Hell yeah. I loved this show to bits when I was a young’un. Friday = VCR time record at the ready.

Google Mail is without a doubt the best email service I’ve ever used. I’ve been using it for a few years now and I’m so completely satisfied with it, from the way my Google Talk notifies of new email, to the integration with mailto: links, to the fact that I just linked my University mail (which I never checked) so that Gmail downloads all new email through the POP server – I so didn’t realise I could do this until today.

I still can’t believe anyone would choose a bulky slow service such as Hotmail over this. Mainstream is always in the wrong.

So, I’m going to attempt to start a new feature on my blog where I recommend a band/artist every week. It’ll not only help bulk up the musical content of my blog, but also hopefully give people the chance to discover new music they may enjoy. So lets begin. This week’s artist of the week is Your Ten Mofo.

Similar artists: Sigur Ros, Lis Er Stille, Joy Wants Eternity
Genre: Post rock, shoegaze

These guys create some beautiful tracks, often very instrumental orientated, although when the vocals are featured they are pretty wonderful. A friend of mine recommended the album to me just about a week ago and I’ve been hooked ever since. Its just plain gorgeous. Hit the jump for links and more details.

Read rest of story…

If you’ve a bit of time on your hands and are interested in what the little guys out there are doing with game development, check out 1up’s 101 Free Games article. Hopefully I’ll get to check out some myself, time permitting! At the moment, only the 2007 and 2006 lists are available, 2008′s article will go live next Monday. 2007′s list is still very much worth checking out.

This morning, doing my usual Sunday morning TV surf, I started watching Jeremy Clarkson’s Extreme Machines on that Freeview channel Dave (odd name for a channel). Anyway, towards the end of the show Clarkson was walking through an airplane scrapyard in Arizona. I thought I’d do a search and find it on Google Earth, since it’d pretty obviously be rather easy to see from a satellite. Thanks to GoogleEarthCoolPlaces.com, I found it prettily easily.

You can check it out on Google Earth here. Its pretty crazy to think all those craft are just sitting idle there in a mass graveyard of once airborne metal.

Just a short post to say that I’ve successfully upgraded the blog to WordPress 2.3.2. Along with security updates, it now adds the facility to tag posts, which you can see under the posting details. This just means that, as well as categories, I can tag my posts with all sorts of useless words. Woohoo!

Edit: I just noticed the categories on the sidebar weren’t working anymore, must’ve overlooked that earlier this week.  I’ve now upgraded the sidebar WP-dTree plugin to the latest version, and all is well :)  Enabled a nice blind effect for dropdowns too.  Hope it all works smoothly!

I only just noticed, unfortunately just after the festive season, that one of my favourite bands, Oceansize, released a free cover version of “Walking in the Air” (from The Snowman) just before Christmas. I guess its not strictly a Christmas song, more winter in general? Anyway, its pretty fantastic, and its free.

Download it here.

For Christmas my lovely girlfriend, at my wishes, got me a black 80gb Apple iPod Classic, such as the one seen below:

(Please note: this is a stock photo, and not my iPod. I do not listen to Jack Johnson or Nelly Furtado.)

My original wanting for the device was due to the fact that it was pretty much the only financially viable player out there which would give me 80gb of music space to fill. For the past few years I’ve been living with the rather fantastic iRiver h320, a 20gb mp3 player with custom Rockbox firmware, which did pretty much everything I wanted: album art, folder structuring, line in recording, radio, video, last.fm integration, worked as a USB hard drive, drag-n-drop, etc. Again, the main reason I wanted the upgrade was for the 80gb of storage space, having found the 20gb space somewhat limiting (heh, I know, but honestly, its true); that and the fact that the iPod has a shedload of universal accessories out there such as in-car audio integration and speaker docks (Apple’s monopoly prevails).

At first I was pretty impressed with the player: shiny and slim player, sleek interface, good sound quality. However, the problems were pretty quick to highlight themselves. Firstly, the obvious one, the iPod likes to rely on you to use iTunes (or an alternative program) to add music, rather than just being able to drag and drop the mp3 files like a USB hard drive, but I knew this was the case and expected it so. I decided to just use iTunes and add my files to it from there manually. Copying over albums was fine, but when it came to B-sides and single tracks it was a royal pain in the ass, since I didn’t want the iPod’s cover flow feature showing a million different albums which I didn’t actually have on the player. Since I didn’t actually want to change the tags on my mp3 collection (I like them as they are) I created a second folder with copies of the mp3s, which I could then add into iTunes and rename/re-sort as I pleased. Despite the 6 hours of sorting this required, it did the job (apart from me getting confused between the two folders and accidentally deleting some of my proper mp3s). So once the mp3s were copied on to the iPod, I deleted the copied folder, thinking I would never need them again since they’re loaded on to the iPod.

After several days of content listening, and getting Last.fm integration to work thanks to iSproggler, I was pretty pleased with the player. I did still have a few issues, such as the very plain “Now Playing” screen (would’ve been nice if I could change the colours/backgrounds/details displayed), and the lack of volume when plugged into a non-amplified set of speakers (in comparison to my iRiver), but I was willing to overlook these minor issues and keep a smile of content on my face. The first major issue came when the iPod hung up on me when I tried to plug it into my laptop one day. This involved having to find out the reset technique (lock the iPod, unlock it, then hold down Menu and the centre button together until the apple appears to say “congratulations, you’ve been screwed by apple”) – not happy, considering it was still week 1 of ownership! That problem, however, pales in comparison to what followed a day or two later. I plugged my iPod into my desktop computer with the intent of doing some more editing on the library to help sort things a bit better. Upon plugging it in, the computer didn’t seem to acknowledge its existence, nor did the iPod show any form of connection on its screen. “Ok”, says I, “I’ll just unplug it and re-plug it”. Bad move. It decided to see the iPod this time, and then proceeded to tell me my iPod was corrupted, and required restoring to factory settings.

$%*&!!!!!!

That meant another full day of sorting music out, thanks to the player crapping itself. Great! Just what I always wanted, an unreliable piece of crap as an mp3 player. Bearing in mind that I’d be plugging my player in to a computer everyday to update my Last.fm plays, this doesn’t fill me with confidence for the future. Now I’m having to look into good ways of backing up the iPod to an external hard drive to make for easy restoration.

So yeah, 2 years of happy iRiver ownership has now been replaced by a 1 week unsatisfactory performance by the iPod.

Nice one, Apple.

(I’m still looking forward to receiving my Intempo IDS05 B speaker dock in the post in the next couple of days though.)

And so another year passes. Welcome to 2008, 7 years after the Transformers movie took place, and 6 years before Blade Runner, not that that holds any significance. My main new year’s resolution I’ve made for this year is to cut down on junk food and revive my gym routine: lately I’ve been eating so much crap and feeling physically terrible for it, never mind increasing the likelihood of a heart attack. Anyway, my other small resolution is to blog a bit more on this site – looking through my past blogs on here shows a severe lack of content (interesting or otherwise) so I’m going to attempt to blarg a bit more about… anything, really, except my intimate personal life, which I’m not a fan of pasting all over the internetz.

Obviously making a resolution of blogging more often has its risks, mainly considering the fact that I’m about to embark on my full literature review for my PhD and therefore spare time will be scarce. The other risk, and probably the most realistic, is that no one will give a crap anyway :) People may never read any of this, but I can’t say I really care. So be it.

Christmas has mostly been spent playing with my new 80gb iPod (replacing my old 20gb iRiver :( – I will miss it so). Already it has hung up on me, and I’ve had to pour hours into organising my music on iTunes so that I don’t have a bazillion albums appearing on the cover flow for a lot of single tracks. I much preferred being able to just use folders to organise my music as on the iRiver, but alas I’ve given in to corporate pressure. At least now I can get a speaker dock and car interface for my player. I’ve also been playing a ton of Guitar Hero 3 on the Xbox 360. I can’t say I’m very keen on the tracklist this time round, but man do I love the GH games regardless. Online play works really well too (well, when Xbox Live wants to work). Unfortunately I still haven’t got round to Super Mario Galaxy on the Wii yet.

In the next couple of days I intend to post up my “best of 2007″ lists for music and games. I’m sure you’ll all be placing bets and such.

Happy New Year!