Now the dust has settled around ICS, I thought I’d write a little something on upcoming improvements to AndChat.
Firstly, there is a lot of work being done to make AndChat work great on ICS. The main improvement being worked on is the userlist handling, which will be similar to how it works on Honeycomb and slight changes to the UI. The challenging part with the userlist is the small screen real estate and nick selection and I’m working hard to find a nice way to get it to work.
I found a very good article about the slow erosion of civil and human rights in the United States, with the framework being laid for a Big Brother State, the suspension of all civil rights, and the installation of a Military Government, who overrides the basis of American Democracy.
The article talks about cancelling election, martial law, the Military and the Partiot Act.
Last week I put my laptop for sale in Loot, a UK based ads paper ( think of it as a ebay on paper 
). So anyway, I got a few responses, but so far, they all seem to be scam emails lol. One email in particular has a request for the laptop to be shipped to Nigeria (how typical), and she was willing to pay £20 extra to persuade me to only sell to her :o .
I thought for once I’d play along with the scammer. I sent an email saying I’d only pay to people who meet and pay me in London. The reply I got was the funniest scam response I’ve read so far. She emailed back saying she works on a boat as a sailor, and can’t meet me or pay me in person, but she can pay via Paypal. Bear in mind that this person hasn’t asked about the condition of the laptop, or any pictures of it. So I replied saying that that is fine with me, but I need her account details first to make sure it was a valid account.
I got a response saying that Paypal has authorised us 
to not give out account information, and am I trying to scam her :o . TBH, yes I was trying to scam the scammer, it was getting kinda fun making them get their hopes up that I might share account information with them. I replied saying, oh noes, not the password, just the account details to make sure it was valid “as I want to protect myself against fraud.” 
We’ll that seemed to end my little game, I got a reply saying she was no longer interested and I could sell to who I wanted. I decided it was time to let all my frustration at scammers out, and I sent a very colourfully worded email, telling them I knew what they were doing, and I was playing along to it to annoy them
So far I haven’t got a reply, but no doubt there’ll be plenty of scam email everytime I advertise something, so next time I’ll be a bit more careful when I ask for info and maybe I’ll be able to make them do some of the silly stuff you find at the 419 Eater forums. :evil:
Yesterday was the 2nd last episode of Prison Break Season 2, and it was a crazy episode full of twists!!!! It’s gonna return again in January (WTF, Why So Late!!!) Anyway, unfortunately for us Brits, Season 2 isn’t gonna be on our screens for a long time 
but, using the ultimate h4x0r method ( ), I managed to see all the eps in this season so far. If you don’t wanna know what happened in episode 13, skip this part of my post
To keep it short, Michael and Burrows get caught by Mahone, who doesn’t have the chance to kill them because border patrol turns up. They get sent to a hold place so they can be transferred to Fox River, but now Mahone is screwed because he didn’t do his “job” properly for the Company, i.e. kill the two brothers. The Chinese dude, who is Kellerman’s and Mahone’s boss is now meeting with his boss, a weird man who writes notes instead of talking, he orders Kellerman to be killed. While they are being transported, Kellerman, who is now a marked man, has the bright idea of screwing with the Company, helping Michael and Lincoln escape, and shooting, maybe killing Mahone in the process.
In other news about my life, Uni is getting very hard. I flopped one test, did ok in another, and aced it in another one. 
Until the 16th of December, I have to work extra-hard, but after that date, I can relax for a bit, since after that date, I have no more coursework and no more exams until next year.
I’m also trying to decide whether I should sell my current laptop, an Amilo A1667G, and buy another one which is more portable and has better battery life. I have my eye on the Dell Inspirion 6400 (Core 2 Duo, 1GB RAM, 120GB SATA HD, £790) , but I’m not sure whether I’m ready to sell this one yet. I wanna be able to play games, but if I get the Dell, which has either a X1300 or X1400, I won’t be able to. This laptop is able to handle Far Cry, Splinter Cell 3, GTA:SA and NFS:MW and NFS:C with either the highest or very good graphics. To be honest, I rarely find the time to play games now, but I probably will start playing after I finish all my work at Uni.
I could carry one using this for a while longer. If I sell it, I would probably make a loss, and I recently upgraded the RAM and HD, which has added to the cost of this laptop. Currently there are no Amilo A1667G laptops on Ebay, so I’m not too sure if I could get this to sell
After 5 long years, with so many setbacks and so many features taken out that people didn’t expect Vista to show up until next year for RTM, it was announced today that Vista has now gone gold!!! According to Jim Allchin, who put together a small video making the announcement, Vista will be available to everyone on 30th January 2007. A big well done to MS for *finally* getting it out the door . Screenshots of all builds can be found here. The Vista Team Blog also has a simple message letting everyone know that Vista is complete.
Links:
After my recent HD failure, I realized how stupid it was to keep backups on a single Hard Drive. So after some hunting around on the net, I found the Western Digital My Book Premium Edition, which seemed just about right for my needs. I went for the 320GB edition (formatted capacity 298GB :o ), since it was only for back up and some minor video editing.
I received it it today, and so far so good. It has a dual interface system; 2 Firewire connections and 1 usb connection. It runs pretty quite and cool, and has some nice eye candy LEDs on the front , one for drive activity and one for how much space has been used. The LEDs also happen to be blue, which is my favorite colour . I backed up all the documents on my laptop, and will backup my desktop pc soon as well. The desktop pc needs to be formatted, its become slow and sluggish and its been a year since I installed Windows on it, so no surprise there.
I also need to get a new router, probably the WRT54G, since you can use modded firmware on it . My current one is acting really funky. lol, it seems that for me, one thing breaks down after the other .
Like I promised I tried out NFS:Carbon. To be honest, I didn’t enjoy it at all. The graphics looks shit, the handling was rubbish, and there wasn’t anything new to the game. Anyway, I took some videos and screenshots of the game, they can be found in my Gallery. I would say this game is not really anything impressive. I reckon its about time EA moved on to something else. The NFS series has lost its touch.
I found a hilarious example of a “scammer” getting scammed by the person he tried to scam!! Confused? Read the conversation below:
br0kenrabbit says:
hi
Greg_ValveOLS says:
good evening
br0kenrabbit says:
What’s ip?
br0kenrabbit says:
up?
Greg_ValveOLS says:
my name is greg a member of the valve online Support team
br0kenrabbit says:
On MSN?
Greg_ValveOLS says:
yes 
br0kenrabbit says:
Why?
Greg_ValveOLS says:
we logged multiple ips from your account and ned to verifi your information
br0kenrabbit says:
My information?
Greg_ValveOLS says:
we believe someone may have stolen your account mmmm you havent shared youre account infomation with anyone have you?
br0kenrabbit says:
No. I don’t even have it written down.
Greg_ValveOLS says:
hmmm maybe a keylogger on you r PC then maybe you need a format?
br0kenrabbit says:
Well…
Don’t know what to write about really. The HD is still dead, seems like the logic board got fried somehow, probably by static. Uni is getting quite difficult, got an exam on Monday, and also pieces of Coursework to hand in on Monday and Thursday. Gotta get started on my Java mini-project as well. So yeah, its a bit hectic at the moment.
I’m also looking to buy an external HD, I don’t wanna suffer again with a massive HD failure . Probably gonna get a 200-400GB 7200 RPM drive, and something that’ll last a long time. The new laptop hard drive is really fast, its a 5400RPM Seagate drive. Now my apps load up faster, and the laptop is just faster in general. So far 27GB is used up, but I’m not gonna bother deleting files until I’m really starting to lose capacity.
I also got hold of the Need For Speed Carbon demo. Once I get round to playing that, which wont be until next week, I’ll post some pictures and post whether it fails to impress .
Pictures of the laptop when it was opened and cleaned have been posted.
I still haven’t got round to posting any pictures in the gallery, so sometime over the weekend, I’ll post pictures of my laptop I took when I was cleaning out the dust and adding some Thermal Paste to replace the crappy stuff Fujitsu Siemens put on .
So today i got my new 100gb Seagate HD. I took out my old one, took them both to my desktop pc, hooked them up with some 2.5″ to 3.5″ adapters, and turned on the pc to clone it. So nothing happens, except for the new HD being detected. I check the adapters and see one of the pins are bent. So I fix it, stick ‘em back in, and still no luck. I put the old HD in the laptop again, and this time I get error message, but no HD is detected. So now I’m a bit worried, I check the connection, still no luck. No spinning, no creaking, no nothing.
I take my new HD, and it works perfect, so the connectors ain’t the problem. So I have to reinstall Windows on the new HD, transfer all my docs (still doing it now), and customize my Windows back to the way it was before ATM, I’m freezing the old HD, apparently this works in some cases. Tomorrow I’m gonna buy an external enclosure for the HD, and see if it has any life It’s a sad ending to a happy story
Ok, so I’d been wanting to do this for a long time, but I didn’t have enough money. So I got paid quite a bit from work, I ordered some RAM from ebay. It was a 1GB 200 pin Corsair PC 2700. I received it today, popped it in, loaded up Windows. Now everything is much faster, but the real bottleneck of my laptop is the HD. It is a slooooow 4200RPM speed, which slows stuff down. I’m gonna buy a new HD from ebay. ATM, I’m waiting for my 2.5″ to 3.5″ adapter to turn up so I can clone my current HD. Ordered it on Monday, and still no sign of it.
I ordered the RAM on Thursday, and it came today. Quicker then I expected. So now I have 1.25GB RAM, and once I get a HD, this laptop should be a beast.
The RAM was £80, incl. P&P.
