My Poor English

I just read over one of my posts on this blog and noticed that my spelling and grammar is worse than a 10 year-old.

I've just gone over a few posts and fixed some spelling mistakes (those that I could spot) but the grammar and text is still basically the same, I'm surprised people managed to read what I wrote.

Anyway thanks for trying to read my posts and I'll try to read over what I write in the future and do a spell check before posting

Retro Gaming

I remember reading online about people's retro games console collection, so for the sheer fun of it I thought I would post this image of my old school games consoles sitting on the top of my bookshelf.


I have owned other consoles in the past like an original Mega Drive, a Playstation and an Amiga 1200 but they seem to have gone walkabouts.

TNA makes an Impact at the Wembley Arena

This January I attended the one of the TNA 2009 Maximum Impact! Tour shows held at Wembley Arena.

Having visited WWE Raw and WWE Smackdown tapings in the past I decieded I would visit more live profesional wrestling events. After a few years of always learning about these events when the titckets had been sold out I managed this time to get some tickets early on.

As far as the show went it was a really good show and had some great moments and some of the wrestlers showing off some awesome moves.


Having seen some of TNA's TV shows on Bravo and because of that I was expecting a lot of high flying moves so I took my camera along to get some cool action shots. To TNA's credit there were plenty of good action shots for me to take but sadly due to my lousy camera work the action was a little too quick for me to time a photo with and I ended up with a lot of blurry and out of focus shots which were taken either before or after the "Oh my how did they pull that move off!!" moments.


If only I had the ability to slow down time I might have been able to take an uber cool photo.

Playing With PlayTV

I have had a PlayTV attached to my PS3 to turn my games console into a Freeview PVR for a few months now and after wanting to write about it for months I thought I would finally get around to it.

I bought the PlayTV to replace my existing Sagem Freeview box, which was getting a bit old and using my PS3's existing hard drive the PlayTV would allow me to record TV.

Setting up the PlayTV is very simple all I needed to do was plug in my existing coaxial cable into the PlayTV and then plug that into the PS3 via one of the spare USB ports on the front, however the USB cable sticking out the front is a bit noticeable. The kit also came with a sticker to stick on my existing PS3 remote so it would label what the buttons on the remote would do with PlayTV. Once I turned my PS3 on I just popped in the supplied DVD and the software installed within a few minutes.

Once the software has installed the PlayTV shows up in the Playstation 3's XMB in between the Video and Game options. When you go into the PlayTV the menu system is easy enough to navigate and reminds me of Apple's old Front Row interface with options appearing in a circular shape.

You get a weeks worth of TV listings in the guide and as far as recording features there's nothing amazing but you record and pause live TV as well as setting up scheduled recordings.

Navigating through you recordings isn't too difficult as they are just in a list format and you can change the sort order to help you find what your looking for.

The picture quality is good and on a par with some stand alone PVRs. However the picture does freeze for a second every now and again, but this is somewhat rare.

When I first got the PlayTV I did notice a few issues such as the guide taking a few minutes to load however this seems to have been fixed in a software update.

My PS3 came with a 60GB hard drive which due to the amount of programs I recorded filled up very quickly and instead of just deleting some of the programs I had watched I choose to replace my PS3's hard drive with a larger 500GB hard drive. Replacing the hard drive wasn't too difficult after watching a few clips on YouTube on how to replace my PS3's hard drive and only took a few minutes to swap out the drives (however it took over an hour to back up my data and over another hour to restore my data on my new hard drive).

Another Holiday Over and I’ve Achieved Nothing.

I am coming to the end of my one week holiday I took and like last time I have pretty much done nothing interesting.

I did however manage to get a few achievements on Rock Band and Scene IT? Lights, Camera, Action.

Next time I go on holiday I think I need to plan ahead and go somewhere interesting.

iReady for iPhone but iPhone not ready for me

After months of waiting I managed to get a iPhone 3G on launch day.


I have had an iPhone for a while now so I though I would give my impressions on it. First of it's a pretty good device and I really like the fact that my contacts, email, photos, music and podcasts are all on one device. I have however had a few problems with GPS which resulted in a few big problems.

I went for the iPhone as 3G coverage in my area is pretty good and had pretty much all the features I wanted in a phone and my old phone (Nokia N73) was starting to get very buggy as it kept taking a minute or so to move from the text message screen to the home screen.

I had no real problem using my finger to navigate the screens, menus or applications. Even my stubby hands were able to use the on screen keypad after a little while I got use to it and I now almost always select the right key.

The web browsing on the device is great and probably the best thing about it. I can be anywhere and surf the net. There are a lot of good iPhone enabled websites which make reading pages and navigation very easy but for the majority of websites navigating and read them is not a problem as the zoom/pinch function allows me to zoom into a block of text and read it at whatever size I want. I am also glad that O2's tariff allow for unlimited data access (although it does have a fair use policy) which means I don't need to worry too much about data charges when surfing the net on 3G or EDGE and O2 didn't increase their tariff's to include 3G, so well done O2 and keep it up.

I use exchange for my personal email but all my contacts and calendars are stored in Address Book and iCal on my Mac. The iPhone was handle this odd arrangement without any problem so I can now send and receive emails from anywhere and I can quickly check.

The phone audio quality is decent. I would say my old Nokia N73 was slightly clearer but the iPhone's phone audio quality is fine.

Photo's look very nice and the pinch action makes zooming in and out of photo's a breeze.

I haven't watched too many YouTube videos yet but clips look really good on the iPhone.

I had a quick look around the app store and too be honest I can't really see many applications that I may want. I don't really want to use the iPhone as a gaming device so and I spent a lot on technology stuff recently so I don't have much spare cash left to pay for applications so that left me small selection of free applications. I do really like the Last.fm application as it a great way to find and listen to music and the Remote app is also useful as it lets me use my iPhone as a remote control for my iTunes library and my Apple TV.

The iPod feature on the iPhone is fantastic. The audio quality (from the headphone connection) is not as good when compared to my 160GB iPod classic but it's still good. The audio quality from the iPhone's inbuilt speaker isn't too loud but this is a feature I would hard ever use. Video playback is vastly better when compared to my iPod and picture quality is very clear for a mobile device. The iPhone's accelerometer means you can watch videos in a widescreen..ish (it's not 16:9) format. The only problem I have with the iPod feature in the iPhone is that there isn't enough room on the 16GB Solid state drive to fit all my stuff. As all my music is ripped to Apple Lossless it takes up a large amount of space to store a few tracks on the iPhone. I have synced all my podcasts and several playlists to the iPhone but I still take my iPod Classic with me to work so I can listen to whatever track I want to while at my desk.

The iPhone is very prone to finger print marks all over the device and the supplied cloth is used a lot and pretty much goes where the phone goes. I was also very worried about scratching the front so I stuck on a protective cover to the front called invisibleSHIELD which after drying out isn't too noticeable and stops me from worrying about scratching the screen.

I did however have a few problems with the iPhone. The main issue I had was that the GPS was not working. It could not find my location no matter where I was. I could not get GPS to work on my iPhone and I went over a load of stuff with Apple support including turning thing off and on, resetting network settings and restoring the firmware but I still can't get it to work.

When on WiFi or Edge it did pinpoint my location but it thought I was in the sea near Canada which is strange as I was in Milton Keynes (England) at the time.

Firstly I tried several different locations near where I live. Including vast open areas such as fields and lakes (no trees or buildings blocking any view to the sky), built up city centres, outside my home in my garden and in a car on an A road.

I also tried these locations with a TomTom 520 and the TomTom spotted my location within a few seconds.

I also tried several different setting like having 3G on and off and WiFi on and off.

I tested with different firmware (if you do a restore in iTunes the version number goes up from 2.0 (5A345) to 2.0 (5A347)).

I tried resetting the network and carrier settings.

I made sure that the date/time and international settings were correct for the UK (according to Apple these need to be correct otherwise when it tries to compare times with the sats/servers and they are vastly off it won't work).

I have turned off all radios and tried and then just turned on location services.

After several calls to Apple Support and having my phone replaced, I found a strange trick on the AVForums (big thanks to AVForums and coops233) website that made it work, turning the Auto-Lock to never. I am not sure how Auto-Lock is related to GPS but turning it off testing GPS and then turning it back on worked!

Now that GPS works the Google Maps application is great. You don't get turn by turn directions but it does pinpoint where you are.

The other problem I currently have is that when I play a podcast from start to finish on the iPhone it does not register as played on iTunes and I still have not found a solution to this.

Other than the problems I had with GPS and marking podcasts as played the iPhone is a great phone.

My Bad Luck

A few weeks after buying my USB only Drobo a newer version is released with FireWire connections.

My original plan was to hold off getting a Drobo until Data Robotics (makers of the Drobo) released a Drobo with a FireWire port but sadly I ran out of external hard drive space and went and bought one with only a USB connection.

Oh well can't complain too much as the Drobo has served me well so far.

I will... I will... Rock You

Rock Band is one of the most fun games I have ever played and tonight was the first time I managed to get 100% on a song.

I was so pleased with myself that I had to blog it so it could be marked in history as the moment I flawlessly played a pretend guitar and thought I was a rock legend!

It maybe one of the easier songs on the set list and I was only playing on medium but it won't stop me bragging about it.