Filed under: Internet — Malcolm Owen @ 10:10 am
Youtube, those glorious bastards, have won today. I can’t be bothered to do a fake post on here, mainly because they have managed to do a fantastic Rickroll of so many people at the same time.
Go to http://uk.youtube.com/ and look at their featured videos. Normal, right?
Click them.
Yes, they lead to a video of Rick Astley… Never Gonna Give You Up.
Damn Youtube, and well played.
Filed under: Gaming, Internet, Other — Malcolm Owen @ 1:15 pm
Yes, 100 Kirbies. As in Kirby but plural. And in costumes. Kick-ass costumes. Like ones that don’t really exist. Really!
I want a Poster… Now…
[Via VG Cats]
Filed under: Internet — Malcolm Owen @ 3:52 pm
Pownce, Kevin Rose’s baby when he isn’t dealing with social news or internet television, has now been released to the general public to use. That’s apparently news to some people, because it’s been vaguely invite-only for a while, but now any Tom, Richard or Harry will be able to sign up for the service. For those that might not have heard about it, Pownce is similar to Twitter in terms of it being public announcements through… the intertubes….
That isn’t the point of the post.
My problem is with their damn Pownce client. They have built something via that Adobe AIR platform, which means it works on both my Mac and PC. How it works on the Mac is fine. It’s in the Dock and I keep it there all the time. Works pretty well. On the PC, however…
I expect the client to work similar to how Trillian, MSN, ICQ, or indeed any instant messaging client under the sun to work. There’s a Pownce icon in the system tray, sitting there doing nothing. I can click and right-click it, but it does zilch. If I minimise the Pownce client, it goes down to the Start bar like a normal minimised program would do. If I close it, however, the client shuts down, the system tray icon disappears, and I get the log-in page when I start the client up again.
If it was able to work from the system tray, much like most of what are down there already work, I’d be happier. Since there is no way to set how this works, I’m stuck with the problem whenever I am using my PC.
It infuriates me, that’s all…
Filed under: Internet — Malcolm Owen @ 4:40 pm
So, Microsoft (large company, you might have heard of them) has expressed an interest to buy Yahoo! (another large company, but the exclamation mark is their own doing) for a princely $44 Billion. Yahoo isn’t performing as well as it first did when it appeared on the internet so many years ago, partly due to Google now being the household name for “search” around the world. Google is continuing it’s attempt on world domination, and this understandably makes Microsoft unhappy that it isn’t the top dog. Cue MS looking at buying Yahoo! for a not insignificant chunk of change.
Yes, it would mean that the company would be the same size, if not bigger, than the “Do No Evil” Googlers, but I feel that the 1000 soon to be unemployed from Yahoo will not be happy about this at all. And I can’t blame them, especially since usually there’s even more “restructuring” once a takeover or merger happens.
Oh, if only I had money to spend on shares in the US…
[Via the BBC]
Filed under: Internet, Video — Malcolm Owen @ 9:19 pm
So. Ed Lau of the.[ED]ition found a blogpost by Michael Kwan, showing videos of how business meetings would happen if all of the participants were like the commenting masses on large forums and blogs. You know, “FIRST!”, “pwned”, “dugg”, that sort of thing. It’s a fantastic pair of video clips, that I can only say are worthy of sharing. However, because it’s already posted on those two blogs, I fear that I really shouldn’t just copy those posts. Instead, here’s another video from the same creators at CollegeHumor.com, whereby they wonder “If urban legends really did exist, what would the Casualty department of a hospital look like?”.
It’s extremely funny, and definitely worth a look, so long as you don’t mind a bit of blood…
Filed under: Internet, Tech — Malcolm Owen @ 2:08 pm
About a month ago, I felt I needed a change of phone, and so I started hunting around for what I could possibly use. Bearing in mind that I’m a relatively low-usage phone owner, whereby I make a few calls in the month, barely a few texts and no real MMS or internet usage, I felt that an iPhone wasn’t exactly the best plan of action, and neither do any of the smartphones currently on the market fit my current needs. I do, however, use Skype a lot, but a phone company would usually throw a hissy fit at the suggestion, and then throw on a heap of data charges.
Then, I stumbled upon 3…
(more…)
Filed under: Internet, Software — Malcolm Owen @ 1:55 pm
This might sound a bit strange, but I’ve registered mIRC. That in itself is weird, although it really shouldn’t be.
mIRC, to the uninitiated, is a fantastic Internet Relay Chat client that has been around since 1995. A fairly simple client with the flexibility for it to be used/misused with vast amounts of scripting, it is still holding it’s own against the now usual Instant Messaging systems such as MSN and Yahoo IM. An absolutely fantastic program that has proved itself over many years as pretty much an essential tool for net enthusiasts around the world.
As I reopened my usual mIRC window to join the usual suspects in the usual communities I hang out in, I saw the usual “You’ve used this for 30 days” registration nag message you get when you run the program, and began to wonder how long I had really been using it for. I mean, most shareware programs are limited in terms of how long they last for, or how much they allow you to do in them. mIRC allows you full access despite asking for a registration, even after the 30 days are up. No stopping you from chatting, no changing your nickname to something useless, not even an over the top nag screen that takes up the entire window. I’ve used the same unregistered installation of mIRC for years, and I think it’s more than earned my registration fee to it. So, I did.
After years of service, I’m now a registered user of mIRC. Fundamentally nothing has changed, except that I feel a little bit better, that I’ve done a “Good Thing”.
Filed under: Gaming, Internet, Tech — Malcolm Owen @ 12:54 pm
Yes, I know I write there. And yes, I know it’s only for the population of Canada to try and win, but quite frankly this is the biggest contest that Gametactics has ever wheeled out into the world. Excuse me whilst I go into “Smarmy Marketer” Mode…
Do you want this year’s most wanted games console by Christmas? Want a Wii but can’t get one in the shops? Live in Canada but not the Province of Quebec? Then you can enter Gametactics‘ contest to win a Wii, Battalion Wars 2 and Fire Emblem from Nintendo of Canada. Just go HERE, enter your details (No, they won’t be sold to anyone else), answer the easy question (Think really hard about this. People really are getting it wrong…), and hope you win.
The winner’s chosen after the 30th of November, where they’ll be contacted and then sent the little white box of gaming goodness.
That didn’t hurt much at all, did it? Things learned - “Smarmy” is in my Mac’s spellchecker…
Filed under: Internet, Tech — Malcolm Owen @ 1:45 pm
So, for the last few months, I’ve been frustrated with my networking situation. Thanks to the locations of my computers and the cable modem (i.e. opposite ends of the house, don’t ask), I’m forced into using Wifi. That in itself isn’t that bad, except when you consider my Macbook not having any problems at all, yet my PC has bad signal and noise issues. My 54Mbps connection constantly goes lower, and for gaming this is not a good thing to happen.
I was close to buying a new aerial, when the latest episode of Systm gave me some inspiration…
Filed under: Gaming, Internet, Other — Malcolm Owen @ 9:46 am
So, Justin and I were recording the latest edition of Video Game Guys, when we ran out of news on a slow news week. This has happened before, but to avoid too much pain and embarrassment, I dutifully looked online for any new things that pique my interest, gaming-wise. Cue reading Destructoid [NSFW], more specifically a story called Second Life gets even creepier: Sex with unicorns anyone? [NSFW] And my brain just broke at this.
Really, you can go onto Second Life, and get… impregnated… by a unicorn [NSFW]. And in return, you get a pet unicorn to keep. And I’ll leave it at that, so you can go see the report [NSFW] for yourselves and get creeped out.
…My brain still hurts…
[via Second Life Herald [NSFW] via Boing Boing [Fairly SFW] via Destructoid [NSFW]]