Feckoff.net

I traded in my old Xbox and Playstation 2 and an assortment of near-worthless old games for them against an Xbox 360 premium today. I picked up the VGA cable (at a wallet-shattering €30) too, so that I could hook it up to my LCD monitor. The 17″ monitor doesn’t really do it justice, so isn’t it fortunate I ordered that 20″ widescreen LG one from Komplett’s weekly specials last week

Ghost Recon Advanced Warfighter is excellent. I got really immersed into it right from the get-go, but I still itch to have a keyboard and mouse when playing it. Project Gotham Racing 3 is also very good (and was a cheap pre-owned copy!), but for some reason when output to a screen running at 1280×1024 stretches itself all over the place instead of letterboxing, and thus looks like crap. Hopefully the wide screen will sort that out when it arrives next week!

Also, wireless controllers = best thing ever.
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James Brown died in hospital in Atlanta, Georgia in the early hours of this morning, following his admission for a severe case of pneumonia.

RIP James.

BBC News story.

Following the death of the Turkmen “president for life”, Saparmurat Niyazov, news reports have been mentioning some of the crazy shit he did whilst in power for the last 21 years:

• Named cities and airports after himself
• Named a meteorite after himself
• Banned news readers from wearing make up
• Banned car radios
• Renamed months of the year after himself and his family members
• Had statues of himself and his mother erected all over the country
• Dedicated a building to the free media… whilst tightly censoring the media
• Replaced most school textbooks with his own works
• Banned ballet and opera
• Banned beards and long hair on men
• Ordered construction of an ice palace despite the country’s desert climate and poor economy
• Closed all rural hospitals and libraries
• Banned computer games
• Built huge mosques and palaces in his honour around the country

Despite the country having some of the largest natural gas reserves and significant oil production, this guy has steadily ran it into the ground since gaining independence from the Soviets in 1991. Some 60% of the population is unemployed, most of them living in poverty.

Funny that he was fashioning himself as somewhat of an Islamic spiritual leader for the country, given that when he ruled the country in its Soviet days as leader of its communist party he would have been, at least publically, an atheist. What a nutter. You could really believe Borat was real if he was from Turkmenistan.

You can read lots about this guy on Wikipedia.

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Hey, who says atheists can’t enjoy Christmas too?

Have a good one!

I came across this monstrosity on Autoblog this afternoon. Only $59,900 for this stretched 5.7L V8 hemi Dodge Charger R/T that’s sure to be the star of any traveller wedding!

Google’s world domination plans are clearly still well on track! Google Reader is their web-based RSS reader.
I like it.
It also has revealed to me the fact that the RSS feed on this site is broken. Oops.

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Strictly 4 my N.E.R.D.Z (sorry Tupac):

I’ve been building my own PC’s for about 4 years now, but have never tried my hand at overclocking until this evening. You may have seen my current configuration in a recent post. You may or may not know that the default clock speed of an Intel Core 2 Duo E6600 is 2.40GHz.

Following (mostly) a simple guide over at Tom’s Hardware made it pretty easy to overclock my E6600 to 3.0GHz, which is a nice 25% boost. I’m using the standard Intel cooler and cheap DDR2-667 RAM. The RAM is running at default voltages and timings, but at DDR2-533 speeds for now. CPU is set to 1.4V instead of the stock 1.325V. Its running about 2 degrees hotter than before at idle, so the Intel cooler seems to be handling it quite well.

It seems stable too, I’ve put it through 3dmark ‘06 and SuperPi and nothing has exploded. Yet. Apparently it will reach 3GHz at the stock voltage anyways. It would probably be worth my time going back into the BIOS and fiddling with stuff to get it as good as possible but its too late for that shit now

Update: Feck it, I went and fiddled around again. Now its at 3.2GHz (3240MHz in fact, pedants) and default voltages all round :). FSB frequency has been bumped up to 360MHz to achieve this. With the voltage back to stock, the CPU temperature has also dropped back to a normal level. The Milky Bars are on me!

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See/buy it at adverts.ie here.

I’m selling some decent enough stuff:
Athlon 64 3200+ CPU
Abit AN8 motherboard
2GB PC3200 DDR RAM
XFX 6800GT graphics card
2 DVD burners
120GB hard drive

Full details available on the page linked above.

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Not the prettiest headline ever, but nobody knows what this silly bint’s name is yet.

You couldn’t make this shit up.

BBC News have a story about how a domestic American Airlines flight made an emergency landing in Nashville, Tennessee, after passengers reported a smell of burning sulphur. A woman on the flight had farted and was trying to cover up the stench by lighting matches. The fucking muppet. 99 passengers and 5 crew were evactuated and the woman was questioned by the FBI.
Fortunately for the woman, she is, as of the time of writing, unnamed.

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I’m heading to the Windows Vista launch at Croke Park tonight. I wouldn’t normally bother with travelling for such things, but they’ve bribed everyone into attending with a free licence for the retail version of Windows Vista Home Premium.
Well that got me hooked!
The fact that I quite like Vista RC2 is a bonus.

Seeya there if you’re going tonight to the 20.00 session.

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