£250 for a Quad Core PC!

Need a PC upgrade? Want a quad core? You can get the following for £257 including postage and VAT. This will get you a 2.4ghz quad core that should easily overclock to 3ghz with little effort.

Case (inc PSU) - Asus TM982 Black MicroATX Case with 400w aPFC PSU £27.50 £32.31
CPU (includes heatsink) - Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600 G0 SLACR, Kentsfield Core, Socket 775, 2.40 GHz 1066MHz 8MB Cache, Retail £99.49 £116.90
RAM - 2GB Dane-Elec Celenade Major, DDR2 PC2-6400 (800), 240 Pins, Non-ECC Unbuffered, CAS 6, Retail £18.99 £22.31
Motherboard (with VGA, Sound etc on board) - Gigabyte GA-G31M-S2L iG31 Express, S775, PCI-E (x16), DDR2 667/800, SATA II, SATA RAID, uATX, VGA £31.00 £36.43
HD (sata) - 160 GB Maxtor STM3160211/15AS DiamondMax 20, SATA II, 7200 rpm, 2MB Cache, 9 ms £21.33 £25.06
DVDRW (sata) - Samsung TS-H653N 20x DVD±R, 8x DVD±DL, DVD+RW x8/-RW x6, x12 DVD-RAM SATA Lightscribe Black OEM £12.49 £14.68

Although if you have a little spare cash, I'd personally get 2x 1gb as the ram or 2x 2gb as ram so that it's being run in dual channel mode (quicker), and upgrade the HD. You can also get free postage (basically £10 off) if you're a participating member of Hexus.net forums.

Apple iPhone 3G Reviews...

Here's a quick 3 person review of the new 3G iPhone. It still lacks some pretty essential multimedia phone features that have come to be expected for several years now, and I'm pretty sure if your latest Sony / Nokia / Motorola / Samsung phone didn't have these features you'd be pretty "pissed off"... and yet for some reason people still buy the iPhone, even when it's missing:

Video recording
Copy and Paste
MMS message sending
Java
etc

Neat Opera Tweak...

here is a great tweak for Opera Speed Dial - it lets you add more "buttons" to the speed dial. For those of you not familiar with Opera speed dial - it's basically your home page but with 9 links to your favourite sites... this tweak lets you add as many sites as you want. If you haven't tried Opera or don't use Opera, then this feature may convince you otherwise! :)

Firefox 3 is out...

Firefox 3 is out. it's got lots of new features.

Goodbye formatted text clipboarding woes

Whenever you ask Windows to copy a selection of text, say from a web-page, if at all possible it keeps all the formatting details as well - whether it's in bold, underlined, in a variety of different sizes of font etc. Well, I don't know about you, but 99% of the time, I -really- don't want all of that. Perhaps I'm pasting into an email - then I'd usually prefer the text to be consistent throughout. For years, I've fired up Notepad, pasted it into that and then recopied it. It was a bit of a pain but it did get rid of all that formatting.

Then, today I started to think - couldn't I write a little application that sits in the system tray and lets me switch betweeen "throw away the formatting" and "keep it" modes of operation? Then, I thought - maybe somebody's already written it - I mean it's a fairly obvious idea, right? Well they have. And it looks pretty good. And now I've told you about it. Click the link and improve your clipboardy happiness.

Fresh.

BBC is going to make its entire archive available online.

Which is cool.

Opera 9.5 is out...

Opera 9.5 is now out, and ready for download. It's got built in almost instant web search in the address bar, that searches while you type, it lets you sync with your mobile phone (assuming it's got mobile opera), and has a new rendering engine... there's more features but you can read them for yourself here, and a new "cool" look... I use it for about 98% of my browsing, and the new version seems to have fixed the blogger bug! Hoorah!

1 gig SD Card, £0 + £3 p&p (brand new)

I dunno, maybe you could store pictures of a horse or pony on it.

Talking fish etc.

Man goes mental in office cubicle...

Security video here (liveleak.com) and cellphone video with audio here (youtube). found at gizmodo (who found it at neatorama). some more info on boingboing...

V for Vendetta, but in real life, in Russia

Gizmodo: "It's been digitally erased from the entire broadcast, a result of his being placed on a "stop list" of critics of the Russian government and Prime Minister Putin. Using digital manipulation to literally erase any critic of the administration is a pretty great way to stifle any kind of dissent, and it's pretty easy when you're in control of the national networks."

Fire NES is a Firefox add on that allows you to play over 2500 NES games without an emulator.

Foobar 2000

In the olden days, when you wanted to play mp3s, you may have used winamp, back when it was good, before it became bloated and slow. Nowadays everything is bloated, winamp, windows media player, itunes, and if you want a basic mp3 player, then why not try foobar?

Peep Show returns tonight...

Channel 4 10.30pm. Series 5.

Which town has the most pubs for its size?

BBC News - I think Colne's got a good chance - it's got a population of 21,000 (Census 2001) - and 16 pubs according to this list - I would have thought there'd be more pubs than this? can anyone confirm?

Too much stuff...

If anyone's interested, I have the following stuff spare...

- Sony A250 CD/MP3/AUX car stereo (£35 inc postage)
- Cambridge Audio A4 AMP (£35 inc postage)
- Hifi (bookshelf) Speaker stands
- USB / infrared Windows Cyberlink Remote control (£8 posted)
- 40GB external laptop HDD in caddy (USB) (£30 posted)
- Black optical mouse (PS2 - new)
- external usb floppy disk drive
- Sata DVDRW (LG, Black) £15 posted
- Sony XB 930 QS CD player faulty - skips last tracks on 1/20 cds (£35 inc postage, rrp £200, so could be worth fixing if you want a high quality hifi cd player)

I've also got a faulty car stereo (Tevion 4187) with USB/SD/CD/Aux Mp3 support - but it doesn't work anymore... someone electrically minded might want to play with it... although to be honest it's probably completely fried, as I may have got the red and black (+ and -) the wrong way round as they came out...

Any Video Converter

One way or another I end up tinkering with a lot of video conversion/video editing software. A lot of it's badly written crap. Lots of very crashy video software out there.

Have discovered a gem here, so I thought I'd spread the word. The free edition is free (which is a great idea), and offers lots of conversion options, including quicktime to xvid and stuff. It's also good with .mkv and .flv files and does a bit of MPEG-1 and MPEG-2 stuff as well.

Sesame Tree

"Sesame Street have created a new show called Sesame Tree to bridge the gap in communities in my country - Northern Ireland. I hope Cookie gets to make a visit!!"

Irish Sesame Street, sort of.

Return of the Dead Flesh Keyboard

The 48K Spectrum had a legendary rubber keyboard, affectionately known as a "dead flesh keyboard". Sort of likely a rubbery calculator keyboard but bigger. I for one always really liked it. Now you can get one for your PC - yay! And what's more it rolls up and slips neatly into a Parka jacket pocket and can probably be cleaned under a tap with aid of a dishcloth. I've just had a go on one, and I have to say it feels gorgeous. If I didn't use a freaky keyboard for folk with RSI, I'd probably move to one immediatley. Fifteen pounds to you sir.

Self stirring tea... sort of

Little ball in bottom of cup stirs the tea for you one handed freaks out there. link. pretty awesome!