I am pretty sure many have seen the news about the 15 Royal Navy servicemen captured by Iranian forces and can't help but feel the whole incident is smeared in politics with our poor UK servicemen caught right in the middle. I think its rather bad manners for Iran to act in the way it has, if it want's to start being treated as a fair country of this world it has really got to stop pulling off these shenanigans, what's more disconcerting is the fact Iran has done this once before when they captured 6 UK service men who were patrolling the Shatt al-Arab waterway on behalf of the Iraqi government. Even if the UK servicemen were in the wrong (and I am not saying they were) it was totally against the Geneva convention for them to be paraded on Iranian TV blind folded and then made to believe that they were going to be assassinated.

No doubt the Iranian government will play this incident for all it is worth. If anything's to go by they will force the UK servicemen to admit they were in Iranian waters (because forcing someone to say something means it actually happened), they will probably parade them on Iranian TV and then secretly talking to US and UK diplomats hint that it would also be nice if those sanctions the UN wanted to impose on Iran for their nuclear program suddenly went away.

Iran really hasn't done it self any favors and is probably quite aware that America has Iran next in its spotlight especially now that evidence has been released showing that Tehran has been engineering a lot of the insurgency near Basra. Iran's seizure of the UK servicemen is probably what it sees as a carefully constructed move, it will want to play very carefully in order to get some concessions out of US and the UK around it nuclear program. Iran could get its way because the UK public is keen on getting the servicemen returned promptly or the move could backfire horribly on Iran and it that case they may just blame an Iranian figure lower down the food chain for the incident. It is also quite easy to see how carefully it was organized by the Iranians who swooped on the UK servicemen with not 2 but six boats surely those boats would have been pulled in from other patrol areas?

Tags: iran iraq UK servicemen

If you read my blog you may have remembered the post I did about Backing up to hard disk in response to my friend Owens blog about the risks of tape backup. And it appears as Owen mentioned it in his blog the worst case scenario happened to an IT staff member in the Alaska Revenue Department accidentally formatted the wrong hard disk, the backup hard disk and what was more the tape backups they discovered were unreadable! His little error wiped out an account worth $38 billion!

This has got to be one of the worst case scenarios I have ever heard of. However luckily enough they still had their vast paper archives they had scanned everything into the system from and would need to start again from scratch scanning in 800,000 records! Good old paper hey? It doesn't matter if its slightly wrong on the paper, the papers crumpled or torn you can still read it :)

I bet that IT department will be doing a serious review of their backup strategy.

Well the PS3 Launched but the reaction seemed a bit mixed and Microsoft rained on the parade with quotes such as "Sony.....you're late!". The biggest launch was in London however over the rest of Europe in some cases the press outnumbered people purchasing the consoles. I was just wondering if the price was what was putting people off the console? I'd really like to own a PS3 but will probably have to wait until they became a bit more affordable. I was hoping Microsoft may have brought the price of the XBOX down but sadly that didn't happen yesterday.

I have just been looking at the Apple TV which is available here in the UK now. I think its a brilliant idea, the only problem I have with it is there is absolutely no TV series or main stream movies available for download from iTunes in the UK which is how the Apple TV box gets its content. I can see it making much more sense in the US where you can download episodes of popular shows such as Battle Star Galactica for a couple of dollars.but nothing like that exists for the UK iTunes market. The only video content they seem to have is music videos and I wouldn't purchase this device just to watch music videos I can do that on MTV. Unless you start ripping your own movies to play on the Apple TV box I can't really see much point in its launch over here yet.

I think Apple need to do some serious investing into on demand TV content, they have the hardware all they need now is the content. On demand TV is set to be rather big, Virgin Media and BT has already released a set-top box's that provide on demand TV however BT doesn't seem to be very good at promoting it as half of the people I speak to about it did have a clue it was out there. Come on Apple where's the content?

Messenger programs have started to become a part of daily life ever since the early use of ICQ, AOL Messenger, Yahoo Messenger, MSN Messenger and Google Talk. ICQ was the program in my opinion that really got the ball rolling (for me anyway). Without thinking about it we log onto one or more of these messenger programs every time we turn our machines on. I have about 4 on my machine that advertise to all my contacts that I am online. It has become such a routine that when friends don't see you singing in they start to panic and here are some of the hilarious comments I an friends have made.

• "I haven't seen <name> online is he still alive?"
• "I haven't seen <name> online has he been hit by a bus?"
• "I thought you were kidnapped or something"
• "Did your broadband go down?"
• "Is your computer broken?"
• "I thought I would call because you haven't been online in a while and I wondered if you were ok"

And the list goes on. Isn't it funny that our messenger programs have started to become a heart beat for all our friends to see that tells them we are still around? I'm pretty sure some enterprising person could make a program that monitors your messenger etc you add MSNAlive as a contact to your MSN and it notices when you haven't been online in a while and notifies someone it could be useful for people who travel a lot (like back packers) checking their email intermittently which usually logs into a messenger program. Neat idea hu?

Interesting article on The Independent website about Sky's grip on Pay TV. We all know how much control Sky has over the latest imported TV episodes, Sports and even pay per view movies and in its latest move withdrawing its popular TV channels from Virgin Media. They also took an 18% share in ITV in what some saw as a deliberate attempt to stop Virgin Media buying it and making it their flagship channel. Sky have made a lot of noise in the industry especially with it wanting to start taking up pay per view slots on Top Up TV. I was wondering how long Sky Three would last on freeview, or would they be placing Sky One on Pay per View on the platform again like it was in the old days of ITV Digital?

My wife has recently started doing blogging tutorials about Quark if you need some pointers on how to do some tricky Quark functionality with bullets and tables etc take a look

I am a huge fan of the Playstation ever since I got my Playstation 2 I have had hours of entertainment playing games on this console. However I noticed after a while I was buying PS2 games played them once or twice and then they stayed on the shelf collecting dust. Playing games started to become a bit of a task they weren't the type of games you used to play on the old Atari consoles where you could have a quick game of pong or space invaders. Each game has an intro and loads a bit like a movie its a great experience for those ultimate games but it gets a bit annoying each time you load the game. But none the less I still loved the console it provided a great Karaoke machine and it was my first DVD player (a darn cheap one at the time). My natural thought was to go onto the PS3 when it came out over Christmas 2006, but then it didn't turn up in the UK. The only console available was the Wii, I had heard little about the console until I started seeing people playing on it on TV and in shops, what a cool idea! Why hadn't anyone else thought of a such a cool way to play computer games. The Wii was a great console for playing fun games and it had made me forget about getting my hands on the PS3 it was a console that allowed all your friends to join in your games instead of waiting one at a time and then trying to figure out all the different combo's.

Now that I have a Wii console I want a more serious console for playing serious games and when I looked at the XBox 360 I was amazed by the game Gears of War there was nothing that seemed close to it on either of the other consoles and I am considering buying the console just because of the game. Also the fact that the PS3 will cost £429 from Amazon and the XBOX 360 is £269 and I have heard a rumor that the XBOX 360 may come down by £50-£80 in price when the PS3 launches. I am wondering who will pay £429 for a games console you can buy a plasma TV for that price in some places.  So what game will convince me to buy the PS3 or shell out so much cash, the truth is there isn't on at the moment and the console is much to expensive. I just hope Sony hasn't overstretched itself a bit too much trying to bring out the PS3 which could probably make or break Sony as the leader in the games console market. 

Is it my imagination or has software that used to take up little of our precious computer memory suddenly spawned into giant memory hungry monsters?

One of the biggest culprits I have seen through the years has been Yahoo messenger and ICQ. I have found them so bad that I eventually ended up removing them from my machine why do they need to take up 55megs of memory each when Google Talk only takes up 16meg? I remember when these programs would load instantly and only take up about 10meg if that!. I just can't understand what else they could have put into these programs to make them so chunky, half the features you will probably never use. One of my other pet hates is how long Adobe Acrobat Reader takes to load? Why does it have to load just about every single plugin under the sun wait about 3 minutes and then ask you if you would like to upgrade it before you get to read the PDF document you clicked on from an Internet site! That is so annoying so much so I decided to install an older version of Acrobat that didn't do it. I think as memory starts to become cheaper (and it already has) companies will start minding less about how much memory their programs take up on your machine.

Tags: Computer Memory

Check this out for fee calls over the Internet. Its a bit like a Skype interface and I am still not sure how they are able to offer 300 free minutes of calls but it works! :)

How cool is this? Using your iPod video as a a screen for your Wii console. Probably not the most usable but cool none the less. Why? because you can do it? :) Although you would probably need a degree in electronics to do it... I would anyway :)

I've noticed a large selection of people placing adverts into newspapers offering to fix your PC from 15 pounds and hour to 60 pounds and hour depending on where you look. Some offer no fix no fee and its pretty cool idea you are providing a service to people who may need it. Unfortunately among the elite guys who can fix problems and don't charge you the earth there are far to many who take advantage of people who haven't got a clue on how computers work to fix them. These people are kind of held at the mercy of others to help them fix the issue, I for one don't have a great knowledge of building and masonry but that's where I ask my father who comes around to help out and I return the favor with any problems he is having with his computer.

I have seen far to many of friends, relatives and friends of relatives who have got into the money pit issue on their computers where they have spent so much money solving problems on their machines where they finally get told by a relative "Hey Rory knows about computers why don't you give him a call?". I usually get some call about them running low on memory or their machine not starting up properly or its lost all its settings. They have taken it down to the local PC shop where they have now spent upwards of 70 pounds to try and get the issue solved. I usually end up taking one look at the PC fuming at how much they had to spend for in some cases to fix what was quite a small issue such as them just needing to clear out those large videos on their Hard Disk they took by mistake when testing out the camcorder that connects to the PC for video editing. In many cases I am offered money but refuse and end up getting book vouchers, free monetary advice or a plate of home made cookies in return.

So in the good spirit of the web, if anyone reading this blog needs some computer advice and doesn't mind me posting articles about the advice I give please drop me a line and I'll see what I can do!

I'm sure everyone's seen just what a hot topic the environment has really started to become and it appears that of late this has all started to center around carbon emissions. I suppose the thing that worries me the most is that people have been lead to believe that carbon is a bad thing. Carbon is basically one of the building blocks of life we are after all carbon based life forms without carbon we probably wouldn't exist. Just like most things, too much of something can sometimes cause an imbalance,  we breath in oxygen and exhale carbon dioxide CO2, trees take in Carbon Dioxide and let out Oxygen in return through photosynthesis.

Its a simple enough process but there are other things that let out carbon such as cars, planes, factories and power plants. While the majority of carbon dioxide is actually not made by man but occurs naturally itself in the atmosphere from the oceans, volcanoes and natural biodegrading of plant life, the small percentage we contribute to the environment is thought to be enough to offset enough of the worlds CO2 to cause a global warming effect.  However people do not seem to realize that carbon is only one of the gasses thought to be responsible for global warming in addition to CO2 there is Methane, Nitrous oxide, CFC-12 etc. and what appears to have happened is a whole industry has sprung up around Carbon many calling themselves "carbon neutral" companies. There are organizations that have risen to start profiting on the idea of carbon credits. Now you can trade the right to create pollution and in theory if there is to much pollution the price of carbon credits goes up because everyone wants them or they in theory could face a fine.

How they measure how much carbon a company creates from production is probably another question but surely such a system can only help the world if major manufacturing countries such as those in the Asia economies sign up to the carbon credit idea? Another thing that appears to have got African states annoyed many with young economies only just starting is the imposing of these restraints on them. "Look how easy it is for you to go green" they are told."You have so much sunshine why not use solar power?". What many people do not understand is that solar energy is not enough by itself to power manufacturing in these countries and solar panels are still relatively quite expensive. Solar energy is also not very reliable, subject to popular belief they do get stormy weather in Africa and the sun isn't always available. I agree that more money should be spent investigating cleaner energy, but people in the developing world are often unable to afford it.

Maybe the cost of renewable energy should be offset against the tax's on fossil fuels?

It was my birthday on the 14th March and my wife got me these Cool Mini Tanks

These little tanks brought hours of amusement, charge them for a few minutes and then let the war begin! Each person gets their own remote in order to control these little tanks, once you shoot you're opponents tank its whirls around in circles for a second before you can commence again. The only problem I have found is the charge doesn't last long enough and you only get about 4 games before you have to charge them. The nice thing about these tanks is that you don't get shocked like the shocking tanks we used from the Joke Shop

Tags: shocking tanks

This has got to be one of the funniest videos I have seen in a long time using apple products to purvey a more political message.