May 2006

I am quite enamoured by this story.  The little guy, gary McKinnon, versus the American Government because he managed to get caught hacking into some of their NASA servers which were running windows not fully restricted.  You can read a PDF of his charges sheet here.

The most interesting thing for me is that he was looking for evidence of UFOs and Extra-Terrestrial technology and claims he found evidence of it too!

I got one picture out of the folder, and bearing in mind this is a 56k dial-up, so a very slow internet connection, in dial-up days, using the remote control programme I turned the colour down to 4bit colour and the screen resolution really, really low, and even then the picture was still juddering as it came onto the screen.

It was above the Earth’s hemisphere. It kind of looked like a satellite. It was cigar-shaped and had geodesic domes above, below, to the left, the right and both ends of it, and although it was a low-resolution picture it was very close up.

This thing was hanging in space, the earth’s hemisphere visible below it, and no rivets, no seams, none of the stuff associated with normal man-made manufacturing.

I know this is all pure Sci-Fi and most people will dismiss reports like this but it is interesting all the same.

It reminds me of a short story I was going to write about a kid who had some terminal disease.  He was big into UFOs and Aliens and made a public appeal through the media for someone from NASA or the government to disclose to him if aliens did exist before he died.  Obviously the NASA or government people could lie or tell the truth - and that would have been one of the hooks of the story.

Good luck Mr Hacker!  You are facing the rest of your life in a prison cell…. for trying to find the truth.
Visit the Free Gary McKinnon site too.  Quite an interesting read.

You might have seen that annoying "This copy of windows may be counterfit" message when booting and logging onto your hacked copy of windows XP.

Thank god there's people out there who can help those affected by this blight on the arse of M$ Software…

Edit: I used these instructions to get round the problem. And here is an activation crack program. Never tried it though.  The file currently has a .TXT extension.  Download and rename to .EXE and all should be ok.

The wife was watching Disparate Whorebags and I was playing my first 5 or 6 games of FIFA RTWC on XBox live, sat at my PC monitor.

In all apart from one of the games did anyone talk, until I played a very chatty American who ended up beating me on penalties, or “shoot out” as he called it.  Actually, someone else did pipe up to appologise for scoring in a flukey way.  On the whole I lost every game I played - but it was still fun!

On a game that I was winning 3-1 my opponent quit the game just after I had scored the third goal with a cheeky Michael Owen chip shot past a defender and over the goalie as he rushed out to hack me down.

He could have at least pretended he needed a poo or something!
I left him a bad feedback anyway…..

Wow!

Just wow.

I received my Joytech VGA Cable for my 360 yesterday and after suffering the planned outage of XBOX Live and the intense double episode start of the new series of LOST, I was ready to play.

Now, my AOC branded LCD monitor is not a recent piece of hardware.  In fact i’m sure that I have seen it pictured on the bayeux tapestry, just next to the knight listening to that £250 Rio MP3 player with 64mb of memory I used to own.

I was concerned that with a low response time, my attempts at FIFA RTWC would just turn to a mushy blur instead of a sharp, Hi Def graphics experience.

I had to cycle via Maplin on the way home from work to obtain a £4.99 VGA Gender Bender as the monitor connection on the Joytech cable is male and my AOC display does not allow me to remove the cable from it at the back.  See, I told you it was old!

I plugged in the VGA cable from the 360, into the gender bender and then into my monitor and booted the 360.  I was pleasantly suprised to see the 360 logo spinning onto my display in lush 640×480.  After getting into the dashboard and setting the display to 1280×1024 I was nearly wetting my pants in anticipation as I loaded a game.  The quality is amazing!  As an old-hat PC gamer, I was half expecting the game to slow down as the 360 tried to pump out the higher res graphics but it was just the same - but better.

After XBox LIVE came back online at midnight I got online using Internet Connection Sharing on my PC and got beaten 2-0 by someone playing as Argentina on FIFA RTWC.  Still, it was nearly half past one in the morning and I was only testing it….

Honest!

Wordpress and I have now hit first base!  It has been just over one week since I made the cut over from Blogger and we are already holding hands and giving each other pet names.

"love you… pressy…"

Since moving over I feel all "grown up" and serious about blogging.  Joining Geeklimit has made this feeling more real and it feels great to be doing some proper technical blogging stuff, like.

As usual I have been obsessed with watching my stats and wordpress gives you a few builtin tools to track your visitors, popular posts and how people came to the site.

My traffic is slowly building and since taking this capture has rocketed after an influx of visits from Geeklimit.

Overall, I am very impressed with Wordpress and would recommend it to anyone!  There is a wealth of free templates available (although we cannot change them here on wordpress.com). 

I have just been accepted as a new team member over at Geeklimit.com.

Therefore, my “technical posts” will go there - and the rest of my mindless drivel will go here!