Archive for August, 2006:

This is a bit late, as we went to see Cars last Thursday, but I completely forgot about writing a short review on it, here on my blog…

In short (as already stated) the film is great! I admit, it isn’t as good as some Pixar films (Toy Story, Incredibles), but better than others (A Bug’s Life) - think of it as Pixar working at 50% of their capacity.

It looks better than anything though, with realistic backdrops coupled with cartoony but shiny cars. It’s full of familiar voices too - with the UK version having Jeremey Clarkson as Harv, Lightning McQueen’s Agent, along with Michael Schumacher as a Ferrari (no surprise there then).

Prior to the start of the film, a Pixar short was shown - the One Man Band. Not as good as Boundin’ but still an entertaining 5 minutes, with great visuals.

All in all, there wasn’t anything to complain about, but plenty to laugh at. It shows that Pixar are still great and varied too.

On a side note, we were shown about 10 trailers for up-coming films, aimed at children. I am pleased that I am now 22 and no longer count as a child, because there are some terrible films for them to see. If you can just about get into a PG, then stay at home until 2007. Seriously, all of them were CG based affairs, with every single one having talking animals. Off the top of my head, I can’t remember the name of the worst looking film, but it had something to do with little red riding hood and it looked like we could have animated it for our Dissertations at Uni. In fact, if I had more spare time I would sit down and try to make a far more impressive film.

Read more about cars over at the IMDB.

Next up, I hope to go and see Nacho Libre, along with Superman before they leave the cinema. I ‘purchased’ Tokyo Highway Drift, along with District 13 yesterday, so should be watching them sometime over the next fortnight - I moved my DVD collection to a set of shelves, only to re-count them and discover I had 201, with over 20 sitting there unwrapped, waiting to be viewed!

Previously I mentioned that aria had gone downhill. I was totally wrong.

Sure, they don’t stock some components, which others do - but you’ll always find that. And they seem to sell a lot of ‘gadgets’ and cheap pieces of tat, similar to poundland. But yesterday they showed me that they’ve still got what it takes.

At around 4:30pm I ordered 4 x IDE Removable Caddys, along with 4 x IDE cables and a 2 port IDE PCI card - around £60 total. Within 5 minutes they had sent me a confirmation e-mail and a second e-mail to say that the order was now being processed by their warehouse. I left for work, expecting delivery on Monday - as they had originally said.

Fast forward to 7:23am this morning and I heard a knock at the door. Sure enough, it was City-Link with my Aria package. That’s delivery within 24 hours!

My Foxconn motherboard was purchased from Aria a month or two ago - and it arrived within a day too. So it seems that they’re not any worse than the other online retailers.

See for yourself at the Aria website.

Unfortunately for them, they don’t stock Samsung Spinpoint HDDs, otherwise I’d be ordering 4 x 250gb IDE versions from them in the near future. Instead, it looks like Scan will be taking my hard-earned cash. Electronically.

Instead of repeating myself many times, I’ve written another log on the Red Nineteen project log - which details all of the overclocking and benchmarking that I undertook.

You can read more about it here and the full log is here.

Basically, I managed to get 2.6GHz stable - so Red Nineteen is now running at the same speed as an AM2 5000 X2, with the added bonus of twice the L2 Cache. Ideally I would have hit 2.8GHz, equalling an AM2 FX-62, but it’s only 200MHz off.

Now that I’ve wasted many hours in the evenings trying to get it stable, I can now get on and play some more games. On Saturday I purchased Warcraft 3, along with the Frozen Throne expansion for a huge sum of £3.99. Hopefully it’ll be another LAN game to add to the collection - which I’m hoping to build-up in time for all 4 of us to play in September.

Also, I picked up F.E.A.R, Quake 4, Doom 3 and a few others the other week, to see how fast this rig really is and to expand my gaming options.

Driving to work this morning, I heard on Radio 1’s News Beat, that there is a scientist in Plymouth who will be setting a new world record this evenining (at the Plymouth Waterfront) for the most amount of fireworks to be set off in one sitting - 55,000 or there abouts, apparently.

I did a quick google search and came up with this and this.

Interesting. Though no mention of a world record being beaten…

Hopefully our Plymouth Correspondant, Adamskii, will be able to shed some light on this news story.

One thing - the first link mentions 10,000 people standing around the Plymouth ‘Hoe’. She must be a ‘Ho if she has 10k men standing around her…

Another post about my Project, Red Nineteen. I promise, no more!

It is now on the Custom PC readers’ drives pages, on the Custom PC website:

You can see it here - it is currently the second one down the page, but will get pushed further and further into the archive as the weeks go by.

Maybe the next time I post about Red19 on this blog, I’ll be showing you the article in the magazine. Maybe not.

If only I had £1000’s lying around to do another project, as it was fun.