The BBC is to indefinitely postpone the new series of Top Gear until presenter Richard Hammond has recovered from the brain injuries he suffered in a high-speed crash.

and

“We would not think of finalising plans for the next series without discussing it with everyone involved,” the BBC said in a statement. “When it is suitable, the team will do this and we will announce a new transmission date.”

Source [Reuters UK]

According to the Times Online the road safety minister has backed the Top Gear cast. This is a positive step and all those who are trying to get TG pulled because it promotes “dangerous driving” should take note and not be so damn difficult!

The road safety minister has defended the high-octane stunts performed on the BBC’s Top Gear programme and described the presenter Richard Hammond as an “adventurer” after he was seriously injured in a 300mph crash.

In a further show of solidarity Andy Wilman has said that Top Gear will not return without our beloved hamster. Mr Wilman threatened to quit if the BBC are going to try to tone down the show as a result of the crash.

The fate of Top Gear, the BBC motoring show, depends on whether presenter Richard Hammond can recover from last week’s high-speed car crash, its executive producer said yesterday.

Andy Wilman, the man credited with turning Top Gear into BBC2’s most popular programme, said he could not imagine the series returning without Hammond. Wilman also threatened to quit if the corporation attempts to “tone down” the programme’s irreverent attitude and relish for speed. Presenter Jeremy Clarkson said he, too, would defy critics who “don’t like Top Gear and would love to see it off the screens”.

Source [The Observer]

Another BBC News clip about the condition of Richard Hammond

As always all we can do is hope that Richard gets better soon so that we can start to enjoy the greatest show on TV again.

Thanks for all the sources goes to FinalGear.com and Viper007Bond

bbc · car · crash · richard hammond · top gear

Gemini have announced the new product in their iSeries line of DJ equipment – the iTrax which allows you to plug your iPod into the top of the mixer and have your entire music collection at your fingertips. As with most mixers you get an eq on the iPod channels, mic insert, headphone jack, option for aux inputs (CD/turntable), master out and record out. Another useful feature is the video out which will allow you to connect your mixer to a projector/tv and make use of the video features of the latest gen iPods.

There are however some features that make this a less than desirable product to own

You will need 2 iPods (who has 2) so that you can mix from track to track.

If you two, then you will need to have the same collection on both as there’s nothing worse than having the next track on the source you are currently sending to the speakers.

This has all been done before anyway by Numark with their iDJ which is now in its second incarnation. The first iDJ had the same features as the Gemini product but without the video (IIRC). The second gen iDJ recognises the fact that people don’t have two iPods and will allow you to mix from track to track through just a single music player – a much better solution if you ask me.

The Numark iDJ (2 iPod) is available from decks.co.uk for £169 and the iDJ2 for £429. The Gemini iTrax is reported to be coming in at around £100 which is what should be expected for something like this.

If you are seriously considering buying an iPod DJ package and have the money to spend go for the iDJ2 any day as the other two require you to have two iPods to use it properly!

Source [Gizmodo]

audio · DJ · iPod · Uncategorized

This is a crazy order for a collection of MacBooks to go in a local school depending on the model and specification these will cost between £524,300 ($997,266) and £1,174,600 ($2,234,204) This is a crazy amount of money for a school to spend on equipment!

Video below of the kit after it arrived.

apple · Computer · macbook · school

I just saw this and thought it was very amusing. Don’t think it has been aired somehow

Oh and if you’re wondering why i have all these videos appearing now I have found a nice WP plugin created by Viper007Bond the plugin is called Viper’s Video Quicktags

comedy · video

You may have heard in the news about how a collection has been going for the Yorkshire Air Ambulance. This was started by a member of the PistonHeads community.

The clip above is the editor of PistonHeads on BBC News 24

If you are willing to help the cause and would like to contribute then visit the JustGiving website and pledge all you can to the Air Ambulance

car · crash · jet car · justgiving · pistonheds · richard hammond · thule · top gear · yorkshire · yorkshire air ambulance

Thankfully this year I havent had to pay for my car’s MOT/Tax/Insurance, my dad has. This is the last time he is paying for my car fully – next year its split 50-50 and the year after it’s all down to me.

The car was due its 60,000 mile service and I knew that a few things needed looking at so was expecting it to be fairly expensive but not as bad as it was.

First up was the road tax which was due before 1st Sept 06 which cost £175.00

Then when it went to Peugeot the following costs were racked up:

• Carry out 60000 mile service  – £107.73 + VAT
• Change engine oil – £24.38 + VAT
• Enviromental charge – £4.00 + VAT
• Fuel Line Cleaner – £11.95 + VAT
• Sundry Items?? – £5.95 + VAT
• HOUSG PLUG SE – £1.05 + VAT
• OIL FILTER – £7.92 + VAT
• Carry out MOT Test – £44.15
• Labour – £261.63 + VAT
• 4x Brake Pads – £45.80 + VAT
• FRONT BRAKE DISCS – £87.12 + VAT
• ANTIFREEZE – £13.05 + VAT
• WINDSCREEN WIPER BLADE – £6.88 + VAT
• RADIATOR – £143.668 + VAT
• BRAKE FLUID – £4.77 + VAT
• WTR OUTLET HO – £21.19 + VAT

Thankfully the VAT on the service was taken off as I had a nice voucher so the total for the first half was £162.98 and for the MOT+parts came to £736.10

I also have to get the insurance done at the end of the month which is going to cost approx £500

Therefore the total cost of keeping my car, and myself, legal for another 12 months is £1574.08

car

I recently installed two mission M70 speakers in our conservatory as a wedding anniversary/birthday present for my parents so they could make better use of the space and be able to relax and listen to music, read the paper, do some sudoku, look out at the countryside…. The only problem is that the Hi-Fi is in the lounge and as the majority of my dad’s music is on his computer he needs to be within cable reach of the stereo.

Now, I could run a very long phono-mini jack to the conservatory so my dad can use it but that isn’t very tidy and its not as technical. Instead I have been looking at audio streamers that will run either through wired ethernet or Wi-Fi and my dad can then use the wi-fi in the house to stream audio off his laptop or my PC to the stereo.

Pinnacle and D-link have been making them for a while but they have all looked fairly hideous. Yesterday I saw the Slim Devices Squeezebox media streamer in my copy of T3 magazine. Initially it looked like another streamer but since reading reviews about it I am liking it more and more.

As well as looking good it can:

• load RSS feeds and display them on the screen
• connect to Internet Radio stations
• fire WOL (Wake On Lan) packets to wake up your PC/laptop at the same time as the streamer
• be controlled from any PC that can connect to the media server
• connect to multiple computers and audio sources

This could be the answer to all my media streaming needs and at just over £200 from broadbandstuff.co.uk its getting cheaper and more exciting!

gadget · music · music streamer

Richard Hammond has been moved from the ICU at Leeds General Infirmary to a High dependancy unit and his condition has been downgraded to stable.

More details at Sky News and BBC News

car · crash · jet car · richard hammond · thule · top gear · yorkshire

It has just been reported that the crash Richard Hammon was involved in was not an attempt to break the land speed record but was an experiment into speed using similar technologies.

Doctors have also said that the TG presenter has suffered a “Serious brain injury” but they are hoping he will make a good recovery. Jeremy Clarkson and James May have visited him in hospital and in a comment to the reporters JC said “I would just like to say how heartened Richard will be when I tell him just how many motorists and truck drivers on my way here wound down their windows to say they were rooting for him. Both James and I are looking forward to getting our hamster back.”

I will keep this updated as I know more about what is happening but I just hope that Richard makes a good recovery and the H&S/BBC dont decide to take TG off the air.

Sky News: Top Gear Star’s 300mph Horror Crash

car · crash · jet car · richard hammond · thule · top gear · yorkshire

If you havent already seen the news Richard Hammond crashed a Thule jet propelled car at speeds of approximatley 280mph yesterday whilst filming for the new series and trying to break the British Land Speed Record (currently 300.3mph).

Response teams who were first on the scene said that he was talking as he was removed from the car (probably complaining about the whiteness of his teeth). Hammond was rushed to Leeds Hospital where he is in a critical condition.

This morning he is said to be improving but both the BBC and his family are refusing to comment at this time.

BBC H&S are going through all the footage and evidence from the incident to see how an accident like this was possible.

Get well soon Hamster and I hope you are back on the Beeb as soon as you are ready.

car · crash · jet car · richard hammond · thule · top gear · yorkshire

After a week of using the M600 and being averagely happy with it I am returning it to Orange for the slightly more powerful and expensive M3100. The M3100 is almost an identical phone but it has the added benefit of

• a faster processor
• full QWERTY keyboard
• 3G capabilities
• improved battery life

I’m also hoping that the new phone will be able to run Skype, MSN Messenger and all the other useful mobile applications. Then when I get round to setting up Exchange at home for my emails I can setup the phone for the push email service where my emails are sent to both my phone and my computer. Cool huh?

Orange are sending out a jiffy bag for me to return this handset and then once they have confirmed receipt of the item I am able to start to order my new phone!

gadget · M3100 · M600 · MDA · mobile phone · Orange · skype · upgrade · V3

In a letter to all of the Facebook members, Mark Zuckerberg has admitted there were privacy issues with the new FB setup and that they “have been coding nonstop for two days to get you better privacy controls.” Zuckerberg and the rest of the FB team have not removed the feed or mini-feed but have, instead, allowed people to choose what information is viewed on their feed.

I am glad that the features have remained and as i mentioned in a previous blog if you don’t want to look at people’s feeds then why not just minimise them and they will all disappear.

You can read the full letter here

Facebook · feeds

Anyone who uses Facebook will know that recently it has been through a massive facelift, with the introduction of new features such as the Feed and mini-feed as well as collapsable sections of the FB pages.

These changes have been met with much criticism as they are invading privacy and they should be removed because people cannot possibly bear what is going on. There are groups with over 500,000 people in protesting about it and I know that one of my friends has joined nine groups that protest against the new features. How do I know this? Did I find it on the feed when I logged in? Yes. But I could have found this out by simply clicking onto his profile and seeing that he is a member of these particular groups.

As the founder of Facebook stated in the site’s blog this new feature doesn’t make FB any less secure than it already was. “None of your information is visible to anyone who couldn’t see it before the changes. If you turned off your wall to non-friends, no one who is not your friend will be able to see a post on your wall. Your friends can still see it; it hasn’t changed.” Surely the point of the feed/mini-feed is that you can more easily see what YOUR FRIENDS are doing.

Now I am not saying that the new Facbook features aren’t without their flaws. The general layout of the profile pages is now more cluttered and less easy to navigate but these can be worked on. The ability to minimise sections you don’t want to read allows you to clear the pages up.

I have just discovered that if you minimise a particular section it will stay minimised for any profile you view. Even if you logout and back in it remembers what you did. If you don’t want to read people’s mini-feeds you can hide it. If you don’t want people to know who you are friends with then don’t use Facebook or MySpace or MSN’s Profile system. This latest update to FB has been an attempt to allow its members to more readily see what their friends are up to. If you are not a fan of what the site is then don’t be a part of it.

angry · anti-facebook · Facebook · feeds

My parents have just had their offer on a house in Pissouri, Cyprus accepted so hopefully within the next couple of weeks we will have our second home in Cyprus that can be used at any time of the year.

Cyprus · holiday home · Pissouri

For the first time in 8 years I am going to go sailing, only this time it’s going to be a bit more of an expedition than going out in a St John’s LaserII on the Queen Mary reservoir. My dad and I are going down to Chichester harbour with our next door neighbour (John) to go on a little excursion in his yacht.

• The plan at the moment seems to be as follows:
• Depart Leatherhead at 0735 to get to Chichester around 0845
• Put stuff on boat and motor out of the harbour
• Raise sails and make our way round to a place opposite Southampton harbour (I forget the name)
• Stop off there and have some food
• Eat an evening meal in the town
• Sleep on the boat
• Get up at 0600 the next day
• Motor back out of the harbour
• Get back to Chichester
• Drive home

It all sounds great fun but John mentioned that it will take approximately 3 hours to sail from A-B so what happens for the rest of the day I am not 100% sure.

John is providing a mixture of food and drink including “Whiskey for late at night”. Bonus! We are simply taking clothes and a few bits and pieces to keep us going. Oh and a camera so that I can make sure that any embarassing photos of my dad trying to sail are captured for plastering on the Internet later.

I will update on Sunday/Monday, depending on how I feel when we return, with what happened and what went on.

Chichester · sailing · Southampton · yacht

my new phone has arrived and as usual I have ignored the “please ensure you charge your phone for at least 16 hours” advice that the people at Orange always give.

So far it has worked really well. I have put all my contacts into Outlook 2003 and they are synced with the phone. I had a slight problem when the phone tried to call +4401372****** (my home number) and found that this wasn’t dialing. After a quick edit of the phone book to remove those number-breaking 0’s I now have a full set of contacts on my phone again.

I have also found out that the phone isn’t powerful enough to support Skype mobile which is a shame as I had planned to let my phone double as a WiFi Skype phone when im at home. Instead I shall just have to make do with the normal dialing of numbers and talking over GSM rathar than VoIP.

I could always try to get an M3100 instead which has the 400Mhz processor and see if that is any better than the M600 – but that depends on whether or not Orange are willing to do it as an upgrade phone.

I have 7 working days to try this out now and see whether or not I want to keep it

M600 · mobile phone · Orange · skype · Windows

Each year around the start of May I start to decide what the latest must-have mobile is. I currently have the Motorola V3 RAZR which has served me very well until now. It has been able to take any abuse from me spliing things on it to accidentally throwing it across the floor. It’s only recent floor has been that the battery life has been reduced from around 5 days to 5 minutes. As soon as a call is made it starts to flash “Low Battery” and beep every few minutes to remind me that if I don’t plug it back in soon then it will have no battery but it is happy to waste its precious resources and tell me this. As a result it spends most of its time connected to the mains and when I go out I hope that if anybody tries to call me it will be for about 10 seconds otherwise they will be cut off.

My other activity at this time is to see if Orange can give me more minutes/texts than i previously had and, at the same time, reduce my monthly bill. I tend to find that this helps a huge amount when trying to get the latest phone for free! However this year Orange refused to budge and when I threatened to leave for another network they told me that they had already put me on their best plan last year when I was upgrading from my V600.

So, i’m not getting a better deal on my calls but maybe they will give me a free phone anyway – afterall I have been with them for 7 years now. No. In order to get the same model phone (V3i) just with a slightly upgraded camera I would have to pay them £50 for the privilege. Furthermore if I wanted to have a more powerful phone such as the Nokia N80 this would set me back £120. It was then that I remembered about the phone one of my friends had. The O2 MDA mini was a PDA smartphone running Windows Mobile 5 and would let you send emails as well as make calls, send text messages, take photos etc. The closest phone Orange had to the MDA was the SPV M600 which was the same size, looked the same and had similar features. The only noticable difference was that the M600 didnt have the qwerty keyboard to aid in message writing. The M600 also would have set me back £100 so I decided to leave it until after my exams and then see what was happening when I got back from Durham.

Upon my return to Leatherhead I found that the M600 was no longer in stock. I phoned Orange every couple of days to see if it was available – No luck. They said they would contact me when one came into stock – i missed their call. Checking the Orange website I noticed it had come down in price and was now free – it was still “Out of stock”. By now it was too close to my holiday in Africa. I decided that there was no point ordering one in case it arrived whilst I was away. Instead I waited and on my return the answers were the same – out of stock.
Now, after almost four months of waiting for the phone to be available a chance call to Orange this afternoon has revealed that it is IN STOCK and will be free. I have agreed to a 12 month extension of contract (I’m not about to throw away 500 mins and 120 txts/month) and I will be able to take receipt of the precious at some point tomorrow between 9am & 5:30pm.

I was overjoyed that this was now available to me but upon finding a link to the phone for this blog I have discovered that Orange have now made a shinier precious that is the same size and dimensions as the M600 and features the qwerty keyboard that I had wanted. The Orange SPV M3100 is the same as the MDA mini except they have put different coloured plastic on the front and back. If I hadn’t checked to for the link in the full Pay Monthly section I would not have known about it. I now want this phone!

Thankfully I am allowed a 7 day cooling off period to decide whether or not I like the phone. If, after the week, I am dissatisfied with the phone I have decided to upgrade to I can arrange to have it sent back to Orange and trial a new one! I will try to see whether or not the M3100 is available as an upgrade. If not then I may try the old “Well I could leave and rejoin Orange” tactic to see what happens!

Either way I will eventually get a nice shiny smartphone to replace the battered old V3.

M3100 · M600 · MDA · mobile phone · Orange · upgrade · V3 · Windows

Well this works fine

No problems with the install, no broken USB, no audio issues!

It seems that there is just no software available for Windows XP Professional x64 so I guess I will have to send this back to Overclockers and try to exchange it for a copy of 32-bit Windows XP Professional as this just seems like a much better option at the moment. I just hope that the PC will still be able to make full use of the available resources!

32-bit · 64-bit · Microsoft · Windows · XP Professional x64

What a waste of time that seemed to be

Intel’s brand new motherboard doesnt have RAID, XP Pro x64 doesnt seem to have working USB support, all is going down the pan for what was looking at being a very nice new computer for my neighbour.

The system is fully cased up and looking very nice but I am suffering from the problem of the 64-bit architecture of WinXP being completely incompatible with any of the other pieces of software most “normal” people would want to run on their computer.

Now I am by no means a fan on Symantec or their Norton Products (give me Sophos all the way) but for a “normal” home user it is the best of the standard products available on the market. There is however no support for Norton Internet Security 2006 in 64-bit Windows. Having checked the Symantec Website I found that “Symantec AntiVirus Corporate Edition 10.0 will support Windows XP Professional x64 Edition and Windows Server 2003 x64 Editions, available today“… But I don’t want “Corporate Edition” so I did more digging and found an article entitled Compatibility of Symantec consumer products with Microsoft Windows operating systems which stated that “Windows XP Professional x64 Edition or Windows 2003 Server – There are currently no consumer products that are compatible with Windows XP Professional x64 Edition or Windows 2003 Server.” Bring on GriSoft.

GriSoft is my second favourite AV engine (after Sophos of course) as it has a free version that can be loaded onto most computers and provide decent anti-virus protection for no costs. However after downloading and copy a number of files around the HDD I was told that only the paid version of GriSoftAVG supports x64. Time for the big guns

Sophos would, at least, do the decent thing of installing but I found myself unable to start up the InterCheck Monitor which meant that I had no onaccess scans available. Another worthless installation.

Next I tried to install the Intel chipset drivers off the supplied driver CD. This not only refused to install the audio drivers but also successfully managed to break the USB root hubs for all USB ports on the system. Which in turn meant that I thought the system was hanging on boot as I was getting a NumLock light on the keyboard through the KVM but no mouse activity. I plugged the PS2 keyboard and USB mouse from my brothers PC into the new system and I had working KB but still no mouse.

A quick trip to the Intel site to get their Chipset Identification Utility proved that Intel can’t recognise their own hardware, either that or XP x64 was preventing it from detecting properly, so I searched by mobo part number and found the BIOS update, chipset drivers and other software. Flashing the Bios has helped speed up boot time but not solved the faulty USB problem.

Checking Microsoft’s XP x64 FAQ’s there is no support for 32-bit drivers in the 64-bit OS as this would cause everything to fuck up.

As there was no RAID setup I was able to use the second hard drive to install 32 bit XP Pro onto to see if this would be any better behaved… It’s installing now so will publish results soon

64-bit · Computer · Microsoft · Windows · XP Professional x64

It is with sadness that I learnt about the death of possibly the greatest animal lover in recent history. Steve Irwin was an amazing person who did so much for animal awareness and he used his celebrity status to further this.

Steve died whilst filming a documentary off the Batt Reef in Australia, receiving a barb from a stingray to the heart. Paramedics were rushed to the scene but they couldn’t save him. Steve is only the second person to die from a stingray in Australia.

More details can be found at the BBC website

animal · australia · death · Steve Irwin · Uncategorized