Stuff I've recently written...

Stuff I've written recently (in the last week or so) that you might be interested in:

Focus on Imaging 2007 Show Report - Yearly Photographic / Imaging Show in Birmingham NEC.
Free Monkey with PG Tips. It's the monkey from ITV Digital, but with PG Tips.
DIY Alloy Wheel Repair / Refurbishment with pics. Step by step instructions.
The new Rover 45 / Roewe 450 Pictures and Speculation. Will the UK accept Rover's new manufacturers?
Pentax Optio W20 Review - currently the cheapest waterproof and dustproof digital camera - and pretty decent too!

March the 3rd : Total Lunar Eclipse

Cool thing to happen on my birthday: total lunar eclipse apparently we're in a good position to see it.

Second Life

It's like a computer game but more boring. Or it's like real life but more boring. Either way: Toothpastefordinner give you a good guide to Second Life.

All about hard drives

Google use thousands and thousands of hard drives. They have shared their findings with some interesting conclusions about the reliability of hard drives:

"First of all, Mean Time Between Failure rates mean nothing.
•Secondly, SMART hardware monitoring missed 36% of all uh-ohs.
•Third, overworked drives fail similarly to standard drives after the first year.
•Fourth, Hard drive age means less than you think.
•Fifth, failure does not go up when temperatures are higher than usual (unless super high.)"

Unfortunately they don't tell us who manufactures the most reliable drives... found at Gizmodo

Fun game: Photograph superman

Another Good Money Tips Site

Obviously there's Money Saving Expert as well, which is great, but you probably already know about that.

The Sunday Times On-line Driving Section

The Sunday Times Online is still stupidly arranged, making finding all the car articles annoyingly difficult (based on guesswork mainly, guessing that the title "If it ain’t broke ... oh, fix it anyway" is one of Jeremy Clarkson's articles about cars). Anyway, here's all the car articles I can find:

Jeremy Clarkson on the new Mini (If it ain't broke... oh, fix it anyway)
New Cars New Ford Mondeo
New Smart ForTwo
Citroen C2 Rally Car (the shopping car that went mad)
Wheel to wheel combat - all about 4x4s and how they are killing the world (YAWN! luxury cars and MPVs can be just as bad, and there are many other things polluting the world more, so shutup already!)
Used Cars: Subaru Legacy Outback
Car Clinic / Letters, Car Letters

... last week.

Widgets in Opera

Opera is a fun, free web-browser (and apparently pretty short on security vulnerabilities), but what I hadn't realised until ten minutes ago, was that it has this "Widgets" menu. If you use it and select "add widgets", you get the option to download a whole load of smart little mini-applications. Here's a few that sounded immediately interesting...

Video downloader - allows you to download videos from YouTube and maybe other places too. It works too, so now you can grab that advert with Gary in! You have to use a .flv player application, though.
Bit-torrent search utility - seems to be able to find quite a lot of good stuff.
Circular tetris - a nice variation.

N

N is a game.  You can play it. 

The Sunday Times

The sunday times online is more difficult to find now that they've redesigned the website, and it's also much more difficult to find the "ingear" (aka car) section of the paper online... probably not finished on it yet, or perhaps they want you to buy the paper instead of reading it online... anyway, here's some of the motoring content from today's sunday times... (I'm not sure if it's all of it, as it's mixed in with "life and style"... I hope the main papers not so badly organised! - see what other people are saying here)

New cars: Volvo V70 and Citroen C-Crosser SUV
Second Hand Cars (Jason Dawe): VW Phaeton
Car Clinic: Letters
Jeremy Clarkson: New Lexus LS460
Article: Death by Supercar

Get a Mac Adverts Updated

Apple's "Get a Mac" adverts have been updated to show a PC running the new Vista - the new one's called "Security" - and "Surgery" is about the PC being upgraded to Vista.

"In a sketch clearly aimed at exposing just one of the weak spots in Windows Vista, Apple's ad is critical of Microsoft's intrusive User Account Control (UAC) element, and of Windows security across the board. The ad features a third character who represents the UAC. The third character interrupts the flow of communication between Mac and PC with a constant string of permission requests."

All the UK Adverts are here, there are more than I thought.

The next Tempest

Jeff Minter is working on the next Tempest... for the XBOX 360... and it's looking very pretty...

WiiJing

Using two Nintendo Wii remote controls to DJ: Video on Engadget full details on DJWiiJ.com