Well it officially just ticked over to 2008 in New Zealand. I wish my regular reader a Happy New Year! For the rest of you, New Year, it would be happy if you were a regular, but you aren’t. Best of luck for 2008 and lets hope it brings joy to you and your friends.
Well midnight just passed on my country of New Zealand and it is officially Christmas Day, the 25th of December, 2007. No, I am not going to write anymore today because this is not a long rant and I don’t think it is really a good time for you to be reading a three hundred to seven hundred word rant on something silly, in this case, something about Christmas.
All the staff here are Yum9me’s Journal wish you a happy and safe Christmas. I hope Santa, your parents, and your relatives are all generous and give you what you have been wanting all year. Have a wonderful day! 
Today is the 31st of October, also known as Halloween. To be honest, this is probably the one day I have no idea what on earth is going on. It seems like a day companies made up so they could sell halloween costumes and decorations and candy. Its silly how we fall for it and waste our money on these things. Its not like Easter or Christmas which have a greater purpose than Chocolate and Presents. I decided to get the Wikipedia to tell me a little about Halloween. This is what he said to me.
Halloween is a holiday celebrated on the night of October 31. Traditional activities include trick-or-treating, Halloween festivals, bonfires, costume parties, visiting “haunted houses” and viewing horror films. Halloween originated from the Pagan festival Samhain, celebrated among the Celts of Ireland and Great Britain. Irish and Scottish immigrants carried versions of the tradition to North America in the nineteenth century. Other western countries embraced the holiday in the late twentieth century. Halloween is now celebrated in several parts of the western world, most commonly in Ireland, the United States, Canada, Puerto Rico, and the United Kingdom.
In my city, we don’t do any of that. I haven’t had any trick or treaters, festivals, bonfires or people dressed up in silly costumes. They do however have some Halloween programming, especially when the day fits in with a weekend. I suppose it is mostly celebrated overseas, in the United States, and not in the small country of New Zealand. I would one day like to see what the fuss is all about and got play in the US on this day in the future.
Well I didn’t get to go trick or treating for candies, actually, I have never been trick or treating in my life. I ended up going virtual trick or treating on some random server with Ketsueki and cowy. I dressed up as a Little Ghost and they dressed up as a Big Scary Monster and a Psycho with Chainsaw. It was fun and we were doing it for an amazing one and a half hours. Now that s a long time to be doing it online, especially when you don’t get real candies. Ketty and Cowy were so nice and I thank them heaps for taking me e-trick-or-treating. I hope we do it again next year!
This time next month, in 30 days, I will have sat my first exam. I hate exams, but then again, who doesn’t. I really have no idea how to prepare for exams. Last year, I did absolutely nothing to prepare and I suppose it reflected in my average grades. Teachers and parents keep harping me to study but I have no idea what that means. I hate reading over my notes, especially since I have no real notes that I would consider acceptable to read over. Only my Maths teacher actually gives sufficient notes and the other ones just write crap on the board that you copy into your books somewhere between answering activities and preparing for tests and such. Even if I try to read over notes, I always end up falling to sleep, or even get distracted by some technological device, aka the computer. If I was to leave the computer, it would take me a month to catch up on everything I have missed, something which I am not prepared to do. I guess I will do another “Jonathan” and do absolutely nothing and get worse than average grades this year. I think I am going to be screwed!!!
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!
Yesterday was International Talk Like A Pirate Day. Many websites partook in this event by either changing the site for the day or creating content. Here are some of the pirate shenanigans I saw yesterday.
Pirate torrent sites, such as The Pirate Bay and Digital Hive changed their logo for the day. The Pirate bay changed their logo to a pirate with text saying “Talk Like A Pirate Day” on it. Digital Hive changed theirs to a pirate and changed the name to Pirate Hive for the day.
Flickr put a pirate flag on their logo for the day. They also had an easter egg in the site, you could change the language to “Arr,” aka, pirate talk. This changed a lot of the text on the site to pirate terms, for example, the golden bars that normally say “new” on them said “gold” instead. They also change some of the words, such as “map” and “contacts” to “treasure map” and “crew.” There were also many “Arr’s” on the site.
Joy of Tech done a cool tech comic, “Rationalize Like a Pirate” Day. The comic consists of a boy watching a pirated movie and his mother behind his asking if he is watching a pirated movie and saying that it is not good. The boy then says that it is not bad, it is green because it is protecting the environment.
All of the sites that made changes have now reverted to their original look with not remains of this day with only screenshots people have taken as evidence of this days existence. Well at least we have a cool, funny comic to remind us of Talk Like A Pirate Day 2007!
About two hours ago, Apple’s Presentation would have ended. I have just woken up and don’t know where to go. There is going to be Apple information from the presentation everywhere on the internet. But where sold I go first to get all the information and pictures in a single, easy location so I don’t have to muck around sifting through information to get everything I want to know.
Digg will definitely have this in the top 10 dugg stories. Digg is one of the many bases online for Apple Fanboys and any big technology news is on there. Apple + New Product + Hype = Top Story! My guess would be that the story either links to Engadget, Gizmodo or Mac Rumors or all. If this is the case why not go to the original source first because I’m sure the information is spread across multiple posts.
I could go possibly go to Twitter, Pownce or Tumblr. Someone on there would have definitely linked to a website with a lot of information on it. My guess would be that it would link to the same article(s) as seen on Digg. The only problem is that there will be quite a few people with different links and I wouldn’t want to go to all the sites to find the exact same information on it so this method of getting all the information quickly might not be the best solution.
I could try the my RSS feeds because I know for a fact that there will be at least 5 different sources with information on the new iPods. The only problem is that this information will be mixed with other stuff so I would have to siff through my feeds. Also if I wanted to see any extra content, for example photo galleries, I would end up going to the site anyway to see these so why not just go to one at the start.
I guess I will just go straight to a website and have a look at the news. Now I have the problem of deciding which one would have the best content, whether its Gizmodo or maybe Mac Rumors of possibly Engadget, now thats a big decision. Well off I go. *crosses fingers for new iPods* :p