Monthly Archive for September, 2005

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Dissecting the Game Boy Micro

Published on Tuesday, September 13, 2005 in Gaming and Technology. Closed
Inside the Game Boy Micro

You should have by now heard of the Game Boy Micro. It will be released in the US on September 19th for $99 and was released today in Japan. The release date in the UK is the 4th November and will sell for £69. PC Watch has managed to get their hands on a working Game Boy Micro and the first thing they did was take it apart. There are many large photos of the dissection in great detail.
The Game Boy Micro is smaller than the Game Boy Adavance, and the screen is smaller. But the resolution of the screen is the same, which means that the picture is clearer. I would personally have a larger screen, but it is upto the user. The Game Boy Micro works with Game Boy Advance games and older games as well, although it would be uncomfortable to have the cartridge sticking out. The Micro is designed to have user replaceable face plates. One of the reasons why they did this is because it is aimed at the less hardcore gamer, people who just want it to be small and useable. I think the price is quite dear compared to the DS and the SP and so do most people, but as I said it isn’t aimed at the gaming enthusiasts but the lower-tech people. I would much rather get a PSP.

read more (Japanese)

Sony recalls PS2 Slimline power adapters

Published on Tuesday, September 13, 2005 in Gaming and Technology. Closed
PS2 Adapter

If you’re like me and have a quite old Xbox and had to get one of those huge crappy Xbox power adapters you know how annoying it is. Now if you have one of the new Slimline PS2′s that were manufactured between August and December 2004 and came with models SCPH70002, 70003 and 70004, you could be one of the 3.2 or so million urged to send it back.ony said it would replace returned adaptors for free. Two-thirds of the affected consoles were sold in Europe. About 960,000 of the units were sold in the US, 210,000 in Asia and 60,000 in Japan, according to Sony. More than 50,000 slimline PS2′s were sold in the UK during its first week on sale in November. If you think you have one of these then you are urged to go to www.ps2ac.com for more information. The power adapters were specifically designed to be separate so that it would save space. I think that those people are quite unfortunate, but these problems occur quite often, as it happened with the older Xbox’s. So there is no reason to criticise either console for its problems it has had.

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First Google Ever

Published on Tuesday, September 13, 2005 in Internet and Technology. Closed
First Google Screenshot

Could this possibly be the first Google in the world? Taken from the Stanford University Website (via the Wayback Machine) could this be Google when it first started. There is also a page for the hardware they used to host the servers. See it for yourself, I think it may have well be the original Google. We’ll see as time passes.

read more | digg story

World Trade Centre Photo taken shortly after Sep. 11

Published on Monday, September 12, 2005 in General. Closed
World Trade Centre Photo

I don’t think I can describe this photo, it is simply breath-taking. As they say ‘A picture says more than 1000 words’. You have to see it for yourself. The photo was taken at 3300 feet on September 23 2001 by an airplane, NOAA’s Cessna Citation Jet using a Leica/LH systems RC30 camera. The above image is only a screenshot of it, the whole image is 14MB at 9372 x 9372 pixels. It is huge, the original site it was hosted on went down because of the bandwidth it consumed (190GB!) I have a couple of links to different mirrors. Make sure you right-click as otherwise it may crash your browser. Just download it, you will be amazed.

Mirror 1 – Mirror 2 – Mirror 3 – Mirror 4 | digg story

The POP Station – PSP Ripoff

Published on Sunday, September 11, 2005 in Gaming and Technology. Closed
POP Station

The graphics on this look amazing, it’s better than the PSP itself. ;) Seriously, this is by far the worst PSP ripoff I’ve ever seen and the name ‘POP Station’. Why do companies even bother? There is no point, who would even want to buy this. People would just make fun of you because you couldn’t get a proper PSP. Your better have not having anything at all. Taken from Engadget, “A note to all the parents in the house: Sure, maybe you’d save a few bucks by buying your kid a POP Station Value Pack instead of a PlayStation Portable (we know it can be tough even finding a PSP in some parts of the country), but you better be prepared for the look of crushing disappointment you’re going to receive when you give them this janktastic knockoff.” I absolutely agree with them. There is no way to re-phrase what Peter said. More pictures below.

POP Station - Playing a Game

POP Station - Batteries

[via Engadget]
read more (in Japanese) | digg story

iPod nano dislikes FireWire

Published on Saturday, September 10, 2005 in Apple and Technology. Closed
Error Image on the iPod nano

It looks like if you want to connect your new iPod nano to your computer then it pops up with an error. You can charge your nano using FireWire but syncing is out of the question. You have to use the USB 2.0 cable to synchronise your music. Although USB 2.0 is faster (by a mere 80 Mbps) this does mean that you won’t be able to boot from the iPod nano as no Apple OS’s have supported booting from a USB device, only FireWire. “Apple did not explicitly state a reason for excluding FireWire on the Nano. Presumably, the company wanted to save the expense of supporting both USB and FireWire, as well as any power and space cost to including both connections.“. A true problem arises for Mac and PC users with old computers that only support USB 1.1, really slow speeds. Unlucky folks!

read more | digg story

We have moved here…

Published on Saturday, September 10, 2005 in General. Closed

I bought my own domain ‘theminiBlog.co.uk‘ and I have the same theme and posts on there. It took a while to update because my old hosting was free it was hard to move the posts. The URL for the RSS will be the same: http://feeds.feedburner.com/theminiblog

Enjoy!

Updated RSS 2.0 Feed

Published on Friday, September 9, 2005 in General. Closed

I have updated the link for my feed to: http://feeds.feedburner.com/theminiblog. If you have subscribed using an RSS News Client you can now change this.

College Student Beats Microsoft in $143.50 Legal Battle

Published on Friday, September 9, 2005 in Microsoft and Technology. Closed

After selling unopened copies of Windows XP and Office that both the collegge store and Microsoft refused to allow him to return, 21 year-old college student David Zamos was surprised to find out that he’d been sued by Microsoft. Rather than just take it, he fought back, beating Microsoft into submission without so much as hiring a lawyer.
This may take you a good 30 mins to read but it is worth it. I think that if more people withstood Microsoft and did the same thing that Zamos did then Microsoft would back down. his just goes to show that Microsoft think they have already won when they start this. Well Zamos sure proved them wrong. This is just one of the reasons that people hate Microsoft, or think that Microsoft is evil.

read more | digg story

Firefox 1.5 Beta 1 is out

Published on Friday, September 9, 2005 in Internet and Technology. Closed
Firefox 1.5 Beta 1

I have downloaded the new Firefox 1.5 Beta 1 and I can say that it does have its improvements. Sadly the plugins that I had with my old Firefox don’t work, and will not work until the developer upgrades them! It has improved popup blocking, drag-and-drop tab shuffling, SVG support, improved Mac OS X support, more prominent update notifications, a feature that will delete private data with a keyboard shortcut, a “Report a broken Web site wizard,” faster Back/Forward action, and more. Also included are lots of bugfixes and security updates.
I used to have the problem in Firefox 1.0.6 that the horizontal scrolling in my Mighty Mouse would trigger the back and forward actions. This was annoying, and so I switched to Camino. As this is now not the case I will be using Firefox from now on. Oh, and just a note from Mozilla:
“This is not the final release of our Web browser, it has been made available for testing purposes only, with no end-user support. If that sounds scary, you’d probably be better off with the latest version of Firefox 1.0.”
Indeed if this does sound scary for you then don’t upgrade.

read more | digg story