Friday, July 30, 2004

Samsung 21" monitor 0.20dpi dynaflat black £129 inc vat! at ebuyer.com
Minolta Dimage F200 4MP 3x Zoom (not F100, F300) UK For Sale.
preparingforemergencies.co.uk preparingforemergencies.gov.uk spot the difference. co.uk: "Under the category of "General advice about what to do in an emergency" readers are instructed to "Remain calm and think before acting, and try to reassure others. Or, trample them in a desperate attempt to flee as the building you're in is consumed by a radioactive cloud"." bbc news article about it.
BBC NEWS | World | Europe | Lazy joke lands author in trouble

Thursday, July 29, 2004

cyrkam airt game. breaking pcs stories on slashdot
www.hardwarezone.com :: Articles - Coolest Hardware, Hottest Reviews Did you know AMD have a new "budget" version of the Athlon 64 called the AMD Sempron !! Sempron! Latin translation Semper = Always - so it's vaguely "Always On". Personally I think it's a naff name - too similar to Celeron, it should be something completely different like "AMD Aardvark" or "AMD Good".
The BBC : Killings by pirates on the rise || kuro5hin.org

Wednesday, July 28, 2004

identity cards and the weaknesses of biometric records.. I wonder whether I'm a luddite. or a pessimist. or what it is, not scepticism, like when you expect something to go wrong, not because you have no confidence in the people managing the large projects, but because they just dont see how its all part of the same project : DVLA | NHS records | congestion charging records | police records | jobseeker and inland revenue / national insurance records | passports | electoral roll
8 more years of analogue tv. hurrah (I dont need a new tv card / video recorder for a while)
unrelated link
At the moment, and this might just be me, but, in general, I think I'm mostly happy about the way this country is.
Which is a really broad statement. And it probably means I'm burying my head in the sand and ignoring some blindingly obvious stuff.
If you could say what bothers you, what's most important, what you would change, if you could..
What's the most important thing you'd want to see done to change the country you live in?
10240 processors.
I'm rated 96000th out of 5million seti at home users.
940 million internet users..
Seems like about 20 million people have faster computers than me.
I just wonder how many people can be convinced to buy even faster ones.. whether 2% market share for apple means they'd expect to sell 400,000 apples every year.
No I'm wrong: Apple shipped 876 thousand Macintosh® units ... during the quarter .. that's 3million computers every year that are faster than mine ;-)
(yeah i know its just random waffle .. looks like there are more fast computers in the real world that don't do seti, and more slower computers that have been doing seti, but not working as hard at it.)
DigiCamReview.co.uk: 6 New Fujifilm Finepix Cameras 3 of them look pretty ugly to me. New versions of the S3000 (6x optical), and S5000 (10x optical) - they both get bumped up to 4mp normal CCD.

Tuesday, July 27, 2004

BBC NEWS | UK | ACPO bans police from joining BNP: "Mr Fox said: 'Under this policy, no member of the police service, whether police officer or police staff, may be a member of an organisation whose constitution, aims, objectives or pronouncements contradict the general duty to promote race equality.
'This specifically includes the British National Party."

- not being funny, but surely racism is 'noticing that someone else is different to you and then deciding that you don't like them because of it' Its a bit like 'gingerism' but not really the same as 'football supporterism' but I mean the northern ireland situation is basically not racism, it could be alled accentism (maybe) and religionism, but you'd probably not want people who hated one side and loved the other to necessarily be in your police force.

Any thoughts??
Yakumo Announces Affordable Digicams 4mp, 3x optical for €99 euros (looks like an old samsung with same spec), and a 6mp, 3x optical camera for €199 euros!
BBC NEWS | Entertainment | TV and Radio | Knight Rider car goes to auction
sold out: ipod

Monday, July 26, 2004

My mate Damon withdrew all his savings once to buy a car. It was like $2000 nz and he had it all in cash in his wallet. In the tunnel under the motorway on his way home there were 3 teenage kids comming the other way. They said "Give us all your money or we'll beat you up."

What did he do? Was it the right thing ;)
google.com is broken! (Server Error - The service you requested is not available at this time. - Service error -27.) yahoo.com works but mainly gives you shops as the results, altavista works. What other search engines are there?
Atari 13-in-1 Two-Player Paddles
Some more bargains at amazon.co.uk: Amazon.co.uk: Electronics & Photo: Kodak LS633 Digital Camera [3MP 3xOptical] £99, Olympus C-220 ZOOM Camedia Digital Camera [2MP 3xOptical] £69.99, Pentax Optio 33LF Digital Camera [3MP 3xOptical] £99.

Saturday, July 24, 2004

Win a Centon DC5 - 5mp digital camera Jessops - Parliament Prints simply vote for your favourite photo on this page!

Wednesday, July 21, 2004

£1,901.00 - Daihatsu Hijet panel van - white
9 days - white Dahatsu Hijet panel van
Sony DSC-P150, 7 megapixel: Digital Photography Review new 7mp digicam from sony! and 6 new cameras from panasonic, 3 with 12x optical zoom and image stabilisation (3,4,5mp), and 2 small digital cameras with image stabilisation and 3x optical zoom (4,5mp), and another 5mp digital camera.

Tuesday, July 20, 2004

Big brother is watching your surfing "[But] anyone who repeatedly tries to access sites may become subject to police investigations and dealt with very firmly."

Related article with nice flawed logic, "We try to stop the supply of images and, through the industry, the demand can be stopped." Any one remember the laws of supply and demand from 3rd form economics? Supply can be stopped, demand can't.

Related link Internet Watch Foundation. Interesting to note I got a request timed out when I tried it. Maybe they're under attack from pornographers?
"Two software developers have opted to take very different approaches to the lack of security in Internet Explorer: one has decided to join Microsoft, the other to beat them." Really? "As security software developer Winferno launches an add-on that fills IE's security gaps, UK-based Deepnet Technologies has decided the time is right to release a rival to IE called Deepnet Explorer." Really? Really? Really?
 
From deepnetexplorer forum "Do you have to have IE also?" "Deepnet is using IE as its underlying browser technology... [snip] ...  They've basically developed a program which wraps IE and extends its functionalitiy."

Monday, July 19, 2004

Fascinating fact:
What is the circumference of the earth?
The circumference of the earth at the equator is 24,901.55 miles (40,075.16 kilometers).
But, if you measure the earth through the poles the circumference is a bit shorter - 24,859.82 miles (40,008 km). This the earth is a tad wider than it is tall, giving it a slight bulge at the equator. This shape is known as an ellipsoid or more properly, geoid (earth-like)."
If a diesel van does 40mpg, and diesel costs 3pound 61 a gallon, it costs 2247 pounds to drive around the world. So its quite a bit cheaper to fly.
Statistics have shown most of the drivers killed last year were driving high-powered motorbikes in good weather on Sunday afternoons. link ...18 bikers had died on north Wales' roads, the highest annual total ever.
I guess then that riding in the rain at night on little bikes may seem more dangerous, but really its more fun.

Saturday, July 17, 2004

at the moment there seem to be loads of 10x optical zoom digital cameras - as we're going to NZ soon, i think it would be really cool to get one... which would you recommend?
 
3mp:
minolta Z1 (cheapest from £185)
fuji s5000 (around £210)
canon S1 IS (image stabilisation - which is very useful for such a long zoom - around £330?)
 
4mp
minolta Z2 (around £245)
olympus C765 (very small from £240?)
olympus C770 (same as 765 but metal body, black, from £360?)
 
or should I wait for the Minolta Z3 - a 12x optical zoom lens with image stabilisation - and should I see if I could get it while we're in singapore for cheap? (it should be cheaper than the large Panansonic Lumix DMC FZ10 (12x image stabilisation, 4mp, from £350) hopefully - review)

edit - there's also the Kyocera Finecam M410R (review - 4mp) from £283, but i'm not very interested in this as I don't think the extra cost over the other's is justified, plus it's much larger. There's also a Premier based on the Toshiba PDR-M700 (3mp) for about £199, but I don't think it's worth the risk. (ebay search)

Wednesday, July 14, 2004


This is the insides of a 2mp digital camera, on the right (detached) is the lens, and the bit in the middle of the circle is the 2mp cmos sensor - I was wondering - if you put a fresh lens on the front - would you be able to use a much better lens? Posted by Hello

Monday, July 12, 2004

SSC Service Utility for Epson Stylus Printer. Sneaky Epson printers, they count how many times you printed with an ink cartridge, and then stop you from using it, they also count how many times you've cleaned your cartridges, too much and your printer will stop. This clever program lets you reset all those counters, so you can keep on going! Plus it does other clever stuff too! :)
Digital Chosunilbo (English Edition) : Daily News in English About Korea: "Samsung Introduces 3 Million Pixel Resolution Camera Phone" - with a 3x Optical Zoom lens from Pentax!

Saturday, July 10, 2004

Mozilla Flaw Lets Links Run Arbitrary Programs: "Updated: The Mozilla Foundation has confirmed findings that its Mozilla and Firefox browsers are vulnerable to attacks using the 'shell:' scheme, which execute arbitrary code under Windows without the user having to click a link." - This flaw is mainly due to Windows, rather than Mozilla/Firefox - but they've patched it anyway. (patch here)

Thursday, July 08, 2004

Fahrenheit 9/11 is definitely worth watching. Yes it's biased, and anti-bush, but with very good reason. WMD may never be found admits Tony Blair, CIA Staff blamed for flawed Iraq data, 11-13 thousand civilians killed in Iraq War, Al-Qaeda had only limited ties with Iraq: 9/11 panel (they used the link as another reason to attack Iraq), US removes uranium from Iraq (without UN approval), but leaves some (400 tonnes) behind ("natural uranium is still dangerous and could be used in a nuclear weapons program or sold to somebody that would misuse it")

Monday, July 05, 2004

Security statistics show surprising finds: "The Micorsoft Windows application is more secure than you think, and Mac OS X is worse than you ever imagined. That is according to statistics published for the first time this week by Danish security firm Secunia." "The proportion of critical bugs was also comparable with other software - 33% of the OS X vulnerabilities were "highly" or "extremely" critical by Secunia's reckoning, compared with 30% for XP Professional and 27% for SLES 8 and just 12% for Advanced Server 3. OS X had the highest proportion of "extremely critical" bugs at 19%."
"Companies may have to make big changes to their desktop and web site strategies after US government security body Cert last week advised users to consider abandoning Microsoft's Internet Explorer (IE) browser." link
The server is having a cuppa tea, bog off. Hotmail is rubbish. FACT. Anyone want a gmail invite? If so, put your email address in the comments box.

Saturday, July 03, 2004

apple ipod tune the other one is "the vines - ride". On the subject of "new" music, does anyone have any recommendations? Most 'recent' stuff I've thought: "Cool! Must buy!" are System of a Down, and Mull Historical Society.

and the fuji refurb shop have some good deals on digital cameras. and funny saddam hussein thing with a double yew tee eff bit in the middle.
Headline news from Sky News - Witness the event: "The prison helper already performs the role for other inmates at the top-security Belmarsh jail, and has earned the nickname Dirty Harry."
"We rang Mike Tait, Jersey's public relations manager. 'There's no law against gay couples sharing rooms,' he insisted. 'You might get the odd proprietor who is a fascist or a redneck, but there's not much we can do about that.'" Guardian Unlimited | The Guardian | Nice place, unless you're gay: "A gay couple have been refused a double room in a Scottish guesthouse."
BBC NEWS | Magazine | This man wrote down his every thought - why?, and can you believe no daleks in the next Dr. Who!?
Unfairenheit 9/11 - The lies of Michael Moore. By Christopher Hitchens quite an interesting and seemingly balanced look at the contradictions within the film. If you've seen bowling for columbine - you'll find this interesting about Moore: "But then, this is the guy who thought it so clever and amusing to catch Charlton Heston, in Bowling for Columbine, at the onset of his senile dementia."

Friday, July 02, 2004

lightertricks.com - fun with zippos (background)
MSN Search (web address: uk.search.msn.com) is now much cleaner. but who'd gonna go to uk.search.msn.com, when they can just type in google.com?
sh1ft.org presents 26 Things : July 2004 - got a new funky digital camera? - don't know what to take photos of? 26things is just the thing, it's a list of 26 things you can go take photos of.
Yahoo! News - Apple Plans New iMac, But Delays Shipment Until Sept: "Apple Plans New iMac, But Delays Shipment Until Sept"
CNN.com - Girl burned when cell phone catches fire - Jul 1, 2004 "A 16-year-old California girl suffered second degree burns Thursday when her cell phone caught fire in her back pocket, according to the Ontario Fire Department."

Wheely Willy the crippled dog... BBC NEWS | World | Asia-Pacific | US chihuahua wows Japanese crowds