After my recent iPod experiences, I bit the bullet and on payday, bought myself one of the chinese made Meizu miniplayer’s. Otherwise known as the M6. Its a tiny, great looking device. Yes its a little iPod ish, but its as well made as my ipod is and this benefits from being 4gb, larger screen and more options, all for a fraction of the price of an iPod nano.

I havn’t had a chance to have a full test of it yet, but at first play the sound is exellent. Dare I say it better than the iPod, especially with the Sennheiser PX120 headphones i’ve been using. Straight out of the box the bass response is good, the midrange cuts through and the treble is nice and clear, as it should be, and the Sub £70 i’ve paid so far is a great investment. I havnt had a chance to try any movies/Tv shows on it yet, it supports Xvid AVI files, and there is some software which reduces the size of the files down to the resoloution of the device, allowing it to have much smaller filesizes. I’m yet to actually try this yet, but thats because my computer is rubbish and is failing to encode it properly for me and is just switching off. If you take one piece of advice from me today, do not buy an Acer laptop!!

Anyway back to the player. Well look at the pics and there is a link above for the main site. One endearing thing is that there is a large forum for owners of these players, which means a couple of things. They are good quality, and there will be lots of support if I come across any problems.

Check the links below for more info.
http://en.meizu.com/product_m6.asp
http://www.meizume.com/

Well I havn’t posted in a bit, partly due to a lack of time, and partly due to having nothing good to say but I thought I’d put something up.

The linux thing has been annoying, I binned Fedora and have now installed Ubuntu, which is slicker and nicer, but my Wireless USB stick STILL doesn’t quite work correctly, it appears the driver is pants, it recognises the stick, finds my wireless network, but won’t connect to the internet. 

 It appears its a common problem with the Wireless G Adapter and Linux, the chipsets don’t have a great driver for linux and has to be updated.

http://www.kryogenix.org/days/2007/02/14/belkin-wireless-g-usb-adapter-in-ubuntu-610-edgy

 I’m gonna percervere though, I will run linux all the time as I’m sick to death of MicroSoft not working!

Can Channel 4 really be making enough advertising revinue to show Big Brother to the extent that it does? Do they really feel the need to alienate people who don’t want to watch what has now become an excuse to show wannabe, fame hungry attention seekers?

Now I understand lots of people do enjoy this program, be it for the brief nudity, fights and racist rants, however does it really need to be on, Channel 4, Channel 4 +1 E4 and E4+1? why not put actual shows on E4 +1?

 What happened to the original premise of putting different people from all walks of life together and seeing how those paths cross. Nuns bodybuilders and remote scottish fishermen?

I know there is nothing I can do about it, and to be honest, this is just a rant really. But what the hell, all I really want to say is, channel 4 STOP BIG BROTHER!!

When I heard that they were making a movie out of the controversial mid 90’s PC game, Postal I was a little excited. Whilst not the greatest game, it was fun, and deliberatly designed to shock, which at the age of 13 is exactly what you want to do. Plus it was on the Mac, which if anyone who owned a Mac in 1996 remembers, there went’t many games available, (bar maybe Pong and Carmageddon).

When I heard about it I had thoughts of some great ideas for plots. Action Horror films, straight up horror, even a Die Hard action flick would have been cool. A postal worker tries to kill everyone at christmas and one of the people he kidnaps happens to be William Atherton and Bonnie Bedelia…

Anyway my point, I read a not so good review on wired.com (opens in a new window)  and the Director of Postal Uwe Boll who the same director of another video game adaptation House of the Dead, a film that has been described as, and I quote, “The Worst Movie Ever Made”, has actually come back and responded to the critic!! Quite a funny read actually, take a look

Someone care to work it out??

A father posed for a publicity picture in a desperate attempt to find the daughter he has not seen for ten years unaware she was just a few yards behind him.

Michael Dick scoured the streets of Sudbury, Suffolk, and looked through the electoral register searching for Lisa, 31, reports Metro.

After drawing a blank, he went to the Suffolk Free Press newspaper, which ran a story on his search.

The paper took a picture for the article, of Michael and his younger daughters Samantha, 22, and 10-year-old Shannon.

Lisa, a mother of three, discovered her father, 58, was trying to find her when friends mentioned the story.

And when she looked at the photograph, she realised she and her mother were just a few metres behind them and got in touch.

Mr Dick, a carpenter from Bow, East London, said: ‘I couldn’t believe it when Lisa told me. It is just pure coincidence that she was walking past.’

He set off that evening to meet up with her and her children Ross, 13, Sam, 11, and Courtney, eight.

Lisa, Mr Dick’s daughter from his first marriage, moved to Sudbury with her mother as a baby after her parents split up.

She was amazed to spot herself in the picture behind her father and two half-sisters.

Lisa said: ‘I was completely shocked. Me and my mum had been standing in that exact place where the picture was taken about a minute earlier, and you can see us in the picture walking away. It is incredible.’

Lisa, who now lives in Colchester, Essex, had only gone to Sudbury on the day the picture was taken to visit her mother.

Mr Dick added: ‘We basically lost touch because I was living in London and she was in Suffolk.’

From Ananova

Just also Stumbled across this.

 http://howto.wired.com/wiredhowtos/index.cgi?replace_your_ipod_s_battery

I love wired!

Recently my old battered iPod (and by old I mean only 2 years old…)flashed up a folder and an exclamation mark, indicating it couldn’t locate a system folder. I thought crap, there is music on there that I can’t get hold of again, especially after a reformat or 2 (Thanks Windows) how am I gonna get it all off??

 Then this morning I stumbled across this article on the mighty http://www.wired.com

http://howto.wired.com/wiredhowtos/index.cgi?page_name=get_your_music_off_of_your_ipod;action=display;category=Play

So tonight, i’m gonna have a go at it!

Wow, I love the concept of this device, and I REALLY hope someone produces it. Despite the fact that CD’s will be obsolete by the time its produced, I see the half size DVD’s with mp3 files on being the way forward. Optical media FTW!

 the full story is on The register http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2007/08/10/dwp_mp3_cd/ 

So yea, I installed Fedora 7 on friday night. with NO problems. All drivers bar my soundblaster Live! player and  my Belkin USB Wireless card. Not too worried about the Soundblaster has driver problems in windows, however the wireless card means no internet at the moment which is bad, however I’ve found a few ways to get some, but none of which appear to be easy.

So recently after deciding to reinstall windows, I decided that I wasn’t going to use the damn stupid recovery discs that you receive with your system, so I borrowed a disc with Windows XP on, and used my LEGAL Windows XP code on installation. Brilliant, it took the code and installed fantasically. Then I decide to activate my copy of windows. But surprise surprise, something had to go wrong, and at this point, MicroSoft tell me the product key is incorrect. Why wasn’t it incorrect when I installed it. Its ok MicroSoft tell me, I can verify online, by paying £63!! For an OEM copy of Windows XP Home I already own!!

It was this point I decided that I’m going to throw windows away and have a go with Linux. Its not my only Windows machine, so I’m not at a massive loss should anything go wrong. Now I installed a mini Linux a long time ago, probably about 1999 or 2000, I liked it, but at the time, the graphical interface was still in its infancy and there wasn’t a huge amount of drivers and software available for it. So after some research on the net yesterday it seems that it is much improved and found a fully graphical system, developed by Red Hat that I’m going to try called Fedora. So last night I set the near 3gb downloading and tomorrow night I should hopfully have it installed. I’m actually quite looking forward to it!

If you only surf the internet, and watch DVD’s (the software for watching movies on it is good and FREE) and like getting something for pretty much nothing, check it out!