Well, I’ve placed 33 out of the 35 pieces I have so far, so it’s starting to look like a picture rather than a white background with a couple of patched of colour!

Also, I say white background because I’ve decided to do this puzzle in the gimp instead of having to install and configure something to create some sort of collage. Instead, what I’m going to do once I’ve completed the puzzle I’ll just upload the completed puzzle and all the pieces to another directory. The only reason I’m doing that is because I assume someone’s going to want to check the various checksums of the images to make sure I didn’t cheat :p

Now that’s assuming I manage to find and take part in the $1000 opportunity in the first place.

Looks like they’re releasing puzzle pieces pretty fast this time around, I’ve now got 22 out of 48 pieces, so I’m almost half way there! It’s the first one of these I’ve taken part in, and I’ll probably not even get to see the $1000 opportunity as it’s bound to be released when I’m not by a computer, but it’s still fun to do.

On the other hand, if it’s anything like the time Colleen won it over christmas, then there’s quite a good chance that it’ll stay up for at least 10 minutes without anyone doing it. One can hope.

I have a pretty outdated computer, though not something you’d consider as obsolete. I’ve been looking for a new computer for some time now and finally found a spec that seems rather adequate for my needs.

Now, according to Ebola (The owner of this blog) I should wait a few months for the next generation of hardware before upgrading, what’s your opinion?

If anyone’s interested, here is the spec I’m looking at, if you have any recommendation/comments or flames then please feel free to reply back.

• CPU: Core™2 Duo E6700, 1066Mhz, s775, 4MB
• Motherboard: EVGA nForce 680i SLI Conroe 1333Mhz, DDRII 1200, 2xPCI-E, 2xGBL
• Memory: 2×1GB Corsair XMS2 Pro TwinX CL4
• HD: Western Digital 400GB 7200RPM, 16MB, SATA II
• GFX Card: Asus 8800GTX 768MB GDDRIII, HDTV, 2xDVI, PCI-E
• Case: Thermaltake Armor Jr VC3000BWS
• Monitor: ViewSonic VX922 19” LCD 2ms DVI

First of all, excuse the lack of pictures, I’m going to fix that tomorrow!

Turbolinux a Japanese Linux vendor have come up with a linux based digital media player, but the wizpy is so much more than a your ordinary media player, as you’ll find out.

Even though it, like many other media players these days, looks strikingly like the Apple iPod (without the control wheel), it packs quite a lot of features, many of which we’ve come to expect in these devices others are somewhat unexpected. It has the ability to play files in the MP3, WMA, Ogg, AAC, and DivX format. It also features an ebook reader as well as the ability to view jpeg files, and since it accepts SD cards you could potentially use it to look at your pictures, should you feel the need to do so on a 1.71 inch 256,000 colour OLED screen.

It sadly doesn’t have the ability to play flac files, but then you don’t really expect a device with the Wizpy’s storage capacity (a mere 4GB) to be able to play files which average at around 25MB.

What sets the Wizpy apart from its competition is the fact that it ships with Turbolinux installed, and allows you to run it from any host PC assuming it can boot from USB, featuring Firefox, Thunderbird and office software for you to work on the go, with the Linux partition taking up 1.5GB of the 4GB provided. However as I already mentioned the device is expandable through SD cards, which helps to negate any loss which may have been caused through the Linux partition.

Sadly Turbolinux is only releasing the Wizpy in Japan at a retail price of 30,000 Yen (US$ 260), with no announced plans for a North American and European release. More information on the Wizpy can be found on the Turbolinux site here.

If a European/North American release is announced I’ll post an update as soon as I get the news.

Another piece of the great PPP and HP puzzle can be found here!

For those of you who don’t know, HP and PPP are giving away digital cameras right now to some lucky people who took part in a previous PPP opportunity!

These cameras are obviously made by HP.

Also HP have some cool Digital Photography Tips on their site.

And thanks to this puzzle someone out there is going to be able to win $1000 just by putting a collage together, couldn’t be easier? Right?

Well, you need to find all the pieces of the puzzle first, and be an approved PPP member.

This post was sponsored by HP.

I just spotted this on the bbc website, according to them the PS3 will be available in Europe from the 23rd of March, with only the 60GB version being available initially.

Each machine will cost £425 (in the UK) or 599 Euros.

Making the UK version £30 more expensive than one bought on the continent, at least according to the current conversion rate quoted on xe.com (1 GBP = 1.51800 EUR). However, I’ve noted similar price differences with the Wii, which sells a bit cheaper in Ireland but not by as much as the PS3 will according to these projected prices.

With the launch confirmed, we will probably be seeing people camping outside of shops for a couple of days in London, even though I highly doubt it, and more importantly the PS3 will now be available in shops other than rather dodgy Arab shops on the Edgware road and similar places.

How badly will it do in Europe?

We’ll just have to wait and see.

As previously mentioned I installed Arch yesterday, what I didn’t say is that I screwed up my locale by being an idiot and using en_UK.utf8 instead of en_GB.utf8, which is major a major failure!

At least that was easily fixed, I also fixed my font paths as those were a little screwed up for some reason as well, so another minute or two of work there.

Beryl is quite nice so far, lots of eye candy and it does exactly what I want it to do, except for one or two little quirks. They aren’t really a major problem, but if you’re an idiot like me they can be a bit irritating. The main problem is, that when activating things like snow and rain instead of using the command combination of ctrl and superkey I use ctrl alt instead, so when pressing one of the F buttons I’m automagically switched to a virtual terminal, which in itself isn’t a very big problem. The problem is that once I am in this situation, X decides to stop responding when I do switch back to it, obviously a bad thing!

How do I fix it? By not being an idiot and changing the command shortcuts.

I decided to install Beryl today, and though I may as well check out Arch Linux as well, because I’ve been meaning to do that for quite some time now and just never got around to it. To be honest being back on a distribution which fetches and installs packages for you without the need for third party software is a bit weird after having used Slackware for a long time!

Anyway, I now have fancy wobbly windows, window shading and all the other cool things which come with the latest version of X and AIGLX. It’ll take a while to get used to, especially when I configure dual screens again…

That’s about it really, I’ll post more when I have it.

This might be a little unconventional, even a little crazy, but since getting the E61 I’ve been using it to look for wireless access points on my route to and from various places, for example school. So what I’ve been doing is scan for APs while on the Bus, which I suppose gives a whole new meaning to the term wardriving, even though I’m hardly ever long enough in one place to connect to an AP and actually do something with it.

It’s a shame I don’t have a bluetooth capable GPS module, otherwise there might be a way of mapping and exporting the various APs I come across while on the Bus, most of which use some form of encryption surprisingly. The next step up would probably be driving along with a Laptop and mapping it that way, but that’s not exactly as inconspicuous as sitting on the bus with a phone in my lap…

I suppose I could try to do that over the summer when people are too busy doing “interesting” stuff, which hopefully means they’ll ignore the strange person on the bus with a laptop, a GPS unit velcrod to it while muttering to himself and smiling!

I’ve come across quite a few “Beboxes” which are wireless routers provided by Be, for those of you who don’t know, Be is an ISP here in the UK who offer 24Mb downstream ADSL2 and as far as I know are the only ones who do or at least one of the early adopters of it. Sadly they’re secured as well, or at least appear to be and getting around WEP/WPA is beyond the scope of my phone.

I’ll have to find my antenna though, because I’m not sure whether the phone reports unsecured networks as secured or not, I have this suspicion because it shows my next door neighbour’s WLAN as WEP enabled, even though it has always been open before. I highly doubt he’s patched it up after having it open for at least 6-7 months that I know of, and in the one month I didn’t connect to it by accident.

So that’s definitely something to investigate!

In other news, hittail fixed their service (and commented on my previous post) so I can now get back to looking at traffic reports and my site loads nice and quick without having to first wait for them to timeout.

I’m watching The BBC’s Daily Politics show right now, because it’s on right after The Next Generation, and it’s actually fairly interesting.

For example, any Conservative MP who doesn’t want a UKIP representative standing against him (supposedly this can lead to a loss of votes), has to be extremely clear about their stance on the EU. They can’t be skeptical towards the EU, they need to be firmly against it and support leaving it, otherwise they get an evil vote stealing UKIP peon…

It’s also highlighting another interesting issue, which is the issue of British people being completely useless with money, being too high in debt and all the other things most people already knew! However what this pointed out is that most people, especially those under 30, aren’t saving for their future.

Personally I think not saving for your future is fairly irresponsible, and being a nice little German woker bee/packrat type person, I’ll probably be saving as much as I can so I can retire in style. Obviously being able to afford my own property is also important, but house prices are bound to crash soon enough so that’s nothing to worry about, and anyway no one says I’m going to stay in the UK forever, I certainly don’t.

I’m bound to save a lot of money on the TV I never watch…