and Burma."
"In another illustration of this state of affairs, figures published last week showed that motorists who commit an offence are actually more likely than burglars to receive a prison sentence. In 2002, 10,178 burglars went to jail, compared with 15,039 motorists. Two-thirds of motorists were incarcerated for minor offences such as a non-payment of fines or careless driving."

Burglaries: becoming more common and more violent, here's some advice.

Win98 Service Pack: "UNOFFICIAL Windows98 Second Edition Service Pack 1.1 (Freeware)

Microsoft has never released a service pack for Windows98 SE. But I made a Service Pack for Windows98 SE users. It contains all Windows98 SE updates from Windows Update site and more."

Also includes Defrag and Scandisk from Windows ME - which are way quicker than the Win98 one. Don't know how legal this is, but the defrag really is way quicker.

Honda ASIMO vs Sony QRIO - which one would win? I reckon QRIO, because even though he's smaller, he'd have an army of robot dogs. It's Robocop all over again I tell ya, with that big robot that kills everyone in that board room - or is that Terminator?

before computers got boring

HEXUS.net Forums - Data Protection and TV Licenses some interesting stuff here. Detector Vans are nonsense apparently. "4. There are a number of very high profile court cases ongoing at the moment, and should any of them win, the TV license will be declared illegal and incompatible with human rights laws. The cases I'm aware of are Jonathan Miller (millionaire sunday times columnist), the "Liverpool Six", Jim Marmot (this guy spent 10 years of his life researching law for the purposes of abolishing the TV license!!!), and some Russian guy."

Digital Deluxe Toolbox remove noise / grain etc.

Digital Dream Quantum 3.2 interpolates to 6.6MP - so does a 1.3MP camera if you want it to. doesn't mean the pictures are any good. in fact you could interpolate it to 10mp, or more, it'll still look just as good or bad as the original 3.2MP image. i can't believe digital camera manufactures have the gall to market their cameras at the interpolated resolution. even Fuji's super CCD "interpolates to 6/12mp" is fairly bad - because in the S5000 review (on dpreview for example), they conclude that the 3MP resolution is no better than other 3MP cameras... anyway, doesn't really matter i suppose :)

http://www.unblinking.com/
"UnBlinking finds data no one else will - data few folks can find, and even fewer try to find. The internet offers an astonishing amount of information on any topic. However, even though dozens of huge public search engines exist, few people know how to find data online. We know how."

MSN to ban pop-up adds "Microsoft's net arm, MSN, is to scrap pop-up ads on most global sites after realising they annoy web surfers." well duh, isn't this obvious? (and hasn't it been obvious ever since pop-up adds were first invented?)

eBay - FUJICA STX-1 35mm SLR inc lots of lenses etc! Forget digital, want to buy an SLR camera?

VIA Technologies, Inc. press release in case you hadn't read about it yet - VIA have delevoped some new "eden" processors (although these ones are based on the faster "nehemiah" core (with full speed FPU)) that are designed to be passively cooled. The exciting bit, they're going to be released at 800mhz and 1000mhz (1ghz - max 7watts!). So you'll no longer need to replace the heatsink on VIA epia boards to acheive a passively cooled pc, you'll be able to buy them pre-passified so to speak.

KING KONG : DON'T MESS WITH THE MONKEY: "began as an audition piece for Eden Phillips. After adapting some scenes from Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh's 1996 King Kong screenplay, the natural appeal of the Kong story attracted more and more enthusiastic volunteers who generously gave of their time to make Kong a rich, funny short film." free download of completed filum. 85mb 10minute film.

WHERE – KONG: Don't Mess with the Monkey was shot entirely at the Piha Falls, (Kite Kite Track), Auckland, New Zealand with the kind permission of Waitakere City Council.

Slashdot | Desktop Linux Share Overtaking Macintosh aww poor apple, linux becoming more popular say stats. but you can use stats to prove anything

Reuters | Latest Financial News / Full News Coverage: "When poured in, they said, spheres occupy about 64 percent of the space in a container. M&Ms manage to pack in at a density of about 68 percent.
'We just stretched a sphere and suddenly things changed dramatically,' said Torquato. 'To me, it's remarkable that you can take this simple system with common candies and probe one of the deepest problems in condensed matter physics.'"

Intel Pentium 4 spanks Apple Mac G5: "Rob Galbraith's Digital Photography Insights concluded that in 58 out of 77 tests, the PC was faster"

BBC News (6pm + 10pm) is funny. Man in jail says it's not nice enough story here (in other stories, it says how witnesses were shot etc... so he's not a very nice man). Hair extensions could be from Russian Prisons and Mental Institutes. A man wins 20,000 something in compensation for getting a lego figure for 3yrs service at legoland (he found it offensive). And to top that all off, on the 6 o'clock news, just as a large woman leaves a building behind the presenter, the presenter says "Fat chance of that..."

Konica Minolta DiMAGE Z2: Digital Photography Review this camera does 800x600 movies at 15fps (as well as 640x480 @30fps) Lots of other new cameras announced, see dpreview.com

eEye Digital Security list of security issues not resolved by Microsoft. First 2 are the Windows NT OS's (NT4,w2k,XP etc)

Very very cool video 10mb wmv dudes hook up remote control stuff to a 1982 Toyota Camry and then drive it around the desert fully remote controlled. Very Very cool video.

i've been looking at a 3MP image produced by a Canon PowerShot A300 and comparing it to a 6MP image produced by a Fuji A303 (3MP Super CCD) that produces 6MP images.

Personally, I thought the 3MP Canon image was better than the 6MP Fuji image resized down (using "bicubic" in fireworks) to the same size as the Canon image - and I thought the 6MP Canon image (resized in fireworks, using "bicubic") looked better than the 6MP Interpolated Fuji image. Both of the Canon images looked sharper / clearer - with better colour.

You can look at a 3MP image from a Fuji A210 using standard CCD here if you want to compare that to the Fuji Super CCD for a more fair comparison. There seems to be little difference between the A303 6MP image and a resized to 6MP (bicubic) Fuji A210 image - the only noticable difference seems to be what looks like jpeg artifacts, and less detail picked up by the a210. (the Canon a300 seems to have the clearest image of all) - A noisier image seems to have been produced by both the Fuji's noticable on the roof in the pictures.

What You Should Know About the Windows Security Updates for February 2004 new security updates effecting all NT based operating systems. apparently MS knew about some of these security risks about 6 months ago, but didn't release any fixes till now...

BBC NEWS | Business | Nokia seizes control of Symbian Nokia now own 63% of Symbian, which was pretty much Psion's most interesting product since they killed the Psion 5 etc.

Map24 - online route planner and interactive street maps for UK and Europe Map24 rocks.
BBC NEWS | World | Asia-Pacific | Diver flees with shark attached
Dialect archive put on t'internet yorkshire folks dialect. quick someone write about lancashire dialect, such as t'internet, and divda (dvd), and filum (film).
don't accidentally glue your daughters eye shut when you're meant to be giving medication by drops.
Barry the Lurve Hamster when words aren't enough :)

BBC NEWS | Technology | Apple investigates iPod batteries - let me see. I replaced my old mobile phone battery (that was at least 3 years old) for 12 pound the other month. Apple should have known how to design a product with an easily removable battery (IMHO).
and also: another microsoft severe security vulnerability, that doesn't affect windows 98 or windows nt 4 (if you've not had any patches applied). see the bbc news front page for that.

Canon have released a whole load of new cameras. canon a310 (with 32mb CF) (claims to have 30secs of vga video as a new feature - even though this is a feature of the a300 (with 16mb CF)) may mean the a300 comes down in price though?

Polaroid have realesed a 1.5mp/4.5mp digital camera which uses the cool Foveon technology. I wonder who this is actually made by, because in the press release it says "polaroid brand" - but concord claim to manufacture polaroid branded cameras as well, and che-ez also have links to polaroid. so much for "brand" name eh? there's cheap polaroid digital cameras in argos, tony had one and it wasn't that good, so polaroid (is this you?*) seem to be doing themselves no favours by letting any tom, dick or harry make camera's with their name on them... (personally it just annoys me that they do this, i'd prefer it if the actual manufacturers name was on it, like Canon, Fuji, who actually make their own cameras, because then you have a better idea whether it's actually going to be any good or not)

* note the disclaimer: Polaroid does not manufacture this product or provide product warranty or support., it is provided by World Wide Licenses Ltd.

How long till you can buy these cameras after they've been annouced?

dcp-systems Geniune Fractals 3.0 - Adobe Photoshop (and elements) plug-in will allow you to enlarge low-resolution digital images without pixelation... "retaining the photographic integrity of the original image without pixelation" so perhaps, as image processing develops, even a 1.3mp digital camera will be able to produce high quality 2mp/3mp/4mp images...

i was going to mention something. then i forgot. oh yeah. Garageband: On the front page of www.apple.com they have hot news headlines: "Garageband is a terrific tool for amateur musicians" - wall street journal and then the review says:
"Also, Steve discovered considerable latency, or delays, between key presses and the actual sound when he tried using an expensive professional synthesizer keyboard as a real instrument. Apple insists this is a characteristic of the keyboard, not of GarageBand.
By far the biggest downside to GarageBand is that it can easily push the capabilities of the Mac to the limit. If you have a lot of tracks, and use lots of customizing effects in the tracks, GarageBand posts scary error messages saying "System Overload" or telling you that your processor or hard disk are too slow to play the song. Both Steve and I got these messages on new PowerBook laptops Apple lent us for the tests, even when we were only playing the sample songs Apple includes with GarageBand.
You can get rid of these messages by changing some system settings, especially on laptops, to turn off power-saving options that slow down the hard disk and processor. GarageBand itself has an obscure setting that will improve performance, at the risk of some slower response time. By tweaking these settings, we were able to use the program without the error messages."
.. not exactly a good advertisement for apple computers in general or this product..

north korea. kills and tortures it's people, is facing starvation due to mismanaged money, is very odd, is facing economic crisis, is complete with a different version of historical events to the rest of the world, and lacking electricity apparently because america won't let them built nuclear power plants.

crikey dpreview get's 9million visits a month! 9 million. that works out at roughly 300,000 a day (for a 30 day month)! that's just mental that is. Super CCD vs "bayer" CCD vs CMOS etc updated slightly.

Patriot seem to be suing anyone and everyone who uses microchips that go faster than 120mhz! Ars Technica: Intel OEM customers being sued for breaking the 120MHz barrier: "The company started targeting Intel's business partners in late 2003, suing the likes of Sony, Toshiba, and NEC for making products that purportedly infringe upon Patriot Scientific's patents."

Amazon.co.uk: Canon PowerShot A60 Digital Camera [2MP 3xOptical] £99 that's a good price for a Canon (2mp / 3x optical). (30quid cheaper than anywhere else)

Olympus C-220 (2MP 3x OPT) pixmania (+ £9 postage) £86 - good price for a 2mp/3x Opt Olympus.

Fuji A205 (2MP 3x OPT) pixmania (+ £9 postage) £85 - good price for a 2mp, 3x opt Fuji.

more digital cameras. I was beginning to think that 2004 would be the year of the 3MP digital camera as the lowest MP available, but Nikon have announced a new 2200 (2MP / 3x OPT) camera!

SCO filed IBM case 'on a hunch' "SCO told the judge that it was "literally impossible" to prove the infringement unless they could see IBM's code first." ha ha. there was somewhere else that said that the judge said that SCO had to release there code first for this to go anywhere (which was something that SCO didn't want to do).

the anthony nolan famous for a day. And at midnight tonite the research pages get updated.

Lemon Jelly nice music. very nice flash website.

Fujifilm FinePix A330 and A340 Zoom: Digital Photography Review Fuji announce new A330 (3MP normal CCD) and A340 (4MP normal CCD) digital cameras (new design too), which answers my questions posted previously - why don't Fuji do 4mp cameras? Super CCD stuff only seems to be available in 3MP and 6MP (and 1MP for camera phones). Fuji must still believe normal CCD is good stuff...

The Casio QV R51 reviewed here looks like a good 5MP, 2" TFT, 3x optical zoom digital camera. Don't think it's in the shops yet though.

if you've got a webcam, why not go over to joshwaller.tk and try out flashcom.

eBay it FUJIYA 6.6MP DIGICAM blatant rip-off of the Fuji / Fujifilm name - surprised that you're allowed to do that... also it's a 3.3MP CMOS sensor yet people keep on "marketing" them for the interpolated resolution they produce.

BBC NEWS | World | Americas | Surgery for baby with second head
BBC NEWS | England | Kent | Terror task for screaming champ
BBC NEWS | England | Devon | Hotel boss in hot water
Enzine.net > Random - Chem Exam
Spyware cures may cause more harm: ZDNet
Band bites back on behalf of 'criminalised' music buyers
relaxing submarine macromedia game

First ever VIA EPIA TC10000 review now on-line, written by yours truly :)

Its been a weird week: don't try this at home kids - man posts himself to his parents house in a crate. exploding tyre makes 25 year old fly. speed cameras blown up 75 year old woman threatened with pair of scissors: "It is shocking for someone to attack an elderly woman, but even more so in Barnstaple where this sort of thing is highly unusual."
superloo explodes in stoke, and goldfish saved from m1 near leicester.

Windows XP 64-Bit Edition for 64-Bit Extended Systems Customer Preview Program - SCO Receives Poisonous Reception at Ivy - the "SCO Group took its intellectual property challenge of Linux to Harvard on Monday and received a cold reception from area students opposed to the company's legal tactics."

dude pretends to hack up a G5 mac to put a pc in then all the mac dudes send over a 1000 hate mails (Wired News: Create a Hoax, Earn Damnation)... you can always rely on the mac community to be fruitcakes and strangley obsessively biased etc.

GameCube-Linux - Run Linux on your GameCube!

Dilbert.com! todays dilbert seems to be topically in relation to the new Intel Prescott chip. (which is new and slower) alternatively it could be in relation to nvidia etc. here's a game i found funny shake the tree

Netadelica: Invaders 78 space invaders - still excellent :)

Praktica DCZ 1.3 S Mini-Review with sample pictures etc. got this off ebay for 36quid - and it's surprisingly small and the quality of pictures is better than I expected. (there's lots of photos in the gallery taken with it)

BBC NEWS | UK | Church organists behaving badly

one in ten workers are incompetent: (working link)
"A total of 11% of workers were classed by their employers as "incompetent" at their current jobs - equivalent to 2.4 million people"

HEXUS.net : Review : Intel Pentium 4 3.2GHz Prescott, 3.4GHz Northwood and 3.4GHz Northwood Extreme Edition : Page - 9/9: "The evil blot on the horizon is Intel's policy of gaining clock speed by lowering the CPU's work accomplished per clock cycle." Remember when the P4 came out and it was slower than the P3 clock for clock - well the Pentium 4 "prescott" is doing the same thing, they've increased the pipeline length so they can clock it to a higher MHz...