Probably not that far from the truth…

[Video Link]

(sorry had to remove the embedded version as it kept auto-playing, d’oh.)

When I first read the headline on Digg I said to myself “Dear God, not again”, then I realised the source! Yes its from America’s finest satirical online publication, The Onion!

“Concerned parents are again blasting the Nintendo Wii for an incident of effeminate violence following a 13-year-old boy’s limp-wristed attack on three of his classmates at a Cleveland-area middle school Tuesday.”

Hehe. Full article can be read here, and its well worth it.

Over the last couple of days whilst working furiously on some PhD stuff, I’ve been doing some spring cleaning and touching up on the blog. Firstly, I’ve changed the Twitter feed from a Flash badge to an rss text feed – I think this looks more consistent and makes for easier viewing of previous tweets. Also, it will no longer show conversations (using “@” on Twitter). As well as this, at the bottom of the side bar I have now added a feed from my Digg user profile, so that any stories I digg will appear down there, which I think is a cool way for me to show stories from around the web which I thought were cool, without having to writing a full post about them. This was implemented using the FeedList plugin for Wordpress.

The only thing I’m not happy with now is the Last.fm feed and the Flickr badge. I may change the Last.fm feed back to text as well very soon. The Flickr badge is pretty much the only one I can’t think of a better alternative for.

I wish it was me.

“Brian has 22 original arcade machines scattered across his house, self maintained and lovingly preserved. Periodically he opens his doors to hold video game parties for friends and family.”

You can read an article and interview with Brian over at LA CityZine.

In the wake of seeing PlayTV, and realising I can copy DivX films to my PS3 hard drive, I decided to upgrade my 60gb Playstation 3 hard drive to a new Toshiba 250gb one. After reading a guide on how to upgrade the HDD, I thought it would be a quick 5 minute job.  However, as with all things computer-orientated, it ended up taking way more time than expected (around an hour).  The reason for the time delay?  The screws!  I’ve never had so much trouble with screws!  Firstly, they were tight as hell.  Second, using my torq screwdrivers I managed to strip about 3 of the 5 screws, meaning I had to try all sorts of ways of getting them off.  As it happened, the easiest way of removing them was just using a pair of pliars and twisting the buggers off.

My hands were throbbing for quite a while after, and the old hard drive is probably wrecked from the amount of dodgy handling I done on it trying to get those screws out!

Anyway, the system is now up to 250gb, and the data backup and restoration was a breeze using the PS3’s own backup utility. The hard drive does sound a slight bit noisier than the old one, but nothing major, plus this is only noticable when the hard drive is actually being accessed (its not a constant Xbox 360-type noise or anything like that).

This also gave me the chance to leave a partition for another OS when I was formatting too, so I may have a play with linux on the PS3 in the near future.