Because they’re laden with so many features you will never use.

Just look at this motherboard for a PC. It has:
1 x 7.1 Audio I/O [perhaps, but i prefer my external soundcard]
1 x D-Sub [no]
1 x Line In [no]
1 x Line Out [no - why with the 7.1 then]
1 x Mic In [no]
1 x Parallel (LPT) [hell no]
1 x PS/2 Keyboard [yawn no]
1 x PS/2 Mouse [no]
1 x Serial (COM) [no]
1 x 10/100/1000 (LAN) [okay useful]
4 x USB 2.0 [you got me, yes]

Why do PC users always want this crap?

Recently I’ve been seeing some weird things happening with Safari & Google. Lately, gMaps is very slow and takes up a lot of process. Streetview is horrible in Safari 5. gAnalytics doesn’t display content correctly.

I’ve been using Chrome for each thing i think is dodgy and each time I’ve been correct.

Now I don’t think it’s to do with Webkit, i think it’s to do with the JS rendering system. Both Chrome and Safari use completely different JS renderers however share the same markup renderer.

Stupid SanDisk make it so difficult to remove their on board software which comes preloaded on the Cruzer range.

I bought a 16gb Cruzer and have had big issues trying to format the disk in NTFS/FAT32. Each time Windows would only allow me 200mb.

Download the removal software (Windows only) to get rid of this nasty software, once and for all!

I pay a service to Lovefilm. £13 per month for 2 rental movies at a time. I can usually get about a maximum of 10 DVDs per month. This is good value. However, their website is increasing with the amount of stupid adverts.

i’m not just talking about the small Google adverts. I’m am talking about the huge Flash overlays which prevent you from viewing your content. This following screenshot prevented me from seeing what movies i had at home. The close button also didn’t work, then crashed Safari:

So I’ve created some sort of hack (specifically from Lovefilm.com) which can be used in most browsers. It’s a custom stylesheet which forces the adverts not to display.

Updated: Download it here: custom-stylesheet-lovefilm.com.css

It’s obvious that pirating music is the cheapest way to obtain music. Pirating because you’re interested in the band or just don’t want to pay the money. Buying an album usually costs around £8 for a digital download (in my latest experience of harddrive crashes I’m rejecting these unless they’re pirated), £9 for new CD or… £3 for a second hand CD.

I want to know, what does the record industry think of second hand sales, and how do they equate these sales into the ‘falling CD sales’ profit losses.

We often hear the music industry is in dire problems and losing money because of illegal downloading. But how much of these lost sales are going to second hand sales. These second hand sales don’t pay any further royalties to the music industry so i guess the music industry would consider this to be in the same category as an illegal digital download.

I gather this because:

Some guy buys the album for £9, then realises it’s not his cup of tea. He can’t sell/swap it from the shop he bought it so his only option is to re-sell it. He puts it on Amazon where many others have done the same. To compete with the other second hand sales, he has to drop his price to well over half what he bought it for, £3. Someone else buys it, sells it again. And so on and so on. Music industry only sees the initial sale of £9.

Now, same goes for the pirate. Some guy buys a copy of the album for £9. Uploads it to thepiratebay. Users x 10 download it for free. Music industry still on sees £9.

To me I see no problem of either downloading illegally or buying second hand. People would tend to think it’s more moral to buy the second hand copy – however the music industry doesn’t see a penny more from either. If you like your artist, support them by buy tickets to see their gig – buy limited edition tee’s or records that come with DVDs etc..

Check out all the second hand copies on Amazon or steal you some music today. Same thing really…

I think OoO messages are ridiculous and I blame Microsoft. It’s so easy to setup an Autoreply for holidays and when you are out of the office.

But these emails are quite frankly stupid. All they do is send an email back, no matter what, that says something retarded like:

“I’m on holiday in the Bahamas. Will be back on 11 July. Please contact Charlie for anything urgent”.

It’s retarded because now I have to email someone else again. Why couldn’t that email have been forwarded automatically to Charlie. Since this is a business, and you want to keep customers/new clients, why not keep this as simple as possible? This a very easy process and simply adds a forward rule to new mail.

To be honest, you can’t even do this with Apple Mail. I’m sure an Applescript could work fine though.

The English LOVE to ruin their language. One of their latest abominations is using past and present verbs in the same sentence, because “everyones doing and sounds so cool”.

For example:

“I am sat here next to Ashley”
and
“I was stood up at the concert next to John”

I dislike this much.

A couple months ago I bought and invested in a Sony DVP-NS930V DVD/SACD player, and about 10 SACDs.

I also bought a Sony STR-DH500 5.1 channel receiver that has two digital inputs (toslink and coaxial) and two stereo analog inputs.

Problem is though, the Sony DVD player only outputs SACD audio as analog. ANALOG?! What the hell?! As it turns out, wikipedia says that Sony/Philips decided that because of potential pirating, to only output the SACD audio as analog. SACD is a highend format. It has a sampling rate of a crazy 2822.4khz (CDs are 44.1khz). It has a dynamic range of 120db and frequency range of 20hz-50khz.

This super high end audio quality is floored by having to go through an analog bus?!

All is not lost though. I have 10 discs (including Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon and Beck’s Seachange) which i will not waste.

I am ripping the discs to 6 channels via Soundtrack Pro and will remaster the audio to suite a DVD. Or at least an AC3.

This means I have to record each channel individually (well, two at a time) – so three track recordings, and some dodgy audio alignment…

I’ll host the files to stick the finger to Sony/Philips. Check back here soon.

If you’ve just installed Adobe CS3/4 you may be wondering why your Safari on OS X can’t display PDFs anymore.

It’s because Adobe mucked up the plugin which tells Safari to choose an application to view the PDF files.

To fix the problem go to:
/Library/Internet Plug-ins/

and delete the file:
AdobePDFViewer.plugin

Restart Safari and you will be looking at PDFs in a snap.