Friday 28 December 2007

Spiderman - One More Day

Warning, Spoilers Ahead.

I have just finished reading the last issue of Spiderman: One More Day. I've been left with a weird feeling of anger and disappointment.

The storyline basically shows Peter Parker's aunt taken to the hospital due to a bullet she took by mistake instead of Peter. Because of Spiderman leaving Tony Stark's side at the end of the Civil War, he is at the moment an Outlaw and has no financial means to confront helping Aunt May's critical situation. He goes and asks Tony for help and after a pretty cool fight were Peter shows he could even rip his armor off if he wanted, Tony declines directly helping him and warns him that next time they meet, he is taking him prisoner.

Tony, facing feelings of guilt sends his butler to pay for the costs of Aunt May's medical bills. Still, there is no way to help her due to her condition and so, Peter is approached by all time baddy, Mephisto. He shows him the images of people he could have been in other realities and one of a little girl he intends to explain later. Mephisto gets Peter and Mj together and tells them that he can save Aunt May in exchange for their marriage.

After a long discussion, MJ and Peter decide to go ahead with it and save Aunt May when Mephisto reveals to them, that the little girl he saw was their possible future daughter that they will now never have.

Next thing we know, Peter wakes up in a world where he is single and Aunt May is alive. Other things look different which is odd since Mephisto did say "Everything else will remain the same".

Anyways, give it a read if you get a chance and you will see what i mean about anger and disappointment. Spiderman, who was once Captain Universe, who's faced all sort of tricksters like Misterio and others, who's won and lost everything over and over again, who's only good thing in life was MJ goes and throws it all away because he doesnt have the guts to carry the weight of his own actions... that, to me, is ridiculous and very disappointing. If they wanted an excuse to get Spidey back to the old times, to a more careless attitude, fair enough, but i think, in the process, they have made the character look like a complete "noob".

Bad effort really, not the ending i expected, but yes the one I feared Marvel would come up with.


Check here for some slightly more official info

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/One_More_Day_%28comics%29


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Thursday 27 December 2007

Adding Themes to the PS3

As you well know, proud owner of a PS3, the Playstation Store doesnt have a particularly impressive variety of themes to install on your PS3 but installing them is very straightforward. Now, what happens if you want to grab a theme you found on the net or that came with a magazine and install it? What you need to do is very simple too, if not a little bit tedious. First of all, grab a form of media storage:

  • Memory Stick
  • SD Card
  • USB Stick
  • PSP with Memory Stick
Connect the device on to your pc, open it and then create a folder called PS3. Inside of it, create another folder called Theme and inside of this one, copy all the p3t files.

Remove the media from your pc making sure the files finished copying over and connect it to your PS3. Once connected go to your Theme Settings, go to choose a new theme and click on the top option "Install". You will then be presented with an option of what device to get the themes from, choose then whichever media you connected and afterwards you will be able to see a list of all the themes available. One by one, you must then choose a theme and repeat the process.

It is a bit annoying of course that you need to copy them individually, but hey, that's the way it works.


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Thursday 15 November 2007

ialmrnt5 - Intel's Display Drivers Strike Again

If you are wondering why your computer's resolution has suddenly gone down to a measly 640x480 and you are only displaying 4 colors and if that wasnt enough, a threating windows error has popped on your screen saying something along the lines of "the ialmrnt5 display driver has stopped working normally...", dont worry, its just intel's drivers making a booboo, yet again.

All you need to do is go to the Intel website and download the needed driver updates.

Here are some related links:

http://www.eddieoneverything.com/windows-xp/how-to-fix-the-ialmrnt5-display-driver-error.php
http://forums.vnunet.com/thread.jspa;jsessionid=1c1ilw0bqmvcr?messageID=890225&#890225

Alternatively, right click on your Desktop, Properties, Settings, Advanced, Troubleshoot and move the Hardware Acceleration option down to None.


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Why is Norton(CCAPP.exe) eating my CPU?!?

We just got some pcs reconfigured to use Outlook and Norton. They had been using webmail until now without a hitch but there seems to be a certain belief that as users go up in the employee/management hierarchy they should be allowed to have things installed such as Powerpoint, Access, Ms Outlook, etc, even when they dont even know how to use them.

Surprise, surprise, some users started complaining afterwards about their pcs getting slower and slower, problems sending emails and more. After a quick check to the Task Manager (Right click on the Systray or Ctrl+Alt+Del and then Task Manager) I found that CCAPP was using roundabouts 70-80% of CPU. I thought I'd google this up but to my disappointment, all I could find was obvious SEO websites with lists of explanations as to what CCAPP is/does but noone explaining how to solve the issue other than to disable outgoing email checking.

I have uninstalled Norton for the time being and I will be depending on our linux server's email antivirus. I'll carry on searching...


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