Yesterday, the premiere of Tekzilla got released. Tekzilla is a technology related show hosted by Jessica Corbin and Patrick Norton. The show delivers product reviews, computer help, tech tips plus do it yourself projects. The show has everything tech, from iPods to camcorders, HD to the Internet, anything and everything.

I initially was disappointed because this show was replacing one of my old favourites, InDigital. This tainted what I though about it and went into watching the first episode expecting it to suck. Now that I have seen it, I don’t think that it was that InDigital was ending, I don’t think that it was because something was replacing it, it was because I will miss the host I have grown to love over the past two years. I will miss Hahn and Wil.

Anyway, the episode blew me away. I loved it, really loved it. There is not much I can say about this show but you have to check it out. I do believe Revision3 has a winner here and I can’t wait to see it grow as time goes on. I would hope that we do see special guests on the show to make it more lively and interesting, and no, I’m not saying Patrick and Jessica are boring or will become boring, far from it actually.

The first episode was basic. They showed a great review on a video on demand box, they had some great tips on making better looking videos by showing camera techniques, they showed a battery hack to use a big 12 battery to power your handheld devices and they also showed you a nice piece of software for RAM diagnostics. You really have to check out the show yourself to witness how great it is. If I was rating this show, five dragons out of five dragons.

It had been 11 months since I bought my last external hard drive. All the drives in my house were close to maxing out. Between the 3 hard drives, the external, the one in the desktop and the one in the laptop, there was 30gb of free space combined. Some people would think that is a lot of space, others would say that it is time for a new drive. I knew it was definitely time for a new drive.

The past week, I have downloaded heaps of TV shows due to the releases of the new seasons. I ended up downloading about 25 different shows this week. If each episode is 350mb, thats about 9gb for the week. I would definitely be needing another drive if I planned on downloading full season of each of these shows.

This morning, we were going to the local computer shop to pick up a monitor for the old computer. The previous one had died (and smelt bad too I may add.) We got a nice 19″ LCD monitor, a major upgrade from the 5 year old 15″ CRT display. While picking up that, I grabbed an external drive off the shelf, a Western Digital My Book 500gb. This hard drive will be plenty of room for the next 11 months, hopefully. I currently have plans on getting another drive of double capacity in 11 months time just to start a nice trend.

I copied all the TV shows, movies, and PSP games from my old drive to the new one, leaving only documents and video podcasts to take up space on the old external drive. I really like this external drive too, it is much better than any other one I have seen and tried. It looks very nice and words nice too. The best feature of the drive is that there are no buttons, no switches, it turns it self of with the computer or if you safely remove the drive. This means that I don’t have to worry about powering the drive and such. This would be perfect as a second storage drive for a desktop computer as it would power up and down with the computer without the user having to do anything.

The total of all drives at home now reach 1000gb, which sounds like a lot of storage but really it isn’t. I could easily use it in a short period of time. I am extremely happy with my purchase and would definitely recommend a Western Digital My Book to anyone looking for an external drive. Now I just need to download more TV shows to store on it and need more time to watch everything. Then in a year or so, its time for a terabyte drive for me!

I listen to a few podcasts, about five weekly ones and a daily one. Most of the audio podcasts are done by the TWiT network. I also watch a few video podcasts, ones brought by Revision3. I have been watching and listening to these shows for a couple of years now. In the past years, I have never had to say goodbye to one of these shows that have become a part of my routine, part of my life. On Tuesday, a podcast that I had watched since its third episode, released its final episode ever.

InDigital is a show that looks at and reviews gadgets and products. I loved watching the show, it was very informative and made me want some of the products, and made me not want to even touch others. The hosts were very respected and all round great people. They had three awesome hosts, Hahn Choi, Jessica Corbin and Wil Wheaton, and I am going to miss them heaps.

Losing a show is a hard thing to do. Watching the flashbacks and everything brought tears to one eyes. I was not read to bid farewell to this excellent show. This show definitally got shut down before its time. It still had heaps of potential to grow and it is unfortunate that it wasn’t given a fair chance for survival. Revision3 gave the producer, Hahn, the options of moving the show to San Fransisco or ending it. He choose to end it because he didn’t want to move. I don’t understand why they can’t keep it the same as they had been doing.

Anyway, farewell my friend, I will miss you. Revision3 are replacing the show with something similar which will premiere tomorrow. I don’t know if I will like the show but hopefully it can fill some of the hole that Revision3 left after it pulled InDigital. :’(

Last week, Digg implemented new profiles for users. Things all seemed great despite some of the negative feedback. The site became more social, which I believe was ultimately their goal with the new profiles. Randoms started adding me as friends. I decided to leave them as my fans and not make the relationship mutual for the simple reason that I do not give a shit about them or what they digg on the site.

I had the shouts set so anyone could shout to me. The first should I received was from a friend that added me. At the time, I though he was a random like the twenty or so other people who added me but it turns out, it was somebody I knew from the internet. Thanks to the shout feature, I was able to identify him, and add him to my friends list. Now there is a good use for shouts. My friends had also shouted me an article they submitted and that is fine too, I can help them try and get teir story to the front page, like they have done to my stories in the past. Another good thing I like about shouts.

Yesterday, I finally got a piece of the dark side of shouts, abuse. A random added me and then kept sending shouts every ten minutes to everyone talking telling us to digg the story he submitted. First off, I don’t give a shit about randoms, and secondly, I don’t want to Digg nonsense crap that you submit. Also for the record, if you submit 300 stories to Digg and none of them ever reach the front page, you should just give up because no one cares about the shit you find interesting. Leave Digg and go make love to your WoW girlfriend (who is actually a guy.) Anyway, back on topic. This really annoyed me, especially the email notifications of this spam. I needed a way to shut this thing and prevent him from spamming me.

Trying to shut this guy up was an extremely annoying experience, especially since the ways of preventing him, were too affective and I didn’t want that. The only option I had was to only let my friends shout to me. This may sound like a good idea but I don’t think that I should prevent other people from shouting to me because one douche spams me. There should be a way I can block him so I no longer have to take his spam. Anyway, I did that and 12 hours later I put it back so everyone can shout to me. I haven’t had spam since. I don’t want to miss out on long lost online friends because of some idiot, it’s not fair.

It is a shame that one douchebag, whether it is on Digg, another site, or even in real life can ruin something for everyone. What sucks more is that we can’t do anything about it or we are limited to what we can do to prevent it from affecting us. I simple block would be sufficient but we don’t have the option to do that. Please let me block this person, also if you haven’t already, delete him. No one will miss him and its not like he did much for Digg, only ruin it and piss off some of its users.

I have been using the Firefox web browser for a long time, from version 1. I remember the days when everyone used Internet Explorer and only web savvy people had Firefox. I remember the days when I would recruit people to join our party, leave the dark side. Real life friends, online friends, random people that we had contacts with, everyone and anyone, we recruited. I love Firefox, it is one of the best things that has happened to the internet.

As you can tell, I am a long time user, but everything I have said so far is irrelevant to the point I am trying to get across here. I believe the search bar is useless. I can’t remember the last time I have used it, could be two months to half a year. You might think that is silly, why would I type google.com or wikipedia.org into the address bar everytime I wanted to search for something, why don’t I just use the search bar. The reason I don’t use the search bar is because there is an easier way to do it.

I suppose most you you have Google as the default search engine in Firefox. Do you switch the search bar to Wikipedia when you want to find something on that? Clicking on the search bar to change the search engine or even type in a query is a waste of time. There is a much more efficient and easier way of doing it. Why wouldn’t you search in half the time it takes you to use the search bar? Why wouldn’t you query Wikipedia in a quarter of the time it takes to use the search bar?

Firefox has something built into it called Quick Searches. This is when you type the search into the address bar and it goes in querys the appropriate page, in the same way it does in the search bar, only its quicker for the user. Typing “google <query>” into the Firefox address bar will do exactly the same as it would if you used Google search in the search bar, just it is much quicker to type that into the address bar of a new window than to click the search bar and type the query. Typing “wp <query>” will do the exact same thing as it would if you searched Wikipedia using the search bar, only much quicker because you don’t have to change the search engine or navigate to the website.

Learning these “shortcuts” will save you a little time searching. But one these shortcuts have become second nature, the search bar becomes useless unless you use a search engine other than Google or search on a different site. For me, I only use Google and Wikipedia, and may others will only use those two sites for searching. I have been trying to find use for the search bar since I no longer need it. I could remove it but then my browser would look odd or I could leave it on Google for aesthetic reasons. I have decided to make it YouTube search. Not that I use YouTube much, let alone search for videos but it gives the search bar a reason to be there, providing functionality I might need that only it can provide. Then again, I can still do without the search bar.

Today was the day I had been counting down to for a few months now. I had a countdown gadget on my sidebar to assist with the counting down the this date. Finally it was here, Volume Two of Heroes, my favourite TV Show ever.

After watching a few of the previews released, I became worried that everything was going to be different from season one. Yes, things were different from season one, including the introduction of many new characters, new heroes. They didn’t really answer the main questions we were left with in season one except for one, are the Petrelli brothers alive. They also managed to add many new questions to the list.

Overall, I really enjoyed this episode of Heroes. I am not going to spoil it for you but if you haven’t already seen it, definitely go and download and watch the episode. If you haven’t seen the first season, you are an idiot, and you should probably go get the DVD set (or download them all for free.) This is going to be another awesome season of Heroes coming up!

Today Team M33 released their 3.71 Custom Firmware for PSP. The major thing that this adds is support for 3.71. It had been a while since the last release and the day before they released a statement saying that the firmware was ready but they were delaying it for various reasons. The release also came with another surprise, M33 is Dark_Alex, the king of Homebrew and Custom Firmware.

I hadn’t updated since 3.10 OE-A and I though now would be a good time to update. There were various reasons why I had held off for this long, one being that I was happy with the firmware I was on and everything we working perfectly and there was no compelling reason to update when there was the possibility of breaking all the stuff I was using. There was also a small chance of bricking my PSP but I like to feel I have the hang of it, for I have downgraded and upgraded 3 other PSPs other than my own.

Then when Dark_Alex announced his retirement of the scene, I was a bit worried about who would take over and release custom firmware. Was someone going to take over or was I doomed to 3.40 OE and the eventual death of custom firmware and go back to the official, most likely 4.XX. A new group rushed in and took the spot, Team M33. They said they reversed-engineered the OE firmware to create their own M33 firmware. When they released it, there were mixed opinions about this group. Some disliked them and wanted Dark_Alex back, other accepted them and decided to worship this new group that has entered the scene.

I was unsure. I didn’t want to go out and update the M33. I waited for the outcomes of other people. I also had a worse fear of everything breaking if I update to this M33 firmware. I quietly hoped to myself, that one day he would return, the king, Dark_Alex. I stopped participating in PSP homebrew but I did keep one eye on it. As time passed, Sony released more official homebrew updates, Team M33 were closely behind them releasing their custom firmware and a thin layer of dust covered the plastic enclosure of my PlayStation Portable.

Eventually I decided that it was time to wipe down my PSP, give in and update my PSP, for better or worse. 3.70 arrived from Sony so I waited for M33 to release their custom firmware of it. This was my entry back in, to bring life back into my PSP, hopefully. I waited and waited until today, it was released! The news was also that Dark_Alex is M33, which gave me comfort and made it definite I was taking the plunge, again. I eagerly downloaded all the files needed for me to make the big jump, from 3.10 OE to 3.71 M33. I did it. The process was a lot smoother than previous updates, it even used the official Sony updater instead of the black and white text screen. It was nice.

After the update was complete, I went to snoop around. My PSP crashed as I entered the setting menu, but this is nothing new. I then had a play with all of the new features. Themes is the biggest update from what I had, other than that, it was little updates that were either bug fixes or something I couldn’t/didn’t use. I had a play with the themes I downloaded and it looks nice and different but I went back to the original default look. Themes are just a fad and the one Sony has released are a little ugly. I can’t wait for people to make their own theme, those are going to be leet!

I also tested playing some ISO’s that I had on my memory stick. These ran amazingly, with no problems. I didn’t even have to modify the clock speed in the recovery menu and even online worked for Ratchet and Clank, it didn’t in my previous custom firmware. Also my favourite homebrew application, PSPTube, still worked in the firmware. I was extremely happy with the update and would recommend everyone update to 3.71 M33 now! Custom Firmware is AMAZING!