Isles of Scilly

We have broadband! Horray! I am not going to be completely out of contact for a whole week. Today at 2.45 I boarded a helicopter at Penzance to fly over to St Mary's and am now settled in the conservatory of a house my family is sharing with one family of cousins (two boys aged 7 & 10). I will be able to get at MSN in the evenings but during the day I will be island hopping and enjoying in the delights of my family! Anyway that's all for now but I'll keep you updated.

iTunes vs, Windows Vista

iTunes isn't playing along happily with Windows Vista. It keeps on having problems with displaying text and graphics (see here) and I have to keep on restarting iTunes. Now this may not be so bad but seeing as Apple have had ages to fix it (I'm including the stage when Windows Vista was in beta) it is a bit odd that they haven't sorted it out. Now Apple have just been really nice and announced DRM-free tracks with EMI but on this case I have a feeling that they are being rather naughty. The only motivation of slowing down the fixing process would be to through discredit on Microsoft, but why? Apple should just get their act together and deal with it! AGGH!

Revision

I did my first ever revision session today and it didn't go to badly. It was 45 minutes of Biology on the GCSE bitesize website. I've decided that because I'm lazy I'll start off with Bitesize and then once I've drained it I'll look at the bits that challenge me in more depth. I survived but I'm depressed because my lava lamp has broken and my desk is no longer bathed in its glow. Only 1.5 hours more of revision so I better get it done. I've settled on 3 units of 45 minutes a day. Is that more or less than average?

We will survive!

Revision Plan

My parents forced me to write a revision plan so I have made one but with some slight additions to make it more fun. (whoops spelt Scilly Isles wrong)

Windows Vista v Linux

I am dictating this blog posting using windows speech recognition. I have just installed windows vista on my computer. Windows Vista is working fine but it has some annoying features. The security is slightly overdone for example every time you wish to open an Exe file it opens up a full screen window where you have to click a button to accept the opening. Another example is the installation of drivers I have a network printer which connects over the Wireless network, I had to install a combination of four drivers and then I had to use some computer wizardry to detect the printer. I am now trying to start a new project. My sister’s laptop only has a 40 GB hard drive, I am trying to put up some Network Storage box I failed to do it with the apple G3. My next door neighbours, the Mays, have given me an old Compaq Computer. I was planning to run windows home server on it but the specifications were not high enough. I am now trying various Linux solutions but I am having some difficulty. So far I have tried Ubuntu server edition and freeNAS. Ubuntu server edition worked but was far too complicated and freeNAS had mounting problems. Well I think I’d better finish the article here. When background noise was minimal speech recognition had no problem but there was a lot of background noise for most of the writing making this article a long and drawn out process. Certainly a fun feature but perhaps not the most efficient. Enjoy the holidays and good luck with revision.

Embeded banners badges

I've gone slightly over the top on placing badges on the blog and now have quite a few. I think it is still quite reasonable but I know some people hate it. Can I please have some feedback and feel free to recommend new badges as well as telling me to remove them. Many thanks!

Revision

I have found the coolest revision aid ever! My scanner came with a program that scans in documents and will then automatically recognise the documents contents. Now this isn't new but what is new is that it can shove stuff like tables into an Excel worksheet so I can scan in loads of tables like vocabulary and have it in Excel to access easily and search or randomize! I should get back to revision but just so you know the program is Nuance's OmniPage SE 4 (the company also does amazing speech recognition software).

New Printer

I'm really getting into this blogging thing it's my new way to procrastinate after Facebook.
Today I managed to get my Dad to finally get a new printer. It has built in wireless and networking as well as a scanner, memory card reader, and 2.5 inch colour screen. It is Canon's PIXMA MP600R and has been bought to replace a rubbish old Epson which is significantly over 5 years old at a rough estimate of 9 years old. The printer looks really cool and be prepared to see lots of scanned images in future blog posts.
Otherwise in my life I have got myself addicted to a online comic called MegaTokyo which is a mix of American style comics and Manga and am working my way through the 950 past episodes.

Welcome

The blog is up and running after much pestering from Farhan and now all hat needs to be done is that I fill it up. Sorry that this is in a completely different domain to my webpage but i couldn't work it out any other way without having to pay (though donations are welcome).
I've set this up using my sisters laptop and extending it onto my desktop as my computers keyboard and mouse are refusing to work. Luckily I hope to be able to fix it once my brother gets off his computer and i can steal his keyboard and mouse to fix mine. At the moment my main concentration is getting my webpage into decent shape, if anyone has any reccomendations for programs I'd love to hear as Nvu is good but a little basic.
The holidays have been going well and I have managed some revision but not nearly enough and am feeling guilty. My grandfather is visiting on New Year's Day and IT work is from Wednesday till Monday. I'll do a final crush and hope that everything works out okay.
This has been a good post and I hope the first of many. I hope you all have a Happy New Year and I'll write back after the celebrations (walking in Richmond park at night!).