Two white wireless controllers, with black rechargeable battery packs (because microsoft stopped making the white ones apparently, so when I came to buy new ones earlier this year (the old ones had stopped holding a charge), I had to get black ones. Only affects things if you’re massively fashion conscious/OCD about matching bits

The USB <-> controller charging cables, obviously (actually, two black cables, and one grey).

Some games: Sega Rally, Mercenaries 2, FIFA 09, Forza 2, Skate, Gears of War 2.

Some more cables and things:
An HDMI cable.
A cable for hooking up to a VGA display, with phono left and right breakout on it. There’s probably a technical term for these things, but meh, you know what I mean.
Component/composite to scart adapter (never used).
The power brick and cable.
The original headset, with it’s single earpiece and microphone. I don’t think I ever used this beyond seeing if it works, and looking at it, you might not want to either – the foam looks a bit brittle (it may have been left in the sun), also, I can’t remember it being overly comfortable. But it’s there.

The bad bits (full disclosure and all that):

According to the box, and the darkest recesses of my mind, there should be another display cable, xbox to (component/composite – I never know/care which is which), which I’m sure is somewhere in one of my computer rubble crates, but I can’t find it at the moment. I only ever used the VGA, and then HDMI connection options. I’ll have a look for it.

Also, the spring which holds the “little door in front of the USB ports” has fallen out, so the door doesn’t close. The spring is still in a known location (or in plain English, I haven’t lost it), and I was thinking of having a go and seeing if I could put it back on, but it doesn’t really do anything. In fact, I believe that microsoft sent back repaired xboxes with fascias that didn’t even have that little door, so it can’t be too important. I had a look at this. Without an inordinate amount of time spent sourcing spare parts, and lots of fiddly jiggling about/melting and re-melting bits of the (non-visible side of the) fascia, this was going to be silly to do, so it’s now just like a more modern xbox 360, and doesn’t have the USB port door.

I haven’t had time to trawl ebay/amazon trade in/gumtree yet, so hit me up with offers (don’t worry, I am going to be realistic about it, I know it’s not a 360 S). I’d prefer to do an in-person deal, mainly because I’m lazy, and dislike the post office, but I am open to a postal deal, if you cover the postage, and don’t mind me not posting it until I’ve got the cold hard cash in my grubby little paws (or at least see some numbers change on my online banking).

There’s a saying, that goes something like “whatever is invented before you’re 18 has alway been there, if it’s invented when you’re between the ages of 18 and mid-thirties, it’s amazing technology, and anything invented after your mid-thirties is witchcraft and should be banned”.

I’m not sure I’d agree with those age ranges, but I definitely feel like I’m now moving into the middle age band, where new bits of tech are making me think “Ooh, wow”, rather than just “well, yes, of course someone sells a box to do that”.

My new TV (well, the replacement for the crap one) came with some cashback, so I used that to buy the hideously expensive proprietary USB camera that Samsung currently sell. Short review – well packaged, easy to open (none of that blister pack rubbish), easy to install – plug in two ends of a USB cable, then use the magnet to mount it to the TV. Small and unobtrusive (apart from the BRIGHT blue LED to let you know it’s powered on, and it works very well, as it’s first test proved last night, with an hour long video chat with a couple of friends who moved out to New Zealand.

(insert dirty affiliate link to amazon, please click, I want pennies to buy more gadgets, thanks ;-p )

Now if you’ll excuse me, I need to go and lust over some sonos gear…

At work, we have a ticket system. This is a good thing. It allows different people to pick up a task, and (in theory), there doesn’t have to be a lengthy handover. All relevant information is in the ticket. It also means that people are more likely to get their task done. OK, maybe it might not happen today, or this week, but it’s logged, it will happen. If you tell me in passing, or come to my desk while I’m in the middle of something (pro-tip, I’m always in the middle of something ;-p ), then there’s a high chance that it may just slip my mind. The same if you email it to me. I get lots of emails, and occasionally, despite my best efforts, I can miss things (or Google can think it knows best, and mark it as spam).

When submitting a ticket though, apart from trying to send it to the right people, it’s usually good to have some substance to the ticket. For example, a ticket with the subject “check config on www.example.com” and a body of “has something changed?” is likely to get a response in the style of those (possibly not entirely true) airport mechanic repair log sheets, for example

P: Evidence of leak on right main landing gear.
S: Evidence removed.

Or in the case of this ticket “yes, something changed”.

Please, when you raise a ticket for a problem, try to describe the problem, and if you don’t know exactly what the problem is (hey, I’ve taken a car to garage and said “Broken, please fix it”), then please try and describe what is currently happening, and what you are expecting to happen, and if that used to happen, when did it last happen, or rather, when did you first notice it not happening. Actually, when I took the car into the garage I didn’t just pull in, say “Is something wrong with this” and walk out, I explained that it used to do X, now it’s doing Y, can it be made to do X again. It turned out that no, not without spending three times what the car was worth, but that’s what happens when you’re a student driving an old knacker of a car

Anyway, please remember that your sys admin loves you (sometimes), and isn’t there to make your life hell (occasionally), and anything you can do to make their life more easy is definitely appreciated.

And if you can’t make their life easy, make it better by buying them a beer

I live in E1, which is pretty damn central in London, and yet I can’t get a delivery from Dominos. I’m stuck in ADSL land (ADSL2+ is available, but it’s not worth having as I get no speed gains), and although there are cable TV cabinets around, they are just lumps on the pavement, as the digital cable TV (and therefore Virgin’s high-speed cable internet) was never available here.

Don’t be daft. There are a million and one other pizza places that deliver, I have three train/tube stations within a five minute walking radius, with a total of two train lines and three tube lines between them. There are a multitude of bus stops, which will take me North, South, East, and West. The buses and the trains are all incredibly frequent, mostly running to an “every X minutes” time-table, where X is somewhere between 4 and 10. There are multiple super markets pretty much on our door step, rather than a 40 minute drive away.

And if we were in a rural backwater, we’d be able to afford an abode with more outside space than a three feet wide balcony, and I’d have a superfast Internet connection at home too

Well played to the people selling them on ebay for £35 though.

Oh, and here’s a link. moustair.tumblr.com – don’t have nightmares

I’ve got an email server to fix (my own) so I’m going to drop a pair of links in here, and run.

Firstly, Robert Llewellyn announced that he is going to publish a book through unbound.co.uk, called News from Gardenia. I dare say that it’s somewhat less difficult for “names” such as Mr Llewellyn, and Monty Python’s Terry Jones (I see him listed on the “books funded and now for sale” section) than it would be for someone like me, but the kickstarter like model for authoring really appeals to me, in a “break the monopoly of the big publishing companies” way. It’s the year 2011, and still there are silly rules like country A can’t have an ebook version of this book, because the paperback isn’t out yet, and country B already has the paperback, but country C can only have the hardback until after christmas, unless it’s an airside shop at an airport, where they can sell the paperback, etc. The times they are a-changing, and old business models need to be revisited, updated, and made appropriate for the global economy in which we now live.

Another site beginning with un, I just discovered this evening a site called unhosted. It’s an intriguing looking project, which allows you to develop a web app which then gives the user the opportunity to use their own backend storage (where “there own” equals something like google drive, or wordpress, or dropbox). Obviously this is a little bit of out of the frying pan, into the fire, as you’re moving your data from the silo owned by the web app developer, to a silo owned by the likes of google, or dropbox, but with dropbox, for example, the data will be automatically synchronised back to your own machine, so it’s not entirely locked away.

I have a feeling that the Next Big Thing(tm) to come along, and I’m talking five years or more, is going to be de-centralisation, and the owning of your own data.

Apart from realising that I have more USB HDDs that is probably sensible, through looking at the invoices neatly folded and kept in side the boxes, I’ve also discovered that not only am I probably more than a little OCD (or CDO, to arrange the letters in the correct order ;-p ), but when buying USB HDDs, I appear to have something of a mental block on the price of them.

Over time, when buying the external HDDs, I’ve accumulated various capacities, and also form factors, between 3.5 inch desktop USB HDDs which require a power supply, and 2.5 inch portable USB HDDs, which are powered over USB. Looking at the invoices, I’ve realised that despite varying disposable incomes, through various jobs, and with varying requirements (not including the obvious ‘get the biggest capacity available’ angle), it seems that I have something of a sweet spot, where I’ll spend a certain amount of money, and get the biggest drive available at that cost.

Maybe it’s just me avoiding the “latest and greatest” largest size, knowing very well that there will be a decent premium for picking up the only recently released X TB drive, but thinking about the various USB keys I’ve purchased over the years, I also have a (different) cost limit that I’ll spend on these, which seems completely disconnected from my actual need, and any sort of budgeting in a “you only need a USB key half that size, so save a tenner and buy the smaller one”.

There must be a name for this this sort of “buying based on perceived [cost|value], not related to actual need or budget” behaviour. And if not, there should be.

It can’t be long until I’m head hunted for a flashy design job now…

Nope, over the last few days I’ve been having a bit of a tweak around and tidy up of my online presence, and have actually started using one of my accounts somewhere again. I’ve started on a re-do of my homepage, basing it on bootstrap from twitter, which makes it nice and easy to sort a layout. I just need some decent design skills and content for it now

I’ve also started using my tumblr account again, since google reader removed the sharing function, I’ve decided that since my tumblr was basically a shiny way of viewing my google reader shared items, I’ll keep sharing things that way, although it does mean a couple of extra steps now (I have to open up the article in a new tab, then use a share via tumblr bookmarklet). I am thinking of changing the URL though, from the really rather generic tumblr.matstace.me.uk to the more accurate and descriptive listocrap.matstace.me.uk, so do beware if you bookmark it. I’ve got other things to do at the moment, like go and get some sleep, so I won’t be doing that just yet