After coming to the conclusion that I need my own camera I have come across a camera made by Canon, the PowerShot G9. This camera is currently available for just shy of £300. This would be a fair price for a DSLR, of which this isn’t. This is a standard, “point and shoot” camera, this means that the price is a small fortune for such a camera that you would expect for under £200. This however, is almost as good as a DSLR.
The PowerShot G9 is what professional photographers use when they don’t want to carry around all their kit to take a decent photo. This camera has 12.1MP which is more than enough for almost anyone, a huge 3″ LCD to view the breathtaking images that this camera will produce, image stabilising (great for me as I don’t have the most steadiest hands), 6x optical zoom and surprisingly, can shoot photos in RAW and change the lens to wide angle lenses etc. The amount of features this camera has are incredible, I just hope I can learn them all.
On the pictures it doesn’t appear to be the best looking camera but it looks well made, strong and looks up to the job, I don’t doubt that it will look better when I actually get my hands on it. Now I just need to find out what each mode and setting does so I can attempt some good looking photos
I would go for a DSLR but the fact that you pay the price for the body and a medium end lens then have to pay for the more advanced lenses and so on. Also I go biking and such where a chunky DSLR isn’t ideal to carry around.
I will be purchasing this once I get paid and find out if my College course has been funded yet or if I have to fork out myself for it!
I went the Staffs Gaming LAN party just this weekend gone and it was really fun, nice organisers and generally nice people attending. I had a few problems with my LAN Party PC and ended up taking my quad core PC which wasn’t ideal but it was my only option.
LAN Parties are a great way to meet new friends aswell which is always nice. As a first timer I thought everyone was helpful on the Staffs Gaming forums and helped me make a little checklist regarding what to bring. It’s not just PC gaming either, most places allow you to take consoles, this is fun as you can have Co-Op Guitar Hero 3, 3 hour long sessions at 3am whilst 7 people are asleep in the same room and having Holiday In Cambodia blasting from the speakers.
I will definatly be attending the next SG LAN’s and if you live around the Staffordshire/Stoke area I would highly recommend coming down and joining in the games!
If you are interested, the Staffs Gaming forums are located here. SG LAN’s can accomodate around 30 people at the moment but their are bigger LAN’s, for instance Central LAN UK. I have never been to a big LAN so I can’t comment on them but I do like the small ones as you get to know everyone who is there.
I bought my Razer and Microsoft collaborative mouse back in October 2006, it’s a nice mouse, comfortable, pretty accurate and the software ain’t to bad.
I have used this mouse daily for about 1 year and 4 months, over this period there has been various problems with the mouse, upgrading the firmware and software was a kick in the teeth, you had to perform some sort of hocus pocus to get the damn thing to update, once it did finally update everything was good and well, after this effort Razer (Who deals with the firmware and software) got their act together with the updates and everyone was happy.
November 2007 came and I bought a new PC, I also purchased a new mouse mat over my old generic one as you may have seen in previous posts, I had erractic behaviour with the mouse and I then went on to buy another mouse mat and it seemed to pretty much resolve the problem completly. I still cannot go in a straight line with the mouse as it glitches and moves around the screen on it’s own.
Yesterday I was playing Call of Duty 4 and I kept hearing the Windows XP USB disconncting and connecting sounds and my mouse would stop working for a few seconds, thought this was just the USB not plugged in all the way, it wasn’t. I dropped a support ticket with Razer and again, like last time I contacted them regarding Habu issues they just ignore the message, regardless of what it says, and pass me onto Microsoft. Support tickets to Microsoft refer me to Razer Support. This is an endless loop and neither company wants anything to do with it.
Luckily I recieved a Razer Diamondback 3G in the post a few weeks ago that came with a magazine subscription, it is not as comfortable as the Habu but it works, as can keep in a straight line. I think I will keep to Razer’s own products and optical sensors from now on.
I was pestered into going a LAN Party by a friend, I have never been one but always wanted to, so, I didn’t want to take my new PC as it’s rather heavy and seeing as I have a rather mid range spec PC sitting in my room I thought I would upgrade specific components and get it running again.
I then started enquiring around, a friend had a few bits and pieces he wanted to sell so I enquired about them (Thanks William) and ended up buying his Antec Nine Hundred and his old graphics card, an MSI 8600GT which had been factory overclocked and had recently had a Zalman VF900-CU fitted onto it, a nice bargain and ended up giving him a bit more than he asked.
Got it built up on a temporary hard drive and installed as many games as I could before running out of space. Waiting for my wages to come to resolve that issue but that is easily done. Got off a few pics of it, this is not in its finished state. I have bought some Hammerite smooth black spray for the inside of the game to get rid of the ugly metal look and make it look darker and stand out from the rest, also plan on getting a new PSU that has black braided cables to help with the cable mangement as the temporary PSU is a generic 350W which is far from ideal.
The final component spec is listed here but as soon as I can locate another 512mb stick of RAM it will be going to 2048MB dual channel which should help. CPU is running at a cool 20C (ambient!) so that gives a good bit of overclocking headroom if the motherboard obliges.
Indeed! After visiting a friend of mines blog (William Hook) I noticed he had a rather sexy layout, I checked the footer for who designed it and went along to their site. I found another design which I loved straight away, this one. I would of stuck with the other but it only displayed 1 post at a time, which I just didn’t like. I tried to edit the pages but it just didn’t work!
Anyways, this one is better and I love it. Also removed the snow as we never get any anyway!
Hope you all had a lovely christmas, I did, home at christmas this year, went well, didn’t get a lot but what I did get I was happy with, only thing I would change is my dog being with us, sadly she (Rio) passed away on my 18th birthday (20th October) she was a great dog and will always be remembered.
On a brighter note, my Steelpad came today, first order from Aria, went smoothly, nice shipping, costly but fast. Arrived well packaged from Citylink. Opened it up and its almost as large as my No.ID, very slightly smaller, the difference overall however, is vast. My mouse glides. It’s really smooth, hard plastic layer on the top, soundless when you move the mouse which was an annoyance on the old mat as it was quite noisy. I chose the flat black one over the elaboratly designed one, I thought this would help with tracking, without trying the other one, i’d say it is better. The pad doesn’t move, the bottom has white, sprayed on rubber type material, this doesn’t budge and inch after hours of gaming (6 hours of COD4 today -.-). I was happy with this pad from the moment I used it, I recommend it to others highly.
Picture after the break for anyone who wants to see it with my Habu which the gloss, original coating is starting to come off, this does not affect the mouse in anyway, only the looks, logo is starting to rub off aswell.
After posting my most recent post I was thinking the site looked a little dull. I do like the default theme for wordpress but it doesn’t have the flair of the other custom ones. After looking through the theme site I noticed BluePoint and installed it and here we are. Overall I think it’s a nice layout, clean, simple and elegant. I don’t post here much but it’s nice to have a professional looking homepage. I also added a few plugins, mostly behind the scene plugins. Wp-cache was the main one, caches certain stuff to help the pages load faster. A nice tool but most people won’t see much of a difference. I also noticed that, even with a Google sitemap generator I wasn’t getting very high on Google under my alias, I went through the settings and somehow I had blocked bots from viewing the site, turned that off and now i’m at #1 for “Acksaw” already :$! Also added an SEO and a few other things.
Also, a bit late but I added a cheesy snow script for the site, nice to be a little festive If you want to put it on your own WordPress blog, here you go.
I bought this mousemat after a few weeks of research, as some people who know me will know, I enjoy to game. I spent a fair amount of money on a good mouse, keyboard and to todays standards a very powerful and complete PC. For a while I was using a standard, no-name plastic mousemat, this wasn’t big enough for gaming with as I tended to move the mouse from the pad and then would end up getting fragged. I did a bit of research and came upon a small company known as No Identity. They do a hybrid pad, basically a cloth and a hard topped mat. This looked good on the surface and the reviews were very good. I went ahead and bought it, these are custom made from when you order so you have to wait a week or so for it to be made then shipped from their base, in Estonia. I ended up having to wait a month for the pad and emailed the company numerous times with no response even 3 months later, bad communication is a serious downfall of any company. The mat was huge and very nice looking, loaded up my favourite game and started fragging away. This is where I started getting troubles, I was getting really bad feedback from my mouse, crosshair was all over the place, this probably attributes to the elegant, multi-shaded design of the mat rather than the manufacture, I also noted the edges were not smooth and sharp in some places, not a comfortable pad to play with. I stuck with it and in the past few weeks have noticed that the pad has taken on a sort of bubbly texture where the pad is most used. It isn’t smooth to the touch anymore, other parts of the mat are still smooth, where I haven’t used my mouse there. I started to see the feedback was going at this point, the laser was probably reading the surface better because of the texture of it as opposed to the original smoothness. This is a good thing in a way.. My accuracy is getting back to how it was originally, pre-noidpad. It is, however, bad because it shows the surface doesn’t last on this mat.
It is getting to the point where I cannot game using the mat and am now considering a harder, plastic/metal/glass topped mat and having to pay another £20. At the moment, the SteelSeries Steelpad 5L is what I am interested in.
A week or so ago I was hoovering whilst my USB TV Tuner was plugged (Hauppauge WinTV-HVR900) and the wire got stuck under the hoover, this in turn, bent the TV Tuner’s USB socket and snapped the small plastic guide inside the port on my case. This reduced me to 1 front USB port. I had heard good things about Antec‘s customer service department, I sent an email off to the appropriate people basically saying it was my fault, do you have a replacement part and can I buy said part. I then got a really nice email asking for my address and saying that they would send the part out.. For free. I recieved this part today, via priority mail from the USA.
Sorry for the lack of image quality, taken from my phone.
I thank Antec for this and will continue to buy products from them in the future. For reference, my case in the Antec P182. (Pic of my PC incase)
The PowerShot G9 is what professional photographers use when they don’t want to carry around all their kit to take a decent photo. This camera has 12.1MP which is more than enough for almost anyone, a huge 3″ LCD to view the breathtaking images that this camera will produce, image stabilising (great for me as I don’t have the most steadiest hands), 6x optical zoom and surprisingly, can shoot photos in RAW and change the lens to wide angle lenses etc. The amount of features this camera has are incredible, I just hope I can learn them all.
If you want to put it on your own WordPress blog, 
