HxBro’s Blog

Feel free to check out this well loved cd, Hard Times The Album Mixed By Roger Sanchez, this is one of the classics from my early clubbing days!

Hard Times The Album Mixed By Roger Sanchez

I’m rising to the challenge to raise money for Sport Relief by running 3 miles at the St Albans Sports Relief event on the 16th March 2008.

I’m getting involved because Sport Relief is all about using everything that’s good about sport to change lives for the better. All the money raised is spent by Comic Relief to help people living really tough lives at home in the UK and across the world’s poorest countries.

I’d really appreciate your support by sponsoring me to take part. If you’d like to make a secure online donation, you can use your credit card by clicking on the link below:

http://www.mysportrelief.com/littlemartin?SID=5632

To find out what a difference your sponsorship money can make, please visit http://www.sportrelief.com.

Thank you for your generous support!

Check out his funny take on the current generation (7th if wikipedia is to be believed) of consoles:

http://valleywag.com/tech/videogames/the-console-wars-animated-295730.php

After a long period without a company website, I’ve now created a new one showing what I offer and a portfolio of both web and digital tv projects I’ve worked on.

I can provide a wide range of IT services, specialising in Web and Digital TV but also covering PC maintenance and troubleshooting, Broadband setup and troubleshooting, and Web Hosting services. Feel free to check out the site and also pass on the site if you know anyone who might need my services.

http://www.spodnet.net/

A new update is available for Wii’s which will bring it up to version 3.0.

Here is a list of what’s new:

Channels

-Digital Clock added to the Wii Menu right under the channel bar
-Forecast Channel now displays the current condition (cloudy, raining, etc.) directly in the Wii Menu in the Forecast Channel box
-News Channel can now show 2 scrolling headlines at a time in the Wii Menu, 3 when you click on the button (supposedly this requires occasional downloading of the headlines to keep the ticker updated)
-Message Board now has the “Today’s Accomplishments” message as a white message which allows it to stand out from other messages
-Address Book entries can now be shifted around using A+B (supposed to be a launch feature) but only to empty spaces. Not too convenient.
-Calendar in Message Board no longer shows “Today’s Accomplishment” only days as having messages
-Scrolling messages in the Message Board now uses a different sound
-Today’s Accomplishments in Message Boards now includes the names of people to whom messages were sent out

Wii Shop Channel Overhauled (Visual aesthetic is the same, changes made to organization and browsing methods mostly)
-New Welcome screen detailing 4 Recommended Titles and the points they cost (gone is the title screen bar that had linkable games). The title bar can be clicked on to bring up a list of 20 recommended games.
-Titles You’ve Downloaded was moved to the main shop menu
-New ways to browse
-Popular Titles (2 pages of 10 and includes launch games so not only based on recent info)
-Newest Additions remains the same
-Search for a title which can use partial names
-Search by Category
-System shows the different systems and how many titles have been released under each
-Publisher showing different publishers and amount of titles released (Nice logos!)
-Genre (different genres listed and amount of titles under each)

Accessibility
-Load times in interchannel loading has supposedly decreased (TheGreatDave)
-Password fields filled in using the keyboard (like on the Internet Channel) now display asterisks (VOOK)

Settings
-Warning added pre-system update detailing that technically modified consoles may cease to function upon being updated. Also the only way to not accept an update is to power down the console by holding the button for 4 seconds (the user can’t back out of hitting I Accept w/o powering down)
-Ability to quickly scroll the different options pages using the +,- keys (Myke Greywolf)
-Blue disc light lights up when inserting or removing a game (thefro)
-Light also comes on when starting the Forecast or News Channels (CreatureX3)

http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=177983 

A few things missing from the above list, some USB keyboards now work in some areas, though not the web browser which would be the place to have it working, and Freeloader/Action Replay doesn’t work now (not tried doing the old swap trick yet).

One thing that I’ve noticed recently is the number of emails I get from companies that don’t get to me due to email headers not been encoded correctly. So I’ve decided to start a name and shame section for me to post the ones that do send emails that are broken. I expect a lot of spam/virus filters out there will block these emails so companies are losing out on potential business by not doing something which should be straight forward to fix.

Ebuyer - Has for some really unknown reason has 3/4 in their X-Mailer: header, this really is a strange one, for most emails from other companies it’s something in the subject but in the X-Mailer header?!?!??!

Aria - Subjects not encoded, they always have £ in their subject

ebookers - Subjects not encoded, another £ in the subject

Petsupermarket - Subjects not encoded, another £ in the subject and a ; randomly in the text - surely someone proof reads before sending the emails out ?

CCL Online - Subjects not encoded, another £ in the subject

Advanced mp3 players - subjects not encoded, another £ in the subject

I’ve contacted some of the above companies, and will do the rest if I can find technical contacts that would deal with this sort of thing on their website.

Feel free to post any companies that fail to follow proper email encoding.

This is to block firefox from fasterfox prefetching links that the user may never read (this happens on forums for instance quite a lot) and using up bandwidth that is best used elsewhere on your server.

To turn it off add the following to your robots.txt

User-agent: Fasterfox
Disallow: /

Personally I only enable courteous setting on fasterfox, the network tweaks cause problems on some sites and if your broadband is fast enough then it shouldn’t matter. Enabling prefetching will eat into your monthly bandwidth allowance for things you may never read!

Please read this message and pass it on!!!!!!!!!

As you are aware my niece, Madeleine, is still missing and I am asking everyone I know to send this as a chain letter i.e. you send it to everyone you know and ask them to do the same, as the story is only being covered in Britain, Eire and Portugal. We don’t believe that she is in Portugal anymore and need to get her picture and the story across Europe as quickly as possible. Suggestions are welcome.

Phil McCann

Ingredients

1 Chicken Breast
1 Chicken Stock Cube (300ml of chicken stock)
1 Small Onion or Shallot
1 Spring Onion
1 Clove Garlic
1 Lemon Grass Stick
Ginger Root (depending how strong you want it depends on quantity, a few cms should be enough)
Some chilli flakes (amount depends on how hot you want it, you can use fresh chilli but it can be omitted if you don’t like spicy food)
Rice Noodles (1 serving or half depending how much you are making)
Small Head of broccoli
1 tablespoon soya sauce

Preparation

Slice chicken breast into small strips
Slice onion finely (don’t chop, slices work better)
Slice Spring onion into 4/5cm lengths
Finely chop garlic
Chop ends of lemon grass and remove outer layer and discard, slice lemon grass down the middle from top to bottom and take out the inner soft lemon grass and chop finely, slice the rest of the lemon grass (the harder bits) into large pieces (you want to remove them or not eat them at the end)
Chop broccoli into small pieces.
Chop ginger into match sticks

Cooking

Add some oil to a large pan and heat
Add onion, lemon grass, ginger and chilli flakes and fry for 3 mins on medium heat
Add chicken and garlic and fry for 2 mins on hot heat
Add chicken stock and soya sauce, bring to boil then simmer for 8 mins with lid on
After 5 mins prepare noodles in bowl by pouring hot water on them and leaving
Add broccoli and spring onion and simmer for 2 mins with lid on
Stir in noodles and serve, don’t eat the hard pieces of lemon grass.

Notes

this serves 1, if you make 500ml stock and more noodles or a larger chicken breast it’ll serve 2, you can always add more broccoli too

One of my favourite things is food, some of my friends have been asking for some of the recipes I use to cook with so I’ll be posting them here for all to see. I’ll try take photo’s when I cook the recipes to help with what things should look like.