MGAceman's AI Blogger

Now what? It doesn't seem to do much, yet it's supposed to be the next big thing. I'm probably missing something blatantly obvious, but to me, it's not the all-singing, all-dancing application it's reported to be. I have to admit, I'm quite disappointed in the lack of things going on. I think there's a guide to getting the best out of facebook in a Web User magazine somewhere, so I'll look that up, but first impressions aren't good... ...Just read the (quite brief) 'Get the most from Facebook' and it just tells you how to create your profile, hardly getting the 'best out of' it really. So, if anyone else happens to be on there and wants to add me to whatever it is on there, network/group/tribe/cult, feel free to do so, I'll be checking on there whenever there's nothing else to do...

I meant to add this yesterday, but I forgot about it and started doing other stuff... Sid Meier said, Civilization Revolution is the game I’ve always wanted to make! We are excited to take advantage of the power of next generation consoles and the ingenuity of handhelds, to create a great and unique strategy game for newcomers to the series, as well as the millions of fans around the world who enjoy Civilization on the PC. I must admit, I like this kind of game, kinda like The Settlers and stuff like that, I'm not a big fan of strategy games, but I am quite partial to what's known as 'God games'. Some of the key features that will resonate with fans of strategy games and the Civilization franchise include 16 civilizations to master and lead to victory, an array of famous historical leaders to play as or compete against, and accessible maps and streamlined time scale for quicker games, intense combat, and constant action. In online multiplayer mode, players will compete ...

So, who cares that they've reunited for a 12 date world tour? It doesn't particularly bother me as I wasn't that interested in them the first time round, so how have they changed since then?! (Going in order of the top image) Well, 'Posh Spice' (Victoria Beckham) actually looks worse, why doesn't she just stop trying to be a 'face' for something? Nobody is interested love, give it up. Melanie C (Sporty Spice) is looking good, way better than the skanky scouse of the old days, in fact, she looked better in her first solo music vid, Going Down and she's still recording on her own label. Geri Halliwell (Ginger Spice) has been fairly busy, yet still looks a bit better than she did, seems to have 'stuff to do', yet what that is, we don't know. Emma Bunton (Baby Spice) is still quite cute and doesn't seemed to have aged in the same way as the others and doesn't seem to have been up to much except for a bit of TV and according to MSN, sh...

This downgrader is for v3.50 firmware, and includes a port of the Homebrew ENabler (HEN) for firmware 3.50. It will automatically detect all known PSP motherboard types, and do the appropriate steps to ensure a safe downgrade. Before we get started, let's have the obligatory warnings: Any downgrader carries some risk of permanently damaging your PSP. We've done everything we can to remove as much danger as possible, but if you choose to use this downgrader, you are accepting all of the risk involved. Nobody else will be held responsible for any damage to your PSP, howsoever caused. Recent Sony official firmwares (3.30 onwards) have included checks that block upgrade from previously-downgraded PSPs with TA-082 or later motherboards. If you use this downgrader on such a PSP, you will lock yourself out of official firmware updates - although you will still be able to use new OE firmwares when they are released. We intend to release a tool to allow a return to official firmwares ...

Here I sit at 4:40am again due to me not feeling tired enough to go to bed (considering I slept for 12 hours Saturday night after not getting enough sleep the night before and then spending 6-7 hours outside sorting the garden out, it's no surprise), so I thought I'd check my email accounts. As usual, my Budweiser email was full of spam, I think I'm just going to close that account as I don't think it's used for anything anyway. On to Go.com where it was just another newsletter type thing which goes straight into the trash, then it's Hotmail's turn. On the first account, just some spam about finding a fuckbuddy or something, but then hello, what's this in my hotmail.co.uk account? Oh look, another email from Photobucket... hold on, I don't have or have ever had a Photobucket account. So, I go to Photobucket and request the password for the account, this time I get it (I tried last time, but didn't get the mail for some reason), it turns out to b...

If you haven't already seen it, WHERE HAVE YOU BEEN ? The latest 'LOL' on the net is a sinister little chipmunk doing a 'den den derrrrrr' moment kind of thing, here's the YouTube vid of it and I won't blame you for watching it about 10 times in a row.

I don't normally add M3 stuff due to not owning one and having the R4 instead. But, I thought I'd post about the new 1.06 update which has pretty much the same as the R4 1.10 update, that means recent ROMs and those needing 1 or 2Mb saves can now be played. I've uploaded the update here if you need it.

A new update for the R4 has been released with just a few fixes, one of them is quite handy. Update R4 v1.10 kernel 2007-6-20 DLDI auto-patching Solved the 1111 and 1151 save problem. This version includes DLDI auto patching, meaning that you don't have to patch DLDI supported homebrew before copying it across to your memory card. The R4DS patches the homebrew on the fly. This version also fixes the recently (understatement) discovered problem with The Legend of Zelda: Phantom Hourglass 2MB flash save type. Congratulations to the R4 team for such a fast release! I've uploaded it to my box.net account, BUT I've left out the themes. That means it's a smaller download and you can copy the files and folders over without overwriting any custom themes you may already have on your R4. To download the update, click here .

Well, it took them long enough. It had been up since March 28, 2007 with 87,610 views and 107 comments, but the 'WWE Wrestlemania 23 Donald Trump Vs Vince McMahon THQ promo' is no more. From YouTube: This is to notify you that we have removed or disabled access to the following material as a result of a third-party notification by World Wrestling Entertainment, Inc. claiming that this material is infringing: WWE Wrestlemania 23 Donald Trump Vs Vince McMahon THQ promo: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TSgODrjjcZ Well done, it's only taken you nearly 3 months to remove A COMPUTER GENERATED PROMO FROM THQ. I'm not really sure if it was even infringing a copyright since it wasn't taken from an official WWE source and I wasn't claiming any copyright over it, I never claim copyright over something that isn't/wasn't originally mine or of my creation. If the baboons that run the WWE can't tell the difference between a computer game and Real-Life™, someone ough...

It's here again, the day of fathers and the usual giving of gifts and cards. If my dad could have been arsed to stay in touch when I sent him my address, then maybe I could have been sending something to him, but since he can't even let me know when my own grandmother died last year, I've completely given up bothering. I didn't seem to get too much sleep last night, so I was up pretty early, next thing I know it's around 8:30 and the kids are bringing in big cardboard envelopes and a present each. My eldest daughter came with her nan yesterday and moaned in a typically teenage manner that she'd carried the bag all the way (even though most of the way was a bus ride) here. I looked in the bag earlier and thought I'd open the present in it first, I could tell it was clothes of some sort, but was pleasantly surprised to find a rather nice Reebok hoodie. I'm not particularly into hoodies and especially since they become part of the 'chav culture', bu...

Oh wow! As I was doing my usual web surfing yesterday, I came across the name Namitha and thought I'd do a little search... I am so glad I did! It's been some time since I posted about babes and I just had to let anyone else that reads this know about Namitha Kapoor. She is so hot! The Bollywood and Indian communities around the world will no doubt have heard about her, but wow, if you thought Shilpa Shetty is hot, she's madras compared to this tindaloo babe. Another babe that I encountered while looking through images of Namitha is Riya Sen. I'd say she's about the same league as Namitha as she's just as hot and apparently from a brief bit of news I read on some site, Riya is a bit naughtier. There is/was apparently an MMS (Mobile phone) video of Riya and a guy called Ashmit, it's not certain that the 'girl' is Riya, but it caused a bit of a scandal anyway. All I know is that she's a babe and certainly deserves a mention by anyone that likes bea...

I didn't realise how popular Samurai Jack had become since it started, I remember seeing a few episodes and thought it was good, then it just seemed to lose its appeal somehow and I stopped watching it. I still watch it now and then late at night on Cartoon Network Too (the abomination that used to be Toonami) if there's nothing else on, but I don't make a habit of watching it. That's why I thought I'd make some skins of Samurai Jack, a couple are from more recent times, but one is an old image from around when it first started and he was looking rather slim. He appears to have put on some weight since he first appeared and the storyline is more random, but it's still a pretty decent programme. The images in this post and on the Samurai Jack Skins page are wrong, I put the 'Vista' overlay on the wrong image, I put it on logo.bmp instead of bckgrd_1, the images in the files are correct though as I always test the skins before uploading, that's how I...

You know, finding images of Spongebob Squarepants that are suitable for making skins with is harder than you may think. They need to be of a certain size so that they 'work' properly and you want them to be fun as that's what Spongebob is all about, but whenever I find an image that would be suitable, it's usually around 100 pixels too small or it's the wrong dimensions or some other stupid excuse of fail. I'll keep looking out for more images to make skins out of, but for now, I have some skins of a character that is fairly popular and has a bit of a following... Download from my Spongebob Skins page.

As previously mentioned, I've been a bit busy making some skins for the R4DS and I've made a couple of basic skins for now while I find more colourful images to use. I've also been looking into finding some decent Naruto game images to feature as skins and possibly use certain images for icons instead of the boring ones I use at the moment. Sorry about not knowing more about Naruto, I used to be quite a big anime/manga fan, but I moved onto other things due to there being so much to do and I'm still the same. I'm into so many things and there's so much I like to do, there aren't enough hours in the day to do them, so I have to limit myself to the things that I really like doing and that came down to playing videogames, watching films, listening to music and badly playing the guitar. Anyway, there are more skins to upload... ;) Download from my Naruto Skins page .

I should have blogged this around Tuesday or Wednesday, but in all honesty, I just didn't feel like blogging this week for some reason. Before I go any further, I'd just like to warn you that images used in this post may either offend or if you're squeamish and have a weak stomach, you may not want to see them. As per usual, my mum brought a load of magazines she had read and in one of them, a story about this guy called Dede. Due to not posting this at the time I was going to and the magazine already at the recycling plant, I can't quite remember the full details of the story, but he's from Thailand or there about and he has some kind of rare skin disease that has baffled doctors and there doesn't appear to be any cure for it. His mum can only put some kind of oil on his skin to help ease it somehow and he has to have help with things because of his grotesquely deformed hands. He apparently travels with a few others known as the Association of Strange People,...

It's a bit of a slow week for DS releases, but there's one game I've been waiting for that's due out... US Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer Time Ace Zendoku Europe Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer Touch Darts Japan Game de Demashita! Powerpuff Girls Z Mizuiro Blood Unou Kaiten: Match-Bou Puzzle DS Australia Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer Touch darts looks rather good and is the kind of game you could spend plenty of time playing. I have to admit to have not even heard of Time Ace and Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer is more suited to a proper console such as the Xbox 360. I've been playing quite a few games and setting up a forum the last couple of days which is why I haven't blogged, but coming soon are more Naruto R4DS skins with a few Spongebob and maybe a couple of Vista style too. I'm planning on adding a couple of 'female singer' skins soon after those others, I'm not quite sure who though, so I'l...

The image you see on the left is the mic that came with the PS2 game, The X Factor Sing. As I mentioned in a previous post, the Wiimote has an audio translator chip inside which enables certain audio such as the human voice to be converted into data that can be read by whatever software is running at the time. It was said that the upcoming title from EA, Boogie was going to have a mic to use in the game, what wasn't said that the mic was going to be exactly the same as the 'X Factor' mic, but with an EA sticker on it. Now, the mic you see on the right (click either image for a bigger version) is the proposed mic that will be used on the Wii to play Boogie. Note the similarities between the two, in fact, you could say it was the same mic. No, I haven't 'Photoshopped' anything, the mic on the left is a photo taken by me as I own The X Factor Sing for the PlayStation 2 (if you have Action Replay MAX, you'll find my save with all the vids unlocked in the Onli...

As I'm not a big fan of anime, I'm not too sure of what is popular these days apart from Naruto, so I've started off with a couple of basic Naruto skins. I've also changed the pages into categories, the R4DS page now just has links to the pages or you can go straight to whichever page you want by clicking the link in the column on the right. The categories so far are; Babes Skins, Female Music Artists Skins and Naruto skins with a 'Vista Style' and Spongebob ones coming soon. I don't mind passing a bit of time away making a skin now and then since they take literally about 2 minutes to do and seconds to upload. I have a total of 12 skins available (once they've all been uploaded and added to the pages), so there's a bit of a choice and I'll be making more when I feel like putting one together (which is probably 1 or 2 per week). Any suggestions and/or comments are welcome as long as it's not just for the sake of trolling or to make childis...

Another week has passed and yet another bunch of games get put up on the Virtual Console. 3 games for you to choose from this week, a platformer and a strange 'go here, do this' type of game on the NES and a pretty decent shoot-em-up on the Turbografx. The Adventures of Lolo, NES, 500 points Balloon Fight, NES, 500 points Dead Moon, Turbografx, 600 points

As I've always said, what you do and say with your mates in Real-Life™ should stay that way, when you're with relatively new people and ON NATIONAL TELEVISION, you should behave and realise that you need to keep up a certain amount of decency. So why did Emily think that using the 'N' word was ok? Here's the transcript (courtesy of DigitalSpy . Warning, contains offensive language): Emily : (referring to Charley dancing/pushing her hips forward) You pushing it out you nigger. Nicky : (shocked laughter) Em, I can't believe you said that. Charley : You are in trouble. Emily : Don't make a big thing out of it then. I was joking. Charley : I know you were... but that's some serious shit, sorry. Emily : Why? Charley : Oh my god. I'm not even saying it. Nicky : Just don't talk about it anymore. Emily : I was joking Charley : Do you know how many viewers would watch that? Nicky : Okay, don't make a big deal out of it. Charley : Fancy you saying tha...

I thought I wouldn't have anything to blog about today, but I need to get this off my chest. What a total fucking waste of £400,000. What complete moron commissioned some over-priced twat to design the logo? Fucking Hell! Give me £1000 and I'll design something better, in fact, I'll get my daughters to do one, it'll be 10x better and won't give people epileptic fits . Prof Harding is an expert in clinical neuro-physiology and he designed a test which all moving adverts need to undergo to check they will not trigger a reaction in people with epilepsy. He told BBC London 94.9FM: "It fails the Harding FPA machine test which is the machine the television industry uses to test images. "And so it does not comply with Ofcom guidelines and is in contravention of them." I don't normally have a little rant like this, but when so much money has gone into producing so much shit, it tends to annoy me. Like in my local town where they've built 'somet...

What? Yes. Apparently, there is a chip inside the Wiimote that translates speech into data, meaning that either with an addon peripheral or (possible, but doubtful) with the Wiimote itself, you could actually talk to other people, sing in karaoke type games or use speech in applications/games. The question is though, when will we be seeing this chip start to be utilized? One possible use would be a Wii version of Dr. Kawashima's Brain Training: How Old Is Your Brain? in which there is a part where you need to speak into the mic (of the DS version by the way) in the 'Stroop test'. The test requires you to say the colour of the word into the mic, if a Wii version of this was released and there's a distinct possibility due to Big Brain Academy due out soon, then tests that require you to actually speak out loud (besides the reading out loud 'test') would be possible on the Wii. To be specific, it's an 'Audio translator' chip, but what it is capable ...

One of the things I like to do, is look around for free software and pass on that info to other people so that they can benefit from programs that only costs bandwidth and can do almost as much as a commercial program. Paint.NET is what is geekily known as an 'image manipulation' program or as I would call it, 'a paint prog' which is jolly good at creating images as well as a fair bit of photo processing. In fact, every image I create or tinker with has been through Paint.NET and so, if you too would like to check the program out for yourself, you will need the following: Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 x86 version (32bit) x64 version (64bit) Changes in Paint.NET 3.08 are: Fixed : Pasting an image from Office 2003 applications now works (e.g. Excel 2003 graphs). Fixed : Some dialogs were not indicating which command button was the default. These buttons now have a highlight to indicate which one will be activated if the user presses Enter or Space. Fixed : Some minor ...

Ok, so I decided to make a 'proper' Vista style skin and I've based it on the Aurora background. It actually looks better than I thought it would and probably has the best working colour scheme that I've done so far, you can actually see everything instead of having to squint (except the bit that says 'R4DS ', but you don't really need to see that anyway). You can either click the image to download it or take a look at the others on the R4DS Skins page where the rest of my creations are. I may decide to do a bunch of other Vista style skins featuring the various backgrounds and rather than 'announce' them on here, I'll just stick 12 together and offer them as one big download. As much as I'd like to offer an anime pack of skins, I'm not sure which are the popular series or what characters are peoples favourites.

On the net somewhere, you can download a 'Make your own Moonshell' kit. It's not a Moonshell kit at all, but files to create your own Vista style skin... I've made a basic skin using the files (there are just .png images, a couple of .psd (Photoshop) and a theme.ini file) by using a not particularly fancy background, although, I may do a few with Vista specific backgrounds (or at least backgrounds that are classed as 'Vista') for anyone that may be interested, but for now, I've just thrown one together to see how it turned out and it's not too bad I guess. Actual Moonshell skins seem to be a lot more complicated than doing a normal theme, there are more images to deal with and the ini files are quite a bit more technical than just changing a few color values, so it's doubtful I'll attempt doing a Moonshell skin, but you know what they say, never say never...

Most of today has been spent finishing off the decorating, it was mainly the matter of doing around the windows which isn't too bad since it was only the top half of the room, the bottom half consists of artex, so that just has a lick of paint now and then. Due to me doing pretty much everything barefooted, it's caused my heel to ache somehow and I get the feeling it's going to throb like fuck later, it's already doing the 'woam woam' thing. I can't be arsed with decorating, painting I can handle as I'm pretty good with a brush or roller, but when it comes to sticking up paper, forget it. Give me a room with proper 90° angles and I could probably do a half decent job, but when you're trying to work with completely random angles and totally mis-aligned walls and ceilings, it becomes a task and a half to get the paper up straight. Anyway, it's done now and I can rest until next week where I'll be taking a sledgehammer to the old fishpond and so...

WTF? A whole week gone by already? The last VC post I did is still at the bottom of the page, mind you, this last week has hardly been blog-inspiring, but alas, the Virtual Console is so good this week, I've decided to post up the info here again! SEGA has taken over the Virtual Console again with another three classic releases that include the long-awaited Streets of Rage II with a Turbografx game thrown in for good measure. Kid Chameleon, Mega Drive, 800 points Streets of Rage II, Mega Drive, 800 points ToeJam & Earl in Panic on Funkotron, Mega Drive, 800 points World Sports Competition, Turbografx, 600 points