I have played so many over the past 6 years, I have literally lost count. It has taken me that long, however, to realise that they are all essentially the same thing… A fancy number game.

Whilst they are fun for a while, they usually all end up being a “second job” with the usual grindfest that you enter at the higher levels and end game.

I would like to say a thank you to the developers of the following games, for the enjoyment I have received from my time spent playing them, but unfortunately I won’t ever be returning to them.

So, my thanks go out to the developers of (In no particular order!), Runescape, Final Fantasy Online, Wurm Online, EVE Online, Talusia Online, Tibia Online, Gunbound, Rappelz, World Of Warcraft, Age Of Conan, The Sims Online, The Lord Of The Rings Online, Guild Wars, Anarchy Online, Tabula Rasa (Oh.. and me for Tuimaux : Land of Sorrow haha!).

I recently purchased a 1TB Samsung SpinPoint HDD from ebuyer for around £80 - http://www.ebuyer.com/product/143288.

I managed to successfully clone my OS and all it’s data from my old 250GB HDD over to the new 1TB HDD using Norton Ghost, and it’s all working perfectly.

The 1TB HDD (931GB in reality) provides more than enough space for all my games, software, music and files, and it has also bumped my Vista Base Score to 5.9 from 5.7! Woohoo!!

I have been using it now for about a month, and it’s absolutely fantastic!

Just thought it deserved a mention

Could this mean that the rumoured new Apple iPods will be released on the store today? Maybe we will see the refreshed Macbooks? Who knows!

Keeps your eyes peeled

For example… When MySpace was first launched, I remember I was reluctant to join. But when I DID eventually join it, another was launched… Bebo. Now, the interesting thing here was that all of my friends who were using MySpace, suddenly switched to using Bebo instead, leaving their old MySpace accounts abandoned.

Then along came Facebook, and guess what? Yup… It happened again. (Please don’t quote me on the launch order of MySpace, Bebo and Facebook. That’s just the order I went in haha!)

Stranger still, is that now some time has passed since these three social giants opened their doors, I find that most people I know, have accounts with AT LEAST two of the aforementioned sites, if not all of them! What’s more, is that some of them also post their new pictures, statuses and comments to all of the sites. Essentially replicating their accounts across the social sites.

The same goes for mini-social sites, such as Twitter, Pownce and FriendFeed. I know quite a few people who have accounts to all three, and post their mini “What are you doing now?” messages to all three simultaneously using software that relays your messages to all services instantly (One example is Thwirl).

If your reading this, it would be nice to hear your thoughts on this… Why do people hop from social site to social site and bother to keep multiple profiles up to date? Why can’t we settle on one and stick with it? Why is it that software practically encourages us to relay a single piece of information to multiple destinations?

Please do visit the permalink (If your not already there!) to this post and post your comments!

Finally I have my basics setup, like Photoshop and was able to transfer my pictures of the build across from my Canon EOS 400D and resize them to a suitable size for uploading in Photoshop.

Before I started the build, I took some pictures of all the components in and out of their packaging, see below:

The first thing I did was placed the ram and cpu onto the motherboard, making sure that the two sticks of ram went into the same coloured slots to ensure dual channel mode.

Next up was to place the CPU Heatsink Fan, my Arctic Freezer 7 Pro. This proved trickier than expected… Mainly because I didn’t read the instructions until AFTER i had placed it! Meaning I had to take it off and resit it later (After this picture!)

As you can see, it’s on a slight slant in the above picture. That’s because I hadn’t fully secured it to the motherboard, doh! I found that out when I tried placing the motherboard into my case later on, and it almost fell off! A quick glimpse at the instructions though and I figured out what I had missed and fixed it (I hadn’t turned 2 of the screws!)

Then came the graphics card… Now… with other computers I have built, I usually put the graphics card after it’s all inside the case… But since this one was so big I thought it might be clever to place it whilst the motherboard was outside of the case… Please… If you learn anything from this post, don’t do that!

I ended up taking it off and replacing it once the motherboard was secured into the case.

To truly appreciate the size of this graphics card (And the HSF!) I took two pictures from different angles.

So after admitting defeat and removing the GPU, placing the motherboard into the case (And after an hour of trying to fit those damn fiddly little screws that secure the motherboard to the case), I placed the GPU back in.

Then came the power supply… I wish I had learned from my last build and put this in before the motherboard… Fitting it required taking the ram out, unscrewing the USB/FireWire/Headphone unit that was attached to the top of my case (For quick access usb etc) and gently sliding the 1000W Modular PSU past my precious components. Which worked quite graciously in the end!

Unfortunately I forgot to take a picture of me fitting the PSU and wires. But anyway, the wires were pretty simple to connect, as my case has quite a lot of space to work with.

So, bearing in mind its not the tidiest build ever (Meaning, the cables are still pretty wild, but not as bad as they were in my old pc!), it was fun to do, and the end result is a very impressive PC!

So that’s it!

I overclocked my Q6600 to 3.2GHz and here are my current specs.

Asus P5E3 Premium WiFi-AP @n Motherboard
Intel Q6600 2.4GHz @ 3.2GHz (400×8)
Arctic Freezer 7 Pro CPU HSF
4GB OCZ 1600MHz Gold Edition DDR3 RAM
PowerColor HD 4870 512MB GPU
Hi-Power 1000W Modular PSU

Windows Vista Experience Index: 5.7 (All out of 6)
Processor: 5.9
Memory: 5.9
Graphics: 5.9
Gaming graphics 5.9
Primary hard disk: 5.7

So overall, I am absolutely over the moon with this system, and for £750 it’s an absolute bargain!

Thanks for reading!

I had originally planned to get an Asus Striker II Extreme 790i motherboard and an XFX Nvidia GTX 280 graphics card.

However, after joining and talking to people on the Overclock3D forums, I learned that if I am not going to utilize SLI… It would be a better choice for me to get an Intel based P45 or X48 board (X48 being the enthusiasts chipset of choice).

So I started digging around for a nice board, taking into consideration the options offered by both the P45 and X48 chipsets. I eventually found the P5E3 Premium Wifi-AP board, according to Overclock3D and other sources this board is an excellent choice. Sporting great overclocking facilities and a 3-phase power delivery to DDR3 slots, and at £50 cheaper than my originally chosen Nvidia based board, I went with this.

Then for the graphics card… Nvidia’s flasgship GTX 280 card is by all means the fastest and most powerful card out there at the moment… But taking all things into consideration, I thought it would be silly to spend an extra £100+ on this card when there are cheaper options from ATI that benchmark around (and on occasion, above!) the GTX 260 and 280. The card I chose was the PowerColor HD 4870 from ATI. Take a look at some of those benchmarks! With that kind of performance, it was hard NOT to justify spending £100 less than what I had planned!

As for the processor, I have gone for the tried and tested Intel Q6600 G0 Stepping 2.4Ghz, with an Arctic Freezer 7 Pro CPU fan. That should hopefully allow me to overclock the Q6600 to 3.5Ghz straight away, just on air!

I have also gone for an eBuyer Hi-Power 1000W Modular PSU, a value PSU that has received great reviews by customers. Since it’s modular, any cables you are not using can just disconnect from the PSU and be stored for later use, so as to not clutter your case with unused wires… They are also braided for nice cable management. It looks the business too! With a 13.5cm fan with blue LED lighting it’s going to look fantastic in my case.

I also got an OCZ 4GB Kit (2×2GB) DDR3 1600Mhz Gold Edition Ram from eBuyer… Unfortunately I can’t link to them as they now don’t seem to exist on the site, and they only offer the lower 1333Mhz ones now! Lucky me!

Overall it totalled at £734.16 delivered (Next day delivery!), all parts purchased from eBuyer. Very good value for money for such a good system in my honest opinion! Especially as I was almost convinced into buying a 2.5Ghz Dual Core, 2GB Ram, Nvidia 8600GTM specced Macbook Pro laptop for £1500!!

Can’t wait to get this thing up and running, unfortunately since I ordered it in the earlier hours of this morning, next day is classed as Tuesday. But I am away until Monday anyway.

I will post pictures of my building process (If I remember!).

Congratulations to Werewolf and Jan Wicher who came in first and second place with their awesome applications (Command Line GUI - GBAK and ClipCub respectively).

All of the entries were fantastic, and I am sure I speak for everyone when I say this has been a great opportunity to learn new skills, meet new people and challenge ourselves and I am extremely glad I participated.

My thanks go out to Bart Roozendaal and his company, Sevensteps, for organising the competition, and all of the sponsors involved.

Looking forward to participating again next year!

Miro is an open-source internet TV application, that allows you to subscribe to video feeds from thousands of sources and has some great content available for you to download and access.

A great feature of Miro is that, not only does it allow you to subscribe to video feeds but, it also allows you to search popular video sharing websites, such as YouTube, Google Video etc and download the videos you find (A feature that the sites themselves often do not offer).

The way Miro works is, you subscribe to video feeds and download episodes as you please. It’s that simple!

There are some awesome feeds out there, and one I highly recommend is the DiggNation Video Feed.

So what are you waiting for, grab Miro here!

I apologize in advance for any mess that may be in the code, I think it’s pretty well commented (For the most part!) but since it was slightly rushed it is not my best example of work, hehe!

But anyway, take it, do what you will with it… modify, copy, distribute… go wild!

TeraClips Source Code - Grab it here!

After looking at some of the other entries, I am a bit concerned that I didn’t spend enough time on my User Interface and that I spent most of my time implementing functionality. One of the entries in particular (ClipCub - Download it here) has a fantastic UI. Whilst I am happy with how TeraClips turned out, ClipCub certainly looks and feels better (But doesn’t provide a colour Picker, hehe!).

As I said before though, it’s been a great learning experience and even if I don’t win I am glad that I entered!

… you still here? Get voting!