Guys and Girls,

Just wanted to say that I’ve finally used my voucher that you all got me for my birthday.

I spent your hard earned cash on a really nice Canon MP610 multifunction printer.
First impressions are very impressive. Print quality is excellent and the speed is just unbelievable.
The supplied software is very good and unlike most HP inkjets the total install with all of the options is 500mb. You might think that’s a lot, but believe me, ALL Hp multifunction injects need 1 GB at least. The printer comes supplied with software for 2k, XP, Vista and Mac, so far I have only tested Vista and Mac and both installed flawlessly.

My favourite piece of supplied software is “Easy-Photo Print EX”. The software walks you through 4 easy steps to print your favourite photos. In step one you choose the image, Step two selects the paper size and type, Step three allows you to select how and how many prints go on the page and step four is print. Just the way I like software to work simple and easy for me to use.

The printer itself is very sweet. I like the way it all closes up when you are not using it, this prevents dust, ciggie ash and anything else getting into the working parts. One nice feature I found by accident is that the front panel automatically drops down if you send a print when it’s closed. I thought that was a nice attention to detail by Canon. The printer comes with two paper trays and a printable CD holder. I didn’t realise until I purchased it that it had a plain paper tray located under the printer so this was a bonus for me. This tray is not meant for glossy photo paper though as the paper path would damage the paper. There is a vertical fold out tray at the back of the printer for all types of glossy paper. I have printed on various sizes of paper and paper types and I have been very impressed with all of the results I’ve had. I did experiment with the cd printing and if I had actually had a proper printable cd, I’m sure it would have worked fine. As it was, with my normal cd the results were messy.

The scanner works well, I tested it with both the supplied software and Photoshop and both images imported with no problems. Copying using the scanner is simply a case of putting the image on the glass and pressing either the black and white copy button or the colour copy button. You can specify, using the front panel controls, various setting for the copy process if you wish.

The printer also comes with support for usb, CF, SD, MMC and MS cards. All of these devices can print directly to the printer without the need for a computer.

The front panel controls are clear and easy to use and I had no problems navigating my way around them.

Well I did come on here just to say thanks, but it looks as if I’ve ended up doing a review. So once again thank you all for my voucher.

God, I’m such a fanboy…Apple have anounced the new iphone 3G. Due to ship on July 11th it includes 3G support and Assisted GPS along with a price tag that has been cut in half, $199 for the 8gig.

Apple 2.0 software for iphone will ship with it as well, with lots of new cool features.

Anyone want to buy a second hand iphone?

As I start to write this review. Age of Conan is currently downloading another 1.2 GB of updates.
I have been playing the game for most of the weekend, first impressions are that it’s beautiful to look at, the new types of characters are fun to play and it has a good solo content.
The game itself is huge and I’m not talking about the in game world. The physical size on the disk is 25+ GB. It took over an hour to load on my PC before it started to download updates. The updates consisted of an initial 100MB download (not to bad) followed by another 600+MB download. All in all it took around 2 hours before I was able to start playing the game. The only good news is that the downloader is direct and so I was getting full speed during the updates.
Character creation is very detailed, you can change almost every aspect of your chosen character and the selection screen is very cool to look at. Although after you have done it once, you do find yourself just clicking the defaults when creating a new character.
The first part of the game is very linear. You always start in the same location with the same quests to complete. It means that you can zoom through the quests, but I would like to see two or three different starting areas.
The game is split into day and night modes for the first 20 levels. Day is for all of the normal quests alongside other players. Night is for solo game play following a single quest line based in the starting town, this culminates with a couple of nice blue items for your character. After level 20 you move into the main game world and the day and night modes end.
The main world is stunning to look at I would compare it to Oblivion IV. The world is split up into multiple instances unlike WOW. This means that the game loads each area as you enter it, its quick to do so, but it does get annoying have to wait for an area to load. The area instances themselves are fairly large, I would say they are around the same size as the areas in WOW. Within those areas there are instance dungeons that you can play in either normal or epic mode.
So what’s the game play like? I hear you ask. Well overall it’s not too bad. Combat is the biggest change that WOW players will notice. The game designers would have you believe that combat is more intense and enjoyable. From my point of view, all they have really done is stop your character auto hitting the enemy. Yes you do have the ability with the new combat system to attack from various directions, but you end up using combo moves to fight and this is just like clicking on the attack icons in WOW. The blood and gore is quite nice to watch though and the new characters do have some cool killer moves.
Equipment is much the same as WOW, you have a bag to store the loot you pickup from your kills. Items that you pick up are graded the same as WOW, grey being crap up to orange for elite. You can equip your character with various armour and weapon types depending on your class.
Trade seems very basic. This is probably because my characters are low levels at the moment. There are trade posts in the game that are supposed to give you an auction house equivalent and a bank to store items. I can’t seem to get this to work for my characters and so all of the items I pickup go straight to vendor.
Crafting is non-existent until level 40. You can gather items at lower levels and trade them, but as I can’t seem to access the AH I am just selling everything to the vendor.
So, is the game a WOW beater? No I don’t think so. It’s good and I like it but I don’t think that it offers enough to challenge WOW’s dominance. I can see myself playing through to level 40 to get my mount, but after that, I just don’t know. Some of the reviews I’ve read suggest that the game really gets going from level 50 onwards, so maybe I’ll stick with it until then, unless of course they make a habit of 1.2 GB updates!

Awareness test

On Friday last week, I took the plunge and purchased a new and very shiny iPhone.

I did laugh to myself as I entered the O2 store in Milton Keynes. There were crowd control tapes outside the door for the launch of the iPhone and lots of members of staff. At least 10 iPhones were arranged on a table for demo, the only thing that was missing were the hundreds of punters all waiting to sign up for an iPhone. “Would you like to try the iPhone sir” an almost pleading member of staff asked. “Sure” I said, I couldn’t help myself from saying “so, do you have any of these in stock?”

Anyway, I paid my £269 and took my new iPhone home. It did feel a bit strange not having the store setup the phone, but all of the activation is done through iTunes.
Opening the box, I was greeted with my first look at my new phone, the packaging is excellent and the box includes a docking station, usb to docking station lead, charger unit, cleaning cloth, headphones, documentation and of course the iPhone.

I eagerly switched on my PC and fired up iTunes. Then I connected the iPhone only to be greeted with the message “iTunes does not support iPhone with this version of iTunes, please install the 64bit version of iTunes” Huh? I knew that I had the latest version of iTunes, so I did a bit of digging on Google and discovered that iTunes does not work properly with vista 64bit. Luckily for me, I fired up my Hackingtosh and ran through the activation on that. I must say in iTunes defence that the activation was smooth and the phone was working in less than 10 minutes.

Wow, how cool is the iPhone, all of my anger at iTunes melted away as soon as the iPhone lit up for the first time. The screen is just a joy to look at and use, I keep finding myself playing with the phone just because.

Amazing applications, this is the best phone I have ever used. I was worried that the onscreen keyboard was going to be a real pain to use, nope; it’s the best phone keyboard I have ever used. In less than 5 minutes I was typing like a pro, the predictive text is excellent and very easy to use, you just press the onscreen spacebar to insert the word or not, the choice is yours. The text messaging is just a joy, I love the way that the texts are displayed like a conversation. The camera is not to bad either, a lot of reviews have slated it, but I thought it’s ok and I love snapping a picture and then zooming into it using my fingers. Email supports multiple pop3 accounts and push mail from Yahoo, although I haven’t tried this as I don’t have a Yahoo account.
Safari web browsing is just in a league of its own, although it is not without its faults. There is no support for flash or real player, but it’s just so cool to have tabbed browsing on a phone. It even works well using edge although it really zooms along when connected to a wireless network.
The phone is very easy to use and moving over to O2 gives me a better signal strength at home. Contacts are easy to add and you can do all of the usual stuff like assigning ringtones to single users, etc. The phone does have vibrate as well as ring and there is a mute all hard switch on the side of the phone if you do not want any sounds.
The ipod part is cool, although not a massive requirement for me. Flicking through the albums in landscape is very cool though!
Setting up the settings is just so easy; it is really nice with the large screen. Connecting to wireless networks couldn’t be easier, the phone prompts you that there is a wireless network available and you can either join it or cancel the request.

So, in summary, I am very pleased with the iPhone all of the applications are better than I expected and the problems it does have are software rather than hardware based, this means that it should only get better in time.

Some French guy and his guild….bastards :)

Link

Guys check out Southpark season 10 episode 8. Avaliable at you favorite torrent site. Well worth a download, The boys are playing WOW and keep getting killed by a high lvl. They spend hours online lvling their chars and finally have a mega battle with the dude. The best part is that the WOW stuff is from in game!

Tried to upload the torrent, but security settings does not allow it :(

Checked my broadband connection today…Freaked out when I saw the line speed was 576k!!

Did a bit of digging around and came up with this:-

Results for exchange: Bradwell Abbey

Congestion

Congestion status on this exchange is AMBER.

Your telephone line has been identified as being on a congested exchange. If you are receiving varying speeds between 400kbs - 2000kbs at different times of the day this is likely to be a result of the congestion issue.

A provisional date of Aug 4, 2006 has been set for upgrading this exchange.

Major Service Outages

There is currently an Active BT service outage affecting your ADSL connection

This service outage started on at and BT expect it to be cleared by at

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Dialling codes affected:

Could be the reason that me and Soop are getting fluctuating broadband speeds. Roll on the 4 August!

I know that some of you guys use a different codec pack than eskies. Could one of you let me know what it’s called?