I’ve written before about internet shock sites, it’s by no means a new phenomenon.  Despite the fact most are displayed with such sheer gut-wrenching distaste, there’s something about them that always appeals to the net nerd, or any non-prude with even a tenth of a normal sense of humour.  I mean it, despite the initial horror, they all share a special place in my heart as the ultimate rickroll weapon, and a great way to tell who possesses stomach of steel and the inverse, cadbury chuck.

Think of any sick site, you name it, and I’d almost garuantee it’s ridden the popularity/Digg wave at some point, and have become household names, even to the uninformed.  I’ve met a few people over time who’ve not seen Goatse before, but they understand the legendary meaning that goes with the word.  Same goes for Rotten, Tubgirl and anything in the animated GIF section on 4chan.org (ech).

On to the point of this post, I was sent a link the idea by a friend at work to what seemed like a rather innocuous bookshop (Lulu.com), little did I know I was about to journey down a path of discovery so amazing that I’d experience  the unique feeling of intense side splitting laughter coupled with an uneasy uneasy urge to reach for the nearest bucket, waste paper bin, tiny paper cup (“Phil… If you’re going to spew.. spew into this” - Waynes World)  or some other suitable spew recepticle.

The link goes to a book in the diverse Lulu catalog entitled: “Natural Harvest - A Collection of Semen-Based Recipes”

What worried me the most about this link was I thought it was a play on words, and the books content centered around:

• Global warming, and the alternatives to water in the coming famine
• a satirical story from a Ships cook about food preparation in the navy; or perhaps
• a book for vegan’s who’ve out of options.

But no, Natural Harvest is a serious recipe book on how to prepare dips, soups, creams and meals aided by the use of a little known cooking ingredient, semen.  And I quote,

“Semen is inexpensive to produce and is commonly available in many, if not most, homes and restaurants. Despite all of these positive qualities, semen remains neglected as a food. This book hopes to change that.”

And after you get over the horror of the thought of whisking, beating and mixing some other mammal’s semen in a kitchen bowl, you’re somehow given a kick in the guts when shown the images of Creamy Cum Crepes, dick dijonnaise, and my personal favourite Man made Oysters.

But it gets better (or is that worse), the comments down the bottom are a mix of funny piss-takers, horrified on-lookers and parties who are interested in the culinary delights or nutricious benefits of this absurd practice.  But don’t just take my word for it:

“This is the best book that I have ever cum across !!!”

“I am a proud Vegan and am working my way towards complete fruitarianism. I have a preference for live foods (”raw” to those uninitiated). I am aware that semen is a byproduct of a creature with a nervous system, but I am intrigued by the protein possibilities of semen for vegetarians, and its ready accessibility for me.”

“I had always viewed having 3 testicles as a curse. People would make fun of me…High School gym class was a nightmare. But no more!! I have now found a use for old number 3! This book now gives me a purpose in life, and I’m proud to have a “trifecta.”

————

(sometime later after writing this post)

Dear the Internet

Once again, I’ve come to the nasty realisation that you’re killing me, sometimes in a horrible, nasty way.

I do appreciate the fact you’re letting me die laughing though.

Ciao!

I’m not a game by any means, and in any year I’d play only a handful of new titles.  Most of the time if I bother to sit down and play a game it’ll be an old favourite like Counterstrike Source or Quake III, but occasionally a game comes along that will hold my attention for many, many hours of joyful life-stealing pleasure.  To name a few:

• Civilisation 2
• Final Fantasy VII & VIII
• Transport Tycoon Deluxe and more recently OpenTTD
• All of the Grant Theft Auto series, but most recently GTA: San Andreas

On December 3rd, Grand Theft Auto IV came out for the PeeCee, and having refrained from trying it on the Playstation3 or Xbox 360 I gleefully got my hands on a copy and waited out the almost 40 minute install.  I should have known pre-install that there wasn’t a hope in hell it was going to play nicely on the laptop, especially not at a great quality/resolution.  After all, it more than meets the requirement for the minimum required system (from Rockstar Site), and meets most of the requirement for recommended system (the video card is the big let down here).

I can play at the amazing resolution of 800×600 with all higher graphic settings disabled due to low specification of system.  I have to wonder who came up with the idea of limiting the quality settings for lower spec cards, it should be the users choice to wind up the settings and make the game unplayable if they so wish.

Back to the game, as you’d probably guess, the performance on my system leaves a lot to be desired but is still playable, and even explosions don’t seem to slow it down too far, but I’m always left wanting more, especially seeing some of the screenshots of people running it at 1920×1200 on monster machines.

I’m left wondering though, is it worth me spending +£1000 on a desktop machine that can play this correctly or giving up and going back to minesweeper.  I’m not sure i could warrant the price given that this is probably the one title I’ll acutally play this year (as well as in 2009), but considering I got months and months of play out of GTA:SA who knows.  It’s an investment in time I guess, and heck, I’d have spent a lot more having fun on booze in the process.

The game itself is fantastic though, I can forsee in the next few years having a map of London (or New York, or perhaps Tehran) with every building, feature, person manipulatable , almost like a GTA in that corny old VR world of the 80’s that everyone was dreaming about.  I could get coffee in the store I go to every morning at work and then go to work on the office front door with a baseball bat, just for the point of it…

Then I’d escape down the tube to my batcave, or home maybe.

Two months ago, I wrote about the Icybox NAS-4220B Network storage unit, my first choice in the search for a set it, and forget it storage and home server solution, and if anyone’s used an Icybox before I have no doubt they’d be at least as dissappointed as I was in my few months of battle with it.  I won’t get into it again, no one likes a whinger but it was so flawed but writing everything to 1,000,000 floppy disks would probably have been a quicker, easier and more reliable solution.

Recently an oppurtunity came up to buy another NAS unit, the QNAP TS-409 Pro, from a friend at work for a good price, so after quick thought and some research (more than I had done for the Icybox!), I snapped it up.  And after a month of use, I havent regretted it.  It’s a four drive SOHO (prosumer, maybe) backup solution which currently has 4x 500GB drives in a RAID5 configuration.

The best things:

• Gigabit network connectivity (realworld gigabit, this time (20 - 40MB/s, much better than the 5 - 10MB/s from the Icybox)
• 4x SATA Bays capable of RAID0, 1, 5, 6 and JBOD configs
• Inbuilt media, iTunes, music streaming server
• Torrent/HTTP queue downloader
• NSLU2 support with iPKG management (basic linux OS with Debian like package installer).
• FTP/Samba/NFS/HTTP file access
• support for USB drives/keys and one touch/scheduled backup of core files, either from the unit itself or from locations around the local network.
• and a whole bunch of other features like web server, database, time server etc etc.

I’m especially interested in the IPKG manager and NSLU2 based linux console as it really closes the gap between useless (or limited use) network device, and fully configurable server or computer, and I’ve got a bunch of scheduled tasks UnRAR’ing downloads, backing up photos and documents, rebuilding/exporting the music collection and downloading new album artwork and doing other system and network diagnostic tasks.  Infinitely useful!

Nothings perfect though, and it can’t all be good, in the case of the QNAP, its loud as hell and building the initial RAID array took a fair few hours but that’s to be expected, and under the circumstances, I think I can let it pass.

I’ve never really been interested in the whole social networking scene, especially not for anything other than communication.  But due to recent boredom with my music collection (mostly after running out of songs on my iPod on a daily basis), I’ve taken to listening to Last.fm recently.

It’s great so far, and is turning out to be a welcome change to being mid way through a 2 hour mix as I’m currently used to, and I can listen to a whole range of music I wouldn’t usually get to.

I’m still wondering what the point of the social networking side to this is though, so I can compare my music taste with someone named jeebee34 halfway accross the world and realise my music compatitibility with him/her is only 12%?  What does this prove, that I should start listening to Madonna or Justin Timberlake to boost this rating with my new found online friend?

Last.fm makes use of the concept of scrobbling, which is where whatever you’re currently listening to is submitted up to the last.fm server for everyone to see, and scrutinise.  This doesn’t just work for when you’re listening to last.fm radio itself but through any popular media player (such as iTunes, Windows Media Player, amarok, Exaile, etc), or through any number of music devices, such as an iPod or my Nokia N95.  You’ve go to wonder though, what do they do with all those stored music preferences?  Could it be used to tailor a bunch of music adverts to our inboxes around Christmas time, or perhaps used in court to prove that we’d listened to a bunch of Metallica music, far more than one person could possibly own?

All that aside though, I’ve been quite impressed at how well it can map music choices to a chosen genre or tag, and searching by tags or artists return results you’d expect (mostly, anyway).  A friend searched for music like Daft Punk the other day and was blessed with the sweet soothing sounds of koRn, so I’m not sure what went wrong there.

Favourite Tags so far:

• dnb
• progressive trance
• psytrance (see a trend happening here?)

So if you’re a last.fm’er, jump on, look at my profile and add me

As many of you know, I bitch frequently, and today is no exception.  I’m not just bitching about slow transfer speeds from a restricted device which should be capable of far more (yes, the N95), I’m over that now, as there a bigger demon in its midst.  One that defies all logic completely, to which I can find no possible explanation, apart from shit-ness by the manufacturer in question.

Disclaimer: The paragraphs below will be boring, and slightly technical, and my contain Vendor Verdicts which whilst not directly opposing HD911’s stringent rules regarding Product/Name Defamation and the Fair-trade and Distribution Protection act of Liverpool 1983*

I bought a NAS (Network Attached Storage) unit from a relatively reputable online computer dealer in England at the end of last year after much deliberation and a little mis-directed (and now seemingly useless) research.  For the money, the unit was supposed to be one of the better performers.  At the time I bought two hard drives to go along with the unit, which were one of the faster drives available on the market at the time.  The NAS, an ICYBOX NAS4220-B (you can see here the name of the offending company has been removed to comply with HD911’s policies), flat out refused to boot/function or do pretty much anything with the new drives.

A little time ticked by, and (stupidly) the owner and purchaser did not RMA either the drives, nor the NAS unit in time, and the store would no longer accept the products as refunds, so I used the hard drives elsewhere and shelved the obviously trusty unit for another day.  Over the next few months, I tried the drives with a few different versions of the Icybox’s firmware, and even went to the extent of disabling features on the drives themselves to see if they would wotk, but still had no luck.

Fast forward to August 2008, I purchased a cheaer, lower spec harddrive to go in the unit as it could surely serve a better purpose than sitting in the cupboard gaining dust, for this aluminium monstrosity cost £100, and that could have been better spent on beer or a treatment program for the authors ever growing fascination with the game World of Warcraft, and a level 40 dwarf (sorry, little person) named El-dorf.

You must understand, by this point I had an amazingly profuse dislike for the pre-purchased NAS unit, neither it nor its manuracturer website or support forums inspired any confidence at all in a good product.  But I wanted it to work, at least in half the way you’d expect a unit to function.  There’s an element of pride here too, and an IT guys damaged ego over a poor purchase decision can be difficult to mend, as I usually make good, educated decisions about what a good product is and where/how to buy it.

So the new hard drive worked as it should and I was away, madly copying the collected works of self-recorded flute solos, and bad karaoke-style ABBA renditions, but noticed something astounding, transfers via built in “gigabit” network connection were going unusually slow.  Just to back this up, I have a laptop hard drive that can quite happily read/write at 40-50MB/s for sustained periods, a Broadcom gigabit port that should be capable of at least this plugged into another gigabit port on the NAS.  The top speed for the 15 hours of transferring was 5MB/s, not even a quarter of what I would deem reasonable, and hardware I had 12 years ago quite happily chugged away at a quicker speed than this.

I’ve done the normal thing and taken everything possible out of the equation, tested via different PC, new/different cable, through a switch, over wireless (not that I was expecting higher speeds this way mind you), and chanted sweet nothings at it, but to no avail.  It seems that the manufacturer thought they’d add yet another shitty feature (to enhance the plethora of other teeth-nashing inadequacies), that being horrendous speed.  In fact, I can quite happily transfer over the gigabit network to other devices at 50MB/s, and the 802.11g wireless network at 3.5MB/s.

If I was to review this product, and say something nice about it, I’d say it would stand the test of time as a door stop, and wouldn’t look out of place next to the 1960’s Parasonik tube amplifier rip-off that your parents still have sitting in the garage, it really is that cool.

Subsequently I’m saving up the money for a better unit (with supporting research) as we speak.

* Link to Legal Documentation required, consult this document for further information (#1443253)

Not particularly exciting, but HD911 is now one year old!  From its humble beginnings, it’s tickled the worlds news sources on a daily basis, and been the source of much controversy from Boston to Baghdad…

Oh wait, that’s not true, or should I say ture.

However, now I’m left wondering exactly what to do with my lovechild, that which I’ve nurtured into adulthood, and has give me back so much.  I’ve said it before, and I’m pretty sure I’ll say it again, I’d like to get out “talking cod-shit to strangers”, and embark on a whole new level of world domination, and i have high plans for the next 12 months.

But do I disband HD911 and let it fall by the way side into the otherwise packed scum bucket that is the internet?  Or do I transition, from blog about nothing, to empire about something?

Wait and see… I know I am.

I know what you’re thinking, and that’s this post’s title seems odd, and out of place on HD911, a contemporary glance at the state of neo-napoleonic faecal art in 1930’s France.  Errr, somethign like that.

As I’ve said before, since leaving my previous position as a C#/ASP.NET minded monkey, I’ve been tooling, (or should I say battling), with the infamous choice of script kiddy and billion dollar social network empire, PHP.  It truly lives up to its meaning as the Palace of Hedonistic Pleasure, and continues to be an outstanding joy to work with, and you know i mean this in a completely non-sarcastic way.

That’s not to say its hard, it just seems to open the void between what is right and wrong a lot more than other languages I’ve worked with of late.  Think of it like riding a bike, there’s a right and wrong way to ride a bike, and once you learn, it’s usually smooth sailling.. You can either keep speed and move forward (right), or fall off (wrong).  PHP works in much the same way, but provides the stupid (me) with many many more ways to fall off.  And from what i’ve seen so far, it doesn’t take much to end up over the handlebars, face planting into a wall with the still-spinning front wheel grinding away at what little is left of your thigh, tummy or scrotum if one is that way inclined.

After an lengthy conversation discussing (bitching) how easy falling off the proverbial bike is, a colleague at work, said, “That’s the way it works, you take the good with the bad, it’s a state of PHP-ness.”

At which point I cracked up laughing, and forever more when I cringe at some of our code base, a smile will peel across my face.

p-h-p-ness  (pee-h-p-ness)

Nothings completely perfect, and there’s not enough information out there on the failings of most products, and this is no exception.  It still has no sway on my decision that at present it is the coolest phone that reasonable money can buy.

As anyone knows from my previous posts on the Nokia N95 8GB, I have an awesome amount of respect for this phone and its older brother the Vanilla N95.  It’s the perfect travel companion in regards to email, light web browsing, GPS/Mapping and a nifty little media player, in the case that a small laptop (or a pretty much immobile 17″ one for that matter) is too cumbersome to carry around.

Gman - Dark Side

But I musn’t go on, I’ve repeated myself enough already.  So on to the point of this post, you see, it has a dark side.  A few of them actually, Possibly not as major as the iPhone missing 3G support (until late July, anyway), or the NASA rocket, which was programmed for calculations in Miles, but data entered in metrics, but it has a down point.

I’ve found that no-one really talks about the N95’s points, the review sites are too concerned with the quality of the camera, or that it has thirty one and a quarter more features than the equivalent Sony Ericcson, Samsung or LG device.  And often if you search for what I would consider issues, you’ll find a small forum thread with two or three people discussing the problem, its just not heavily publicised.  So here’s my attempt to keep it real, level the playing field if you will.

The Major - Data Transfer Speed

The transfer speed to/from the N95 is nothing short of horrendous.  In this day and age of flash and other storage devices which can read up to (and in excess of), 50-100MB/s, the data transfer to the fixed flash card is a pitiful 500-600KB/s.  This wasn’t an issue when phones had 256 or 512MB free memory, as filling the device would still only take a few minutes.  Filling the full 8GB card takes the better part of three and a bit hours!

A faster data transfer medium

My 4GB iPod Nano has a file transfer speed of approximately 10-15MB/s a second, and I can fill its memory just under 10 minutes (not including the time it takes afterwards to level sound output and “determine gapless playback information”).  If Apple can get it right on a 2 year old, cheap as chips, consumer device, then why can’t Nokia achieve better than USB1 speeds on their “flagship” device?  I’ve been assured it is USB2, just not High speed (HS) ~480mbps.  Instead, we’re stuck with Full Speed (FS) which is marginally faster than the USB1 spec of 12mbps, Pitiful!

This probably wouldn’t bother most people as there might not be much of a need to be removing and replacing the data on the memory card often, but when you’re uploading movies, music and videos on a nightly basis this becomes a real pain.  This is the one thing I can see that might make the original N95 a better choice, as it has a removable memory card, so you can put it any old card reader in the hope that it may read/write faster.

Other

The rest of the bad points come as a direct result of comparing the N95 to the Apple iPhone.  That’s usability, and design, and interestingly enough battery life.  It really is just too complicated, sometimes just the easiest tasks can require 10-15 key presses.  Considering the keypad (not including the numeric keypad) consists of over 20 keys, you’d think there would be easy, fuid ways to accompolish simple tasks.

Nokia have included a lot of features in the phone that promote its use out in the open, such as using the web browser on a train, or walking/travelling with the GPS Maps app/Sports Tracker open.  In any form of glare or sunlight, this is a difficult task, often to the point where it gets too difficult and I’ll just give up.

Battery life has improved a lot since i did the latest firmware upgrade (I assume a permanently running process has been removed?!), but I still find on days of moderate to heavy use the phone can be dead before I get home to charge it!

A worthy competitor??

Considering the iPhone has a larger, more vibrant screen, and it still boasts almost double usable battery life and media playback/talk time, this is definitely something that might need a look in, in later models.

But as I said, nothings perfect, and trawling around the web shows that pretty much any product has its ups and downs, and the techy in me loves (almost) everything about this phone.  So no, I still wouldn’t trade it in for an iPhone, HTC (Windows Mobile) phone, Blackberry, or Cheeseburger phone despite their positives.  I just can’t help but think that it may have been a bad business decision letting these fundamental features slip, when they’re elsewhere in the market for a much cheaper price.

Remember the days of Winamp, that funky, light (~v2 anyway) little MP3 player? It was the ultimate accessory on every geeks tools belt, along with ICQ, mIRC, Netscape and possibly Eudora (though I never cared for it).  I remember it, very fondly, it was in my opinion responsible for bringing MP3 music to the masses, or at least to those geeky enough to have gone out looking for it.  It did, what every good music player should, and what many of todays media players faily miserably at (especially a certain Media Player that’s at ver 11).  Simplicity is what it did well, and at the time it worked fantastically.

Winamp v2 - Basic, like a crappy car stereo

Sonique media player was a funky upstart that was in development about the same time, which had a completely different approach to to the MP3 and media playing application.  It went outside the box, of what a normal application looked like with funky designs and skins that didn’t fit into the shape of a normal window, and if I remember correctly came standard with a host of plugins, visualisation and other addons.

Sonqiue’s interesting style

Now, to the point of my post!

I was talking to one of the guys at the office the other day, and it turns out he was one of the lead developers on the Sonique application and some of the plugins that came with it to produce oh so clear crystal sound.  He spoke of the hype surrounding the application, and the chance at millions when bought out by Lycos (I think??!), and subsequent downfall as the other competitors tried different/more successful things.

This proves basically nothing except that once again, the world is a tiny place, but oh well, I still think Winamp was the better player!

Off topic, but I still happen to have the original set of MP3’s I first managed to download all those years ago (digitally copied many times of course), but the tracks have managed to stay (embarrisingly) in the collection all these years and have kept their original script kiddie style filenames.  These include such greats as:

• John Denver’s, Thank God, I’m a country boy (aptly name Denv-ThankGod.mp3)
• various Smashing Pumpkins songs
• Paul Simon, You can call me Al
• Pink Floyd
• Stairway to Heaven by Led Zeppelin

and many more! Random!

It’s been a whlie since I posted an article on the N95, and thats not to say it’s falled out of favor, or I’m bored of it.  To tell you the truth, this truly amazing piece of portable technology, continues to enlighten me, and still I’m finding new things out every day.  A couple of months ago, in my previous post, I mentioned Nokia Sports Tracker, which at the time, was a buggy, horrible example of beta software.

That’s all changed though, Sports Tracker is now a powerful, bug-free (at least from what I’ve seen), exercise accompanyment which is a damn load of fun to use at the same time.  Broken down, it:

• use GPS to map speed/distance travelled on a map;
• allows you to set routes for commonly travelled paths, and records times for previous workouts so you can beat previous routes;
• includes a Step counter to approximate work done and energy consumed;
• updates progress, and live workout status online, updating the users profile (ala Facebook).

Nokia Sports Tracker Online

I’ve now completed the 3.5 mile walk from the office to Waterloo Station 10 times, and got my time down to 24 minutes, though I’m sure this could be a lot better if I wasn’t walking through peak hour traffic to get there.  And best of all, the GPS/live part still works jammed in my pocket.