Month of February, 2007

Shocker: tarted-up toys are slaggy. Apparently a bunch of American scientists –after a lot of study – has determined that dolls that wear fishnet tights and trowels of slap don’t promote healthy childhood innocence. So if the American Psychological Association can do it, with a stroll round the Internet we can too.

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a "How To" guide that will teach you how to find TV programming to watch on-demand or via BitTorrent download so that you can watch your favorite TV shows whenever you like.

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We all know about mininova, The Pirate Bay and Torrentz, but what few know is that there are a host of less known torrent sites that also have some great, and sometimes rare, content. Here are 20 of these less known torrent sites.

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For everyone out there claiming that you need a very high-end PC to run Windows Vista, this article shows that you don't need to break the bank to enjoy Vista to its fullest

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See for yourself...

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Coca-Cola Japan Co has redesigned its cans and bottles as part of its "The Coke Side of Life" marketing campaign. The beverage maker said that the new look can will hit the Japanese market before its introduction to the world market in March.

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Yet another reason why we need a photo section on Digg. Amazing collection of images.

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Live preview of a new revolutionary new software by Microsoft allowing people to tag, view and upload pictures in 3d space! 10x Better than flickr!

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Construction was completed in four hundred hours...working five hours per day. Matchsticks for the curved portions of the ukulele were pre-soaked and bent, and the glued-together sections were weighted into shape with the aid of flat-irons, fire bricks and pans of water.

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"This is a project that me and my friends built for school (UC Berkeley). Its made of lego mindstorms, scissors, and some scrap metal. With all things considered, I think it turned out alright."

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When is a chair not just a chair? When it
’s made from 4,000 AOL CDs. Find that and more in this geeky list

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Block Posters Is a good tool that allows you to upload any image, choose how many sheets wide you would like your poster to be and then print it at your own home.

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Western drivers are understandably confounded and rightfully annoyed, when faced with such traffic-routing masterpieces as these

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They've come a long way...

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All you have to do is upload a photo. That will take about 3 seconds, and the image that you chose to upload will be turned into text, using keyboard characters. Its very hard to describe, so go try it out yourself. Just don't spam Digg with too many of them in the comment section.

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Amazing graphical art created by various artists merged into one, long, artisitc worm.

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Amazing

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My Vista review is now up on the articles section.

I started writing this as a blog post however as it continued in length it started to sound more like an article so here goes.... For doing IT support at work we had to learn Windows Vista and while we haven't had much interest yet it is inevitable that something will go wrong for us to fix. The majority of other reviews I've read online have not been particularly positive with many people commenting on the DRM restrictions and lack of anything ground breaking.

I wanted to see for myself and of course share it with the wonderful ImAFish fans. To save reinstalling I opted to use Virtual PC 2007, it made sense as it meant I could do XP and Vista support from one computer though it made it hard to see the performance differences. My rig is an Athlon 64 3000+ with 2GB Memory, I gave Virtual PC 1gig of memory and used Vista Business Upgrade. Installation seemed to take forever and wasn't helped by the fact I had to install XP first then install Vista. Three hours later and a couple of restarts I had a Vista desktop. At this point Vista was painfully slow to do anything , I managed to slowly install the Virtual PC additions and reboot the system. This vastly improved things however I tweaked the performance settings a bit more to give maximum performance. At this point i'm sure your all gagging for a screen shot so here we go Windows Vista... (click to enlarge)

As you can see from removing all of the high performance settings you get what looks like Windows 2000! This unfortunately made me lose the "wow" factor so I enabled "Use visual styles on windows and buttons" from the performance options.

This made Vista look like....

You probably recognise this from many of the other Vista screen shots. It's hard not to like the new theme, even without Aero its a lot more polished, smart and has an almost calming effect on what you do. Also in the screen shot is the new start menu, finally they have discarded those annoying nested menus that required pin-point mouse accuracy to follow. Start menu items now simply display below the folder title, more like files in Explorer view. Once you start doing anything you will notice lots of confirmation windows popping up, these tend to be incredibly annoying, I got 3 pop-up boxes just when trying to install Flash Player in IE7.

Fortunately these can be turned off in Control Panel > User Accounts > Turn User Account Control on or off. It will ask you to reboot but its well worth it. You will also need to turn off alerts in the Windows Security Centre to stop Vista from constantly reminding you that account control is disabled.

I tried a couple of common applications, Firefox and SmartFTP both worked fine and didn't look too misplaced within Vista, in fact IE7 looks more out of place with its annoying interface. The majority of Vista can be customised like XP and as you can see from my first screen shot its not hard to pull away the glossy interface though as I said before it is nice.

Most of your favourite tools will be in the same place such as msconfig and the command prompt though incidentally these are now run from the start search box. This can also be used for launching applications, if I was to type in 'Internet' it would launch Internet Explorer, or if I type in 'ass' it launched Remote Assistance. Search has been deeply improved, instead of it taking three minutes to search your hard drive its takes three seconds. Microsoft have redesigned control panel again but give you the option to go back to the classic view.

The majority of items within control panel are unchanged, though there are a few new additions such as the option to upgrade your copy of Vista online. The networking section has the most changes and is now branded under the Network and Sharing Center (even though I set my language to English they still cant spell centre right). At first this is a little confusing however it ends up being a nice way of organising various connections. The system tray now only shows one network icon for all your connections making it easier to forget if you keep a VPN connected by accident. The network map is also a nice tool as it shows other Vista computers and how they are connected. Useful stats such as IP address and computer name are also displayed.

Here you can see many more of the tools common in XP have not changed greatly for Vista. I could fill another four pages with Vista comments but its not really worth it, on the surface Vista is not hugely different. It's stable, has working applications and looks nice. If I brought a new PC having Vista would not put me off however I wouldn't upgrade my current desktop. Vista might be a lot different deep down but on the surface its not and for the price of £80 just for the Home Basic edition upgrade (£152 for Business Upgrade) it doesn't feel value for money. What's worse is that we pay in £'s for Vista editions what the Americans pay in $'s, considering £1 is almost worth $2 we are being ripped off beyond belief. The system requirements are too high for many older computers so if you intend to buy a new computer over the next year that might be the best time to experience Vista. I will leave Vista for now and go get the majority of features elsewhere.

The Millau bridge over the River Tarn in the Massif Central mountains is more than 300m (984ft) high - taller even than the Eiffel Tower. With its concrete and steel pillars soaring high above the morning fog in the Tarn Valley, the construction makes a spectacular sight.

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As if the folks at Top Gear didn't already have the best job in the world, they recently went and completely outdid themselves, building their own Space Shuttle out of a Reliant Robin, roughly the British equivalent of a Pinto or a Gremlin (minus a wheel).

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The guys over at speedtest.net have really out done themselves this time. Checkout the new interface and the global comparison features.

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If you don
’t have cable at home or if you just want to watch TV amd movies while your using your PC, then you should check out the list below which lists the best free online TV services I’ve discovered.

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All of these are real excuses that people have written to "excuse" their children from school. Some of them are pretty unbelievable.

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Five origami that work with dollar bills that you can leave as a tip the next time you dine out

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IE does what it does best.

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For those unaware, today is Fat Tuesday. So, what is a better way to ring in the holiday than a grand 'ole list of some of our favorite alcohol and breast related gear.

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I wish I'd thought of this idea for portraits. I'll have to give this a try.

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It's been snowing all afternoon here in Shrewsbury and it's just taken me 90mins to drive home from town (a journey that usually takes 10mins). There is gridlock everywhere and noone is driving over 20mph.

I've not had much chance to take some photos and I don't have a waterproof cover for my camera but here are some of the photos I managed to get from my house including Shrewsbury Business Park.

This is the view from the front of my house, usually you can see the south Shropshire hills, today everything is white.

Here is my car, I had just driven home in it so there was not too much snow.

Here is the Shrewsbury Business Park, people usually work here.

Here is my back garden, usually you can see the different areas including the lawn, patio, gravel and woodland. Today is it all white.

Finally here is a the other side of my back garden.

I will try to get some more photos tomorrow when its light and the snow has stopped!

The BBC has decided to use Windows Media technology for their upcoming on demand online service meaning that only people using Windows XP or Vista will be able to play content. The iPlayer will be launching later this year and will let you download and watch content aired on TV for the following 7 days for free.

Five and Channel 4 already have online paid download services that also use Windows Media and will not work on Mac OS X or Linux. ITV is launching its online download service later this year though little detail has emerged about this service so far.

Its a shame the BBC is not using open standards to protect its content and that a significant amount of public money will be going to Microsoft to fund the service.

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