It’s dying it’s dying, it’s dead

By Thomas Henwood · December 14, 2005 · 13 comments

NH is now dead. The blogging bubble has burst.

Nerd Herd June 2004 - December 2005

RIP

Leastways, I’m fairly sure it is.

SOo now I know…

By Thomas Henwood · December 11, 2005 · No comments

I often wonder what makes my harddrive churn and gurgle randomly, so I ran this proccess checker to see what. I was suprised to see that the biggest users when I was doing nothing were my USB card reader and my modem program. This was suprising seeing as my Anti-virus spent less time running! Though I still wonder why it takes so long to detect a CF card being inserted.

Windows Live Local

By Thomas Henwood · December 8, 2005 · No comments

It’s meant to be like Google Maps, but made by Bill. It does do maps quite well, although I can say I like the drag scrolling, which feels like trying to drag the earth around with a pin. It also has satellite pictures called birdseye, which are taken from a different angle from Google’s on top view, although they only seem to have pictures for New York. So, it’s not as bad as it might be, but still not great…

Easy Free OS’s

By Thomas Henwood · · No comments

I like the idea of free OS’s, but they are a bit pointless (if you already have an OS), and a bit of an unknown quantity. This site happily makes them much more accesible, by using virtual machines, so maybe I can have a crack at SuSe after all.

Back Up FF Bookmarks

By Thomas Henwood · November 30, 2005 · No comments

I often store lots of useful stuff as Firefox bookmarks, essential sites, cool tutorials, programs I will download… one day. But, I keep thinking what if I lose all my data, I can re download the programs, but I will never remember all the bookmarks. So I found this tutorial, that has lots of faff, but basically tells you that you can back up bookmarks, by going to Bookmarks-> Manage Bookmarks-> File -> Export and there you are, all your net life saved, now I need to remember all my passwords.

Firecat

By Thomas Henwood · · 1 comment

I like cats more than dogs, that’s why I got Firecat!!!!! Very sweet!!!

Firefox 1.5

By Thomas Henwood · · No comments

It’s here, more or less a year after 1.0. Wow… All that seems to have changed is the website, the number in the about screen. Oh yeah and there’s a new marketing campaign. Firefox 1.5, I haven’t noticed any difference from 1.5RC3, or RC2, or 1. Oh well, enjoy the hype whilst it lasts.

An Adblock, that works

By Thomas Henwood · November 27, 2005 · No comments

Nuke Anything Enhanced, is a tiny little extension for everybodys favourite browser, that allows you to block anything and bring it back, with just a click on the right-click menu. Although this is fairly useless, it can be quite fun for bored people like me, and at least unlike adblock or all the rest, you can bring it back.

Free Flight Sim

By Thomas Henwood · November 26, 2005 · No comments

Once upon a time, it was possible to pay £60 for Microsoft Flight Sim ‘04, now you can get an open source flight sim for free! Flight Gear, is an open source multi platform flight simulator, or so it says. Anyway, it is hardly stingily provided for, there are hundreds of planes to download, scenery for most of the world, and it all looks pretty good. I think that anything open source has got to be good news (Blender, sadly stops me from just saying good), and this one looks particulary so.

Update: Just forget it, any initial expectation vanish, when you soon realise that the controls are impossible.

Too big, and too small

By Thomas Henwood · November 25, 2005 · No comments

Possibly the two most annoying things in the nerdy universe are at either end of the scale. At one end, are the stupid Mac Mini “competitors” which turn up on Engadget/Digg/Gizmodo, each one smaller than the other, each more useless than the other. Few of them have optical drives, which is useless, few have a processor faster than 1.5ghz a sort of speed reached 4 years ago and more. Some even lack a harddrive. Honestly, what is the point.

At the other end of the scale are the holographic optical drives, supposed to compete with blu-ray and HD-DVD and supposed to hold 1tb or so. Once again they are pointless, they will cost the earth, be slower than harddrives and not be as succesful as blu-ray and HD-DVD anyway. Come developers, stop trying to make the biggest/ smallest and do something useful.

Wow!

By Thomas Henwood · · No comments

Look at this video, all the stuff in it is CGI, if only the XBOX360 and PS3 could do this!

Don’t buy these…

By Thomas Henwood · November 24, 2005 · No comments

iSkin
I bought this so that I could protect my beautiful iPod from getting scratched and looking minging. Once I put it on, I soon realised that it certainly made it minging and bulky, not to mention the pocket fluff that became stuck to it like a magnet. Over all, this is a pointless product onless you have either an iPod nano (which is small enough for this to work) or have cavernous pockets, that are free of fluff. Oh, and if you must buy something, buy a metal one off the internet, it costs about the same as the overpriced iSkin.

HP Home Photoprinter
I’m not exactly sure what model mine is, only I’m sure that it doesn’t work. My family already have a B&W laserjet 4L from HP and it has been brilliant, about nine years old, and I haven’t had a single problem with it, fast, reliable and economic I would recommend this to anyone. So, when my crappy Canon S200 bubblejet broke about a year ago, I was happy to choose an HP photo printer, it should have all the good bits of the Laser, but with colour. Not so, it worked not to bad at first, good quality, the only slight problem being that it neede lots of photo paper loaded to acknowledge its existence. This problem soon got worse however, as it decided not to acknowledge any paper loaded whatsoever, then today only about a year after purchase, it finally decided not to turn on, and that was that. Major suckage.

Gunz!

By Thomas Henwood · · No comments

Ever wondered what would happen if you emptied a pistol into a wall, or maybe a lock, or a door even. This website is brilliant, chances are it will answer any of your schoolboy fantasies of shooting things and it is well illustrated, with conclusions at the end of each “test”. The guy who runs it seems to be some crazed bored pensioner in the USA, who has a fixation for shooting things, but hey! It’s great fun.

WordPress.com

By Thomas Henwood · November 21, 2005 · 4 comments

Basically, WordPress, differs from Blogsome.com in one way, it keeps all the functionality of Blogsome, but adds a usable interface. Believe me, this makes quite a difference with an interface as horrible as that of blogsome.

Better than Google Earth?

By Thomas Henwood · November 18, 2005 · No comments

I’m glad to see that the master of satelites, NASA, has got in on the “earth” scene, by producing an open source product to rival Google Earth. It’s called World Wind and can do more than just satelite images, it can also do weather data and more. It’s open source, so it would be an interesting program to use the source to create a strategy game with the real world.