Back when I was a little nipper, the first computer we ever had in our house was a ZX Spectrum 128 (I’m pretty sure it was the 128 model anyway). I loved the system, played a lot of the games (probably played them better than I could now-a-days) and generally was quite addicted to it. The system was sold a few years later, along with all the games.

About a year ago I took the notion of going back to my childhood days and started buying Spectrum games from eBay. They are great items for collecting since [a] they provide a great sense of nostalgia, and [b] they’re cheap. Anyway, recently I joined the Retro Gamer forum, and, even more recently, spotted someone selling a good old Speccy +2 System (yes, its an Amstrad, but I’m not a purist so don’t really care) with a few games for a smashing price. I couldn’t resist. So here it is in all its 8-bit glory (hooked up to a high definition TV, no less, haha).

…and here’s my rather small collection so far! (though I accidentally forgot to include 3 other Dizzy games I have, d’oh)

This looks fantastic! Its a freeview viewer which allows for Sky+ type features such as pause, record, rewind, etc. Whats best about it is that its coming to Europe first! :)

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.

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!

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.)

Gamedevelopers.ie have published my write-up of the Serious Games Awakenings ’07 Conference, which took place in Derry on Friday 26th September 2007. Check it out :)

Oh yeah, and its my birthday today. :)