406 Not Acceptable

This happened ages ago, but was rather annoying. Must have been a all nighter due to some project… lets hope this does not occur on Monday night/Tuesday morning…

In a strange move, you can’t move an image down the page in Wordpress 2.6 if there is no text above it. Makes me think: bug, feature, or hidden button? Mmm… medium picture size is tiny too, I don’t really want to resize my photos down to 640×480 every time. That images shows what Wordpress does to a nice 5 mega pixel picture if you let it loose.

Will there be another picture next week? Will there be the shock of another post tomorrow? Who knows, accidentally stumble here thanks to the wonders of Google to find out!

I couldn’t believe I got this working, but you can run Crysis on the Eee. For those of you running Windows XP or Vista on your Eee, this is a real treat. I don’t think you will have any luck running Crysis under Wine or VirtualBox as the Eee barely copes with the game in the first place.

First you need to be comfortable with overclocking to attempt this and have upgraded your memory. You’ll need to be up to 2 or 4GB of ram, as you need some of the space to install parts of the game on. Running directly from memory makes the game run much smoother.

Please check the post’s date.

With my ASUS Eee Pc at 630Mhz and Crysis on medium settings at 800×480 I get only 12 fps. Once I put the processor up to its true speed of 900Mhz I got the game going at 18fps. Finally with my Eee running at 1035Mhz I managed to squeeze out 20fps, just enough to make the game stable. This was done with numerous tweaks to the game.

Although the game is demanding, the small resolution of the Eee makes it playable. Desktops struggle as users attempt to play the game at resolutions about twice that of the Eee, which require far more power.

Anyway, I can’t write up a full guide now as it’s getting late. So enjoy the pictures. Click the links to open the 5 megapixel shots, you can see my monitors dead pixel in the last…

Crysis Eee Pc screenshot 1

Crysis Eee Pc screenshot 2

Crysis Eee Pc screenshot 3 (You can even see my Eee’s dead pixel!)

If you haven’t realised by now, this was an April Fools joke.

This picture just had to make it one week:

We got bored waiting for someone to turn up at the pub (and our food,) so we had some fun. The crazy stuff computer science students get up to!

A nice find on Bristol road:

 

 

Not sure if the sign is still there, the road works are probably finished now.

All the universities in Birmingham are currently ’spamming’ the city with advertisements. Now for the smaller Universities — read “fake universities” these places are really just revamped sixth forms that now offer courses for over 18s — this is probably necessary; however, the big boys are at it too.

What I don’t Understand is the University of Birmingham, the oldest and most prestigious university in the city, is advertising just as much as these ‘unknown’ universities. I wonder how many people you would have to ask who live in Birminham, or the surrounding areas, if they have heard of the university before you find someone who hasn’t?

This is as dumb as an advertisement for the Eiffel tower in Paris…

Remember this blog does have a lighter side!

This is what the Spar on the University of Birmingham’s campus think a ‘large croissant’ is, and would like to charge us poor students 45p ($1) for:

Maybe for an insect that’s a large croissant… another example of rip-off Britain, or just rip-off campus. Everywhere on campus is really expensive; for example, a cruddy (pretty much stale) sandwich costs around £2 ($4) when you could go to subway for just £3 (or £1.99 for the sub of the day.) Sometimes I wonder why my credit card isn’t maxed out yet.

For reference, the milk carton next to the croissants is a 500ml carton (just under a pint,) for you Americans it’s just a tiny bit bigger than your ordinary can of Pepsi.

As I stated in the last post, I went to the Cinema tonight to watch Untraceable (technically yesterday.) The film was okay, nothing special. I think the director wasn’t sure whether he wanted to make a horror (effectively a Saw clone) or some kind of thriller; as the film is never really scary (heck it doesn’t even have the typical ‘jump’ moments,) yet neither too ‘thrillery’. If that word exists, which it doesn’t.

Anyway, me and my flatmate decided to grab the über large drink and popcorn for the free refill you get. Yes they may be about £3 ($5/6) each, but with a refill you get your moneys worth (well in relative cinema terms.) This is usually fine, expect this time it didn’t work out quite so well. You see I went during a dull moment in the film (just after someone died) to refill the coke, as my flatmate bought some very salty popcorn and the so called ‘bar’ on the second floor of the cinema was shut. So I went down the escalator, which took an age as another film had just finished, and made my way to the main food area. Guess what, also shut!

The guys behind the till were useless and refused to just refill a drink, seriously it would take 5 seconds! So I was left with a very dry and salty mouth to trundle back up to the second floor. At which I saw this ‘highly affordable’ drinks vending machine:

 

 

I was forced to buy this rip off coke, as I would have probably died

Anyway, we decided to collect some of the the other large drinks cups left in the cinema to bring next time, none of them were marked as refills. That will make up for the £1.70 (£3) I paid for a bloody bottle of coke! We’ll just make the bottom soggy with some water and ask for a new cup — you don’t expect me to drink from them do you!

Sometimes google just isn’t enough, sometimes we need to get a map out.

Click the picture for a full size… picture of course! I can’t stop laughing at ‘The compass rose shaped island’ and the ‘Gays of Web 2.0′.