Headdies [spiny]

My Plantronics headset died, well out of warranty. After a sniff around I settled on a pair of Sennheiser PC130s which turned up today.
Initial impressions are that they are quite flimsy & nowhere near as well built as the plantronics. (A big) But (for me) is the warranty on them is twice as long as the Plantronics which died. Enough of an incentive to give them a go. Time will tell I suppose.
In use they're fairly comfortable, being on-ear rather than over-ear. They'd probably be a bit hard on the lug-holes after a day+night lanparty sesh. In hindsight, I'd probably should have shelled out the extra 20 for the PC 150s.
One great feature for me is that the boom mike swings both ways, so you can wear it either side of your head. This means I can simultaneously bleat in TS, drink and still have mouse control. The left-only plannies got on my tits for this reason. Most games can swap l/r speakers to adjust but I haven't found a driver switch in the creative drivers yet.
Oh and MP3s & movies sound pretty good although nowhere near proper cans.
£30 squid from here.
8/10.

Investment advice [lurks]

The wife and I get paid into a joint account and the balance of this has been growing steadily as our little nest of savings. The thing is, it's just a working account so it pays zero interest and the fact it's there - makes it pretty easy for us to go spend on our joint cards and eat into the savings. What's needed is some proper savings and I've had a sort of cursory look around in order to get a handle on things. Normally you'd see an independent financial advisor but basically the last one I saw wasn't very independent at all and I'm thinking since we have this Internet thing and a bunch of people who must be in the same boat, maybe we can have an actual useful blog discussing the subject. Novel eh?
I think what I need is basically an ISA and this is what I've managed to work out so far; An ISA (investment savings account?) is a governmental scheme to encourage saving and hence it's protected from tax up but has limits on how much you can invest to stop rich bastards from using it as yet another way to dodge paying their share. There's a mini ISAs and maxi ISAs. The minis can be either shares, life insurance or cash. You can have one of each from the same or different companies. They've got limits in how much you can pay in, the cash and share mini ISAs are £3K per year each, the insurance one is £1K a year.
Or you can have a maxi ISA which appears to be all three rolled into one, with the same limitations. Where it gets kind of confusion is that you can just open a cash one and slap dosh in it yourself or you can go maxi and pay in a regular amount and specify a sort of investment portfolio - normally you'd just pick a pre-packaged sort of one to save doing your head in, ranging from fucking risky through to safe as houses.
So I thought I needed just a plain ISA but I'm thinking, it'd be foolish not to just get a maxi one and pay in a regular amount into a share investment scheme and then shift any spare disposable into the cash component as I see fit. That sort of makes sense to me.
Of course... my original plan was to get some joint savings with the missus but I think all this is basically for individuals and I don't know if there's any way to do this with a joint account. This isn't a show stopper but really we were planning to put this money away so we could slap down a phat deposit on our next house or something. Nothing to stop us from doing this individually I suppose, if necessary.
Firstly, have I got the above right? Secondly, are there any flaws with my reasoning? Thirdly, what are you lot doing?

Black Listed Airlines - the UK publishes! [brit]

Choice. Everything these days is about choice.
As millions of Britons pack their bags this summer and jet off for sunnier climbs, they are doing so having made a choice as to the carrier and route they want to take. Well, up until today, kind of.
You see dear reader, we live in a world where any two bit government can slap a sticker on an ailing DC10 and call it a national airline. Unsurprisingly, bits tend to go awry with these veteran airframes, to the point where they kill lots of people all in one go.
So Aviation Authorities ban them from the relevant national airspace. Up until now, this black list of evil plane operators has been, incredibly, secret. You book a flight on a carrier and you expect to be given the choice of an approved one, or one which dropped half it's undercarriage on takeoff before winging it over to some el-dodge airplot before spewing fuel everywhere.
Anyway, the list of operators banned by the UK are: All airlines operating from Equatorial Guinea, Gambia, Liberia and Tajikistan. The others on the blacklist are Sierra Leone's Star Air and Air Universal, Cameroon Airlines, Albanian Airlines and Central Air Express, from DR Congo (Source: BBC News Online)
Hardly any major surprises in the list eh? '2 tickets on Air Tajikistan' can't be something heard very often :)

Looking for a DECT phone [lurks]

Looking to replace my shitty cordless phone/answering machine thing at home. I've got some Philips thing which has been rebadged as BT. It's bloody terrible. It's difficult to retrieve messages and the sound on the handset is far too low. I popped into Dixons thinking they might have one on sale and it'd be good to look at them physically.
They had a variety and most of them look appalling apart from the BT branded ones which all suspiciously looked like the Philips one.
Anyone actually got a decent DECT unit they can recommend? One that looked interesting was the Panasonic KXTCD 735 but a review on amazon mentioned some looniness about retrieving messages and stuff.

Sven Co-op 3.0 [beej]

It's okay ashually. Pick up and play no-sneaky kind of braindead action - Half-Life but co-op and with lots of very hard-arse marines and ninjas in PVC. Think Serious Sam. You pick up some guns, you run to where the action is, then you shoot lots of bullets. Lots of 'em!







How to get it working:

1. Install Steam [FULL][CS flavoured]
2. Install Sven Co-op [mirror1][mirror2][mirror3]
3. Let the installer run its course. It looks like its screwing up, but as long as it has found your Steam install, there are no probs. It asks for your original Half-Life as an option - skip this for now, you get maps with it.
4. Check your key config. It's WASD, but bind the command button (eg. Q)

Almost The best PC Gamepad Evar [spiny]

My Logitech Wingman Cordless gamepad died. A loss I still mourn, but I'd be buggered if I was going to shell out another £30 on one, so here's the little recipie I cooked up:
Ingredients

• 1 Xbox Controller Extension Cable
• 1 USB lead (I picked mine up from the bargain bin in PC world)
• 1 Soldering Iron With Solder
• Electrical Insulating Tape
• Some thin wire
• Aluminum Foil
• Electricity (For Soldering Iron)

Method

1. Lop the Xbox end off* the extension cable & remove a few cm of the sheath. Peel back the shielding layer.
2. Cut four of the wires to staggered lengths and strip each wire a few mil. The fifth wire (yellow) cut back to the length of the outer casing. It won't be going anywhere any more. Staggering the lengths of the individual wires ensures your less likeley to get a short accross them and it'll make the resulting cable neater.
3. Lop off the USB A end of your cable (The PC spade connector end) and stagger & strip the wires inside.
4. Tin the ends of all wires with your solder & iron then solder red to red, white to white etc.
5. Wrap each one in insulating tape.
6. Wrap the whole bundle in tape.
7. Fold back any shielding you have.
8. Cut a length of aluminum foil to the length of your join and wrap two or three times round the cable.
9. Wrap a some wire the length of your join round the foil. The foil & wire replaces the shielding you destroyed in making the join. It stop your cable being a big ass antenna.
10. (Optionally) Wrap the rest of the aluminuim foil round your head & the heads of your family & pets. This stops the aliens probing your feeble human minds.
11. Wrap the lot up with bags of tape.
12. Download the driver & setup utility from here
13. Connect up & at the prompt to install a driver for 'XBOX Game Controller, do 'Specific location', 'I'll install', 'Have Disk' and point it at the driver you downloaded.
15. You'll also get an second install prompt for a HID compliant game controller. Just go with all the defaults for that.
16. Calibrate & go and kick ass.

Works great, rumble effects & everything. You can turn these down in the setup utility, where you'll also want to select the 'enhanced analog sticks' checkbox to get better deadzone operation.

Scorchio!

Best Racing Game Evah [slim]

MSR was a fucking good racer, with two problems... Firstly it had a progression system that was innovative yet fatally fucked up. Second it was released on the Dreamcast, which no fucker bought. Thank shit that wasn't the last of it though, the bizzarely named Project Gotham on the Xbox which turned out to be MSR 1.5. The faults had been fixed, the graphics were beefed and it was released on a platform which people actually owned. Top. In fact it was so top, that when Project Gotham 2 came out, I couldn't be fucked to buy it. I mean, what on earth could make it better? But one weak moment in Tescos later, and I'm hooked. This is the best racing game ever.

What makes PGR2 the best racing game ever? It's made about the same leap in refinement from MSR to the first xbox game. Big changes are the removal of the 'betting' on the results to gain more Kudos points, instead you have stepped challenges. Thats cool, often you'd waste time judging the difficulty of a challenge before placing a reasonable bet. They've also added to what makes you earn the Kudos points, not only do you get them for driving like a nutter, you now also get them for driving like a racing driver, with points for following the correct racing line, which is is now subtly marked with skiddies on the track. The penalties aren't as cuntish as they were either, if you crash in the middle of a combo, you lose the last few additions instead of the whole combo. The style challenges have gone, replaced with cone challenges which allow you to get good medals without pissing around, although the top points still require a complete drifty combo nutter lap. They've also added a fuckload of courses, there's now loads of cities instead of just three and a shitload of new cars, woot! The result is a slightly easier, more forgiving game, but it's still bastard hard to unlock the new highest level platinum medals for the challenges.

All of that would only make it a very good racing game. What makes it the best is the cunning way Bizzare have weaved the online Live stuff into every part of the game. It's got the bit you'd expect, you can race other people and call them wankers over xbox live when they cut you up. But online is everwhere else too! Complete a challenge, an arcade race or a time trial, and you see the worldwide scoreboard for that section, it also uploads your score to Live so people can laugh at your puny attempt. Wonder how the fuck that guy could get so many points in a puny Cooper S? You can download his ghost car, and watch the fucker do it! Ooooh, he got a million points for drifting then passed on the last bend, aaaaah! The whole thing feels more like an mmo game than a racer, the joy of redoing a challenge and jumping from a worldwide rank of forty thousand and something into the top five thousand pushes you to get better. You get recorded kudos on Live too, kind of like xp in an online RPG, your ranks displayed. You use that rank to put yourself against players of a similar skill, so you know your going to get a good race. There's a slight downer in that if you haven't unlocked the fannytastic cars, you are going to get hammered online, but that does give you a good reason to unlock the fanny cars too. Besides, you can always host a game and lock the car selection to something you do have for a far race.

So, an utterly superb single player game, a top and easy to use online feature, and a brilliantly integrated online scoring and ranking system. Best racer ever. Who wants some?