Ultimate Gambit

Recently, my cheap Casio watch which I have had for the last 2 years broke, and I was forced to get a new one. I decided that I wanted to get something a little more fashionable, but didnt really want to lose out on any of the features that I used on my previous watch. After scouring the internet, i came across the KDX 5404G, and after checking the returns policy on the Kahuna Website, I decided to take the gamble, in the knowledge that I could return it if I didnt like it. For a bargainous £29.95 this watch looked excellent value for money in comparison to some other similar style watches.
Since when I was looking I was unable to find any reviews, I thought I’d write a brief review so that others who may be thinking of buying one of these watches may have more of a clue and feel like they were taking less of a gamble!

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That could be the TV Licencing’s campaign in the future according to this article here on the Register.

Personally, i find this less than exciting. I resent having to pay a TV licence as it is – there are 2 programs i watch regularally on the BBC – Neighbours and Top Gear – and i dont think that watching them adds up to £120+ a year. Having to pay a PC tax, while is some ways better (i use my PC a hell of alot more, so seems more worthwhile), scares me a little.

They can’t monitor whether you are using a PC (according to the article), so how are they going to know a) if you have a pc, and b) if you are using one without a PC licence.

Simple… spyware. If this is the route they choose to go down, how long before it is compulsary for every new PC to have a little piece of software installed (or even a small piece of hardware to avoid re-formats) that reports your activities to the governing body? That doesnt appeal to me at all. Nor will it to many others.

I really hope that this doesnt come down to this, but if it does, i hope it’s they don’t go down the route of monitoring users activities.

I’ve just seen some new screenshots of a pre-release of Internet Explorer 7. While it certainly looks nice, and a massive improvement on IE6, I can’t help but feel like i’ve seen it all before?! Yes, it certainly seems to have an air of Firefox about it, doesn’t it.

That really wouldnt be a problem for me, except for the fact that I can see loads of ignorant people getting IE7 shipped with their new pc and thinking that its all Microsoft’s innovation, when it is clearly Mozilla‘s open-source project that has led to these evolutions in browser technology. Power to the people!

For nearly 3 years now i have been using Azureus for all my BitTorrent needs. At the time, this was the easiest client to set up, use and download using, and I couldnt found anything better.

Until now…

I came across uTorrent about a month ago, and while it looked good, i really couldnt be bothered to go through the effort of changing over from Azureus. However, this morning, i started having a problem with the NAT testing (the test for checking the data can get through) on Azureus (even though my ports were definately open), so i thought i’d give uTorrent and try to see whether it had the same problems…

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A few of my friends have been on at me for a while to download Skype, and when I got a free 30minute voucher from the shop the other day, I decided that there was no better time to give it a try!

After an incredibly easy install, i gave it a try by calling my mate John. It’s fab! The video and audio is very crisp, and the lipsync was near perfect! I intend to try make all my mates download it now so that i can chat to them on the phone instead of messenger for free… it’s much more personal

So, everybody, download Skype from the link on the right, and then Skype me

I’ve just added an e-mail sign-up to the sidebar, so if you dont use RSS and want to recieve pretty e-mail notifications of when I update my blog, enter your e-mail address and click the link in the e-mail you get sent It’s completely secure, so you don’t need to worry about other people accessing your e-mail address or anything! Go on… you know you want to!

Well, after checking this thread on the Feedburner Plugin site, i realised that i had done something very silly, and fogotten to allow access to my .htaccess file, which meant the plugin wasnt working properly! D’oh! There was also an update to the plugin released yesterday, so I installed that too for good measure! It’s all up and running now, so feel free to subscribe to my feed!

I’ve also got gambituk.co.uk up and running, although at the moment it masks this site when it links here, so all you see in the address bar is http://www.gambituk.co.uk wherever you are on the site. I’m going to try and sort that, but if i cant, at least it points to the correct place!!

I’ve also just added a spoiler plugin which will hopefully be useful when writing reviews of MMA events/Movies/TV Shows! Just hover your mouse over it and you get to see what it says

I’ll hopefully have some more interesting posts for you soon!

I’ve been trying to set up feedburner on my RSS feed so that i can monitor how many people are reading my feed, and it isnt working. I can access the feed which i am getting feedburner to link to myself, but feedburner doesnt think it’s there?! I’ve tried loads of things, but while it recognised it initially and worked briefly (before i made a silly mistake and messed it up), whatever i do now, i cant get it to work!

How annoying. If you want to subscribe to my feed, please bear with me, (you can subscribe to the feed linked above for the time being!) and i’ll notify you when its up and running!

After a few days of ummm-ing and ahhh-ing, i’ve finally decided to jump and bought a domain name and hosting package from SniffHost. Blogging is  bit addictive when it looks as good as this!
I don’t know what they’re like as I dont know anyone who’s used them, but they were definately the best value at £15 for one year’s hosting including a domain name. I wont reveal my domain name yet, but its pretty good

I’m also going to register the .co.uk version of the domain I’ve got for completion! I’ve really started getting into this blogging lark, and I feel its about time I owned a domain name – what’s a computer scientist without one ey!?!

Initially, i’m just going to forward those domains to here while i set up my blog on my host. It’s going to look a little different, but i’ll still be using WordPress and the current theme. Once thats set up, i’ll import all my stuff from here over to there, and run my blog off my host.

So, if my blog goes quiet for a few days, its because i’m setting up my host (although i’ll probably still be tempted to post!)