Today, someone from Dixons announced the touchpad will sell for £89, usually selling for £349.

At just past 6pm gmt, dixons website indeed reflected that price for the 16gb, however shortly after, their site ground to a halt.

Those lucky enough will have themselves a cheap portable web browser and picture frame, while other keen consumers will be able to puck it up from Currys or PC World in the morning for the same price. While stocks last.

Their denote is that the OS is and app storewill not continue, device cannot compete with the iPad so are quickly throwing in the towel, hence the massive price cut. They said they will continue to support webOS.

Last night I was watching a ripped movie – a crap one at that, but then suddenly the sound cuts out and I see this message appear:

Just goes to show Sony are indeed dicks. Cutting off Linux for PS3, enforcing their copyright measures, rootkitting PCs – what else?

To be honest, I used to have a lot of admiration for Sony but now that’s lost. As a games machine it’s pretty cool – however i prefer to game on PC using mouse & keyboard. The only game i really play is IL2 on PS3.

So now, I am building my own Boxee. Boxee plays internet media, shares it via Facebook, Twitter etc. Awesome.

My door bell buzzes a couple times. I thought it was maybe a party going on downstairs so I was really pissed off. I picked up the door phone and said something like “Don’t ever ring my door bell at this time in the morning… You bastards!” – heard more shouting so put on some jeans and went down stairs.

The guy who lives in the basement flat had kicked in the window of flat 1, accusing him of stealing money from him. He was going absolutely ape – so I shouted at him (quite heavy metal shouting, proud for that time in the morning) telling him to get the frigg out and to leave the poor polish couple in Flat 1 alone. He backed out the door and was “alright mate chill”

At this stage the police were already on their way, the lady in flat 1 called them. He saw the cops flashing lights so ran into his flat and locked the door. The cops tried to get him out but he wouldn’t so they called in a riot squad. They arrived in those mean as, black flak jackets, batons and shit – really intimidating stuff. But as they arrived ready to smash down his door, the police officers manager to get him out.

They arrested him as he was apparently hiding out six months for previous crimes. They also found “drug equipment” in his flat. They weren’t specific about what it was.

So, he’s not coming back. The landlord has evicted him while he’s in prison. The council will lock up his shit or auction it off (he didn’t have much stuff there though).

The poor Polish people in Flat 1 were quite shaken up. The crim from downstairs had slammed the Polish mans hands in the door – so i got some bandages for him. His girlfriend was a bit hysterical and was saying “that’s it, we leave tomorrow – i hate this place”. So i made her a cup of tea. A female police officer consoled them and took statements so I went off to bed as I had to drive to Ikea in about 3 hours.

There are a few issues.

• pages with JS loaded content panic and gives you a warning saying “the page has become unresponsive”
• the spinning beach ball seems to come up randomly
• switching tabs, shows a blank screen for up to 10 seconds, while it renders the content (nothing to do with bandwidth, just seems to take ages)
• when downloading something, the download window doesn’t show – but a small icon in the top right next to the search show a progress

The download thingo really annoys me and seems to be a ‘feature’. This minimalistic icon, which Apple seem to love (monochrome icons in iTunes sidebar, Safari controls etc). But I ended up downloading the same thing over and over – until I went to check my Downloads folder. The icon needs to be prevalent or at least some other way of showing the item is being downloaded. Maybe a badge on the Dock icon for example.

Also Safari STILL has a URL bar and separate search bar. Why still do this Apple? Combine the two as the other browsers do. If the content is “something.com” try that address. Otherwise try the default search. This is basic stuff.

Fingers crossed Apple already knows about these and addresses these seemingly minor but annoying flaws.

This is the result. WARNING: Content may offend.

To my surprise EasyJet’s checkin queue was empty – what a great day for flying.

I went to the counter to check in and gave my passport to the lady. But then the lady looked at me and said “can i see your extension please?”

-”my wah?”

“You’re passport extension. This one has expired last month. Do you have an extension form?”

“no”. I was told that the only thing i can do was to ring the High Commission and receive a quick renewal at a cost of over £400. Which I won’t be doing. Not when the normal renewal price is like, £75 for ten day service.

So sadly I’m not going to Germany this time around. I am not upset as it didn’t cost that much and am thinking it could have been worse.

Think I might go to Edinburg instead.

I came across an amazing pile of crap today, Papa John’s redemption site where you can score vouchers off your next pizza. The idea was to click around the site and find vouchers.

This is a screen grab of what hell I went through:

In no way did I actually understand what the hell I was supposed to do, until roll over hidden points which didn’t appear to do anything. The finally was clicking on a pizza box to reveal a loading screen which really tipped me over the edge.

Let’s try to think about user experience, rather than glamourous screens of SWFshit.

Papa John’s pizza is fantastic though. Top quality take out pizza. Shame about their shitty site.

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?

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.