If you have been waiting for more information on my fish tank, then tonight your dreams will become true. To everyone else, I have fish. Obviously the meer existence of such a blog means I am avoiding doing something else, but I promise I will do that next! You are not the boss of me!




So firstly I am sad to report some deaths in the community! One of the algae eaters and both Firemouths died sadly, I think the firemouths were rather prone to infections and although I tried my best, they seemed to get weak and die. It was at different times and the second clearly had an infection which seemed to be going away after treatment but it suddenly became very clear I would be removing it from the tank the following morning.

I didn't buy any new fish for quite some time, last week actually. The remaining fish are getting quite big so I was very hesistant to put more in - there is plenty of room but you alwas want to give them their space especially...

So the longer term members will have noticed that over the last year or so and a gradual decline before that I hadn’t been playing a large part in the OSNN community and I just wanted to go over what I have been up to.

I guess part of it stemmed from the pressure to redesign the site which would have meant skinning and tweaking two separate systems. When I came home from work at night I really just wanted to chill out and enjoy myself. The Virtuanews system was an interest project, but hard work to skin with almost all page elements being spaced out in different yet similar templates. With the collapse of its own site and no real design community it got harder and harder to maintain it as vBulletin continued to change.

Regardless, I was looking for a new style but never really found anything. I met a girl and she became my everything, nothing else mattered. I wanted to be with her all the time and that was perhaps too much because a year and a half later...

So here we go, this post is completely irrelevent to technology and completely and utterly getting in the way of my review of the HP mini as a few thoughts about the HP PhotoSmart and MediaSmart - but I am doing it anyway.

So in Summer of 2007 I decided one day I wanted a fish tank so I rocked on down to Porton and during the selection of tanks it suddenly dawned on me that I could go ahead and make it tropical with the addition of a heater

So, I wanted to take this seriously so I got it setup - waited a week to let the bacterial agents do their thing and convert the ammonia into nitrates and then the nitrates into nitrates (or was it the other way around?)

My 15 litre tank was'nt very big at all and was only support a single fish to start with (or I was playing it safe) - this fish was a Synodontis - a type of catfish and I still have him today, two of them infact.

I experimented with more fish such as Kryptopterus bicirrhis (glass...

I saw this film last night with Victoria and it was certainly a good continuation of the original and still fairly believable although the whole film came about because of a very unlikely series of events – the wife of the facilities caretaker is rescued and happens to be a carrier for the disease without other symptoms. Was that a spoiler? You most likely could have guessed that things don’t go so well.


Seeing the derelict streets of London was also interesting, considering the amount of cash it must have cost to actually clear the few shown streets in the original, I suspect a lot of it was computer generated this time around although it was fascinating to see Wembley stadium with long grass and a Longbow Apache firing into the streets of London and generally a lot of familiar landmarks in serious need of repair or being destroyed.

Was also interesting to follow the progress of one of...

So the last time I covered this was before Windows Vista was officially available and as far as drivers go things have been ok – but not perfect. I was thinking that things were progressing nicely but it has been seven months since RTM and nearly four since GA! Having both an NVIDIA card and a Creative card and visiting forums supporting their products regularly, I have seen sites created trying to sue them for not supporting an Operating System that was announced after the product shipped, amusing how immature and clueless some people are – myself to some extent so I have done some reading up on it all day. Here is my current hardware:

Creative SoundBlaster X-Fi Fatal1ty Edition
ObviouslyVista is different to Windows XP and the audio changes are a fine example. Vista has moved the audio stack out of kernel and into user mode and part of that change has meant that Directsound3D can no longer be hardware accelerated. As EAX is an extension of Directsound3D it also can...