After last years close attempt to get Jeff Buckley at number one instead of Alexandrea Burke it seems that there will be a yearly trend to try and stop the X Factor getting to Christmas number 1 and this year the song that the public are trying to get to number is Rage Against The Machine with Killing in The Name. I have purchased the song myself as I think it would be as hilarious as it would be fantastic to see the X Factor song not reach top spot. I have nothing against the guy who won the show but I have plenty against the Christmas number 1 being ruined by the X Factor. The christmas number one used to be a massive deal. It was a highlight of the chart year. Now it goes to whatever moron wins the X Factor regardless of singing talent or song. They could have got Jedward singing Ghostbusters and the morons who watch and vote for that awful show would buy it. The midweek charts showed that Rage were winning the race but I have a feeling when it comes to Sunday we will be disappointed. But lets not give up!
Buy it here
So after a long wait, Mozilla have finally released version 3 of it’s email client, Thunderbird. I use thunderbird for all my business emails and have never had a problem with it. It’s very simple to use and very quick. So what improvements have been made to an almost flawless program? Well Mozilla claim it is now even faster. Personally I have not really noticed much difference here but even if it loads a second faster that is still an improvement so I wont grumble. The first change the user will notice however are the tabs. Thunderbird now has Firefox style tabs however I don’t see much need for these, especially as when you write a new email it still brings it up in a new window.
One massive improvement is the simple creation of email accounts. For a regular computer user such as myself it has never been difficult setting up new emails but for more novice users it has been more challenging as they are not expected to know what their STMP settings are. Well now Thunderbird will look them up for you. All you need to know now is your email address and password and Thunderbird does the rest. It also asks for your password on initial setup of the account which is something i’ve always thought it lacked.
Another new feature is the improved search. Again, it is not something that I use much and when I do I usually do a basic search of subject titles or message content of recent emails. But if you’re looking for a certain email from a certain someone that contains a certain phrase then you can easily find the exact email you are looking for. Thunderbird lists the senders of the emails down the left hand pane and also displays a graph showing the months the emails were sent in. All this information of course, is stored in it’s own tab.
A more detailed list of the new features can be found here.
I think Thunderbird has taken a step backwards graphically. All the graphics and even the logo itself look more outdated than in the previous version. To me they give the whole program a feel of Windows 2000 and considering the program itself doesn’t use very many graphics anyway, I would have expected more effort to have been put into the few it does contain, or at least keeping the same would have been enough. Of course this doesn’t alter the performance of the program in any way and for me Thunderbird still remains the number 1 free email client in the world.
Once again the media have gone way over the top about a wrong decision by a referee and blaming a player for it. The player in question this time is Thierry Henry. If you play for Arsenal or used to, then if you do anythign wrong the media will blow it out of proportion and want your head on a spike. I’ve seen the incident, yes Henry handballed in the build up to France’s extra time goal but I don’t think it was that deliberate. Even if it was, some of the comments I have read are just embarassing for those who wrote them. Theirry Henry is one of the greatest players the English Premiership has ever seen and now people are calling him one of the biggest cheats in the game. I have even read someone calling Thierry ‘Scum of the earth’. That’s just pathetic. What if Henry had scored a goal that was offside? Would he be classed a cheat then? Of course not. Yet it’s the same principle, the referee and the officials got it wrong and they should be the ones to blame. How many more witch hunts will the media create just to sell their stupid tabliods now that they can’t actually sell newspapers for the news content anymore? The calls for a replay of the match are a bit silly really and it’s another international game that we can do without. Not letting Thierry Henry go to the world cup would be pathetic.
The referees are always in the spot light in football. What other sport do you see the officials getting things wrong in almost every game? Rugby have the benefits of a replay, tennis has introduced the challenge system so why can’t football just combine these two things so if a referee gets something wrong then it can be put right in seconds. Giving each team a number of challenges stop the game form having too many breaks in it but also allows teams contest poor refereeing. I’m sure more questions will be asked of FIFA from this incident.
It seems a bit weird to review an album that was first released 20 years ago but the new release of Bleach is different to the original and is worth a review. The album comes in a really nice digipack case with a booklet full of rare photos of the band in their early days. The album also contains a bonus live show which I expected would be on a bonus disc but it is added on to the end of the disc instead. The live show is from February 9th 1990 and was recorded at Pine Street Theatre in Portland. This show was available on a bootleg but it is not as good quality as it is on this disc. The only bad thing about this show is there is nothing special about it. It is just live performances of songs with no mid song banter and average crowd reaction. I would like to have seen a show such as the Vienna show from November 1989 which is widely known as THE best Bleach era Nirvana gig. The main highlight from the live show is that it contains the song Sappy, which is the best Nirvana song that was never released officially.
The first 13 tracks on the disc were the original release of Bleach plus the song Downer that was added in later releases of the album. Bleach is a favourite among many Nirvana fans because it is Nirvana at their rawest and punkiest sound. Apart from About A Girl all the tracks have destorted guitar, heavy bass and tinny drums. It really makes you realise just how polished their later albums were in comparison and this is the only album where you’ll really hear Nirvana sounding the way they always wanted to. For me personally there are not really any tracks on this album that stand above the rest. I really could not pick out the top 5 but songs such as School, Floyd The Barber and About A Girl really stood the test of time and were performed by Nirvana the most in their career.
Verdict: If you like Nirvana and don’t have Bleach then buy this album. If you love Nirvana and already have Bleach, buy this album anyway. If you want to get into Nirvana I suggest Nevermind or In Utero first.
If you are a fan of the Flight of the Conchords TV show then you will no doubt love this CD. The album contains songs from the second series of the cult musical comedy, and these songs definatly top those form the first series, and the first series had some very funny songs.
For those of you who are not familiar with the TV series you may find this CD a little odd but still enjoyable. There are many different varieties of musical genres throughout this album from the bands attempted rapping in the opening track Hurt Feelings to a dark 80′s sound in Fashion is Danger, with vocals that sound slightly like Marilyn Manson and a cheesey reference to Thatcher and Reagan. You are also treated to an odd Russian styled track called Petrov, Yelyena And Me which in the TV show has an odd video to match.
The lyrics in all of the songs are not just amusing but also on the verge of genius. Rambling Through The Avenues of Time and Carol Brown are prime examples of the skillful and clever song writing the band frequently produce, although that could easily be said about the other tracks too.
Verdict: These guys may not be to everyone’s liking but they are certainly to mine. You have to get the humour to really appreciate them and I highly recommend watching the TV show first. If you enjoy the second series of the show you will find it hard not to buy this.
On Saturday my home town of Great Yarmouth attempted to break the world record of the number of people dressed up as wally in the same place at the same time. The current record was set earlier in the year by residents in New York with 1052 Wallys. I was quite confident that we could break this record, especially as it was confirmed that over 1200 people had bought the costume, however with only 901 showing up on the day it was disappointing not to have broken the record.
However it is not about breaking a world record that this event excited me about. In recent years the town has started to have more and more events but these usually take place over the summer, due to us being a coastal holiday town, so it was nice to see that on a rainy October afternoon people got together to do something different. Despite not breaking the record I think the turnout was very good and to see that many people dressed up in the red and white of wally is quite amusing (or really cute if you count people who dressed up their toddlers and babies!). The main importance of this event though is that it was all for a good cause. £1 for every person who entered was donated to breast cancer care, so despite not breaking a world record at least it was a fun afternoon that raised a lot of money for charity.
You may have seen the new Monopoly City board game advertised on tv or in the shops, well there is also an online version of this called Monopoly City Streets. This online version combines google earth with Monopoly City. That’s right, the whole planet is now a giant monopoly board. Although every single street in the world is there, they are not all available to buy however the majority of them are. You start off with $3m to spend and each day (aslong as you log on) you get extra income from the streets you have bought.
You can gain more income from streets by buying buildings for them. There are quite a few buildings available ranging from small houses for $50,000 to Monopoly Towers which costs a hefty $100m to buy. There are also bonus buildings and hazards that you can only build if you get a chance card. Chance cards are recieved randomlly after buying buildings. There are 5 types of chance cards from what I can see. They are: Fines, Cash increases, bonus building, hazard building and demolish a building. Hazards and buildings such as power plants and prisons that can be placed on other peoples roads. By placing one of these down you stop that road from recieving any income until the other player demolishes your building or place a bonus building down. If a road already has a bonus building on it you cannot place a hazard on it. You can also demolish buildings, such as hazards on your roads or other peoples bonus buildings.
There are local and world wide leaderboards. Overall I don’t see a great deal of point to the game. It’s wise not to purchase many roads as you get taxed on every street you own after the first 5 so it’s far better to buy 5 long roads and place lots of buildings on them. I have just found myself gradually adding buildings to my few roads each day. What I do after this I don’t know. There will never be one ultimate winner to this, nor is there any prizes or gains if there were. It’s a little bit of fun to kill a few minutes each day but nothing more.
Today sees the general release of Microsoft’s new operating system, Windows 7. I have been using the beta for sometime now and i’ve been very impressed from the start. Now you may have already heard a lot about the new features of Windows 7, especially the touch screen technology, but most of us do not have touch screen monitors. What about the features that will help us every day users the most? Well this post is about all the little features that make just every day computing much easier.
The New Taskbar
The first thing you will notice about Windows 7 is the brand new taskbar layout. If you are like me then you may have been a bit wary at first over this. We are all so used to the taskbar from old versions that we might find it hard to adapt to the new one but this is not the case. I found myself gettting used to the taskbar very quickly and it is certainly an improvement over the old one. I like my computer looking tidy but I also like having lots of things open and quickly at hand. The new taskbar makes all of these possible. Programs can be pinned to the start menu so they can be easily accessed. A little box appears around the pinned programs when they are open so you can easily tell which is being used or not.
By left clicking a program you will bring it to the front it as normal, unless you have multiple windows open. Thie picture picture on the left shows my web browser with two windows open that i’ve left clicked on once. It shows previews of both windows. I can hover over the preview to view it and I can click it to bring it to the front. You can also do this without left clicking. Just by hovering over a program’s icon on the taskbar you can get the small previews up, even if the program only has one window open.
Right clicking an open program on the taskbar also brings up a nice feature. With most programs you will be treated to a list of your most recently opened files from this program. In the picture you can see the last few tracks that I listened to in my music player. In web browsers it will bring up your last viewed web pages. Just like in the taskbar you can pin files or web pages here so you can easily access your most used or viewed files. By right clicking you can also choose to pin or unpin the program itself from the taskbar and you can also close it from here too.
Another nice little feature is that different program icons glow different colours when you hover over them. Thunderbird for example glows blue and firefox glows orange.
Start Menu
The start menu hasn’t changed too much from Vista. You may notice that recent files has gone which at first is a disappointment but thanks to pinning you wont need recent files no more. The start menu can be used in the same way as the taskbar and I use it for my less frequent programs and files. I have pinned microsoft excel for example and when I click the little arrow next to excel I am shown a menu with my most recently used excel files, to which I have pinned my business accounts file. This file is usually updated every day or two and not everytime I use my computer so I keep it here as it is easy to get to without being on the taskbar. Another nice feature is the much quicker search box at the bottom which can also be used to execute commands in the same way as the run command does.
Snipping Tool
If you are writing a blog on Windows 7 using screenshots then the snipping tool is just fantastic. In fact if you are someone who used the print screen button a lot you will find yourself using the snipping tool instead. What the snipping tool does is it allows you to drag a box over any part of your screen and when you’re done it will take what’s in the box and turn it into an image. You can save it or mail it in just a click. It’s a really handy tool.
Snap
Snap is a great tool if you need to look at two windows side by side. Instead of spending ages resizing two windows you can now just snap each on to the edge. One way of doing this is by dragging each one to the egde of the screen. You will see an outline of a box appear that’s half the size of the screen. By releasing your mouse the window will then fill this half of the screen where the box outline was. I’ve found a much easier way to to this is by pressing the windows button and the left or right arrow key when viewing a window. This tool is especially handy for when web designing as I can have the code or ftp program one side and the web browser the other.
Paint/Image Editing
Not really much of a new feature or improvement here but there are a couple of small changes that I like. The image editing has been kept seperate from the viewer unlike in Vista where they were together but there are now more things you can do when image editing. By right clicking and pressing edit, the image will be opened in paint. Paint has got slightly better over the last few editions of Windows. It is now possible to crop and resize images much easier, which were both key features that paint really lacked. I always used to find myself opening up Fireworks just to resize an image but I no longer need to. However that said there are not any other features to paint that are that useful to image editing but for me I am glad these two basic features are finally included and very easy to use. There is one draw back here though. When you could edit an image in the Vista picture viewer you could use auto levels to ajust the colour and contrast and you had red eye reduction. This are not available in paint which is a shame.
There are plenty more features in Windows 7, in fact there is a 140 page document that contains them all, but these are the main ones for me. Overall it is definatly the best operating system from Microsoft. It is faster than Vista as it uses much less resources which was the major downfall of Vista. I think that XP users will be swayed to use it and they will like it. With the touch and speech technology built into it we could see the way we use computers change over the next few years.
Absolute Radio have teamed up with Spotify and Shortlist magazine to find the song of the decade. The last 10 years has seen some fantastic bands/artists and songs come to light so choosing one song is very difficult indeed. Luckilly you can vote for more than one song if you wish but if I had to choose just one song then I would choose One Day Like This by Elbow. It’s a bit of a weird choice for me as I am not a massive Elbow fan and I don’t listen to this song that much (in fact as I write this it’s 98th on my last.fm page). However this is one of those songs that can brighten up a rainy day and i’ve even heard of couples playing it at their weddings. It really is just one of those songs that everyone has their own reason to enjoy, it has great lyrics and is the only song I know that has ‘Holy Cow’ in it. It was also the song that launched Elbow into the mainstream. So if you agree then please follow the banner below to vote for it.
