This has to be one of the better Microsoft Knowledge Base articles I’ve seen written. Boldly entitled, “Computer Randomly Starts Playing Classical Music” - the article looks at a rather peculiar safemode extra, the ability for the computer to randomly decide it’s time for some Fur Elise. Go figure…

SUMMARY

During normal operation or in Safe mode, your computer may play “Fur Elise” or “It’s a Small, Small World” seemingly at random. This is an indication sent to the PC speaker from the computer’s BIOS that the CPU fan is failing or has failed, or that the power supply voltages have drifted out of tolerance. This is a design feature of a detection circuit and system BIOSes developed by Award/Unicore from 1997 on.

MORE INFORMATION

Although these symptoms may appear to be virus-like, they are the result of an electronic hardware monitoring component of the motherboard and BIOS. You may want to have your computer checked or serviced.

Microsoft has brought many a tear to my eye, but never before in a GOOD sense (no offence guys - or Yuvi). Hard-drive failures make me cry. Fatal errors make me teary. “Error: Operation Completed Successfully” sends me off in floods. But this my friends? This is good…

Check out the Knowledge Base article for yourself and listen to the classics. This is what I’m talking about… Rock ‘n’ roll! Viva-la-fur-elise!

The best Apple marketing campaign yet? Sheer genius.

When you consider that a PS3 game costs about a gazillion dollars on average, it’s pretty obvious that when Madden 2007 is being offered for $9.99 with free shpiping, you know they’re desperate to clear the stock for the holidays and start pushing ‘08.

Engadget are also having one heck of a giveaway in line with the christmas shopping season. You can get your stinking grubby paws on everything from Sidewinder mice and Slingbox Pros to MS Wireless Entertainment Desktop setups, the Apple iPod Shuffle, a nice looking AT&T Tilt and a Limited Edition Halo 3 wireless controller (something I’ve been talking myself into getting this coming holiday).

Apple seem to be having a pretty nice deal going on today only, too, with iMacs and iPods in particular being graced by some pretty impressive savings.

Not to be outdone however - Circuit City wins editor’s pick this year with an incredible set of geek offers up for grabs. $7 for a 2GB SD card? Get out! $800 for a Sharp Aquos 42″ HDTV LCD display, too, and a Roadmate GPS system for $125 - Darn importation taxes. Believe me, if I had it my way, I’d be living in the US right now. I don’t suppose I mentioned the $300 HP laptop by the way, did I?

Just when you thought you had it good, a dual processor-powered eight-cored, 16GB DDR2 RAMed up behemoth comes and knocks over your little parade by encoding a 2TB video in less time than it took you to read this sentence. And it ONLY costs $18,400.00. Sheesh kebab! Supply and demand just got thrown down the toilet! Rolling in with some pretty impressive specs, the Apple Mac Pro can be configured with up to two 3.0GHz Quad-Core Intel Xeon Processors, 16GB of low-latency RAM (8 modules weighing in at 2GB a piece), a thousand-dollar Mac Pro RAID Card for optimized storage performance, not one, not two, not three, but FOUR 750GB 7200-rpm Serial ATA HDDs running at 3Gb/s EACH.

As if that wasn’t enough, presuming you’re going flat out and getting yourself two 30″ Apple Cinema HD Displays to bask in your super-speedy glory, you’ll need a pretty hefty graphics rig to handle the pressure. Good job the NVIDIA Quadro FX 4500 512MB is on hand (Stereo 3D 2 x dual-link DVI). Think of it as the 8800-Ultra’s big brother-in-law’s body-builder’s trainer. Holy cow… Now we’re talking! When you consider that you can fit in two 16x SuperDrives (how I love their automated fancy eject) and both Bluetooth 2.0+EDR AND AirPort Extreme support within the chassis of this beauty, the genius of Apple’s so-called “designers” (really another way of saying astro-phyiscists moulding our products to perfection) really starts to shine. Quad-channel 4Gb Fibre Channel PCI Express card, an Apple USB Modem to boot and an Apple Wireless Keyboard and Apple wireless Mighty Mouse (WOOHOO!) included.

That’s one powerful web browsing system, so I figure to make use of it’s talents, we could either run Protein Folding applications, simulate a nuclear explosion or use some of the software I specifically included in the order menu, to be preinstalled. Mac OS X Leopard (What else!?!?!? Vista?!?!?) - iWork ‘08 (I’ve been testing it - a nice MS-Office competitor!) - Aperture 1.5 (Schaweeeet!) and Logic Express, for when the likes of open-source Audacity just don’t cut the chase. If you’ve got some spare moolah flying around, don’t hesitate to send it my way. (Joke, BTW…)

…but seriously. If anyone’s got a spare $18.4 grand you were going to give to some noble cause, consider us little guys. Hit the Apple Store to check out my configuration. Inspired by none other than our very own Nate Whitehill’s single most uber Apple rig EVER.

(Again, a joke. Don’t take everything I say so seriously and stop flaming my inbox. I just changed e-mail addresses.)

Boeing 747s aren’t necessarily known for their stunning looks and the super-modified anti-nuke laser-equppied aircraft seems certain not to change this less than thrilling sterotype by adding a fish-hook nose onto the existing pokey-dokey primer. Of course, all it needs is a stray wicked-laser and you could “accidentally” blow up Terrorist Country X’s (naming no names) latest attempt to “destroy the west”. Peace and love, terror-obsessed dudes. Peace ‘n’ love.

SIDENOTE: What d’you do when you lose your Inter Continental Ballistic Missile? You look for it! (Hoy, hoy, Seshi-chan!)

I’m taking this rather well considering the seriousness of the situation. The Thunderbird e-mail client just tried to self-update and… well… pooped itself. My whole “last-update.log” file hidden in my AppData/Local/Thunderbird/Mozilla Thunderbird/updates folder was (or should I say IS) full of error messages and I’ve conveniently lost 25,000 stored e-mails along with about 30 e-mails saved in my drafts - some of which contained irreplacable data. Maybe I’ll find a way to get my stuff back. Maybe I won’t. Stuff happens. It’s life. You just gotta keep moving on!

On a more cheery note, Affiliate Defined is going well - though not so well I could buy myself 30-years of video game nostalgia, something at this point in time I’d consider killing for. (Joke - by the way, I’m not really that unstable CIA bot who keeps spidering my site.) $15,000 Of Video Game Relics… 1,700 boxed games. Goodness knows how many consoles!

Atari 2600, Atari 7800, Atari Jaguar, Atari Lynx, Coleco ColecoVision, Coleco Gemini, Coleco Telstar, Commodore 64/128, GCE Vectrex, Mattel Aquarius, Mattel Intellivision, Mattel Odyssey 2, Microsoft Xbox, Microsoft Xbox 360, APF TV Fun, Miscellaneous Handheld Games, Miscellaneous PC Games, SC Eight Thousand, Sega Pods, Miscellaneous TV Games, NEC Turbo Duo, Nintendo DS, Nintendo Game Boy Advance, Nintendo GameCube, Nintendo NES, Nintendo Nintendo 64, Nintendo Super NES, Nintendo Virtual Boy, Nintendo Wii, Sega Dreamcast, Sega Game Gear, Sega Genesis, Sega Master System, Sega Saturn, SNK Neo Geo, SNK Neo Geo Pocket, Sony Playstation, Sony Playstation 2, Texas Instruments TI 99/4A, VM Labs Nuon.

Officialy the longest list I’ve ever had to type (or read at all, for that matter)! I have a hard time believing that the lot (including the 1,700 video games) went for $9,000 - as much as a cheap car. Give it another 20 years and this lot will be worth $50,000. Hit the lot and join the 120,000 other drewling geeks who already did (myself proudly included). Be sure to check out Technabob, who sourced this for us too.

UPDATE: Okay, so reality is hitting home and I now realise how much I needed them 25,000 e-mails. O_O Holy cow - techie advice welcome!

UPDATE: Well he is my Dad, afterall. Problem sorted. At least for my TechZi mailbox. Now it’s just hard manual labor getting the remaining ones sorted out. Zoids. O_o

I don’t know what the heck Black Friday is all about seeing as all we’ve got coming up here in the UK as far as I’m concerned is Children In Need. Call me ignorant, my American friends (and 90% of my blog readers), but accept my apologies. All it means to me is bargain-basement electronics! Anyhow - word on the street has it that Kmart and Target have put forth thou ads and have some great deals running.

- Polaroid A801 8MP Camera just $79 - £40. Sweet mother of cheeseburger!
- Guitar Hero II Xbox 360 Bundle selling at $59 - £30. Sure to be a smash-hit.
- Three PS2 games for $8.99 - £4.50. “Mommy, what’s a PS2?” “Ssshhh, darling. It’s alright. Just think an PS3, but older, less elegant and not quite as extortionately priced.”
- Olevia 37-inch 1080i HDTV - $549 - £275. Great value, but we want progressive scan, baby!

And finally, my pick of the bunch, ladies sweaters for just $7.49. *ROFL*

via Gizmodo

This is one argument that I won’t let drop… Ink Cartridges and their (to say the least) absolutely RIDICULOUS pricing. I blogged about it back in August… What’s changed since then? Well, in all honesty, not that much. Laser printers are still killing people and the printer companies are still demanding borderline unbelievable prices for their cheap-as-pie to produce toner cartridges.

Sites link Inkshop, based out of England (who by the way have a very nice Free UK Delivery offer running) offer re-filling services at a fraction of the price of what their brand-name counterparts think is the ‘norm’ to charge. Run a Google search for “ink cartridge refill” and browse your local listings to find the cheapest option available near you. For me, almost 2,000,000 results were listed. Presumably, even at their rock-bottom prices, these refill companies are still walking away with nice money which leaves me left to ponder… How much money are the likes of Lexmark, Epson and Canon scamming people out of? I dread even guessing, however it’s safe to say that just the first few cartridges you buy must subsidise the cost of the printer (which manufacturers produce and sell at a loss) along with the advertising campaign that got you hooked.

UPDATE: Like all good things in life, this blog post has been sponsored by our lovely little friends from InkShop (again). But heck - if it saves me 75% I’m not all that bothered about it. Muhahaha! But seriously - the only difference is the brand name of the cartridge and the price. The quality is just as good - at least with our Lexmark printer.

UPDATE: How dare you guys accuse me of being on John Chow proportions! He’s just totally evil. Muhahahahahaha! *cough* I mean… Uh… Yeah.

Words are not needed.

For once (as they say on Digg)… The picture says it all.

Video games, the sheer joy. The (accidental) headshot kills which you smugly pass off in the same old “Yeah - I meant to do that” tone of voice that ONLY gets used after a totally flukey yet awesome kill or trick. You gotta love online gaming.

In this instance, Mr X lobs a grenade at Mr Q. Mr Q on his buggy, rides over the grenade and wobbles off to one side. The force of Mr Q jumping off mid-air causes the buggy to head straight at Mr X who in turn gets ran over by the killer vehicle, which comes to a halt some 50 feet away.