the mini Blog

I originally had a small blog on blogger just as a hobby, but over the past 1 and a half years it has really progressed. I’m getting much more readers now, and people are actually commenting on my posts. The domain theminiblog.co.uk was bought around mid-September of last year, and I wanted to do a [...]

Microsoft may be making an ingenious move by offering Vista for free or at a discounted price to those who buy a new PC with Windows XP after October 28th. Those who buy a new computer with either Windows XP Pro, XP Tablet Edition or the 64-bit version of Windows XP will be eigible for [...]

David Chartier from TUAW has found that on his iMac, he has had no success of installing Release Candidate 2 of Windows Vista. Even with the new Boot Camp 1.1.1 update, which was supposed to offer compatibility with the new iMacs, the installation fails. Windows Vista reports that it doesn’t like the drive Boot Camp [...]

Nintendo’s PR department have been busy making lots of accessories to sell along with the Wii. These will have their own dedicated stands, and will include things like rubberised controller ‘gloves’ (for sweaty hands?), game cases, as well as dog tags and lapel pins. The glove idea may not be too bad, but I don’t [...]

As a counter measure by Microsoft to stop people from using the Xbox 360’s DVD drive to copy Xbox 360 games, they have updated the firmware of the Hitachi/LG drive. As seen in the picture above, they have also put a lot of plack glue over the chip, as if to stop hackers from physically [...]

I thought I’d mention this because it is really cool! An LED flashlight was built using an old tic-tac box and a few other components. You basically shake the tic-tac for 60 seconds which is enough to power the LED. As you shake the tic-tac, the rare earth magnet inside the coil (the red thing) [...]

The shorts for Tuesday 3rd October 2006 are:

PSM3 Magazine get their hands on the PS3 - Fast, quiet, heavy and a dust magnet (above) [link] [video]
Zune Wireless basically worthless - You can’t connect to the internet via it’s WiFi or sync to your computer via its WiFi [link]
Microsoft Unbox Zune for CBS’ camera with blatant [...]

The latest version of OS X has been deployed by Apple. Mac OS X 10.4.8 is available for download via software update as well as disk img (.dmg). It fixes the following things:

Connecting to wireless networks using the EAP-FAST protocol
Apple USB modem reliability
using OpenType fonts in Microsoft Word
compatibility with 3rd party USB hubs
scanner performance
RAW camera [...]

Sony are deep in the mud this time After Dell and Toshiba issued a battery recall for some (not all) of their laptop batteries, Lenovo (formely IBM’s PC Division) and Sony themselves have issued battery recalls for their laptops. The affected laptop batteries are made by Sony, and after recent incidents where a Dell [...]

A lot has happened over the past week, and I’m sorry I couldn’t post, but I have had a lot of work at school, and the server was down for a while. Posting on week-days will probably continue to be sparse, but I will try and post as often as possible.
Getting to the topic, there [...]