After getting the kicking of a lifetime over their controversial plan to force gamers to use their real names when posting on its official forums, Blizzard vice president and executive managing director for international operations Michael Ryder told Eurogamer before StarCraft II’s midnight launch in London that the “process” had “worked”.

So, it turns out that getting their arse kicked by the community for coming up with such a stupid idea was all part of the plan.

To celebrate this revelation, I have prepared a couple of images that show other people’s plans coming together.

After my launch Xbox 360 died on me the night before last, I ordered a new Xbox 360 S. It arrived a couple of hours ago (though sadly the data transfer cable was sent separately and won’t be here until tomorrow – thanks, Amazon!), so I quickly opened the box and took out all of the essentials.

First off, the console is gorgeous. It’s noticeably smaller than the original and very shiny. The power and drive tray buttons are both touch-sensitive so you only need to tap them for them to work and there are 5 USB ports instead of the old one’s 3 – which means my USB hub is now unemployed.

Somewhat annoyingly, the connection to the power brick has also been changed so I had to go behind the TV and untangle a load of wires to get the old brick out so that I could put the new one in.

Anyway, once all that was done I looked again at the console. The hump that housed the HDD on the old model has disappeared and in its place is a little slot with a little cover clipped on it. I took this cover off and found a little HDD case about a half inch tall and about 3-4 inches wide. I pulled out the HDD to take a look at it and saw a couple of standard Serial-ATA connectors on the other side. Was Microsoft finally letting people upgrade their machines with unofficial drives that were bigger and cheaper than the official offerings?

A discussion with @XboxSupport on Twitter revealed that no, this is not the case. Somewhat annoyed by this since my PS3 is happily running a 7,200RPM 500GB drive since I got it, I asked why. The ensuing conversation (after the jump) has been edited to make it more readable but the content is untouched.

Read more…

Just over a week ago, United Utilities issued a hosepipe ban because we’d had about 3 days of sun and apparently all the reservoirs were running low. Since then it’s done nothing but rain and today we’ve even had flooding all over the north west – which has even made the news – and still the hosepipe ban persists! In the south of the country though where the weather has been much warmer (and not raining), there is no such ban!

Here’s a photo that I took of a road that’s less than a mile away from my home – clearly this is not the weather for hosepipe bans. United Utilities: sort out the leaking water pipes, you clowns. We all know it has nothing to do with the weather!

Having already convinced four family members to sign up to one of the offers that Vodafone’s UK Deals Team is offering, I’ve decided to write about them on my blog so that even more people can take advantage of what they have to offer.

I got the HTC Desire with 300 minutes, 3000 texts and 500mb data on a 24-month contract for just £20/month with the phone itself costing me £55.

If you look at what the competition is offering, the same deal would cost £30/month at the Carphone Warehouse (although the phone would have been free), which over 24 months means that I’d have paid £185 more overall – including the cost of the phone.

It’s a similar story at Phones4U where the same deal again costs £30/month although the duration of the contract is lower. However, all is not as it seems. While Phones4U would claim that an 18-month contract is better than a 24-month alternative, in this case it simply isn’t. Allow me to demonstrate:

£30/month for 18 months and a free HTC Desire = £540
£20/month for 24 months and an HTC Desire for £55 = £535

At first glance Phones4U looks only slightly more expensive here, and if you speak to them on the phone they make a big deal about it “only” being an 18 month contract. However, for that you’re actually getting 6 months less service, and to have a working phone for the same length of time you’d need to extend the contract by another 6 months which would cost an additional £180 which brings it up to the same cost as the Carphone Warehouse. No-one only needs a phone for 18 months, and that’s what they’re relying on here to make their deal look more attractive. It doesn’t take much to see through their false logic though.

You could argue that with Phones4U you’d be getting your upgrade 6 months earlier than you would with Vodafone, but the £185 more that you’d be paying for a phone that works for 24 months would cover the price of an upgrade from Vodafone (for a similar phone) over 3 times over.

Vodafone’s UK Deals Team is also offering the HTC Legend on a similar contract for just £15/month (which is the one my father and two of my sisters have taken) and they have lots of other deals for different manufacturers as well.

First things first, for nearly 600 photographs of the event, click here.

Last weekend I went to Classic Car Live 2010 with my father, to Mondello Park near Naas (nay-ass) in Ireland. We went in his 1966 Ford Mustang and got the ferry from Holyhead to Dublin on Saturday morning. The crossing was incredibly smooth and you only knew that you were on a boat when you looked out the window.

We got to Ireland to find that it was sunny and pretty hot – a welcome change from the last time we went to this event back in 2008 when it was chucking it down and blowing a gale. Sat-nav on my Desire got us onto the N7 carriageway without having to go through the centre of Dublin and we got to Naas in good time.

When we got to Naas we checked into the hotel that we’d booked to find that the room was unavailable because some woman who had slept in there the night before still hadn’t checked out – and this was at 3pm. They offered to put us up at a house that was also owned by the hotel owner, and since there was some OAP party on at the hotel we accepted. We left them to sort the house out and get it ready for us and headed into town for some beers.

It is at this point that I have to make a couple of complaints about Ireland. As I’ve mentioned previously, it’s incredibly expensive over there and despite the Pound having made up some ground against the Euro since last time we were over there, everything still costs at least 1.5x as much as it does in the UK and sometimes more than that. The second is the selection of beers on offer – there’s no Carling, no Fosters, no XXXX and no Stella. There’s Heineken, Budweiser and Carlsberg. I don’t like Carlsberg as it leaves a bitter after-taste and drinking Budweiser is pretty much the same as drinking still water, so that leaves Heineken and not much else. The Heineken in one place was nice; everywhere else is was awful. Luckily I spotted Kopparberg while trying to find an alternative drink, though sadly only the sickly mixed fruit version and not the pear version that I could drink all day. My father took a couple of those but then had to move onto something else; I stayed on them for the rest of the night.

The next morning let itself into my room earlier than anticipated thanks to some super-thin curtains. At 5am the room was lit up like it was midday, so it wasn’t long before we were both showered and ready for breakfast before making our way to the track. The paper-work we had from the organisers stated Gate 1 as our entrance; Gate 1 was closed and locked when we arrived. We continued down the road past gates 2 and 3 before finally arriving at gate 4 which was open letting people in. Since we were so early (not long after 8am!) there wasn’t much there yet, but this gave us ample opportunity to put our names down for some parade laps later in the day and for me to wonder around the paddock taking photos of the cars that would be screaming down the track in a few hours.

Over the course of the entire day more and more cars flooded into the grounds – from a rusty old BMW 2002tii to a quarter-million pound Aston Martin DB5 and everything in-between. An unfortunate down-side to the event being so popular was that the track was rammed with cars for the parade lap, and as a result the traffic was much slower than it was two years ago. The event organisers seem to have come up with a money-making solution to this problem though – for 50 Euros you can get onto a less populated track and race – which I think is what we’ll be doing next year. It’s not necessary to actually race the car, but to just be able to go quickly without being flagged down and without getting stuck behind some 1920s chariot-with-an-engine.

I really enjoyed Mondello Park this year, even though I was pretty badly burned in the Irish sun and even though there wasn’t a familiar pint to be had. The weather was great, the event was a huge success and it was a great opportunity to sink some beers with the old man since the Isle of Man trip a couple of months ago. This event was also the first event that I’ve gone to with my new SLR – a Sony Alpha 500. While I think there are still a fair few things for me to learn about using an SLR, I did manage to make some cool-looking wallpapers from a couple of the photos that I took which are also available to see in the Flickr section.

Next stop: Le Mans!

To cut a long story short, I’ve sent the D-Link 655 that I got just over a week ago back to the retailer which, coincidentally, cost me £13.85 because I had to send it back to bloody France! Nope, I seriously won’t be buying from PIXmania again.

The reason for sending the unit back is simple; though actually diagnosing the problem was far from it. Having hooked the D-Link up to my Netgear DGN2000 which was now running in modem-only mode, my internet download speed dropped from 20mbit to 10mbit. Because it wasn’t actually the D-Link that was dialling up, this unit wouldn’t give me any connection details other than “connected” (which was far from helpful) so I had to disconnect that and connect to the Netgear directly in order to access its webmin and check the details on there. The Netgear reported a 20mbit connection, and yet whenever I downloaded anything on any of the computers, I was getting 250kb/sec max.

It turns out that the D-Link was establishing a mere 10mbit connection to the Netgear (the D-Link being a gigabit unit and the Netgear being a 100mbit unit), so no matter how fast my internet connection was I was only ever going to get 10mbit from it. I set the D-Link to force a 100mb connection and when that didn’t work I tried the gigabit option, which also didn’t do anything. Hardly performance that you’d call “Xtreme”, is it, D-Link? There was no such option on the Netgear. I disabled QoS, packet shaping, UPnP and everything else that was there to be disabled but no, nothing made any difference so I logged into PIXmania, found my order and requested an RMA number. I wrapped the D-Link back up in its French SKU box and prepared it for posting. I then did what I now wish I had done at the beginning and ordered a gigabit switch, which I’d use to connect everything to the router and get the best of both worlds – a gigabit internal network and a 20mbit internet connection.

I connected everything back up to the Netgear for now and put that back in modem/router mode, only to find that this was now playing up and refusing to issue a DHCP IP address to one of my computers. Also, one of its ports refused to work with any device. I’d had another Netgear router do this to me 18 months ago – the DG834G – which was what I’d replaced with the DGN2000. Really angry at this point, I binned the Netgear, vowed never to buy any of their crap again and hooked up the old Thompson router that we got from O2 a year ago. Everything connected to that without any problems.

The gigabit switch arrived a few days ago and so far everything with the internal network is fine, though there is an issue with O2′s router which I’m hoping a replacement router from O2 will fix, but I’ll write about this separately as it appears that a number of others are experiencing the same thing.

Hassle, hassle and yet more hassle!

Well, the D-Link 655 router that I ordered a few days ago arrived from PIXmania. First off, the router is a French SKU. The manual, the software CD and the guarantee are all French. The alarm bells rang when I first opened the box and found a UK mains adaptor converter, though my first instinct had been that PIXmania had shipped me an American SKU which was how they make their profit margin. But no, it was French. I don’t think I’ll buy from PIXmania again.

Thankfully the router’s webmin was in English so I wasted no time in setting everything up. Or at least, to a point because I quickly discovered that there was no in-built modem and I’d have to use an external modem to connect to my ISP. That’s not really a problem because the Netgear DGN2000 that I’ve used for two years has been great in every way apart from it only being a 10/100mbit unit which is too slow for the Thecus – but obviously fast enough for internet access. I thought I’d set up the network with the D-Link and then connect that to the Netgear for internet access – should be easy enough, right?

Without an appropriate manual, I was left to Google to troubleshoot when my initial attempt failed. The D-Link seemed to connect to the internet as it was successfully checking for the latest firmware, but nothing that was connected to the D-Link could get out.

Over an hour was spent reading various forums, reviews and articles to try and get the information I required, when I then concluded that the internet is FULL of people who have NO IDEA what they’re talking about. One person would claim that the way forward was to disable DHCP on the D-Link; another to disable it on the Netgear. One person would claim that you put the ISP settings into the D-Link and use the Netgear as a pass-through; the other that you put the settings into the Netgear and let the D-Link piggy-back on it. In short, no-one had a bloody clue.

While searching for answers I also found this thread on the D-Link support forums where someone else was experiencing problems with the 655. I was distinctly unimpressed to see such a haughty attitude on Lycan, the “Technical Engineer Global Moderator” of the forum, as he proved particularly unhelpful to anyone who asked any valid questions about the unit. Idiot.

In the end I stumbled across a short discussion about Netgear. Some guy was looking for a way to set his router as a modem but couldn’t find the necessary option, and someone posted a link with a “try this” suggestion. The link was http://192.168.0.1/setup.cgi?next_file=mode.htm, and opening this link myself brought me to a minimalist page with nothing other than router mode: modem/router or modem only. I selected modem only and immediately the machines connected to the D-Link had internet access. For some really stupid reason, this page is only available to you on the navigation pane once you’ve already set the router to modem-only – when in router/modem mode, you’ve got to type in the address which means you need to already know it’s there. Who’s the Einstein that came up with that idea?

As for the other settings that I’m using, the Netgear has a LAN IP address of 192.168.0.1, DHCP and wireless are both disabled and the ISP details are specified. The D-Link has an IP of 192.168.0.10, DHCP is enabled with a range of 192.168.0.50 – 192.168.0.254, the wireless is enabled and the ISP details are also specified (manually). The internet port is connected to one of the Netgear’s LAN ports.

Hopefully this post will prove useful to others who find themselves with zero documentation and an internet-full of useless guesses!

Having picked up my old Mustek 600CU scanner from my parents’ house over the weekend, I discovered today that it won’t work with Windows 7. The drivers on the website relate to Windows 98, and a Windows 2000 patch that I found years ago (which also worked with Windows XP) refused to work on a 64-bit operating system. Hmm.

Rather than spend a few hours trying to hack something together with drivers from the four corners of the internet, I decided that I’d buy a new scanner. After all:

1. Scanners aren’t expensive;
2. Technology has moved on a lot since I got that old Mustek and a new scanner would give better results, faster;
3. A new scanner (and its software) would actually work on 64-bit Windows 7.

I needed to scan some documents to send over to my graphics designer ASAP, so rather than place an order online and wait a few days I decided to pop down to the local industrial estate and get something from Currys/Comet.

Both Currys and Comet are right next to each other in Southport, so I went into Currys first with a view of seeing what they had available and then going into Comet to compare. On the way in I noticed a huge “Our price promise” sign next to the door that claimed that Currys would beat the price of a range of local competitors including “Argos, ASDA, Comet, Jessops, Tesco, John Lewis… in fact any local retail store”. Impressive.

Inside, Currys had three scanners – a Canon LiDE 100 for £69.99, a Canon LiDE 200 for £89.99 and a Canon CanoScan 5600F for £149.99. Thinking those prices were on the high side, I went into Comet to see what they had. Nothing. Some laptops, some printers, but no scanners. Back to Currys.

At this point I decided to check Currys’ website because I knew their products were cheaper on there, so the plan was to go in and ask for one of those scanners for their online price – something that I’ve done before with positive results. After all, if a company is willing to beat its competitors in price then it should happily match its own website. I got my phone out and navigated to the Currys website where I found that the scanner that I was most interested in (the LiDE 200) was indeed on there for a reduced price – a full 25% off in fact at £68.28.

I approached a member of staff and asked if the store would match the price they had on their website for a scanner. The assistant said no, they don’t match websites. I pointed out that this was Currys’ own website, to which he enquired if I meant Dixons. No, I was talking about Currys. He wasn’t sure if he was allowed to price-match his own website, so he went off to check. A few moments later he returned and said that no, he couldn’t price-match his own website. So much for their “price promise”.

I noticed that there was a “Reserve and Collect” facility on the website, which upon closer inspection allowed me to reserve an item online for local store pick-up. I hit the button, selected the store at which I wanted to reserve my item (no prizes for guessing which store I selected), entered my name and email address and then went to the till where my reservation was already printing out. With the ink on my reservation still wet, the assistant asked a colleague to fetch the scanner for me. I paid the £68.28 (I know it’s available cheaper still online, but I really needed it today), got my receipt and walked out.

This was the most bizarre case of red tape that I’d ever experienced when making any kind of purchase. Were it not for the mobile internet exposing this blatant case of double standards, I might actually have been forced to pay £89.99 for a scanner just so that I could take it away today. Thanks to this technology however, I saved myself 25% without even leaving the store.

I contacted Currys about this and referred them to this blog post and asked them for their opinion. They made no comment.