You are browsing the archive for 2004.
This is the most awesome toy! It plays music and radio. It gets the radio from the internet and it gets the music from mp3′s stored on a PC. It is called a “Digital Media Adaptor”. It streams files over our Wi-Fi network. All you need to do is to run Squeezebox software which acts [...]
Kix gave me this Linksys Wi-Fi access point for Christmas. We use it to connect our Squeezebox to our network without needing to trail Ethernet cable all over the house.
This clock may take a few seconds to read but it’s worth the effort for the interesting factor. It’s a bit easier to read than if the entire time was coded into binary. Instead, each decimal digit is encoded separately:
The previous owner has a partition wall due to old regulations about a bathroom not being allowed to directly lead onto a kitchen. We decided the kitchen would feel a lot bigger without the wall: Before: After: We also got to work on renovating the kitchen. We removed the old kitchen units and then the [...]
The house didn’t have a boiler (only an old immersion tank) and it used ancient storage heaters. This meant the shower was cold, there was only ever five minutes hot water and it was impossible to heat the house with any flexibility. We dismantled the storage heaters (which were full of tonnes of heavy bricks) [...]
XBox,First Person Shooter,7/10 – September 2004 Friends ask me what’s the difference between Halo 1 and 2. Halo 2 has more vehicles and the marines can now drive them, you can hold 2 weapons, you get to be a Covernent soldier and thats about it. Except that the multiplayer mode has been boasted with XBox [...]
Unbelievable that our shiny new house didn’t come with a TV aerial. It was obviously an urgent requirement . We had a company install an aerial suitable for digital TV (freeview).
XBox,Battle Racing,9/10 – July 2004 Go Fast and Hit Stuff. This game introduced a great form of driving combat which I first saw in “destruction derby”. You get to knock opponent cars off the track! The levels manage to vary greatly and the game gives the best impression of speed that I’ve seen so far. [...]
Horror, 5/10 – Summer 2004 It is obsessive, gory, cruel, repellent and gut churningly unsettling. This book will no doubt encompass some of your worst nightmares and lay them out clearly for you on the page. It will destroy your innocence. The story has a twist at the end, but I was expecting more and [...]
Cyberpunk, 9/10 – Summer 2004 First realise that this is the 2nd book of a trilogy that is “Neuromancer”, “Count Zero” and “Mona Lisa Overdrive”. I don’t advice reading this until you’ve read Neuromancer and have got into the whole cyberpunk vocabulary. The plots in the storyline are deliciously challenging to unravel and Gibson certainly [...]
In July 2004, we bought a small Victorian terraced starter home 12 minutes walk from Reading railway station. It has easy parking, a park out the back and plenty of potential (i.e. needs lots of work). Owning my own house has been a dream for a long time! This is a loose representation of the [...]
Sci-Fi, 2/10 – Spring 2004 Besides extra moons in the sky and stories of devastating meteor showers that toppled a former Empire, this novel’s squalid, pre-industrial world seems to have no sci-fi elements. I was constantly anticipating something cool to happen but it never did, or it did but was really really disappointing. I would [...]
I bought this “Ford Ka” because he was built recently (1999) and has 4 stars in the parkers guide for reliability. But he’s an upgrade in a lot of other ways, power-steering, airbags, immobilizer, back-wiper, lights-on-doors-open warning sound, 1.3 engine, slow-speed wipers, 5-gears. He’s got good head room but not enough space to rest the [...]
Cyberpunk, 9/10 – Spring 2004 Wow, I’d never read anything like this before. The language and slang is heavy going but once I got to grips with it I began to love it. I like tech stuff and this kind of literature is just what I’ve been looking for. A great amount of imagination is [...]
GBA,Turn-based strategy,9/10 – March 2004 This is a tweeked version of Advanced Wars 1 with the introduction of interesting defensive buildings such as canons, missles and lasers. There is also the new NeoTank which expains why the strong tanks of AW1 were only called “Medium” Tanks. The game is set at a perfect level of [...]
