So, yesterday, I went to Game in town and picked up the Xbox 360 Elite Forza 3 bundle (which has 2 controllers, a 250GB HDD, and of course, Forza 3), as well as GTAIV: Episodes from Liberty City (which is a standalone game, with the two GTAIV expansion packs). I’ve previously owned two Xbox 360s – the first one was in Australia, which I had to sell (it RRoD’d), and the second one was here in the UK – which I liked, but it was somewhat noisy, and I didn’t really play all that many games on it back then. Anyway, the 360 has since had a revamp (NXE), and now has a lot more titles which I’m interested in playing, so I decided to buy one again – however, the main factor that made me buy it was Forza 3 and the GTAIV expansion packs.

So, I now own one.

Except, a problem. Due to cost cutting by Microsoft, the component AV cable is no longer included (why not, MS?), and instead, there’s a cheap-o composite cable (the one with a single yellow RCA jack for video), and that’s it. Which is somewhat of a problem, because I want to hook it up to my projector. I could use HDMI (which I will eventually), but the projector doesn’t have anything to do with the audio, so it’s just ignored – and for some stupid reason, the composite cable that’s included with the 360 is too large, and blocks the HDMI port. So right now, I have two choices:

• Use HDMI to my projector, and have no audio. The upside is it’ll be HD, but the downside is, I won’t be able to hear anything.
• Use composite video to my projector, and use the stereo RCA jacks for audio (I’m using my PC as an amplifier at the moment but in the near future I’ll be getting an AV Receiver for switching the 360, Sky+HD box, and PC, into the projector’s one HDMI jack). The downside for this is that it’s horrible SD video, but the upside is, I can hear everything.

So of course, for now, I’m sticking to SD video. I’ve ordered one of those HDMI breakout cables for optical audio off eBay, which should arrive soon. Once it’s here, I can use the HDMI port for HD video, and the RCA or optical jacks from the cable for audio. Perfect.

Finally, the gamertag I signed up for is WilliamTM UK. The reason for this is simple. I’ve sort-of adopted the nickname “WilliamTM” around the web, so I’ve decided to use it on the 360. The only downside is that my original account that I created in Australia is WilliamTM – and Microsoft won’t allow you to change the account’s country (which you need to do in order to use a UK credit card). So, I’ve now got WilliamTM UK, which is my UK gamertag which I’m now using.

One day, I might try to change the old gamertag to something else, and then change my UK one to WilliamTM, but I’m not doing it yet, for two reasons. One, it would cost about £14 worth of MS points to do so, and two, I’m not sure if it’s possible to change your gamertag to a previously used one. If I can confirm that with MS, I might do it, but until then I’m not going to do so.

So anyway, that’s enough about that. Again, if you want to add me, please do.

Oh and finally, if you’re wondering, no, I’m not selling my PS3. And yes, I did swap my bedroom TV for the Xbox 360 – I really didn’t use the TV for all that much other then some SDTV off Sky, so I’m not really going to miss it that much.

Well, no. You don’t. But a fresh install of an OS is always a nice thing. For example – I reinstalled Snow Leopard on my MacBook last night, and have almost finished installing everything – I just have to install three things now, Photoshop CS4, Toast Titanium and World of Goo. With all my other apps installed so far, OS X is sitting at a pretty tiny 9.26GB. Once I install those three apps, it should bump up to about 15GB used space, tops.

Before I reinstalled Snow Leopard – and with the exact same apps, data, and so on, on the HDD, OS X was taking up just over 35GB. That’s with 11 months of constant use, and what was originally Leopard installed.

So yes, sure, Snow Leopard was running pretty smoothly before I reinstalled, but now it’s running even better. Actually, the one thing I have noticed is that now it only takes about 25 seconds to reboot, from the time I hit “Reboot” to the time it was at the desktop, with everything loaded – before, it used to take about 60 seconds.

Next up, reinstalling Windows 7 with the retail version this coming week.

Released in November 2008, I bought it and was hooked. The clean UI, overall simplicity, and ease of use were great. Sadly, it lacked useful features like multiple attachments (eg, photos to TwitPic), and support for other services, like TwitVid. But it was still usable. The problem is that the developer pretty much dropped off the face of the earth for a few months.

Until last month, when Tweetie 2 was announced, which came out, literally, in the last hour or so.

Sweet new icon eh? Anyway, Tweetie 2. It’s awesome. It has support for 2394586345749356436 different services, including TwitVid (yay!), and, in one word, it rocks. It’s well worth the £1.79, and the whole app feels super smooth, the UI is still clean and still works well, and it’s amazingly good overall. If you have an iPhone and use Twitter, then get Tweetie 2. There’s a reason why it’s the winner of Apple’s 2009 Apple Design Award.

And of course, you can get Tweetie 2 on the App Store.

To be honest, my headphone and earphone history is quite easy to remember. Pretty much: Generic Sony earphones -> more generic Sony earphones -> “sport” Sony earphones (they were yellow, how could I say no? ) -> some random generic headphones -> iPod Nano 1G earphones -> Logitech USB Headset (which I still have, for if I ever want to use it with Skype or something similar on my PC) -> iPhone 2G earphones -> iPhone 3GS earphones….and now, Sennheiser CX300 II Precision earphones.

So basically, Fr3d and Acksaw were discussing earphones on IRC, and the CX300s were suggested, so I took a quick look and noticed they were only £14 on Play. Not bad. So, I bought a pair. I’ve had them a few days so far, and they’re fantastic. Compared to the iPhone ones, they’re amazing. They sound much clearer, you can hear all parts of the music, and they have ACTUAL BASS! The iPhone earphones didn’t even understand what bass was. These do, and they do so very well. I’ve watched several movies with them so far, and a few episodes of CSI Miami, and compared to the iPhone ones, they just have so much more bass and clarity, it’s amazing. No surprise they’re the best sellers on Play.com. You can pick them up yourself here.

Pros:

• Comfortable to wear, small, and neat.
• They sound fantastic, have plenty of bass, and are loud too if you want them to be.
• Comes with different sized thingies for your ears, and a small pouch for when you’re not using them.
• Cheap in price, but not in quality.
• Cable wraps around the back of your neck to go to the right ear, which I find is quite nice.

Cons:

• The Eco packaging is nice, but good luck getting it back together again easily.
• The cable is a rather annoying stringy-type one, that tangles up quite easily. I don’t like this. I like the cable like the original iPhone had – it didn’t curl up all the time and just sat there.
• When wearing them, you go deaf. Seriously. They’re not noise cancelling, and on a plane they’d probably be pretty “meh” at doing so, but it would be nice to be able to hear someone speaking to me in my own home.
• Doesn’t have a mic or controls for the iPhone, however, there is an almost-identical model with these features, the Sennheiser MM 50 iPhone.

So, yeah. Go and buy some yourself if you’re still using the crappy iPod ones.

I purchased a .Mac box set back in mid 2008, a few weeks before the service was announced as having it’s name changed to MobileMe. I managed to get it for a not too bad price (£45 instead of the usual £59), and it worked very well with my iPhone and Mac. Initially, MobileMe was quite unstable, going up and down quite a bit after it’s launch, but after a month or so it became stable, and Apple gave a free extension to all accounts (hence why my one year account has lasted a few months more).

I’m not posting this because I want to complain, I’m posting this because I want to express my love, yet at the same time, shall we say, dislike, of MobileMe. At £59 per year, it’s not cheap. Yes, technically, it’s less then £5 a month, but the only thing I managed to ever use it for was syncing and Find My iPhone, and that’s more then I feel is necessary for that, especially when you can get it for free or cheap elsewhere (eg, Google Sync is free, albeit with no Find My iPhone feature).

As the full package, if you make use of the full suite of features – sync, email, gallery, iDisk, Find My iPhone, Remote Wipe, Back to my Mac, etc, it is, in some ways, worth the money. However, for just sync, it is not. And here’s where my idea comes in. I think that Apple should offer two versions of MobileMe. First off, the full package, with everything, at £59 per year. Secondly, a smaller and cheaper package, called MobileMe Sync. Advertise it as “the basics” for the iPhone, or something like that, and price it low – £15-20 per year is ideal. MobileMe Sync would offer calendar, contacts, and bookmark syncing, along with Find My iPhone, and Remote Wipe, all for a low fee, with, say, 20-50MB of storage for calendars, contacts, and bookmarks. I think that this would appeal to a fair few people, myself included, as it offers just the commonly used basic options, as well as Find My iPhone, which is quite useful if you do happen to lose your phone. This would offer an incentive for Exchange users too – Exchange does allow remote wiping of mobile devices, but it can’t find them.

In addition to that, the current MobileMe service has a “family pack”, whereby you can add additional users onto your MobileMe subscription, and with MobileMe sync, you could do much the same – but for less. Maybe £5 per extra user?

I hope Apple do consider this in future, as I’m sure it would allow them to earn even more money ( ) – they already have the server infrastructure in place, and of course it would need a few tweaks to both OS X and the iPhone OS to work, but in the end I think it would be worth it.

So, that’s why I’ve not renewed my MobileMe subscription this year. I simply don’t need to spend £59 on something that I use a very small part of. In the meantime, I’ve switched to using a friend’s Exchange server, which does the same job (albeit without being able to locate my phone if I lose it), but for free.

So, Go Ape. What is it? Well, simply put, it’s a bunch of platforms, wires, and other stuff high up in a bunch of trees. If that doesn’t sound exciting, well, in real life, it’s actually quite awesome. You basically make a booking on their website, turn up the next day (or whenever), go through the safety briefing (cause, you know, falling out of a tree and killing yourself isn’t all that fun ), and after about 20 minutes, you’re into the treetops.

It’s quite simple really, you just climb a ladder, and go from tree to tree over a few different platforms – for example, a solid log, a wonky bridge, a log hanging from ropes, etc…and then there are a couple of sweet zipwires – you attach your harness to the steel wire, jump off the platform, and let go, and you go flying across a pretty expansive area (at least in Cannock Chase, where I went – the longest one was 260 meters).

I went this afternoon (just got back a while ago actually ) and it was pretty sweet. The course isn’t amazingly long, but it keeps you busy and does take a couple of hours to get through. I would highly recommend it if you have one nearby.

There are some videos and photos on their website if you want to see (I didn’t take my camera/phone on the course, so no photos from me ), and they have quite a few locations around the UK, so it’s not too far to drive most of the time.

I was first introduced to the Colin McRae series back with the ‘04 version of the game, and I was instantly hooked. Despite having to play it at very low settings on my old PC, it was great fun, and I used to like seeing how hard I could push a car before smashing it into a wall and losing a wheel or two, and a bumper, and possibly the windscreen, mirrors, doors, boot, lights, and every other part of the car before eventually passing the finish line with a scrap metal cube with one wheel*.

Anyway, just five years on, Codemasters have released Colin McRae: DiRT 2. I enjoyed the original DiRT, but it was nothing special – sure, it looked nice, and was fun to play, but the cars seemed to be unrealistic to drive – for example, they seemed to accelerate too quickly, and they slid around on the road. A lot.

DiRT 2, on the other hand, is MUCH better. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that DiRT 2 is one of my all time favourite games. I’ve only had it four days now, but it’s insanely fun to play, and looks amazing. When you jump into the game for the first time, you’re greeted by…well, it can’t really be described as a menu, because a menu is a static boring list of options. In DiRT 2, you’re basically greeted by a pretty amazing interior of an RV, and when you go outside, you’re greeted by a pretty detailed festival-like environment, with the background of whatever country your last race was in. Honestly, the menu alone is worth buying the game for.

As for the game itself, it’s superb. The handling is still a little off at times (IMO), but it does feel a lot more realistic, and it’s awesome fun. The environments and tracks are superb too. For example, driving around Malaysia gives you a gravel track through a pretty dense forest, complete with puddles and sunlight peeking through the trees. It really is very nice to look at. One of the other things I love is that if you drive through a puddle, and you’re using the driver (in car) view, the water splashes onto the windscreen, and you’re blinded for a moment or two while the windscreen wipers battle to clear it. More the once, I’ve crashed because of that, and it’s a very nice touch to have. Talking of crashing, another feature that DiRT 2 has (taken from Codemaster’s GRID title) is “flashbacks”. Pretty simple – say you go around a corner, and ram into a tree. In the previous games, you would have to either restart the race, or lose valuable seconds getting back onto the track, whereas in DiRT 2, you simply hit select on the PS3 controller, rewind a bit, and hit the square button. Sure, it could be considered as cheating, but I find it’s a very useful feature for just casual gaming, and it is disabled if you play at the hardest level.

DiRT 2 also has plenty of events and stages, and you can race through places such as LA, Utah, Baha California, London, Morocco, Croatia, Malaysia, Japan, and China. However, I have some complaints about this. The original DiRT, for example, had a fair selection of tracks through Japan itself, which I loved…the problem is, DiRT 2 has…well, it has a pretty small selection of tracks. More often then not, it seems that you’re just driving through the same place, and there aren’t all that many tracks overall. Japan, London, and LA, for example, are very limited. Each location only has ONE track each. They change around a bit (LA has several variations, all based around a central stadium, London has a single location in Battersea, and so on), but essentially, they’re the same place. Places like Malaysia and Morocco have a few more tracks, but there are still only a small selection of tracks in each place.

What I’m most disappointed by is Japan. DiRT actually had real stages through Japan, yet DiRT 2 only has a very small central circuit for the Japan location, which is disappointing. I really hope that Codemasters can have a larger selection of tracks for ALL locations in DiRT 3 (if that ever happens), because as it is, it does seem like there aren’t many places to race in.

However, despite all that, DiRT 2 is still a fantastic title, and well worth the money. If you have a PS3 or a 360, check it out today, and be sure to give it a go in December when it’s out on PC.

And finally, here’s a (rather low quality, sorry – filmed off the TV with my iPhone ) YouTube video I took of the level of realism in DiRT 2 – be sure to watch the tires, and how they seem to go all soft and squishy when you land:

*I may have exaggerated a little. I only ever managed to cross the finish line with three wheels, not one.

Anyway, so I was looking for a way to make that myself, when I came across the recipe on a website called “Smitten Kitchen”. It looked pretty good, so I searched around a bit, and found some other recipes – including one for a fairly rich chocolate cake, and some chocolate chip cookies. And wow. I made both – the cake for my birthday, and the cookies last night, and damn they both tasted good. I’d consider myself an “okay” cook, but even these tasted simply awesome.

So, if you like food, and you like to cook*, check out Smitten Kitchen. Even if just for the photos, because they’re pretty great too.

*I’m fairly sure this covers 0% of the people who read this blog, but I can try anyway.