200 OK

So I say hey to my folks and see an empty box on the table, they’v been having a Sunday afternoon treat. Out of interest I had a look at the box and then the shock hit me:

Calories per ‘Whirl’ 162. 162!
9.7g of sugar

Now these muthers aint even big:

I had to do a to scale picture on account of the parents eating three each on a whim. They look to be a mouth full if that.

So per box that is 972 calories, Holy mother of cakefuck. I asked them if they individually could of eaten the whole box to which the reply was ‘yea easily’. Hell I could eat a box of them easily and have done similar in my more fatter days and probably had a pizza beforehand! I wont even go into the carbs and saturated fat in these abominations but needless to say they aint great.

If you dont have any clue about calories and you are overweight then go read a book or you are gonna die an early death but for giggles an average sized apple has about 80 calories in it (forget about the carbs and fat and sugar for a sec). So comparably you could eat 12 apples for one box of ‘Whirls’ 12! you try and eat 12 muther fucking apples homeboy it aint gonna happen. I might follow this up with a video of me ‘trying’ to eat 12 apples.

The best is for last though, how much was this box of death? 79 pence! Don’t believe me?, check it out. Ok so they are from Aldi so that adds to the cheapness but wtf! i’m pretty sure Tesco’s own etc would not be a mile off this price.

The government taxes alcohol and cigarettes up the ass (which i grant you are just as unhealthy) to line their pockets and ‘encourage healthy living’ but not shit like this?! They are missing a trick because I would bet that this kinda crap is being eaten enmass all over the country. Everything in moderation though Nick I hear some people thinking because i’m a psychic bastard…

Yes the odd whirl aint gonna kill ye ass, but eating one ain’t like eating an apple, you know when you’v eaten an apple, you don’t think twice about dusting that whole box off while ye sat on ya fat ass watching Eastenders. The key problem is ‘most people’ are thick or just don’t care, or worse can only afford cheap crap or all three so make poor choices. In defence of my folks they had three as a rare splurge, they are generally pretty good at not eating too much crap.

In my glory days of eating too much i simply didn’t care what I looked like or how long i’d live too but that changed, i’m unsure why it did but it did.

This wasent intended to be preachy, eat what the fuck you like it don’t concern me, I just felt like writing about it owing to the shock… 162! fuuuuuck.

So over the weekend just gone I did some LAN gaming with some mates. It was me and five other people playing games on PCs for over twelve hours solid. It was an exercise in reaching the brink of how much a human mind can take when exposed to that kinda stimuli and guess what we did the morning after? and when I got home on the same day? yep, more gaming! …crazy.

It got me thinking that since as long as I can remember and probably a lot longer than that, I have never gone much time without being exposed to some kind of digital entertainment. The longest I can think of is three days and that was because I was in fields at music festivals, which is a surreal experience so can’t really count as ‘real life’. In real life I can’t remember a day without using a TV or PC or both for some kind of entertainment even if it was briefly.

So I am going to turn it all off and go without it for a week to see what happens.

Why?

I want to see in my normal home environment what effect it’ll have on me to not have these things to keep me entertained/occupied. I want to see what emotions it produces and how i cope with them. I want to see how much of that ‘stuff’ you always put off to get done will actually get done. Plus, I am also an idiot.

The rules

• I will have to use a PC at work (I make websites!) but it will be used only for work, no YouTube/Facebook/RSS feeds/Iplayer etc on lunch and breaks.
• If I need to do something (e.g. pay a bill) and the only option is to use a website to do it then I will, but it will be done at work during lunch/break.
• I can use my phone but only to call people, no texts or internet or apps etc…
• I can use my Kindle to read books that are already on it, no internet or downloading new books. (Anyone who has used a Kindle knows its pretty much just like a normal book) Forget that, on second thoughts no Kindle, its still digital entertainment so normal books it is.
• I can use my camera to record the experience.

Other than that I am going to avoid all forms of digital entertainment, no PC, PS3, MP3′s, TV, Laptop etc…

When?

As soon as I press the Publish button on this blog post. I will write about the experience but I guess its gonna have to be on paper and i’ll transcribe it to a blog post or two later on… argh, not sure I’v thought this through.

So Goodbye, see you in seven days.

So i’v not done a blog post in ages (a skill i have mastered). Lately i’v been really abusing my new PC with all the games it can play on ultra high settings so i’v neglected my other hobby of geeky toy soldiers (remember when video games used to be geeky?! what happened there!).

I’v been thinking about the armies I own and i’v decided to systematically finish them all! and one of the long overdue ones to be finished are my World Eaters.

Now the current Chaos Space Marine codex is rubbish from a competitive standpoint and the previous World Eaters list I was running with this army included two daemon princes and two land raiders which, although this made the army ‘better’ at punching my opponents face off it actually made the army play 1. Semi defensively and 2. Very boring. So throwing caution to the wind in true Khorne fashion i’m taking Kharn the Betrayer, a few more berzerkers in a more fluffy list that’ll probably get smashed by IG mech and Grey Knights but meh it’ll be fun.

One of the additional marines I have added to bolster the numbers is this guy to the left.

This is one of the first models I ever bought and is probably one of my fav Gamesworkshop models evvvar. He’s one of the old Space Wolf blood claws from years ago when box sets of dudes were metal!

In his time he has been part of many armies, each time getting a paint stripping before getting drafted to another force. I think before this he was in a small Black legion army I had. Anyway now he is Jómar a Skull Champion of the Bloodied Fist Warband, a Space Wolf left for dead by his chapter and given a second chance to fight for the ‘real’ gods (after a healthy amount of lobotomisation ofc).

Its models like this once hes painted that get me back into the 40k universe, i could invent an entire history for this dude and hes just one model. It’s half the reason i don’t ‘get’ people who just like the 40k fiction and don’t dig the models, for me they are not really mutually exclusive. Here is the new list I am gonna go with:

1500pts World Eaters Army

Daemon Prince 140
Wings, Mark of Khorne

Kharn 165

8 Khorne Berzerkers 208
Bolt Pistols, CCWs, Frag, Krak
/w Skull Champion
Power Fist

8 Khorne Berzerkers 208
Bolt Pistols, CCWs, Frag, Krak
/w Skull Champion
Power Fist

Rhino 45
Combi-Bolter, Combi-Melta, Smoke, Light

8 Khorne Berzerkers 208
Bolt Pistols, CCWs, Frag, Krak
/w Skull Champion
Power Fist

Rhino 45
Combi-Bolter, Combi-Melta, Smoke, Light

Defiler 150
3x Dread CCWs, Battle Cannon
Heavy Flamer, Smoke, Light, Possession

Land Raider 220
2x Twin Lacannons, Twin Heavy Bolter
Smoke, Light

Dreadnought 100
2x CCW, 2x Twin Bolters

With 11pts to spare, which i might stick on the rhinos in the form of dozer blades since everything else is already put together. This is a totally fun list which is a chance of pace for me as i’m normally all about eking every point to be as competitive as possible within the given codex.

So everyone is raving about Google plus at the minute and indeed its awesome and I think it is set to eventually take over from the book of Faces. However one thing that strikes me about a lot of reviews Google+ gets is that the circles system is new an innovative and with Facebook you either share everything to everyone and risk ye grandmother seeing a facebook update about how you totally went out an got smashed when you were meant to be fixing her shed or something.

This is not the case, you can easily create  using lists (although not as easily as google+) groups of people you can include and exclude stuff from.

I will now guide you though this process so you can show and hide stuff to different groups of people and manipulate the world <insert evil laughter>

Creating a list

Top right of the screen select account and then click edit friends.

Then click the ‘Create a list’ button at the top which will bring up a popup window. You can then enter in a title for the list and the people you would like to add to it, this is very similar if you have ever created an event on Facebook. This list will act as grouping of people you can show and hide stuff too.

For example above I have created one called wargaming and added 5 people to it. So in the future if I have something wargaming related i’m gonna post I can make sure only these guys see it or visa versa you could create a list with the aim to hide stuff from one or more people like ‘douche bags i keep around’ or ‘the ones i’m trying to impress so will hide stupid shit from’ etc etc.

Hit save and you should be presented with your list:

Hiding and showing stuff

So now whenever you do a status update or anything else all you need to do is click on the little padlock and a popup window will appear like the one below. From here you can just type in your list in the visible or hide boxes and whatever you post will be hidden or only shown to those lists. You can also do this for specific people too.

So here is a status update and hovering over the padlock you can see its only visible to my wargaming list.

Becareful with lists, its a pretty quick way to alienate people if you never share anything with them so probably best to use in extreme cases, I don’t actually have any lists set up my self, or do i?! do you know the real me? hah luckily i’m not that interesting.

Just a quick heads up blog post about a sweet online store Becketts Adventure

http://www.armynnavy.com/

I wanted to get some shorts and a light jacket for a holiday and they have some sweet clothes. If you are into camo/military style clothes etc give them a go they literally delivered the next day are pretty cheap and the quality of the stuff i bought is amazing.

Customer service is also top notch, guy Andy there replied to my emails almost right away.

Defo the place to go for combat trousers, shorts that kinda stuff. They also have a wide range of other stuff you’d expect like custom dog tags and knives camping gear etc. Only downside is their site is a tad slow but its not too bad.

So I have two netbooks one of the first ever ones the Asus eee 700 and a newer Samsung one. The Samsung one is running Windows 7 basic or whatever its called (the lowest of the low version) and the Asus did have some odd version of Linux called Xandros that stopped working but I never bothered with it because I got the newer Samsung since it was time to upgrade.

Anyway I never sell/chuck devices away because i’m weird like that and thought this little Asus might come in handy one day and sure enough a couple of days ago a opportunity for it to get some love after being turned off for a couple of years reared its head.

I am going away on holiday and I was uming and aring about taking the Samsung with me for fear of damage or it getting nicked etc, so i thought i’ll bang Linux on the old Asus that i’m not too fussed about and roll with that for dumping pics on and checking email etc. Should be pretty straight forward i told my self…. haha how naive.

So i knew the little Asus was not a power house so I decided to go for a distribution of Linux call Xubuntu, this is basically a version of Ubuntu for less powerful machines, even better I found one called eeeXubuntu which was created a few years back especially for the Asus netbook I have.

So first thing I had to do was download it and burn it onto a CD, then boot up a PC using the CD (basically runs the operating system without having to install it) and then use that machine to make a USB stick with the OS on to install on the Asus, confused yet? you aint seen nothing yet home boyyy.

I put the CD one of my PCs and:

Great start, what does all that mean? i’m sure someone knows. I put it down to a dodgy CD burn and I was right, I reburnt the CD booted again and then followed a process of  creating the USB installer, seconds in and in order to do this we need to load a Linux terminal window and physically punch in commands along the lines of:

...sudo mount eeeXubuntu.iso /cdrom/ -o loop
cd /cdrom/
sudo /cdrom/mkusbinstall.sh --autodetect...

blah blah blah. Long story short this process worked and I put the USB stick into the Asus and turned her on (unintentionally filthy).

Whey it works, we install eeeXubuntu and life is grand, I can now play Mahjonng and shit wheyy… what about YouTube? Movie player to watch some films? not installed or supported, I need to update? ok cool.

So I run the updater so I dont have software etc from 2007 and it ticks away downloading 800 and something files to update to the latest version gusty fire badger 8.09 or some such. Reboot and low and behold the wireless no longer works… but it did the first time. It appears the eeeXubuntu has been shot dead and normal Xubuntu has taken over. This is cool at least I am up to date, i’ll just install the driver for the wireless card, cant be that hard…. ha.

So I Google like I have never Googled before and eventually hit a site that tells me this might work:

...
sudo apt-get install build-essential
wget 'http://snapshots.madwifi.org/madwifi-hal-0.10.5.6-current.tar.gz'
tar zxvf madwifi-hal-0.10.5.6-current.tar.gz
cd madwifi-hal-0.10.5.6-*
make clean
make
sudo ma..

blah blah blah more typing commands into a console. The above did not work first time because the link mentioned to the file was broken so I had to google again to find the newer one and type that in instead, the newer file name was the same as the old one but of course they added in a few more numbers to make it more of a pain somin like madwiif66456-82374234.78..333/hahafuck you/.beta5.6667.3 3. I realise there is no doubt a way to cut’n'paste into the terminal window but I dont know how and was not gonna waste more time googling.

So that process finished and after a restart the wireless was back up. EXCELSIOR!  well not quite.

Now the Internet connection is so slow I might as well train a fleet of carrier pigeons to carry data too an from my location. I grin and bare it for a while and decide to do some other tasks like install VLC to watch videos, chrome web browser and flash to watch YouTube etc…. hah all failed chrome error message of no sense and the other two, even using the GUI program installer… coudlent find either of these after ages of head scratching.

Abandoned that and went back to sorting the speed of the Wifi using google… what ensued was a series of forum posts on par with stuff from computer science lectures from my uni days, mixed in with the green code stream from the matrix. At this point I gave up turned the Asus off, put it back on the shelf where its been sat for two years and decided to take my Samsung with me and be extra careful.

The thing is i’m a geek! I know i could sit down for a couple of months maybe more an become a bearded sweaty Linux guru, i have that ability. What i do not have is the time to do that and lead a (somewhat) normal life! I’m sure once you understand what you are doing with something like Linux its great, for most people though…  not worth the hassle.

This has been a bit of a weekend of news! I thought i’d jump in with my thoughts just to write something to be honest. I might start doing some regular posts on recent events without trying to get too involved.

My views on the Norway Attack

The thing that hit me and most of the world was that we all immediately jumped on the ‘al-Qaeda musta dunnit‘ band wagon. But as it turns out it had nothing to do with that group and everything to do with a lone (current evidence) mental right wing farmer who himself was a Norwegian. I found this quite refreshing purely in a resetting the balance of perspective. I dont mean refreshing as ‘oh thats a good bit of news‘ i mean as in taking for what it is and learning from it.

We can learn from this that we’v got our selves into spin about the dangers of the world. It is once again clear that they do not always come from evil organised brown faced bearded turban toting dudes in far away lands and could just as easily come from the person next door, The one we sign packages for or look after their cat when they are away. Plus! they might do it for reasons purely of their own, not part of any big plan or agenda of others.

Everyone has the ability to be a Anders Behring Breivik and to mastermind something like that and kill a lot of people. This is like the social version of a freak natural disaster and there isn’t much you can ever do about it and still have freedom.

Flip that on its head though and if one person has it in them to create that much terror and destruction they just think how much good just one person could do if they put the same effort and passion into something positive.

Amy Winehouse death

I can’t help but feel not much for Amy Winehouse dieing, I just don’t get the relationship people seem to have with musicians. I can understand how a musician’s music can effect  or even change your life, but that does not create a personal relationship with them. You don’t ‘know’ them and that song or music that had an effect on you was your own interpretation of their work, they wrote it based on their own situation or feelings not yours.

Even if i am a fan of a public figure and they die then i feel sad thats the last of the ‘stuff’ they’ll produce, be it comedy, music or anything. Plus because i’m aware of their death i’ll naturally feel something for their family etc… but i’d feel that same way if i was aware of ‘anyones’ death its just what separates you as civilised from a freak. Past that? nothing, i didn’t know them personally.

Maybe its different for other people and they do feel some emotional connection, who am I to tell people what to feel. Thats not me though, i don’t work that way so don’t get it.

On what she died of, its pretty much gonna be drugs right?! For that I have absolutely no pity for her, I see junkies the same way I see most choices people make, a choice. We all make choices everyday and make them sometimes with all the facts and sometimes not. You can be ignorant to the effects of drugs or know them full well and still dive into it. Fact remains you made a choice, your own choice and you get to own it and its results.

So one of those little evil!!! flies made it into my monitor last night. This has happened to me before at work and the little fellas have died, however they snuffed it right in the corners of the screen so it does not really offend. This little shit decided to make manoeuvres onto the middle of my monitor at home! Needless to say i would not stand for it, the thought of having to look at a black spot on my screen every day would of driven me mad. Below is most of the terrible affair of coaxing the bastard out of my life! heh. In the end I went back to the music technique and blasted Devildriver at ‘full’ volume which managed to shift it.

Pt 1

Pt 2

Pt 3

Just finished a chaos space marine havoc squad for the Scourged army I am doing, Just gotta do the bases. Its shocked me a bit how time consuming painting can be when you do a traditional paint job (e.f. no drybrush/wash), espcially with chaos space marines as they have so much extra detail over normal space marines which further makes them a bit tricky.

This squad is a bit of an experiment/break from taking obilterators which tend to be the defacto heavy support choice in 99% of chaos marine armies these days. Idea was to keep them cheap and cheerful in the pts department but still a concern for enemy transports and light vehicles.

So I turn on Google Chrome today and all the Google sites have this big old black bar at the top since i’m logged in:

I’m not sure i like it, seemingly there is a growing backlash already of folks not liking the colour. Interestingly my theme in Gmail has a better looking bar, which I think has been up there for ages:

This style is wayyyyy better than the horrible google black bar of blackness. I like the idea in principle of being able to get to all your google stuff real quick but I think a style change is in order pretty quick.