We were hungry the other morning at work so someone decided to pop off to KFC to get some breakfast stuff, try as hard as we could it was not possible to find a menu anywhere online for what they do! Later it became apparent that this was because breakfasts were not official yet and were still only being trialled in our area (North East), so we all went down (shotgun was called) and half-inched a menu and scanned it up;

After I posted it up on my favourite forum I noticed a lot of strange referrers on my webstats, after investigation it seemed that lots of people decided to post it up on a lot of other forums too, including here, here, here and here. Seems people are quite interested and we’ll all take a bow for bringing the menu to you. Anyway, the offending menu is included above for your consumption.

So yea, I bought another 20″ Widescreen monitor (LG L204WS) so my desk will be pretty much full of them, will be nice to have two monitors again too, especially since I’ll be doing a lot of website work, and ooh, I’ll be able to use the dual screen mode in games like Supreme Commander.

Next up is this lovely clock, I’ve always wanted a little clock for my desk, just something that was simple and was lit up all the time, this one seems to fit the bill nicely and its a USB hub to boot, no more bending down under the desk to attach stuff in the dark. Best of all it was less than £10 and should be with me within a week!

I also bought some 3D glasses, you know the red and blue kind that you got as a kid to read those 3D comics, they were £1 for 2 pairs. And why? Because they’re cheap and I’d like to see how Trackmania looks with them as it supports that 3D mode. I have a sneaky suspicion it will ruin the colours, not sure why…

Last but not least I’ve been looking at a replacement laptop, I was looking at getting one of those HP tablet laptops, however, as cool as touch screen is and having a tablet would be nice, those pros come with the con of 12″ instead of 15″ screen. I think I’ll stick with a much more stylish Sony Vaio:

It’s nice to have a desktop again, I get get onto things that weren’t possible with the piddly laptop, thankfully I should be getting a nicer laptop soon too. I’ve taken the opportunity to re-encode some of the videos on the site, so they now look nicer and sound better, I’ll also be uploading the multiboxing video instead of using the Youtube version.

I’ve also been playing some Trackmania, which is a nice free racing game, unlike most racing games though the tracks in Trackmania are manic, massive jumps and aerobatics make it a little different and the main premise (which I haven’t touched on yet) is the online play, rankings, teams and such. It’s good fun. Whilst the graphics aren’t brilliant they are nice and smooth. There are also lots of car models available to download from the net. Edit: Video is encoded and ready;

I was bored and haven’t had a forum signature for a long time due to not having access to a lot of my old files, and now I have a desktop PC I can actually make something look half decent, just made a couple:

I’ve Also used a few neat tricks to spruce things up a bit; firstly I used the url shrinker I mentioned in a previous post so I only have to put in http://url.csignal.org/sig instead of the full image url, makes it easier to remember and it also means that in the future if I change my signature I don’t have to go about many sites to edit it, just have to change it in one place and all websites will have the new one.

I also used an image rotation script, which means that every time someone views a page with my signature on it loads a random one of the above images and displays it, so people will get a little variety.

For everyone at work;

Because of the PC situation and the problems I’ve had with it I’ve now got another PC and have got rid of my laptop for now, which means I can at least get on with some design work and play some games finally. I’m going to see if I can get the other PC replaced or sell it and get another laptop at some point this month, been looking at a nice 4GB one 😀

Other than that I’ve been messing on with shorty on one of my domains, basically it’s the same as tinyurl, but instead of using someone else’s site I can use my own to not only make them more personal, but to track how they are used and clicked too, my urls look like this; http://url.csignal.org/facepalm/ but once I’ve had a play I’ll probably change it to something like http://chaoticsignal.com/url/whatever/, adios anyways, back to work tomorrow, yay!

Edit: Woop! i figured out how not to spam the main page with full articles with the ‘read more’ link.

Finally after over a week I’ve confirmed the problem with the PC, both my memory and processors work fine in another PC, but this means that both of my motherboards are fried! The brand new OCZ Power supply must have had some knid of grudge against me and maliciously decided to annoy the crap out of me by fucking me about as much as possible.

I guess the only thing to do now is send back the motherboard and PSU and get them replaced, but god knows how long that will take. 🙁

The team behind Aion have released some news and screenshots detailing their new lighting and shadow changes to the Aion engine (cryengine), the difference is evident, but I thought it would be nice to compare them directly, look at the images below and move your mouse over to see the improved image, hopefully it provides a more direct and useful comparison of the two images.

Read more…

Here we are again, another component up and still the computer is dead, it’s mind boggling… Now my newer power supply seems to have bitten the dust. I cant help but think that the universe is trying to tell me something, because it certainly doesn’t make much sense. The only part that has now not been swapped out is the memory but I just find it unlikely that somehow both sticks fried at the same time! But I guess we’ll have to wait until Monday to find out. Soon I’ll have enough parts to make another PC.

I’ve been looking through lots (hundreds) of WordPress themes to suit me better, but none of them fit properly, they’re either too slim for my videos to fit in or they just don’t look any good, I need to make my own theme, but doing any kind of graphics work is basically out of the question on the laptop and I’ve got all my templates and stuff on the main PC.

I think I might make use of one of my own templates, maybe the old modifi theme, or if I can get nupo back up and running I might see if I can port that over, or just use that for my personal blog instead, personally I love the old nupo theme. To me at least it was different enough to default themes and it was light on graphics and high on content.

/moar facepalm

Do you ever get that ‘verify your age’ popup when viewing videos online (you know that little thing that has drop downs for date, month and year)? Me too and it is really starting to tick me off, especially when the ‘check’ doesn’t seem to work and I’m not able to view the video in question. I mean what’s the point, it doesn’t verify your age it’s simply an arbitrary test of which D.O.B you decide to choose regardless of whether you’re 5 or 50.

I’m not sure why websites are doing this, it seems to be the new ‘feature’ on videos, especially gaming videos. I can only assume that it is some kind of attempt (maybe they’re required to under some law?) for websites to cover their backs and saying “we did an age check so no one under age should be viewing inappropriate content on our site”, but that doesn’t even make sense, because there is no verification at all, nothing at all is verified, a simple rating next to or before the video (like film age ratings) would achieve the same amount of verification.

Even if you do decide to put in your real date of birth and it says ‘sorry you’re too young’ there is nothing, on any of the websites stopping them from just refreshing the page and choosing a different value. Seriously do they expect a 14 year old child who goes to view a video to abide by the rating? Do we think even if they are naïve enough to put in their real age they’re going to think “oh fiddlesticks, it appears I am too young to view this content I shall have to instead play some spore” or will they just refresh and put in a different date.

Maybe it’s a conspiracy, part of a drive to decrease our available spare time and subjugate the masses, imagine the 5 – 10 seconds it takes to ‘verify your age’ multiplied by the times the verification has been done and I’m sure it will work out to a lot of man hours down the drain for NOTHING.