In a previous post I mentioned some wishes for the final version of Boot Camp for Apple Mac Pro. One of them was better support for multiple graphics cards.
Since I had an old unused 15″ TFT I decided to ask directly at the Apple Boot Camp forums about support for ATI X 1900 XT and a NVIDIA GeForce 7300 GT. I didn’t get a 100% confirmation that it would work but I went ahead and bought the graphics card. In case it would not work then the graphics card would go on sale on eBay. Continue Reading »
I was not expecting that I today would be sitting and thinking about the next holiday for me and the kids but I just did that right now.
We have been to a few amusement parks in Germany and Denmark before and the kids love it. So when I saw the Amusement Parks in Blackpool, Britain then I got ideas. I checked their site and was impressed. They got a lot of riders and attractions (more than 125) and shows. There are a lot of wild and crazy roller coasters and other thrill rides, something the kids love (and their dad also). The park is not only about wild rides but they also got a lot of family friendly rides, always good to relax between the other rides and just have a good time.
The location also seems to be rather nice, 4 hours drive from London. A perfect family trip would be a few days in London and then some days in Blackpool. To ease this the park got their own hotel, so get up in the morning, have break fast, go to the park all day and just walk back to the hotel to have a good evening. Could it be more perfect!
Oh, nothing is free of course but after having a look at their prices and don’t see that as a holiday stopper, all pretty fair.
I finally got around calling Microsoft’s XBox 360 the other day. It went very smooth to explain the problem with ‘The Red Ring of Death’, guess it was not first time for them :-) Just had to mention the problems with the light and the girl at support took over, just one question from her (beyond identifying me) and that was about the light on the power supply. A good friend of mine had already mentioned this so I had the answer ready; he also called Microsoft the same day, to get this 4th XBox 360.
So now I’m waiting for UPS to show up with cardboard box so I can return it again with UPS. The repair time should be around 15 working days. So now the race is on with my friend, does it go faster in Germany or here in Switzerland.
Game ordering of the day
I don’t expect any problems with the repair/replacement so I went ahead today and ordered Halo 3 and Sonic Hedgehog for XBox 360. Sonic Hedgehog is more for my son than it is for me; I never liked the Sonic games after they went 3D. I remember getting the game for Dreamcast but only played it a few times. But my son plays the demo often and since the game dropped a good bit in I decided to get it also.
I also ordered Super Paper Mario for Nintendo Wii, one game I have been looking forward to for a good time. I never played the Paper Mario before so it will be rather interesting.
The final game I ordered was The Legend Of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass for Nintendo NDS, first Zelda game I get for hand held. My only Zelda experience was on Nintendo Wii; I never completed it but was very fascinated by it.
So time to sit back and wait for the games to arrive and then it is gaming time.
My son just got a small simple binocular in birthday present. This brought back memories of when I was a kid, my dad had this big and heavy binocular that I often borrowed to watch animals in the area we lived or even better, look at the moon, amazing how you can see the craters at the edge between light and dark.
We even looked at various nebular clouds and to my big surprise; if the weather is good then you can even see the galaxy Andromeda (Even without binoculars).
So I guess it is time for me to get back to that and check out the night sky. During winter time we got lots of good places here in Switzerland where the sky is very clear.
I just checked out celestron binoculars and they got a LARGE range of Astronomical Binoculars, found one that was pretty cheap and offers zooming! They also got lots of binoculars for other areas such as: Digital camera binoculars, night vision, hunting, theater… oh, and microscopes, also something to get for the kids when they get older.
Guess I might order Barska 10-30×60 Zoom Binoculars one of the next days. Oh, and they offer free UPS shipment.
As mentioned the other day, I recently signed up at HubPages and already did my first Hub, so some might wonder what that is about and what it got to do with my blog.
What is HubPages?
The very short version: HubPages is a CRAZY big blog with around 40.000 articles, written by a lot of different people (Their best list got 6999 listed). A Hub can be seen as a single post/blog entry.
The Hubbers (writers/bloggers) can write a Hub about what ever they like and it is not connected directly to their own ‘space’. The Hubbers do have their own profiles where the latest Hubs are mentioned, but it does not work as a blog for each member. Just have a look at my profile.
Around 3 million people are visiting HubPages each month, often are people coming from the search engines, so a big audience.
Hubbers are not paid directly by HubPages for blogging but if they sign up with Google’s AdSense and Amazon (eBay also possible) then the impressions (impression = when an ad is shown) is split so that Hubbers gets 60% of ads impressions (Meaning, 60% of the impressions will have the AdSense/Amazon code from the Hubber in them). It is also possible to get more and get impressions on other hubs by linking. You also get some % if you refer people to sign up to HubPages. But even if 60% of all the ads shown have your code in them, then this does not mean that they will be clicked.
Why not use my own blog for all?
So there are great possibilities but you might ask ‘why write there when you have your own blog’. When I signed up at HubPages I liked the idea about that you can write about whatever you like and whenever you like, not as other blog networks that might require that the author selects a category and then are require to write X number of posts pr week. But back to ‘why’; on HubPages I can write about subjects that might not match my own blog. I’m also able to go in and have a look at the ‘requests’ from other people; these are suggestions from other people.
My first Hub was an answer to such a request (See the Hub). I plan to use the requests a lot, find a request that I find interesting, do some research and write about it. So it is as a practice for me: quick research and then blog about it, even if it was about a subject I never had to deal with before. If I write about things that I would find suitable for the blog then I will of course mention it here on blog; together with a link. You can of course also subscribe directly to the RSS from my profile.
I have been on holiday and on business trips to the UK several times, often in London. Each time the main issue before the trip was: What hotel to stay in. So time to use the search engines and check if I could find a suitable hotel, in the correct area and within my budget. In the end I ended up with several hotels that I then contacted, either by their web sites or by email. So this is not always an easy task.
Some might say you get what you pay for, and sure if you pay for a 4 star hotel then the quality of the hotel will match, but for cheaper hotels you will have to count on luck. I have been places where the service was shocking, the breakfast offers was a joke. You just never know.
What is important for me is: Clean rooms, nice location, friendly staff, simple but nice breakfast and of course the price. I also like the hotel to have a good selection of facilities. This is special the case if I stay for a longer time, then a swimming pool is a great thing to have. Having a TV in the room is almost always standard and a nice thing, after spending all day on your feet walking the town it is great to relax with a good movie.
There are several web sites that make it a lot easier to search through hotels, one of the interesting ones is UK Hotel Reservations and Bookings Not only do they list a lot of hotels but they have integrated great features for making it easier to limit the list of hotels that suits the person booking.
One neat service they offer is special ‘breaks’. So in case you take a break and go to a hotel then why not combine it with something special. Such as a theater or museum visit, romantic break, a shopping break or a Gourmet break (One I will consider).
People might wonder why I suddenly blog on HubPages and not directly here. I will do a post later today about HubPages and how I plan to use them. Feel free to check out my profile page on HubPages, just click here
Apple announced official today that the next version of OS X 10.5 (Leopard) will be released on the 26th of October. I consider this great news, just too bad that I mainly use my Mac Pro for Windows XP.
I’m using Boot Camp for this of course, which allows OS X users to install various versions of Windows, such as XP and Vista. It includes all the drivers needed for the hardware. When all is installed it is possible to dual boot, meaning, upon boot you can select what operation system you want to boot. It is of course also possible just to let it boot into a selected OS each time.
Boot Camp is a great product for us who likes the quality of the Mac hardware but needs to run Windows XP due to work. But so far Boot Camp has been in beta ever since it was released, latest release was 1.4 beta. I would have liked to link directly to it but the page about it has been taken down after they announced Leopard for the 26th. Some of the pages do direct to the Boot Camp information for Leopard, so have a look at that on
This also means no Boot Camp for people who run OS X 10.4 (Tiger) unless Apple decides to release a standalone version.
So based on this it must mean that Boot Camp is no longer in beta and will see the light as final release together with Leopard, no surprise really.
There are new drivers according to the new feature page. I just hope there will be some serious updates also. I made a small wish list of things I would like to see improved, all related to Mac Pro, as this is what I got.
Better support for ATI X1900 XT graphics card.
This is a known issue on the forums, that some fail to get Windows booting and some have issues with blue screen of death when it is rebooted, or just that display is trashed with random graphics. I have had these issues and still have them from time to time. Not a big deal for me; just requires an extra reboot. But really, this should not be the case.
More than 2 GB of memory.
Windows XP can handle 3 GB normally but when running on a Mac Pro it is limited to 2 GB no matter what configurations are done to Windows. MacBook Pro can handle more than 2GB, so it is related to the firmware of the Mac Pro (I assume).
Mac Pro itself can support up to 32 GB when using OS X but I doubt that many can afford this.
Support for multiple graphics cards.
I can not confirm this problem but according to the forums there are serious issues (such as it does not work) when using two ATI X1900 XT cards or combinations of ATI and NVIDIA. I have been considering to getting more graphics card as I got an unused monitor here but as long as there are doubts about if it will work I will wait.
Sound and sound plugs.
This might just be an issue for me or maybe I have done something wrong (or is using wrong plugs). I’m not able to use the sound plugs at the back of the Mac, so I have my speakers connected to the headset on the front.
I don’t think that’s a long wish list but let’s wait till after the 26th and see what Apple has improved. I’m pretty sure that I will upgrade but who knows maybe they do release the final OS X 10.5 to developers with paid membership.
As a follow up to my post about WordPress 2.3 and theme change (See here) as promised I would do a list of plugins and what else is in use for this blog. Questions and comments are as always welcome.
Hosting
The site is been hosted by DreamHost. This means I got close to infinite storage and bandwidth (at least it feels like it). They are also hosting at a great price with possibility for some great discounts (See my $97 discount). They have a great list of supported packages, such as WordPress.
Blog software
I’m using WordPress 2.3, which was a one-click install from the control panel from DreamHost. I have not used any other blogging systems so I’m not in a position to compare them other solutions but I have been pretty happy with it from the first day. It is also very flexible, as you can change theme and there are LOTS of plugins to add any extra functionality you might want. If you know your way around PHP then you can also add your own of course.
With just hosting and WordPress 2.3 it is possible to get started with blogging…
Theme
After lots of searching and testing I finally came to the xMark theme by Lisa Sabin-Wilson. This theme was close to what I wanted, widget support, 3 columns, nice layout, easy to change if needed by editing a style sheet, directly support for the plug in for archives page and Share This and very easy to setup for SiteMap. I have done some small modifications myself but if you compare my site with the xMark one then you will notice some changes but not a lot. Lisa has been a great help with some of the questions I had. Thumbs up for good support.
I will probably come back from time to time to do small changes to the theme and surely also to the layout of the columns.
Plugins
I use a good few plugins and also here I would expect things to change over time. These are the ones I use at the moment:
Akismet, version 2.0.2 This plug in works as a Anti-spam system for comments. Probably 90% of all WordPress users are using this plug in (just my guesstimate). Maybe there are alternatives but I never investigated it. It has caught around 2000 spam comments so far, so saved me a good bit of time.
Adsense-Deluxe, version 0.8 This plug in makes it easy to define AdSense codes that can be inserted into posts, so I can decide while writing the post if I want any AdSense ads in it or not. To add a AdSense I just have to type <–AdSense–> (example) and the Google AdSense ad will appear. Also makes it possible to disable a group of them. Also gives one places to change the look of them all if needed. So no more adding AdSense code into the php files directly.
DiggClick, version 1.3 This is not the latest version of DiggClick (1.4 is the latest one) but I’m no longer able to find it. The old web site that hosted the plugin is no longer working and the email address I had to the author is also no longer working.
At the start of all my posts I have the DiggClick icon, letting people submit the post to Digg or allow them to Digg my post.
Google Analyticator, version 1.54 Plug in that handles any java script code needed for Google’s Analytics. Too just a few minutes with this plug in to get the analytics up and running
Google XML Sitemaps, version 3.0 Plugin for creating sitemaps xml files that Google can use directly.
Share This, version 1.4 The xMark theme got direct support for this great plugin, see the green icon at the end of this post, try to click on it and you will know what Share This is about.
SRG Clean Archives, version 4.2 The xMark theme also got direct support for creating archives but requires this plugin. Do check the archive pages and see how nice they are :)
WordPress Database Backup,version 2.1.3 Backup and backup again. I’m always paranoid about loosing data, especially after a hard disc crash that cost us a good few thousand to get restored. So automatic and manual backup is something that may NOT be skipped. This plugin makes it all so easy, creates backup of all databases used by the blog.
wp-cache, version 2.1.2 Always let the cache speed things up when possible, specially when it can all be adjusted by a nice plugin.
WP-ContactForm, version 2.0.7 See my contact page for what this form can do. Replace your email address with a contact form.
I’m always looking for new plug ins and widgets that can improve the site, both for myself (need a new text editor plug in) and for the viewers/readers.
Just saw on the blog of Paul & Dave (Creator of Flash Element TD and more) that they are doing a re-vamp (remake) of Flash Element TD. This is not the first game they have done after Flash Element TD, as they did Desktop TD, Flash Circle TD and Vector TD also.
I played Circle TD a bit and Vector TD once. Vector TD impressed me most both game play and also visuals, but one issue I had with both games was that the games where very long. The first time I played Vector TD I got to level 28, so it is very hard to say when things go wrong. Maybe I played the first 5 levels wrong and that resulted in that I could not get far. But after playing 28 levels I just didn’t feel like trying again.
So this is what I fear might happen in Flash Element TD2. But I will be looking forward to this re-vamp of the old game, from the short blog post they did it looks promising and they where even so kind to do a YouTube movie; this shows that the game will be rather different but still based on the techniques we know from their games.
