sprites & bites

Gaming, iPads and a few biscuits on the side…

Weird thing in My life

It was Dec 2000 and I’d had an allergic reaction to something and was in intensive care and nearly died. The drugs they were giving me to keep me alive were giving me hallucinations. Some weird, some funny and some very upsetting. A common theme to my hallucinations was that a friend of mine had been hit by a taxi and was in the next bed to me with a full head bandage on. Then I hallucinated that he had died and I was terribly upset. I even imagined seeing the headline on local newspaper. Despite everyone assuring me he was okay I didn’t believe them. Once I got put of hospital and was well I saw his mum told her what happened but I knew he was okay.

Two weeks after getting home in Jan 2001 we got a phone call from his mum. I answered the phone and she asked to speak to my mum. I left the room and sat talking to my brother and dad. My mum came in and said she had some bad news. I remember her words clearly “beck please sit down and don’t take this personally and think its your fault”.

Andrew my friend had been to a nightclub and was waiting for a taxi when an altercation occurred at the rank and he was punched and he hit his head on kerb. He was in intensive care and they tried to save him but he died of brain injury.

Those visions and what happened are still clear in my head as if it was yesterday. My biggest regret was telling his mum what I saw.

Getting Old

On Friday 14th June I turn 40 years old. Quite a milestone in my life.  Most normal people would be going out with friends, having a meal, getting pissed up and vomiting up a kebab in a taxi on the way home.  But I don’t want to do that, I don’t drink alcohol so where is the fun in watching others get drunk?

Sadly I’m a bit of a geek loner so my perfect night in would be takeaway, fizzy drinks, chocs and internet. But alone? I want my friends to join me, but not at my house!!

I will be having a Twitter party. I want my friends across the world to join in the fun online with me at the same time.  Play some music from the 70s, have a quiz, giveaway some phone apps and maybe one lucky winner will receive something bigger, who knows, anything can happen.

I cannot give away Android apps as gifting is not available yet so apps will be iOS and also due to appstore restrictions the codes will be UK only but I am hoping to arrange something special for international friends.

So the deal is you arrange your own food and drink and be online for between 11pm-11.30pm (UK time) on Friday night 14th June.

Of course this could all go belly up – after all I am sure most people have better things to do with their time but it will be an interesting experiment and I will have fun even if only a couple of people attend.

That week from 10th June I will be an @PeopleOfUK person so my party will cross both of my accounts. Also for purposes of transparency so people know I am not cheating in quizzes and things I want everyone to use the hashtag #Becks40th – That would be funny if I trended, although highly unlikely.

 

Far Cry 3

Okay seeing as it is Christmas I have decided to give away my copy of Far Cry 3 for Xbox 360. Competition is open to all my twitter followers only. Followers up until last night so please do not follow me just so you can enter the competition, I want this open to twitter friends!! If you enter and are not following me then I will destroy your entry.

Please do not send in your entry in the comments page here, either send entry via the contact link at the top of the page stating your twitter name for confirmation or send me a twitter DM.

I will announce the winner some time tonight after 11pm when I so desire.

Okay here is the question:

On 19th December I shopped in a supermarket for some goods. I want you to guess how much I spent. The person closest to my guess is the winner.

Here are some clues:

1) I shopped in Tesco

2) I spent something between £40-60

3) among things purchased I bought cheeses, 1 ribeye steak, gammon joint, chicken joint, fairy liquid tablets, mushrooms, spinach, coriander, value peppers, asparagus bunch,but this is not all.

4) Some of the offers I received were meat two for £10, pro-tech toothpaste buy one get one free, cheese 3 for 2

No other clues will be given. Good luck

Samsung Galaxy Note

I have had the Samsung Galaxy Note for a couple of months now. I don’t use it as a phone as the phone part of it is not very good but as a small handheld computer it is excellent. I use it most for browsing or using twitter while in bed.

I’m not a big fan of the Android operating system so I won’t speak about it here. I do want to speak about a few of the phones capabilities though.

Samsung have been creating decent phones of late. It used to be a few years back that their phones were best avoided but a few years on they have released some excellent devices and they are now really the devices to beat when manufacturers release new models.

The Galaxy Note sits in a small niche in between a phone and a small tablet or PDA. A bit too big to be a comfortable phone though due to its long and wide bulk. It is not bulky in thickness thankfully. For a device of this size it is very thin and light which is deceiving as it appears heavier than it is.

This model is 16Gb although most of that can only be used by photos, videos and music. There is a limitation of 1Gb for apps which is odd although this can easily be overcome by using a micro SD memory card for app installs.

The screen is excellent with vivid colours and a decent resolution making photos and videos vibrant. Apple bark on about retina screen displays so you don’t see pixels but in all honesty I cannot see pixels in this screen either.

This bright and vivid screen is also a great aid for the 8 megapixel camera built in. With the larger screen it feels easier to frame photos and so far it does not appear to be affected by glare from the sun, although that is easy in England as sun in 2012 is rarer than hens teeth.

There is a minor issue with this phone that can happen randomly at any time. For some strange reason the battery will all of a sudden have a life of only 2-3 hours standby after working perfectly. It loses battery so quickly that you can see the battery meter dropping. Until Samsung fix the issue there is a temporary fix. All you have to do is turn phone off, take battery out and hold it in your hand for one minute then pop back in and switch on. I had the deleting battery issue a few weeks ago and this trick fixed it for the time being. I have only had to do it once so it works for quite a while. Hopefully this can be fixed with an update.

If someone asked me if I would recommend this phone I’d say definitely as long as you really are happier with a bigger screen as that is the main selling point.

iPhone 5

The recently released iPhone 5 has broken pre-order sales records with a whopping 5 million handsets sold in the first day alone.

I never had the previous iPhone 4S as I felt it was not enough of an upgrade from the iPhone 4 to justify it.  However,  I was out of contract when the iPhone 5 was released so ordered for release day and purchased it from Three for only £79, excellent price.

The first thing you will notice about the device is that it is extremely light and thin. So thin that you could put a small case on the phone and it will still be thinner than the iPhone 4/S. It is also the thinnest phone on the market right now. Thin may sound uncomfortable but it really is not, it is very comfortable to use.  It is also slightly longer with a 4” screen.  Some may not want a bigger screen but actually it is a good size. I have small hands and still I am able to use it comfortably.

The next thing you will notice is how fast this phone is. It is incredibly fast and apps load in the blink of an eye. It has a new A6 dual core processor which is double the speed of the previous processor used in the iPhone 4S and the new iPad. Through some magical engineering it also is the highest scoring phone in test benchmarks on the market even beating quad core processor phones including Samsung’s flagship phone the S3.  Everything runs so fast and smooth, from bringing up the phone app to loading the biggest of apps like games.  Multitasking and switching from app to app just flows as it should with no stutter or lag.

The camera is the same 8 megapixel as the previous model but now it has a larger and improved lens –  proof itself that megapixels are not the important factor in cameras, it is the quality of the lens which matters.  Another improvement is in the colour saturation, the 5 has the same retina screen as the 4S (albeit slightly longer) but has higher colour saturation so everything looks brighter and more colourful.  I found this was quite noticeable in the regular games that I play.

Battery life has seen an improvement although not a vast improvement, the improvements are more inside – a faster processor would require a better battery to keep up. I still get through the day with about 80% battery left over. Not bad for a phone range where people think the battery is poor – that is just a myth.

I welcome also Apple’s new earphones which are bundled. Apple spent 3 years designing and developing these new earphones. They are shaped like a weird aliens head but fit perfectly in the ear lobe like they were moulded for everybody.

The one let down which must be mentioned is that they have changed the connector port for charging the phone so if you have old cables or docks you wish to use you would need to buy an expensive adaptor. Bad Apple, the connector needed changing so they could fit in the new components but they could have included an adaptor with the phone, it is not like they cannot afford it.  I want an extra cable for my PC but I am not spending £15-25 on one.

iPhone 5 Upgrade

Some people think I am a gadget whore and will buy every iteration of iPad and iPhone that is released. That is true to some extent but I actually did not get the iPhone 4S, I felt it was so similar to the 4, I wanted to wait and see what the iPhone 5 offered.

Now the iPhone 5 has been announced I wanted to dive in and get one, not because it has amazing features because it has not but I felt it had enough to justify missing out on the 4S model.

The next decision would be do I buy the phone sim free (£529) and stay out of contract or do I pay a lot for the phone still but sign a contract. I expected the contract price to be a couple of hundred pounds at least.

My current phone plan is £17 a month which is non contract – over the life of a 24 month contract that would be 17*24+529 which is £937

Woke up to an email this morning from my current provider Three. They are offering the iPhone 5 on a 24 month contract – 500 mins, 5000 texts and all I could eat data for £35 a month with an upfront cost of £79 which by my calculations is 35*24+79 = £919

So really the contract price does work out a smidgen cheaper over two years than buying outright but the downside is being tied to 24 months.  The plus side is I do not have to find £500 straight away to fund my geekiness.

Product ordered: 16Gb black iphone 5, should be here next week :)

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Sleeping Dogs

Got Sleeping Dogs at the weekend and yesterday finished it. It’s not short but I did plumb nearly every waking hour into it at the expense of words with friends and other games.

Great game, very much like GTA which is the normal comparison these days for any game with a free roaming world.

The main character was likeable and the sub characters were awful which is how it’s meant to be. Took about 20 hours to complete and had a huge amount of fun. This is not a review, just a comment.