Just a quick note about The Gadget Show on Channel 5 here in the UK. I’d always avoided it, as techie TV programmes usually end up being complete rubbish. Recently however, I somehow ended up watching The Gadget Show, and I have to say that I quite enjoyed it. The presenters were up-to-date and were giving out genuinely useful advice. It was also refreshing that the prices displayed were realistic Internet prices, rather than irrelevant manufacturer prices.
I’ve just done a bit of cleaning up of the smart car reviews on Carsurvey.org. The manufacturer name has been changed from the old MCC Smart to the current name of smart. In addition, I’ve grouped the fourtwo and city coupe reviews together, and I’ve changed Roadster to roadster. All this will have broken some links and RSS feeds (sorry about that), but should make the smart reviews easier to navigate in the longterm.
On Carsurvey.org and related sites (mobile phones and motorcycles), it’s now possible to vote on whether a comment is on or off topic, without being a member. On the reviews with lots of comments, I’ve added “On Topic” and “Off Topic” buttons to each comment. The total of on topic and off topic votes are compared to decide where each comment should be displayed.
I’m trialing some In-Text advertising on Carsurvey.org. Basically this is double underlined links that will appear in some of the reviews and comments. Hopefully this is going to be subtle and won’t distract from the content of the site. If anyone has any strong feelings about its implementation, please leave a comment or email me.
Because of the large number of off topic comments that have recently appeared, I’ve added a feature to enable the filtering of comments according to whether they’re related to the original review.
If there are enough comments to justify splitting by relevancy, the “On Topic” comments become the default view, with “Off Topic” and “All” being offered as alternative views.
Currently only the members and myself can vote on whether a comment is relevant, but my intention is to open this voting up to everyone in the very near future.
As a starter, I’ve trawled through some of the more active reviews, and have done a first pass at filtering the comments.
As usual, any feedback is welcome.
Despite the relative lack of processing power, and the slow integrated graphics, I’ve been very impressed by how well my 1Gb Mac mini copes with running various emulators. In particular:
SixtyForce, which does a great job of emulating the N64. I’ve had great fun playing Wave Race and Diddy Kong Racing again.
Mame OS X – Arcade perfect Pacman and Galaga on a 46 inch TV 🙂
For anyone who is remotely interested in aircraft, pick up these two fantastic books by Jim Winchester:
Concept Aircraft: Prototypes, X-Planes, and Experimental Aircraft – Amazon UK
The World’s Worst Aircraft (From Pioneering Failures to Multimillion Dollar Disasters) – Amazon US
They’re both very affordable, and have loads of entertaining analysis about some of the stranger aircraft to have graced our skies.
Just a quick update on my Oppo 981HD.
I’m still impressed with its general playback quality, but I have run into a significant issue. It really doesn’t like playing back DVDs recorded by my old Panasonic HS2 DVD Recorder. Its deinterlacing capabilities fail it, and there are some juddering issues.
Although there’s nothing mentioned on the Oppo site about the 981HD having any issues, I suspect it must be the same issue refered to in the FAQ for the 971H.
Not a major problem for me, but it’s worth considering if you are planning on buying an Oppo, and were planning to play back a lot of your own recordings.
I found this excellent video of my favourite stretch of road – the A686 over Hartside in Cumbria. I’ve got some very fond memories of slicing across the moors on this road, in both my old Civic Type-R and current Golf GTI.
I’m rather enjoying ArithmeTick at the moment. It’s a free Windows Mobile game, which involves performing mental arithmetic against the clock. Very similar to one of the tasks in Brain Training on the Nintendo DS. Very simple, but surprisingly good fun when you’ve got a couple of minutes to kill.