Re-Frederator the podcast is great, it’s an offshoot of Frederator and it shows a classic/antique cartoon every single day. The other day they presented an ancient episode of Casper, and in one scene, whilst the camera panned across a dark room of drapped belongings I spotted an object that can only be described as phallic, so suggestive does it look that I cannot imagine it being unintended. Those dirty animators.

The other night I was itchy intensely the entire night. It was one of my worst flare-up’s for some time and I felt absolutely terrible. When it was time to get up in the morning I just didn’t want to move, had the whole feeling clammy and yet dry, and sore and creaky. I didn’t want to move a single limb an inch. Looked so red and blotchy, I took a photo, cropped it to a tiny segment for embarrassment reasons, but suffice it to say my skin was as that photo all over my body. Thankfully, it gradually wore off throughout the day and by the next my skin wasn’t too bad. Hope the photo doesn’t put you off your food. Hmm, wonder if I can find a point where it can tile/repeat, could make a great gross out texture for a game.

Hey scan.co.uk is going straight to the top of my favourite online retailers. When I ordered the RAM I knew it was out of stock and didn’t mind waiting a few weeks. When I ordered they sent an email, separately to the confirmation to tell me its out of stock but that they expect a new batch to arrive on the 25th. Then they sent me an email to tell me the item has arrived and is awaiting to be despatched to me… then a few hours later an email arrived to tell me it has been despatched. It arrived on Friday! How is that for service! They tell you exactly what’s going on at every stage, plus you’d ordinarily expect to pay a premium for such a service and yet this memory was less than half the price of most places. Awesome. After installing the RAM (which is easy peesy lemon squeesy on the iMac CD) the first thing I did was check “about this mac” to see if it was running at the proper 667MHz speed, it was. Next I booted into Apple Hardware Test and did the extended system test, this Passed. Then ran MemtestOSX which this time managed to lock 1715MB for testing, I left it going and went downstairs ‘cos this is a really in depth test and takes freaking hours. I let it complete 3 test cycles and it didn’t make a single mistake. Next to check its running fast enough. Ran XBench and the memory actually scored ever so slightly faster than it did with the 1GB, this is possibly because it can take advantage of dual-channel optimisations when there are 2 sticks inside. Also, for completeness sake I rebooted into windows (boot camp stylee) and ran PCMark ‘05, just as with Xbench it scored slightly more than when it was 1GB. So hey, you don’t always have to pay the extra! Now all i’m regretting is that Apple don’t allow you to buy the iMac with no memory installed, would have saved about 75 GBP per GB. Sure I could have got the iMac with 512MB, but i would have had to sell the 512, otherwise end up with a mismatched pair adding up to 1.5GB.

Still no universal ecto in sight. Big smelly poopies, or maybe even poo pies. Haven’t had a good pie in months me. Hey despite not being in stock my memory purchase was dispatched today, so that’s good, wonder if the delivery people will be working saturday, otherwise i’ll be waiting till Monday no doubt. I sound a bit like Russell Brand today by jimminy cricket.

I was bored earlier, and whilst the sun was bright and pouring into the room hitting the mac on its rear I took a photo, straining my skills with casting light to the max.. haha, with a compact camera, sheesh. Though hey, it still looks kinda stylish. Do you like my TOSlink cable with the TOSlink-mini-jack adapter clipped on the end? Bet you don’t seem them every day. Trust Apple to be so design conscious, wanting not to have too many holes on the back that they decided to hide the optical behind the mini-jack by using a technique that was actually meant for small DAT portable recorders.

Anyway yeah, other memory misadventures, I tried to get memtest86+ working on this here iMac core duo and did it work? Did it *beep*!. Downloaded it and burned the bootable cd in preparation of testing the new memory when it arrives. All it did when I rebooted and held ‘c’ was poop “Loading………………” on the screen and blink its hellish cursor at me indefinitely. I even took a photo I was that peeved. Anypoop, there does appear to be an alternative flavour geared for macs, but isn’t a bootable cd affair, instead it runs in OSX and you have to clear as much memory by closing all the running apps as possible so that it can lock a decent continuous amount of physical RAM to test. It really doesn’t seem to be entirely useful IMO, it only managed to get access to 256MB worth of RAM, not much good that is it now? I suppose, as long as the mac allocates the new stick of memory to the top end of the memory it might be ok. Hmm, but is memory allocation really so considerate of such things? I can’t image it is

The wacom tablet i swiped off ebay arrived today, it’s actually not too bad, and being so small didn’t seem such a hindrance after all, well, you seem to get used to the sensitivity quite quickly, plus being small means you can be lazy and rest yer wrist in the same position most of the time. The buttons on the pen are annoying though, I keep catching them by accident, so I might assign them to do nothing. About the sensitivity, if you’re going to be working on something for a long time and don’t want to be zooming in and out you can sneak into system preferences and limit the extents of the screen it draws across. Its ideal, but it would be a lot more useful if there was some intelligence behind it. For instance, it really should be built into photoshop so that it automatically adjusts to the size of the current canvas/windows size. Tell yer what though, even things like tracing around the outline of an object, to extract it from the image feels a lot more natural with a pen tablet than with a mouse. Wouldn’t like to use it for actually navigating a GUI though, apparently some people do, they must be nuts.

Why did I hyperlink hindrance?

I fancy upgrading my iMac’s memroirs to 2GB, I fear it would be an improvement to certain scenarios, particularly when several large apps are running via rosetta (some eat up memory like clients with their slappers (???)). So yeah, I took out the stick of RAM which I might add is SO freaking DIM! In order to check the brand and shit, took a picture of it too as you can see. Took a while to figure out the brand because I only had a never seen before logo to go on. Turns out its by Micron, who it also turns out are the same people as Crucial. I guess Micron is the company and Crucial is the retail brand, they probably think it sounds hip and MTV-like. Problem is Crucial charge an absolute fortune for this particular spec, 117 GBP, which is only around 20GBP less than Apple themselves charged when kitting out the iMac.

Reason I would prefer to get the same brand is because quite a lot of peeps say you should always match brands when using 2 or more sticks in the same machine. But d’ya know what, I reckon they’re just talking bullshit, I bet they’re sys admin dudes who always have their employers paying twice what they should for the company’s IT dept just because they’re techno snobs. Anyway I found this at Scan, it’s exactly the same specs as far as I can tell, but its over half the price! It’s out of stock at the moment but I’ve ordered it anyway. We’ll see.

I’ve really fancied getting a graphics tablet for quite some time, don’t really need one but i just really fancy giving one a try. Problem is they aren’t really “giving it a try” type prices. It’s all because there’s only one company making them, Wacom, so they can basically charge what the hell they like, and because its mostly profitable design firms buying them they get away with the inflated prices. Only A6 sized tablets are anywhere near affordable. I would really only want an A5 tablet but they cost at least 140 GBP. Wacom have an A6 tablet with a retail price of 75 GBP, the Graphire4. So anyway, in one of my weird impulsive moods I discovered a slighty older model; Graphire3, still only A6, but going on ebay so I gave a conservative bid and ended up winning it. Was only 35 GBP, bet yers I never use it though. haha.