By Cyrris , 14th September 2:44 pm
Three months without an update can only mean one thing.
But that doesn’t mean I am taking the site down. Not at all. The fact is, our archives are an absolute gold mine of information and well-thought opinion, and the number of googlers still finding them certainly justifies their continuance. I like to think we have helped a good deal of people get their questions answered over the years because of that. Going through our mostly-complete visitor logs from the past four years, the site appears to have had somewhere in the region of 350,000 unique visitors since it began as a blog, with around a million visits in total. Proudly, it has for some time had Firefox as it’s most viewed-with browser.
Aelon has certainly been an interesting experiment over the years. It’s made me a better writer, a better designer, and hell, it even got us a few free t-shirts. We were accepted in to a fairly exclusive group of quality blogs. We’ve also had some incredibly popular posts linked to from all over the web, from a showdown with Jack Thompson to Mactastic reviews. We even had a pre-release scoop on the Xbox 360.
The fact seems to be that with so much less free time, we’d all rather be spending it playing games than writing about them on this blog. Vermouth is now studying journalism and political science at university. Holliday is also balancing life between uni and his flashy new IT job. Plagiarize is running loose somewhere in America, though details are sketchy. Kelmon is still stuck in Belgium, armed with a new budget for his Apple habit. I am just over a year in to my new job, and still playing Civilization IV.
Thankyou to all those who contributed via posts, comments, or email. Getting good discussion happening was one of my primary goals for the site, and it certainly succeeded there. If I have one regret, it’s from not giving the site a proper name.
By Cyrris , 19th June 6:37 pm
Almost 3 months ago now, I told the story of my quest for the perfect clock radio. News of my progress has been scant as of late, but I am here to tell you that it is now over. The previous contender, Seangean’s RCR-1, was so close to being exactly what I wanted, but it had one crucial flaw - it hummed. The internal transformer turned the expensive and featureful device in to nothing more than a useless brick, playing havoc with my incredibly light sleeping habits.
Where I left you all last time was at the point where I was deciding on what to do next. Indeed, I did contact the retailer to ask for a replacement, and another RCR-1 was shipped out to me in due course. It suffered the same problem. Contrary to Sangean’s claims however, the devices were not atypical of the RCR-1 model line. I believe they were all like this, and the final resolution to the problem only proves it further.
» Read all of “The Perfect Clock Radio“…
By Cyrris , 27th May 11:01 pm
In stark contrast to my usual fanatical following of each previous version, I decided not to bother going near any of the beta releases for Firefox 3 which have been successively released over the past few months. It wasn’t until a couple of weeks ago, with the unveiling of Release Candidate 1, that I bit the bullet and gave it a go. While the reviews I have read around the web have given it glowing praise so far, I can’t help but feel a bit disappointed.
The best analogy I can think of is the car I drive. Just a few months ago I was driving a 15 year old bomb. All sorts of things were wrong with it, and it was generally not a pleasant driving experience. Now I have a brand new automobile. Being new, it has everything I could possibly want in a car, and more. What this means though, is that the few niggling bugs which do exist (a couple of rattles, a scratch or two, and a slightly misaligned dash panel) drive me absolutely insane. It’s so close to being perfect, but just not quite there because of some really stupid minor issues.
This is why Firefox 3 RC1 makes me so frustrated, and unfortunately very few of the issues appear to be fixable before the full release.
» Read all of “Firefox 3 - So Close, Yet So Annoying“…
By Cyrris , 3rd May 12:58 am
The past few years have seen me computing on a 17″ LCD from BenQ. It was priced reasonably and for the day it’s 8ms response time meant that it was a decent choice for gaming. Being a budget brand though, it had it’s fair share of problems - it’s viewing angles were terrible, the substandard contrast and colour reproduction meant the images were not fantastic, and most annoyingly for me was the incredibly uneven backlight.
As time progressed, I got used to the nuances of the BenQ, but at the same time I’ve grown more and more aware of the move to widescreen formats. Previously not very well supported by many games, this is now no longer the case. Seeing all of Blizzard’s StarCraft II demos in widescreen format, I knew I’d have to make sure I was able to play it that way by the time it was out. So, I got myself a new monitor.
» Read all of “Wider Pastures - The Samsung 2253BW“…
By Cyrris , 29th March 11:07 pm
Few consumer electronic products are given as little attention as the clock radio. They don’t make for interesting reviews, they’re difficult to get excited about, and unlike plasma TVs or lava lamps, they don’t really add much to the look and feel of a room. It is for this reason, I can only assume, that no-one has bothered to create a perfect clock radio yet.
What irritates me however, is despite the fact that they’ve been hugely common for decades now, you still can’t go out and buy a cheap one which has no glaring issues. Surely manufacturers have had enough experience over the years to iron out the bugs? The only way you can get a product approaching what I would deem an acceptable level of quality is to spend, spend, spend. So, being a very light sleeper and extremely fussy about the things I buy, that’s exactly what I did.
» Read all of “The Perfect Clock Radio - A Pipe Dream?“…
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