Posts by stu 4

New plastic telescope ammo machine gun is light as a rifle

glocks

they made a lot of noise about C with the glocks came out too.

Now 3/4 of law enforcement use em.

NASA tells Voyager 2 to save its strength

nice. I like it

u could probably reduce that TTL safely. Or has it been dropping routers on the way out ?

stu

p.s. I reckon I could actually win against voyager2 in COD MW3 with that ping!

Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3

PC version

Just picked it up. Installed BF3 at the weekend on the 2011 27" imac - runs a treat. Pretty jaw dropping graphics. So figured I'd get the set.

Be nice if El Reg would review the PC versions sometimes... what with your readership - I'd have thought there are probably more PC gamers here than on most forums (admittedly we are outnumbered by the thumb twidlers still)

GoPro HD Hero 2

sensitivity

dark is dark sure. these are uncorrected straight from camera. however, view full res and you will see noticeable less noise on the mk2. which is the point.

got one day before they came out

happened to be on hols in the states, and Best Buy had stuck em on the shelves on the sunday afternoon. 180 quid. bargain.

I've had the original HD since it came out. The new 170º fov is exactly what I was waiting for - it's always been a compromise between do I need to FOV and having to settle for 720p. And the 120fps is surprisingly effective and clear. The fact that it now uses the full sensor for 1080p seems to have made the low light performance better too - on a dull day I sometimes found the quality pretty grainy if shooting in 1080p with the old one.

It's also worth mentioning it now has a dot matrix LCD so the menus are far easier to navigate than the old one. It's also compatible with the LCD backpack, plus some new wifi things coming out soon.

I stuck a number of videos on youtube to illustrate the differences between the new and old model:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fqI8yli4AE0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qr7cCo8W1E

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CqwvzFO2rYk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Ykc45jP_7Y

Pete Townshend condemns Apple as 'digital vampire'

music vs apps : same thing shirley ???

I struggle to see the difference. If anything the 'app store' has brought out the ridiculous way that music is funded and sold.

If as a talented software artiste (cough.. I'm not.. but IF) I create a masterpiece I don't 'sign up' with EA anymore - I flog it on an app store. If its good it sells, it gets reviews, it gets rated, it sells more.

Why the hell do musicians think they are somehow above the commercial supply and demand system that , for the rest of us, seems to work pretty well ?

Oh we need to EAs of the world sure - Battefield 3 took years to develop with 100s of people... a song doesn't. sorry to rain on the artiste's parade, but the successful ones have had their mental funding system for too long.

The bad ones ? Well they'll still struggle to earn a living. As they should. If I was a crap programmer I wouldn't expect to be subsidised either.

What do 'labels' do these days ? Fuck all. You'd be mental to sign with one unless they offer similar terms to an app store (say +5% for marketing).

WHSmith Kobo Touch wireless e-book reader

kindle has no lock in

it plays mobi, etc, pdf all natively. there is no lock in with kindle.

epub to mobi conversion is easy peasy - use something like calibre to manage all your books on the computer and it's more or less automatic.

Amazon Kindle 4

Calibre

If you've got a Kindle, and not using Calibre yet - give it a go. It's the mutts nutts.

One of the most useful things is the automatic scheduled scraping you can set up - so for example I run calibre on my home server: every morning it scrapes a bunch of websites (bbc, the glasgow herald, the register, engadget, etc) and creates an indexed ebook from each (mobi format). It then emails them to my kindle email.

when I switch my kindle on - I've got all my daily reading. All for free.

Converting between formats, maintain multiple formats, syncing to multiple devices (e.g. an iphone, etc) are all no problem either.

Apple cofounder Steve Jobs is dead at 56

He found out, much like his computers, that his parts were not replaceable...

RIP mr J.

The iPhone 4S in depth: More than just a vestigial 'S'

Oompa Loompas

I believe Foxconn used to use a load of em, but their singing got on the rest of the workforces tits - leading some to suicide.

In the end, Foxconn brought it a few Vermicious Knids to get rid of em all.

'iPhone 4 to be free' when new iPhones ship

I think it died a long time ago...

every time I drive by a car dealership advertising a brand new Mingmong Deathmaster for £199 a month or whatever.... and the small print has an initial payment of 4k and a final payment of 4k...

you sort of wonder why they don't advertise it as 'free' or 99p a month - it would be no less accurate.

my mate gets a new car every 3 years - 'it doesn't cost me anything - it's the same £300 a month'...

er... but you'd be paying nothing a month if you kept the 3 year old car.

'no, you don't understand: it's costing me nothing - just the £300 a month I was paying anyway'.

sigh.

stu

Ten... all-in-one inkjet printers

oem ink

I must admit I used to always use cheap ink off ebay, online stores, etc. I swore by canon printers as they were the ones you could most easily get cheap ink for.

But time and time again I'd have problems with ink drying up in nozzles and gaffing around for ages to sort it out again and again.

I hated to admit it was cheap ink - ink is ink and all that... however,since I got an HP and decided to just stick to HP ink (albeit from the cheapest ebay seller I could find) I have never had a single problem ever.

My friends and relatives who had had similar problems with the canons I recommended to them with cheap ink, also stopped having them when I told them to start using canon ink.

I know it's a rip off, but the cheap stuff can sometimes be a different kind of rip off in that you don't really know what you are getting.

just my experience anyway.

stu

Apple MacBook Air 11in Core i5 notebook

top gadget

I bought the i7/256mb/4gb 11" when it came out - replacing my previous 11" 1.6 core duo.

it really is an amazing little powerhouse. My MBP17 has been resigned to the study now, and the air has become my main work computer (I travel with it everyday).

I've never seen the beef with non-replaceable batteries. If you are tech-savie you can easily buy a replacement and DIY. If you are not, you just take it into an apple store and they do it while you wait + properly dispose of the battery (which is probably more than most of use do normally).

Combined with the fact that the latest apple battery tech seems to not really degrade very much compared to lipo, I don't think I'd ever expect to have to replace the battery - my 2 year old MBP still has 100% charge for example.

Surprised you didn't mention CPU usage with HD playback - this is incredibly low thanks to the tight integration with the intel 3000 HD - playing 1080p* mp4 or mkv full screen barely registers on stat CPU gauges at all (old nvidia model was around 30%).

*cue muppet moaning about playing 1080p on non-1080p screen... sigh.

AMD spills secret to World Record clock speed

helium weirdness

I was taught at school that liquid helium behaves pretty weirdly - crawling up the sides of containers, etc. Is this why the cyclic flow thing was required ?

I mean, I grant you, I was also taught at school that if the earth stopped spinning we'd all float off to space (albeit in primary 3 - 8yo)

stu

Star Wars: The Complete Saga Blu-ray disc set

won't have to purchase again ?

er... star wars 3d has been green lighted.

LOHAN to suck mighty thruster as it goes off, in a shed

getting to the real burn

I think the main problem is ensuring you get to the real burn before the lid pops and 1 ATM is restored.

pointing the rocket at the lid doesn't help that.

Also, you really want an area that can accept the thust/extra gas without affecting the vacuum majorly.

What I'd suggest, is a reservoir tank piped in at the bottom of the tube. A water heating tank would be ideal.

This, plus reverse the thust so pointing away from lid.

thus, when the rocket fires, the lid will not pop(ATM will not be exceeded) until the extension reservoir tank pressure has been restored.

i.e. effectively this gives you a large hyperbaric chamber rather than a wee tube.

This should give sufficient time to reach real burn with the oxidiser, or not - then you'll know you have a problem.

Hacker defaces Irish Catholic paper: 'Gotta love false hope'

cause and affect

Don't forget vegetarianism - we'd all be murdering jews if we stopped eating meat, what with hitler being a veggie, etc....... jeez.

alpha

http://uk.alpha.org/

just to get your back up... they have posters on my way to the station now..

and a junior 'wing'... FFS... legalised child abuse imho.

Sorry, but I do see fighting religion as a battle - I'm an anti-theist rather than atheist.

If they just 'believed stuff' I wouldn't give a shit. They indoctrinate children, kill, oppress and abuse it the name if it, and through government try to force their beliefs on others.

fuck em all.

Cello C42T71DVB-3D 42in passive 3D TV

kiddy fingers

If only we'd get the thick kids out of the school system at 7 or 8 years old, I'm sure we could rival china in manufacturing - they're nimble little fingers are ideal for putting together intricate circuitry.

We used the lead the world in child labour, what with the mills and the chimney sweeps.... another sad case of British decline.

obvious icon selected - check.

agreed

I'm writing this on a PK350 - great set and a bargain price.

Christ appears in phone advert, secular authorities act

Aye she did !

When the woman saw that the tree produced fruit that was good for food, was attractive to the eye, and was desirable for making one wise, she took some of its fruit and ate it. She also gave some of it to her husband who was with her, and he ate it. -Genesis 3:6

Christianity Defined

The belief that a cosmic Jewish Zombie who was his own father can make you live forever if you eat his flesh and drink his blood and telepathically tell him you accept him as your master, so he can remove an evil force from your soul that is present in humanity because a woman (made from a man's rib) was convinced by a talking snake to eat from a magical tree.

Sony to ship VR-style 3D headset in November

glasstrons upgraded

good to see sony re-entering the eye display market - their glasstrons were some of the best out there at the time (2000 ish).

I have 4 pairs of eye glasses

- the olympus eyetrek (low res but great optics)

- a cheap chinese LCOS 640x480 pair (crap contrast, and now cannibalized to give me a monocle display for vewing the gopro video output when I am flying my paramotor

- a pair of VUZIX VGA jobs - good to use with PC, but optics not great.

- a set of eyetop monocle jobs built into a set of shades (good but bulky cables/control unit)

The market has been crying out for a good set of HD glasses with quality OLED panels and excellent optics. If sony can do that, I'll be in the line.

No mention of motion/gyro support which is a pity for gaming support. :-(

Seven lessons from the HP Touchpad fire sale

fallacy no 7

Was it in the requirements for those website to scale massively for spikes ? No - it wasn't, because that would be a bloody expensive and mostly pointless requirement.

If it was, it would be easy enough.

This is the common misconception of software 'engineering'* - where quality is seen as an absolute...

"you can't have designed that properly'

- er yeh I did - I designed it properly as a real engineer, not as a 'software engineer' who tries to build everything as a gold plated ferrari - failing to recognise 'quality' only as a variable. Thank fuck they only build software - or every tin of baked beans would cost £100.

*sorry, but as a EEE, I am daily stunned by how some of my piers have the audacity to call themselves engineers

stu

Autodesk Fluid FX

Kai krause

Now there was a man who couldn't see the wood for the trees... and insisted on making sure his users could'nt either.

If there was a 'crimes against the User Interface' panel at the Hague, he'd be top of the Wanted list.

Kai PowerGoo, Power Tools, Bryce, early Fractal Painter, etc.

Stunning pieces of software totally and absolutely ruined by his UIs from Hell.

- 100 stupid little icons you had to guess how to use or what they did.

- UIs which when maximised continued to have a pane in the middle that was 640x480.

Apple MacBook Pro 17in 2011

house of macs

I'll be sticking my 2009 3.06hz core 2 duo on ebay in the next few days after finding the upgraded 2011 air meets my needs now (along with my 2010 air).

It's a great piece of kit though, lovely screen, I stuck a flash multicard reader in the expresscard slot - better than just an SD card job.

Mine was about 2600 all specced up, Certainly a lot of cash for a laptop, but you get what you pay for imho. It makes even the vaios looks plasticy.

currently providing a home to:

imac 17 2007 core2duo

imac 27 2011 3.4 i7

mbp17 2009 3gz

mba 11" 2010

mba 11" 2011

macmini 2006 2.33 coreduo

macmini 2009 2 core2duo

I believe with my next mac I get a gold 'fanboi' badge from Steve

Chic USB drive leads double life as personal vibrator

ah - you have one of those vibrators I see

that's the basic problem here I reckon - if they got permission to make em look like a kingston flash drive or summit they will sell, but as it is, IF they do get popular it's a pretty big statement to have a vibrator sticking out the side of yer laptop at meetings....

Audio Technica ANC7b noise-cancelling headphones

yup, I agree

I have the goldrings, and they are exactly the same looking, down to the hard case, accesories and net pouch.

I'd wager they are a rebranding.

You can pick up the goldrings for 65 quid from play.com among others.

I certainly agree that they are great headphones with top sound cancelling... and for 65 quid rather than nearly 200 (which was what the goldrings originally sold for) you should bite their hand off

People don't want tablets, they want iPads

bollocks

it's never been easier to install osx on any modern x86 hardware.

yup

its great for what it is though ,and people in the main are consumers.

It's not my thing - I like to edit video, photoshop, etc so went with the macbook air (now on my 3rd - 2011 i7 11" jobby) - about the size of an ipad, but tons of power... seriously good framework integration with the intel gpu lets me playback 1080p50 (yup - 50p) at about 2% CPU. even encoding is pretty rapid running at around 70% speed of my 3ghz mbp17 core duo... hence its getting flogged and I'm now just down to the one device for all my work* and play.

*parallels takes care of my windoze ibm websphere stack, and runs fast as f**k on only 2 of the hyperthreads.

And again, I have to respectively disagree with people saying the are expensive... an off contract decent android phone will cost you 400+, 400 squid is bloody cheap and easy to use - and THAT is why they are selling - its not brand brand brand - ferraris don't sell like hotcakes even if folk love the brand... cause the average joe ain't got 100k... he's buying ipads because they are good value for money to him. end of.

And if you take the time to actually compare like with like, the airs are a bargain too imho - about 100 quid less than competitors from sony, samsung, etc.

waiting to get marked down for clear fanboi rant... but honestly I'm just a techie looking at the best deals

Sky wins TV riot battle

London pish

' Everyone' doesnt know mate because most of us - brace yourself here - don't live in London.

Yup I know - difficult concept for a londoner to grasp.

London rioters should 'loose all benefits'

Fah

Just burn them

Paul McCartney's ex-wife makes phone-hacking claim

exactly

I mean - how a regular person would react:

- the moment the hacking story broke -talk to police (media optional) and cry 'me too' and here's the evidence.

how mills trash reacts:

- call PR company for advice. They tell her to leave it a week or so to get max impact and not get smothered by others. then announce to media (never mind police - that won't help exposure).

Microsoft man saves drowning woman

nope - I'm with you

As a died in the wool fanboi (5 macs and counting) I agree - they should pull Jobs in front of the Hague for crimes against humanity - the ubiquitous iphone headphones are the scrurge of the last 5 years - personally I don't give a flying shit how loud some muppet wants to pump music into his ears - as long as I don't have to listen to it from 10 feet away. Unfortunately, even today when they could easily have rubber earbud earphones supplied they insist on the same shite open back crappy earplugs they've used for the last 10 years. nail him up.. thats what I say...

PCTV NanoStick T2 USB TV tuner

work fine

I built one inside the hackintosh I build 2 years ago. worked a treat.

pics and video of it playing tv here:

http://powerlord.smugmug.com/Gadgets/Making-a-Macbook-Nano

Canon EOS 600D 18Mp DSLR

wow. now THAT is sensible

Unlike my Sonys - that insist on 25/50 because I'm in europe. It does my head in - sometime I want 30fps, somethings I don't - well actually I'd be quite happy always getting 30/60 - 'PAL' 25fps should have died with analogue SD imho.

stu

Film studios thrash BT in Newzbin site-block test case

welcome to china

that is all.

Apple Flash buying clout will give it the ultrabook edge

Apple tax

Airs are already cheaper than their competitors.

Sumsung and sony equivalents are about 10% more expensive.

The apple tax ceased to exist and 3 or 4 years ago

US Navy orders laser machine guns

ha!

Yeh, because the US have always respected the geneva convention. I'm sure they'll add it to the list of depleted uranium shells, phosphorous bullets and water boarding.

Lost 1967 spacecraft found crashed on the Moon

pah - aliens

I know a 'greys' alien face when I see one - look at those eyes.

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=greys+aliens

I suspect the probe was crashed on the 'dark side' facing a way from the earth so that this wonderful massive 'grey' portrait could be seen far away by other 'greys'. A sort of cosmic bill board advertising the presence of intelligent life in need of a good anal probing.

Lexus CT200h hybrid

eh????

you think 900 quid for a reversing camera is good value ?

kits available for 40 quid including screen.

and satnav: http://tinyurl.com/4xgc2e9

a fool and their money, etc...

then again... you bought a hybrid...

I extend my offer of magic beans to you. Only 900 quid for the bag.

what big screen ?

the 1800 quid optional big screen ?

so your point is that, provided you are happy to spend 2000 quid on a 'mirror' you are sorted...

oh yeh - its a GPS too - woopee do.. with nearly as much functionality as a 25 quid satnav.

Apple Mac OS X 10.7 Lion Part Two

urg

So unlike SL which gave me real performance improvements this gives me FA... makes my mac act like a big phone, dumbs down an already pretty dumb finder, and manges to remove 10 years of useful non-linear file editing (i.e. I can save when I want to with useful names like - 'before I do the big thing that might fuck it up' and easily come back to it 2 hours and 100s of changes later if those big things didn't work) with linear file editing...

It's a total pain on imovie... it's absolutely hellish in FCP X (having to go out to projects to 'duplicate every time is a total pain... along with lots of the rest of it tbh - got my 200 quid back from apple there at least). I can only see a handful of programs that I'd actually want to be commiting my changes to disk constantly (garageband maybe - as it crashes all the fecking time). Without a non-linear meta-data driven change-browser (aka PS History palette) it's a massive step backwards. It's a good example of a feature that makes sense on a phone, but rarely makes sense with complex/creative apps.

I look forward to them introducing a linear file system to go with it next.

what a load of toss. I'll stick with SL as long as I can.

My MBA 11.6 gets replaced next week with a new top spec one - I'll be immediately scrubbing Lion and restoring my current MBA HD onto it.

stu

p.s. copy and paste has always been in osx....

Higgs Boson hiding place narrows

anadish

congratulations mately. A clear potential winner in what I think should be a new reg catagory: MoTF: mentalist of the week.

I especially enjoyed the pictures of your 'experimental apperatus' balanced on 4 shoe polish tins.

stu

Parmo v poutine: The ultimate post-pub nosh deathmatch

your SON ?

that is all.

Bug-Byte Manic Miner

we had far more skill than today's kids

3 lives to complete all the levels.

yer modern COD/Modern Warfare scrote wouldn't have a chance in hell.

Cray stuffs 46 mobile Intel chips into microserver

osx lion

hackintosh grand central dispatch ultimate test there - lets see what FCP X can really do....

Pricey Apple Thunderbolt cable inner chippery exposed

Monster

Ah. . But was in a mOnster cable with gold plated connections ?

Ten... pocket compact cameras

PAL/NTSC again

It records 720p HD video as MP4 files at 29.97fps ....., although 25fps would be nice

no.no.no.

Almost always for all but cinema type stuff, more temporal info is better. 25fps should have died a death when we moved to HD, as should interlaced (though Sony annoyingly still use the bloody thing randomly on some cameras and not others*)

stu

*my Sony A55V shoot AVCHD 25fps** progressive (in interlaced AVCHD container), whereas my HX9V shoots it at 50i true interlaced....arggggg... die interlaced video. DIE!!!!

**Sony are still one of the arseholes that insist on selling 'PAL' cameras to PAL markets, even though there is no such thing as PAL in HD and LCD tvs. does my fucking head in but gave up trying to source a 'NTSC' model...

Apple Snow Leopard update sets stage for Lion

er

I have 5 macs.

1. that hardly ever happens to me when I shut one down.

2. I hardly ever shut one down - suspend is king. why are you shutting it down all the time ??? unlike windoze: suspend works reliably every time on laptops and desktops.

3. if it happens... you've got stuff you've not saved or that's hung... probably summit you want to know about I'd have thought.