the mini Blog » General

Quick Update

balazs — Wed, 10 Jan 2007 19:57:15 +0000

I guess you have all heard of the iPhone (no, not the Linksys one, the one made by Apple) and the iTV being rebranded to Apple TV. Or if you haven’t you must be living under a rock. Anyways, I just wanted to say, that I will be making posts on them, with my thoughts (obviously ), however, I couldn’t make them yesterday as I was busy studying for the Biology exam I had today. It went quite well, but I have a Chemistry one tomorrow, and a Physics exam on Friday. I hate exams packed together like this, especially so soon after Christmas. I hate revising during the Christmas holiday.
I did, however, somehow, manage to follow most of the news, and I had the #mwsf2007 IRC channel in the background. A quick note about it, I did feel a bit dissapointed, with the fact that a 2 hour long Keynote, only covered 2 products. It didn’t even touch Leopard (which I was really hoping) — I know this is no WWDC, but still. I was surprised at there not being any actual Mac announcements, as in no computer updates/bumps. Shame.

Happy New Year!

balazs — Sun, 31 Dec 2006 20:11:21 +0000

I wish you all a happy new year. As we roll into 2007 in the next few hours, in Europe that is, I hope that you all have fun during this next year, and I hope to see a lot of new technological advances. I didn’t make one oif those prediction lists for 2007, but there are a few things I wish to see from various big name companies, *cough* Apple *cough*.

Happy Holidays

balazs — Mon, 25 Dec 2006 20:51:05 +0000

This past week has been quite busy for me, as I have been away on a Medical Conference at Nottingham University. However, I wish you all a Merry Christmas, or Happy Hannukah, or whatever religion you are following. I do have free time off school, but with my presents, studying for my exams in January and lack of news during this time, there probably won’t be many posts.

Contest Winner: James Gardner!

balazs — Tue, 12 Dec 2006 20:16:16 +0000

I know it’s later than the actual end date of the contest, so sorry! But James you have won the contest. Please send me an email to contest [at] theminiblog [dot] co [dott] uk with your choice of prize. Would you like the £15 iTMS voucher or the £10 by paypal. Make sure to include an email that I can reply to with your details and confirmation. Enjoy your prize!

Updates

balazs — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 20:03:20 +0000

Sorry I haven’t posted, but Wordpress went a bit janky on me and decided to show a MySQL Error every time I tried to post. That, coupled with a lot of schoolwork, meant that I wasn’t able to post. Sorry, I know I haven’t been in the best schedule lately, but I’ll try my best. The error is sorted out now, but it was all down to a stupid quote that I accidentally put in the database, leading wordpress to not recognise the table. I do have plenty of goodies and lots of topics to post on, as well as some MacHeist invites.
On a side not, to those who subscribe via RSS, and don’t visit the site often, the contest is still open, and anyone is free to participate. £10 cash (via paypal / equal money in USD) or a £15 iTunes Music Store voucher is up for grabs. Click here for full details. Contest ends December 2nd.

I’m going to MacExpo!

balazs — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 11:22:04 +0000

I got back from Hungary at around midnight of Sunday. I would have posted news on Monday and yesterday, as it was awfully busy in the tech world, but my copy of Ghost Recon: Advanced Warfighter arrived in the posted. So I ended playing it pretty much all day. It is a fantastic game, but more on that in a separate post.
So while I was looking through my emails, I remembered that I had been given a free ticket to MacExpo which starts tomorrow. As it so happens, the rest of the family are going to London for shopping, so I’m going as well, but to MacExpo. I will be taking lots and lots of photos, and I will try to blog about most of them. This week will be really bust for me! My camera isn’t back from repair yet, so I’ll be taking pictures with my K800i phone. It has a superb camera, though it often shows up quite a lot of noise. I’m going to try to set up my Flickr account so that I can send photos from my phone to it, which it then should post onto my blog. Hopefully it all goes well.
Other than that I have not much else to say, I have got a lot of news lined up, which I will try to all post today.

Im going on holiday, again!

balazs — Fri, 13 Oct 2006 18:03:48 +0000

I know, I know. Though I was recently on holiday, we’re going back to Hungary to see the relatives and whatnot. It’ll only be for a week, and I’ll try to post as much as possible when I get back. Until then, I hope todays news will tide you over.

Contest!

balazs — Sun, 08 Oct 2006 21:29:45 +0000

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 contest to celebrate, but I forgot about it. So here is the contest, albeit a bit late.

The winner receives either a £15 iTunes Music Store Certificate (UK only!), or a £10 via PayPal. It may not be much, but as a 16 year old student, it’s the best I can do. To apply, all you have to do is leave a comment in the comments of this post, with your thoughts about the blog. You don’t need to write much at all, but make sure you use a real email in the form (will not be displayed) and tell me where you are from, so that if you win I can contact you appropriately. The rules are:

Only one entry per person; a person found to have multiple entries will be banned from this contest and all future contests.
Contest is open to international participants as well, but those outside of the UK will have to opt for the £10 by paypal.
The winner will be randomly drawn on December 2nd, so you have more than a month to apply.
This contest excludes familial relatives to me (Balazs) and those who know me personally. Sorry!

If you don’t have a paypal account, and would like the £10, don’t worry, it is very easy to set up an account, and very safe! That’s about it, and good luck to all.

Server was down…

balazs — Thu, 21 Sep 2006 07:20:05 +0000

As many of you may have noticed, the site was unaccessible for a few days. This is due to my hosting provider, which had a driver failure on one of their main servers. Fortunately all was rescued, and a few things were sorted out, but we are back up now. You may have also seen a wordpress MySQL error, which was generated because the MySQL databeses hadn’t been restored. I’ll get round to posting things later on in the day (UK time).

I’m back!

balazs — Wed, 13 Sep 2006 19:04:15 +0000

As you may have noticed I am back into my regular posting habbit. I have been back in the UK for a couple of weeks, but I have just started my A-levels and they are a lot of work. I am taking 4 subjects (out of a maximum of 5), which are Chemistry, Biology, Physics and Maths. Not the easiest ones, but I am finding them really interesting. It is a lot of work, more than I did at GCSE, which means there may be fewer posts per day, or days where I won’t post at all. I’m going to do my best to stay on top of all my work, I don’t want to get behind. I’m aiming for 4 A’s (at AS and A2). I have some good articles lined up for today so get ready!

Update

balazs — Thu, 17 Aug 2006 13:44:19 +0000

Sorry, haven’t been able to make any posts as I’m on holiday in Hungary, and I’m quite annoyed that I can’t make any posts especially because of all the news (WWDC ‘06) and other general things. I do have some interesting topics lined up, but I doubt that I’ll be able to post them until I arrive back to England on August 23rd. I may just post some short links and then elaborate later.
Separately today is my birthday, I’m 16! Woo-hoo! First thing I’m going to do is buy a lottery ticket (what else did you expect?) I was supposed to get a new phone, but due to unexpected delays it seems that the phone that I chose (Saung Z400 Black) is well, not released yet. It’s only in silver which I don’t like (for this phone). I may just choose another one, but I really like it! I have asked around and no-one yet knows when it maybe released.
I hope you have all had a nice holiday so far and enjoy the rest!

Going on holiday

balazs — Sat, 01 Jul 2006 19:24:59 +0000

I am going on a school holiday (residential as we call it) to Italy for a week, and coming back next Friday, so I’m afriad there won’t be any news until then. The weather should be quite hot so I hope I am going to enjoy myself. The worst part: I have to wake up at around 2:30AM as we are leaving from the school at 3AM. I will try to get as much sleep as possible, because once we are on the plane, I can’t really fall asleep (I don’t know why, I just can’t!)
So see you all, and I will be back in a week, with the latest gaming and tech news!

Update

balazs — Wed, 28 Jun 2006 16:01:47 +0000

Sorry I haven’t been posting for a while, due to my exams. They have now finished; well the last one was on Monday and I took some time to relax from the past 2 years of stress! Anyways that burden has now been lifted, and I think it’s safe to say I think they went pretty well. I will get my results in mid-August so I can have fun until then.
Being summer time, I probably won’t be able to get back into regular posting mode until August, as I am going on a school holiday to Italy next week and 2 weeks after that I will be going on a summer holiday with my family. During that time though I will be able to make some posts, but probably not too many (days when there is nothing to do etc), from my Auntie’s computer. I do have quite a few topics piled up today so I will be posting as many of them as possible. This week is an interesting news week!

Ughh, Exams!

balazs — Mon, 05 Jun 2006 17:24:55 +0000

We started our exam period this week. I have a further 13 exams to take as a part of my GCSE’s in year 11 (Roughly I think I would be in High School in the US, but I have no idea how their Education System works; I am 16 in August). This means I have to do a lot of studying throughout the next couple of weeks, so the blog might be a little light on posts. This is really what makes or breaks my career, so I definitely need to stay away from the computer (great job, eh?) for at least 5 hours until I am sure I am ready for the exam I have the next day. I am doing 6 this week, the first of which was today. The first exam was Maths which went surprisingly well.

SPAM, SPAM and more SPAM!!!

balazs — Fri, 26 May 2006 21:33:34 +0000

I have been receiving way too much spam on this blog and I am getting floods and floods of emails from the blog telling me there is a comment in moderation (because I set it to moderate a comment if it has more than 3 links). I am going to disable this, but Akismet has not blocked it all, and so I am taking action. Any spam comments received will get their IP permanently blocked from the blog. However, if your ISP uses dynamic IP’s and you happen to receive one of the blocked IP’s then you can shoot me an email (a link is provided on the page you get when it shows your IP is blocked).
Sorry for having to do this but it is such a pain, I have had nearly 5000 spam attempts to the blog (most of which have been blocked by Akismet, others I have had to do manually).

Updating the Blog: Part 2

balazs — Sat, 20 May 2006 17:56:56 +0000

I have been using the K2 theme for Wordpress and I downloaded the SVN in hopes that all the cool new features would work. I tested it out on my apache server on my mac mini with no problems, but now none of the ajax features work. So I have to down-grade backto the previous version and re-style the site. So many problems
Anyway most of the site should look like this when it is finished, the problems are with the features that make the site pleasant to use. Feedback for the site is welcome!

Note: Because of some problems with the menu bar, it may show up out of aligned in Safari and Firefox for Mac (but should be fine on Windows) and in IE. I am working to fix this, but I hope the menu is still accesible and useable.
This problem has now been fixed: However if you are using Firefox on Mac you will continue to have a miss-aligned menu bar, for some reason Firefox on Mac displays it different to Firefox on Windows.

the mini Blog Version 3: Coming Soon

balazs — Fri, 19 May 2006 19:11:31 +0000

I am in the process of re-designing the blog, and it should be released soon. Hopefully it will be a lot cooler and more unique!

Sorry for the lack of posts…

balazs — Thu, 27 Apr 2006 19:50:50 +0000

…but for some reason I have been having trouble reaching the blog’s server and I couldn’t make any posts! I just hope I don’t lose any readers. I’m going to try and make a few posts tonight as there is lots of exciting news; Apple, Nintendo and PS3. Check back soon!

Got any tips or ideas for the site?

balazs — Mon, 17 Apr 2006 17:17:59 +0000

I’ve been experimenting with the design of the blog and I want some of your ideas / tips. Anything small to big I would love as I am looking for a unique design (which I don’t think it quite resembles yet). I’m not much of a designer, at all, so anything to freshen up the site would be really helpfull

So, got any ideas? Then leave a message in the comments, or send me a note using the contact form.

Thanks!

No Windows Live Mail or Messenger Invites yet

balazs — Wed, 01 Mar 2006 17:21:51 +0000

A lot of people have still been asking me for invites for the Windows Live Mail and Windows Live Messenger Beta programs even though I have said I don’t have any. As soon as I get some (or any sort of beta invites) I will make a post about it and thosee who haven’t got any yet can make a post. Please only post your email once, and if you are genuinely interested because I only get 15.