Please wait for a site operator to respond.
> You are now chatting with ‘Matt’
> Your Issue ID for this chat is (removed)
Matt: Thanks for contacting Chumby! How may I assist you today?
William: Hi, just wondering if I was to get a friend to order a Chumby, and ship it to me (I live in the UK), will it work with UK-related stuff like the power jacks and so on, and UK-related content on the device itself?
Matt: Power not an issue. the power supply is 110-240V
Matt: You would need a US to UK plug converter though
Matt: Can get from Maplin Electronics or Boots
Matt: There’s a lot of UK based content as we have many community developers in the UK already
William: Ah right, thanks. I’m very interested in getting one, so I’ll definitely consider it soon. Thanks.
Matt: Sounds great, no worries
Matt: Thank you for chatting, please don’t hesitate to chat again if you have any further questions. Good bye!
> Chat session has been terminated by the site operator.

Now that’s what I call support. A US company that ships to the US only, but they actually know what Maplin and Boots are (they’re UK stores), and they don’t come up with some “overseas countries are not supported” rubbish like some firms do. Chumby, if you ever read this, give this Matt fellow a pat on the back.

So, since discovering this Chumby thing about 30 minutes ago, I’ve decided that I now want one, for sure. Time to ask an American for a favour.

Woke up. Drove to Stoke-on-Trent. Purchased stuff from OverclockersUK. Drove to Alton Towers. Had day of fun. Drove home via Pizza Express. End.

Now why could I have not put that in a tweet on Twitter?

Because, at OcUK I purchased a steelseries 5L gaming mousepad, which, btw, is AWESOME. It’s so much better then using the desk. My Logitech G5 just *glides* over it, effortlessly. I also picked up a Logitech VX Revolution mouse, but that’s not for me  - as I said on Twitter, I’ve ordered a laptop (Lenovo Thinkpad R61E), iPod nano (silver, 8GB), and the the mouse for one of mum’s friends who wanted me to do so (it’s for her daughter, who lives overseas). Anyway, as she doesn’t have a PC, and I suggested against buying from PC World’s overpriced stupid crap range of products, I’m doing the order for her.

But that’s not the reason I’m posting this. I’m posting this because of the ‘brawl’ that happened at Alton Towers today. Basically, it was about 6:45pm and I was queuing for the Spinball Whizzer. I usually always go on the single rider queues because it’s shorter. Most of the time. Anyway, I was queuing behind a guy and his wife/girlfriend, and this other family came up behind me. As far as I could see there was the dad and four kids, three of them under 12 I’d say, and the other looked about 16 or so.

So, as I’m standing in the queue, the two in front of me are talking with some other guy in the queue, loudly, about Alton Towers vs Thorpe Park, and if a season pass would be worth it. As they’re talking, the family behind me, well, mainly one of the small kids and the 16(ish) year old start to sortof push in in front of me (I hate Alton’s wide queue lines for that exact reason). As it’s the single rider queue, I was just going to wait until he got to the front of the queue and then push back in front of him. However, I got the chance to sortof get back in the front of him and the kid once we’d gone round the corner in the queue line. So, I stretched out both arms and leant against both sides of the queue. The little kid then decided to re-push-in and went under my arm, right next to my elbow, so I bent it back over, and knocked him, incredibly lightly on the forehead.

So, guess who decides to complain? The 16ish-year-old decides to then say, loudly, “oi, you elbowed by brother in the face”. lolwut. So, I turned around and said “well maybe if you stop trying to push in, he wouldn’t have been knocked in the face. And I hardly elbowed him, it was more a gentle knock”. Anyway, he didn’t like that so he said to me, and I quote, “I’ll smash your fucking face in if you’re not careful”. In the interest of 1) saving my face, and 2) getting him to shut the hell up, I turned round and ignored him. Besides, I’d hardly be worried about knocking his little brother’s forehead lightly if his big brother acts like that…

Eventually, the queue disappeared and the couple in front of me went on. Well, more importantly, they didn’t. See, the twat behind me was only the beginning. The two in front of me is where it gets good. Before I go on - Fasttrack (or is it Fastrack?) is the ticketing system at both Alton and Thorpe that allows you to “jump” the main queue and go on a second shorter queue, on the condition you pay for the Fasttrack ticket when you come into the park (it’s about £5).

Anyway, so, the couple in front of me had already used up their Fasttrack ticket earlier that day. However, he decided to try and use it again, so that, despite being in the single rider queue, he could go on with his wife/girlfriend. However, the ride operator said no, they’d have to go on separately. So, he tries it with another operator…who says the same thing. Anyway, to cut out the boring bits (and by now I had got into one of the Spinball cars and was watching all this), they eventually were told after INSISTING that they go on together that they must either get off or the staff would call security. By this time they were both sitting in the Spinball car, so the one operator bent down and undid the restraint. The woman got up, but the guy refused to and stayed in the car. He was told, again (and this time over the PA so the WHOLE QUEUE LINE could hear), to “get off the ride now or else I’ll [the ride operator] call security”. He still refused, and, on top of that, pulled the restraint down (yeah, clever, so now that security is coming you now don’t even have the chance to do a runner). So, the guy says again over the PA, “don’t undo the restraint, I’ve called security and they can come and undo it”

By now, there’s a whole bunch of people standing at the exit, watching. The people in the main queue are getting annoyed and starting to get annoyed, and one woman calls out “stop acting like a child” to the guy’s wife/gf. BAD IDEA. The wife/gf storms across the track, grabs onto this woman in the queue and starts trying to scratch her face, while the woman in the queue pushes her away, accidentally pulling her top down (look away little kiddies, nudity!). So, the Alton staff throw themselves in the middle and try and get the wife/gf away from this poor queue line woman. By now, security had arrived. By “security”, I mean two older looking guys who weren’t much at all, but enough to basically say “stfu you dumb bitch”.

So, the one security guard is all up in the woman’s business trying to tell her to leave, and she’s saying “stop spitting in my face”…anyway, after about another two minutes, two MORE security guys arrive (by now it’s turning into a HUGE issue, half the park had turned up to watch), and restrain her, since she was still trying to attack the woman in the queue. One of them goes and gets the husband/boyfriend out the Spinball car, and takes them over to the side (away from the queue), to talk to them. They’re now both acting like retards. On top of that, the guy then starts swearing at the queue woman’s husband/boyfriend and starts arguing with him.

Eventually, the “serious” security guards turn up (the ones with handcuffs, a full uniform, and one of them looks like the “I’ve got a beard and I WILL kill you if necessary” type), and they all get escorted off the ride and down the back path.

So the whole thing lasted about 20 minutes, and they stopped the ride running for about 20 minutes because they acted like small children not getting their own way.

What they could have done: Gone on the ride, separately, and be done with it.
What happened: Made a HUGE fuss over a tiny issue, wasted 6 security guards’ time, the ride operators’ time, extended the queuing time by about 20 minutes, got kicked out the park, and provided lulz for about 100 onlookers.

When I finally had a ride, and got off, the stupid guy behind me was waiting in the queue line to fling insults at me (again). Anyway, since it was now about 7:40pm we just left, drove back to Stafford, had a quick meal at Pizza Express, and came home.

So. That was my day.

It’s my birthday today.

I’ve been 17 years old for an hour and, as such, haven’t got any presents yet. We usually only open presents in the morning when everyone is awake, so I’ll report back later.

Anyway, my present to myself is that I’ve changed my iPhone theme. It’s looking really nice now, IMO. I’ve dumped the old tutorial for unlocking a 1st gen iPhone and replaced it with a page about mine with screenshots, which you can find here: iPhone.

Anyway, I shall make another post tonight when I’ve done everything and got all my pressies and stuff.

I broke WordPress again. Well, more specificially, I was trying to play around with the theme, which didn’t work, so I tried to do something to it manually (setting in the database) which broke it. So, I’ve restored the backup from earlier this month. Lost three posts I think. >_<

I might apply a new theme later, too. This one is old.

I didn’t like the one I had in mind.

I went to Drayton Manor today, which is a theme park, in case you’re unsure.

It’s about a 45 minute drive from our house, just a tad further then to Alton Towers. However, it’s much easier to get there, as you just drive down the M6 for a bit, whereas to get to Alton it’s mostly country roads to get there. Whereas Alton Towers is kinda South-East of Stoke-on-Trent, Drayton is more North-East of Birmingham.

Anyway, we went for most of the day, and rode Maelstrom (rode twice - IMO, it’s better then what Thorpe Park have), G-Force (rather unique lift hill design that goes upside down), Apocalypse, Shockwave, Stormforce 10 (very very wet….but Thorpe Park’s Tidal Wave is wetter), and a couple other smaller rides, including “Excalibur, a Dragon’s Tale” and the Buffalo Roller Coaster, which was pretty good.

It’s an okay theme park but it’s not really worth another visit, and they REALLY need to clean it up a bit. The was loads of litter all over the place, especially in the queue lines. In terms of litter, Thorpe Park is the cleanest, Alton Towers is pretty good (but there is still some…), and Drayton Manor is the worst.

Overall though, the whole day was quite fun, but if you’re planning on driving up from the South, go the extra 20 or so miles to Alton Towers, and if you’re planning on coming down from the North, don’t waste the extra petrol.

Could Apple potentially be taken to court because of false advertising? If you visit Apple’s UK website (this), and then navigate to the App Store page for the iPhone, it lists several apps including the eBay application, Loopt, and Super Monkey Ball.

Sure, Super Monkey Ball is fun, and for £5.99 it provides plenty of entertainment if you’re in need of a game. However, that’s where it ends. Because both Loopt and the eBay app are not available on the UK App Store. Now, if Apple had one global website for the whole world, this might not be that much of an issue, but they’re advertising two things, for the UK market, on their UK website, that are not available here.

Sure, there are alternatives, such as an application called “GarageBuy”, which you can use for eBay, but Apple aren’t advertising that. They’re advertising the not-available-in-the-UK official eBay app. Now, shouldn’t this be considered false advertising, to which pretty much any company can get in serious trouble for from the government section in charge of this type of stuff? I’d be interested in seeing if someone take Apple to court over this issue, as it could very well be that Apple are doing something wrong. I know that if, say, I purchased the iPhone 3G in the UK, and I needed the eBay app for my business, and found it wasn’t available, I’d be very angry.

What do you think?

The Apple Airport Express. What is it? Well, simply put, it’s a WiFi access point with two additional features. First, it has a built in printer server (and USB port), so you can plug a printer in and run it off that. Secondly, and this is why I purchased it, it has a 3.5mm audio output.

Now this may seem quite odd to you that a WiFi access point has a 3.5mm audio output, but it’s not. Because, once you setup the Airport Express from within OS X (or Windows…if there’s a compatible utility, which there should be):

You then get a new option in iTunes:

So now, you can choose where you want to send your music. It’s as easy as that. You just plug the Airport into an ethernet cable, and into your speakers, or in my case, AV Receiver, then run the setup, and you’re done! You can use either an analogue connection, or, an optical cable.

It’s really easy to setup, and awesome if you want to pipe your music to another room in the house. Plus you can add as many Airport Express’es to your home network as you like, and they’ll all show up in iTunes. And if running an ethernet cable to the back of your garden so you can listen to music while having a BBQ isn’t convienent, you can set it up to connect via WiFi - it’ll then connect to your current WiFi network, and does the same thing. Actually, you have several options:

• Connect via ethernet and create a brand new WiFi network.
• Connect via ethernet and merge with your existing WiFi network, to extend the range.
• Connect via WiFi to your existing WiFi network, and extend the range.

Overall, if you already use iTunes and need a way to send your music somewhere else in your house, the Airport is a very useful device, and it’s nice and small too. If you don’t want to spend the whole £65 that Apple charges for it, pick one up on eBay - I got the older 802.11b/g model for a mere £35 (the new ones have 802.11b/g/n).

Now all I have to do if I want to listen to music downstairs, is send it to the Living Room speakers, go downstairs, and hit “AirTunes” on the Logitech Harmony remote.

The interconnected home. I has it. It’s brilliant.

Placed a small order tonight for a few titles…

Well…to be fair it’s all the way into March 2009, I’d probably buy that many discs by then anyway, right?

I thought I’d write an article about the Firefox extensions that I used, after totally coming up with the idea myself. It’s my idea, I swear!

All the extensions below are fully compatible with Mozilla Firefox 3, unless otherwise stated.

Customize Google

This handy extension adds some additional options to tweak Google to your liking, one of which I find very useful is to bypass Google’s annoying click tracking - basically, you can’t right click a link from within the search results and copy the path, instead, you’re copying a Google-based URL which then redirects to the page you want to visit. Plus, it adds some extra options such as removing ads, adding additional links to stuff like WayBackMachine, showing favicons in the search results, and so on.

Favicon Picker

If a site you visit doesn’t have a favicon, yet you visit it often and want to put it in your bookmarks toolbar, it won’t have a favicon visible. This annoys me, so, I generally always change the favicon if it’s either ugly, or doesn’t exist. Sadly, this extension does not work on Firefox 3, last time I tried, which is a pity (enabling it crashed Firefox for me). If anyone has a fix, please do share it.

Update: Just found out there’s actually a Favicon Picker v3, which can be found here.

Foxmarks Bookmarks Synchronizer

An invaluable tool (saved my owned bookmarks several times in the past from ‘accidents’), which backs up your bookmarks to either Foxmarks’ site or your own FTP server. Also very handy if you have multiple PCs, and don’t want the fuss of keeping them updated all the time.

FxIF

My latest extension, thanks to Pandya’s aforementioned article, this shows EXIF data for images - stuff like the camera model, apeture, and so on. Pretty simple really. Example photo used can be found here.

Greasemonkey

This highly useful extension enabled the modification of various web pages, to enhance them or change the layout or feel. I use a couple of Grasemonkey scripts including Flickr Rich Edit, Flickr Buddy Icon Reply, Flickr Camera Images, Flickr Multi Group Sender, and deviantART MCF Bypass.

President Bush Countdown

Not really useful, but it shows that he’ll be kicked out of office soon. Hurrah!

Server Spy

Shows what software the server is running. For example, on my blog: Apache/2.2.8 (Unix) mod_ssl/2.2.8 OpenSSL/0.9.7a DAV/2 mod_auth_passthrough/2.1 mod_bwlimited/1.4 FrontPage/5.0.2.2635. See the above President Bush screenshot to see what Server Spy looks like in the status bar, too.

ShowIP

Another server tool, this shows what IP address the server is that hosts the site. Again, as an example, my blog is on 91.186.27.166. It’s also intelligent, and shows any additional IPs for that site if you require so. See the above President Bush screenshot to see what ShowIP looks like in the status bar, too.

Stylish

Similar to Greasemonkey, but more for modifying the look and feel of sites then adding features. I use a couple of Stylish scripts including Firefox 3 Mac OS X - Favicons on Bookmark Bar, Flickr Vista Fonts, and IMDb - dark blue redesign.

User Agent Switcher

For stubborn sites that refuse to let me in because I use Firefox / OS X.

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Anyway, that’s all I use, feel free to suggest any more, or, post your own in the comments.

Sorry for last night’s downtime. Turns out trying beta versions of software isn’t a very good idea (even more so when you don’t backup first), I somehow managed to mess up the permissions (I think), and overwrite the themes and plugins, which made the site unvisitable for about 24 hours.

Should all be working again, thanks to Minthost’s backups (and Jonathan’s help). >_<

Update (17th July 08): Sucessfully updated to Wordpress 2.6 final.