johng Blog

iPhone 3G to 3GS Upgrade

John Griffin — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 13:54:31 +0000

I took the plunge and treated myself to a brand spanking new iPhone 3GS this weekend. After much dilly dallying I decided to upgrade from the iPhone 3G because cashinmyfone were offering good rates for trade ins that could cover the cost of buying out my contract. Getting the handset proved to be a bit of mission.

After finally tracking one down at the Apple store in Westfields I had to spend 75 minutes in there going through everything. O2 were not very helpful and were trying to stop the buyout from happening in the Apple store. Of course Apple have been doing contract buyouts for a while, it just depends if the call centre worker they call to verify it knows that.

But I have it and I’m happy. It’s fast as hell, it has a compass and the camera is significantly better (there are hundreds of reviews online if you need to know). Oh and now I’m inline with the yearly release cycle the upgrade hit won’t be to bad next year.

Giant Bomb Achievement Tracking

John Griffin — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 17:06:54 +0000

I’m really liking the way Giant Bomb have integrated game achievements into their site recently. You just import your Xbox Live, Steam or WoW account and they track how your doing using some fun metrics. You get graded on how well you have done on each game and in a big nod to Blizzard each achievement has a rarity associated with it.

The great thing is that this is all based on community data, not what they deem to be hard to achieve, so you get a much better idea of who is a hardcore achievement hunter. It makes me even more proud when I look at my Crackdown page. Aside from that it’s just nice to have all your achivements under one roof, and they will be adding PS3 trophies eventually…if that’s your kind of thing.

Star Wars Old Republic – Watch this!

John Griffin — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 21:09:52 +0000

Watch it people. Is that Malak? Oh yes!

Now Hosted on Linode

John Griffin — Fri, 29 May 2009 11:43:43 +0000

This blog is now running from the fine VPS servers at Linode. I really needed root access with my rails work increasing and Dreamhost just couldn’t cut it. Spending half a day trying to install a single gem is no fun, spending 10 minutes installing an entire rails stack to a new server is.

Best Google Reader iPhone App – Byline

John Griffin — Tue, 26 May 2009 21:17:59 +0000

I never followed up my previous post but I found far and away the best app for reading RSS on the iPhone is Byline. It syncs brilliantly with Google Reader and the caching features are great, buy it now!

3 Things I Want From A Google Reader iPhone App

John Griffin — Thu, 26 Feb 2009 23:33:01 +0000

Fast, reliable syncing
Reverse chronological sorting
Image downloading

Gris and Feeds come close but neither can do all three.

Red Ring of Death

John Griffin — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 12:18:33 +0000

It finally happened.

Dark Knight Thoughts

John Griffin — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 01:15:02 +0000

Can’t sleep.

It was hard to avoid the hype on this one. Especially after it came out a week earlier in the US and then I had to wait slightly longer to get a chance to catch it on IMAX. But nether the less I managed my expectations (after being burned before) and walked out completely blown away by the movie. Its strange walking into a movie you know is good before you have seen it.

IMAX is incredible. The improvement in the definition and clarity of the image in IMAX shots is staggering and really gives it a completely unique feel. There’s so much to look at and its all so clear – it really proved to me that IMAX can be used effectively in Hollywood films and not just be relegated to crappy educational movies. The switching between IMAX film and regular film was not a problem either. You have to see this movie in IMAX.

Great pacing, constant tension and epic scale. The pieces were all in place before the movie began so we get straight into the action and story without having to set everything up again. The whole goal of the joker being to prove that everyone is just like him shown and then being proven wrong in ferry scene was very different and climaxed brilliantly. The engrossing final scene with Dent, Batman and Gordon coming back together just proved the joker right in the end, even if he did have to drive Harvey mad. The swerve that led to the death of Rachel was genius. With Dent’s face in the fuel I all but expected him to get incinerated and Batman to rescue Rachel. Unexpectedly Batman goes for Dent, Rachel gets blown up and Dent’s face still gets burned off during the escape!

Which brings me to Heath Ledger. Great job but I think the post death hype got the better of this area of the film. I was expecting him to be darker and even more messed up, but that could just be my reaction to the people around me laughing at the joker cause he made a funny face when he’s actually a fucked up sociopathic mass murderer. Maybe the creepiness didn’t cross over that well here? I don’t know, I enjoyed his performance but I feel it was in a different way to others in the audience.

Can’t think of anything else but I will be seeing it again soon.

MGS4 Reactions and Opinions

John Griffin — Mon, 16 Jun 2008 18:55:57 +0000

Shawn Elliot sums it up nicely.

I was literally screaming at my iPod listening to this week’s 1up Yours podcast. I think I spent half an hour venting to my brother about it and Metal Gear yesterday. I should have recorded it because I am struggling to write it up here.

Suffice to say Shane Bettenhausen and Ryan Payton don’t get it. They are in a bubble that resides up Kojima’s arse.

I find it hard to read game reviews these days, not just for the appauling hyperbole Shawn points out, but for the whole meaningless nature of scores and the subsequent arguement that ensues. MGS4 just highlights the immaturity of the entire enthusiast press be it Edge, IGN or whoever.

Play the game, critique it, done. Your scales and scores are meaningless.

As for MGS4, my opionion can be summed up in one sentence. If I wanted to watch an overly long and overly complex movie I’d go do that, I don’t need a game to do that for me.

Shopping for NAS

John Griffin — Tue, 03 Jun 2008 12:13:54 +0000

I have been shopping around recently for a network attached storage device to see if I can come up with a better solution than my current linux server. One of the main features I am interested in is automatic volume expansion. Basically if I insert a new hard drive the NAS should just handle it and I won’t have to do anything.

Devices such as the Drobo and the ReadyNAS NV+ offer implementations of this but at £400 to £500 without any drives included makes them ridiculously over priced. So I looked back at my linux box and wondered what could be done in software.

The much hyped Sun file system ZFS offers these features and more but with it only being on Solaris and a Linux port not even close I ruled it out a while back. Then I remembered that FreeNAS is BSD based and that ZFS has been ported to FreeBSD 7. Well it turns out that FreeNAS is currently based on FreeBSD 6 but they specifically mention in the roadmap that ZFS support will be coming soon.

So now I just have to wait a bit and soon I will be able to build my own free software alternative to the overpriced Drobo.