Firstly, I’m sorry. I couldn’t not put that title. Anyway, England is pretty much covered with a thick layer of the white stuff. Not cocaine sadly, but snow. It was accurately predicted by the weathermen a good while in advance, and it’s just as crazy as they expected. It’s snowed pretty much non stop all day.

I managed to snap some photos, one during the very limited period when the snow actually stopped falling (above). They’ve not come out great, but I had to include some pictures to make this post seem more interesting than just a post about snow. The one beneath was just taken a while ago, and it’s starting to get dark already. I’m hoping the snow will keep coming until my shed is pretty much buried.

In light of the success of our tutorials on YouTube (over 1500 subscribers so far), we decided to relaunch FlashLearner.com (FL) with a new look. It’s gone through a few different versions, and we had a different idea for the content on each version. It never quite worked out because tutorials were always a side project, and our plans for FL were always so grand, like a “YouTube for tutorials”, gathering all the best written and recorded tutorials from around the world, and it was always going to require more time than we were prepared to put into the project.

So now, FL is reborn, with a simpler aim in mind. Only our tutorials will be posted on there. So, we avoid the possibility of crap tutorials, and don’t have to approve and search for any other tutorials. FL is purely for our own tutorials. It won’t include written ones, just videos. New ones will still be posted on YouTube, but obviously the player is a lot smaller than ours, and the quality is a little worse. That’s why we’ve decided to post them on FL, in HD, because for tutorials you need to be able to see what’s going on. The entire content area is used to display the videos, and we’ve not taken prime real estate to plaster ads all of it. At least not yet.

Anyway I encourage you to check out the new site from the thumbnail image or link above, and let me know what you think.

I’ve not really been following Windows 7 news. I’ve seen the odd article from Digg, but only recently have I begun researching what is actually in the new operating system.

I’m only going to cover the Windows Touch functionality briefly, because I want to focus on another feature in more detail without making this post too long. Windows Touch was developed for touch screen monitors. Now if I stop there, put your hand up if you have a touch screen monitor. Really? Nobody? Well that’s not a massive surprise is it. But hey, why not, let’s add a bunch of features for touch screen users! And while we’re at it, let’s let users flip through photographs with just their fingers. I don’t know how Microsoft come up with these magnificent features. Maybe they got some ideas from elsewhere.

Microsoft have assembled a thrown together site for the new OS, with some absolutely epic videos. These videos contain extraordinary performances from the “Windows Gurus”, who are the most horrible actors I have ever witnessed. You’ll see plenty of “Wow! That’s amazing!” and the like, which sounds like it came straight out of a late night infomercial.

But my beef isn’t really with the pointless touch features, or the ridiculous and uninformative video. I’m outraged about the new Windows Taskbar. Check out this video, demonstrating this feature:

Put aside the irritating man who is demonstrating this product. We know you copied this from Apple no matter how much you try to protest, I don’t care about that. What I care about is having my taskbar replaced with enlarged quicklaunch icons. As you saw in the video, these icons launch the program, and then change into the button to open and close the program. The problem is, if you have more than one window open per program (for example with instant messaging programs, you could have plenty), you have to hover over the instant messenger icon, and then you are presented with thumbnails for each chat window you must then click to go to that conversation.

This also means that there is no way of telling which song is playing, which folders you have open, or which Firefox pages you have open, at a glance. You have to manually hover over the thumbnail. This is horribly impractical. Why do you think most people turn off task bar grouping in Vista and XP? Because it’s entirely useless for productivity and just means you have to go through more menus to get to the damn window you want to open. The worst part is, Microsoft have not given users a way to disable this, because they are determined it’s the way of the future.

I think I’ll be passing on Windows 7, which incidentally, will be full price, despite the fact it’s essentially one big fix for the horror that was Vista.

While this may seem like I’ve only returned to this long abandoned blog to post of the (relatively small) sucess on YouTube, I assure that certainly (is)n’t the case. YouTube recently approved my application to become a YouTube Partner, something which I once thought to be a prestigious honour. That was until I saw some people had been approved before they even had a single subscriber or video. Still, being a Partner means I can monetize videos using Adsense “video units”, and have access to a number or branding options.

In other YouTube news, the latest video (at the bottom of this post) has received the following honours:

#37 - Most Discussed (Today) - Howto & Style
#90 - Most Viewed (Today) - Howto & Style
#15 - Top Favourites (Today) - Howto & Style
#88 - Top Favourites (This Week) - Howto & Style
#15 - Top Rated (Today) - Howto & Style
#65 - Top Rated (This Week) - Howto & Style

And the KnowFlash channel received these two:

#77 - Most Viewed (Today) - Gurus
#86 - Most Viewed (This Week) - Partners

So genereally things are slowly getting there. We also finally breached the 400 subscribers mark. Anyway the latest video, “How To Upload Flash Movies To YouTube”, can be seen beneath:

So Warhammer Online has been on and off for many years, and it’s finally going to be released this summer. I’ve just been looking at some videos of the new title, Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning, and it looks almost identical to World of Warcraft. Like, worryingly similar.

I should point out that Warhamer Online is in the beta stages, so it will probably look better when it finally comes out, but I still feel I should highlight the similarities.

Firstly, feast your eyes on this World of Warcraft in game screenshot. Analyse it. Look at everything.

Now, take a little look at this screenshot, taken from a video of Warhammer Online.

They are so similar it almost angers me. Look at the map at the top right - identical. The player profile and health bar in the top left - identical. The spell bar along the bottom - identical. The list of people in your party under your profile on the left - identical. Scrolling text chat shown on the bottom left - identical. How can they get away with that? Nobody seems to have batted an eyelid about it, but when I saw it, I thought I was watching a WoW video, not a video of a brand new MMORPG (2008, and those graphics are horrible).

Still not convinced? Check out this video. Even the artistic and technical graphics seem to be the same, and the way they’re animated:

Edit: I’ve just been browsing through the archives of Penny-Arcade, and I stumbled across this comic. So I guess someone did bat an eyelid. I guess I should give PA credit for noticing this 2 years before I did.

Just so you know, this isn’t a post about the crazy speed at which all the GameSpot staff appear to be quitting (which now includes Rich, Jeff, Ryan, Greg and Alex), but rather one or two stupid things I’ve come across during my recent browsing.

Firstly, Firefox decided to sign me out of my session at GameSpot. So when I wanted to post a reply on the forums, I clicked the “Quick Reply” button under the post. The text area expanded and I typed out my post. When it came to submitting it, GameSpot just redirected me to a “Join GameSpot!” page. I hadn’t noticed I had been signed out, but I assumed that when I tried to post, it would just send me to the login area. But no, it lets you type out your entire post, and then says “Oh no, you’re not logged in. Log in now, OR BUY GAMESPOT TOTAL ACCESS!! Oh and by the way, you should probably write out that post again. We deleted it.” It doesn’t remember the post, or even redirect you to the forum once you’re logged in. Terrible.

Secondly, even if you do manage to log in and get back to the forum, you ain’t makin’ no posts. Not when GameSpot’s horrible HTML checker is involved. That’s right, even when your post only contains characters, and no tags, it will greet you with the following message:

My HTML isn’t well formed? That’s because there isn’t any. I can confirm that it also manages to break when you do add valid HTML, or even when you use the “Insert/Edit Link” icon to have it automatically generate it. That’s right, GameSpot’s own code seems to be scrutinized by GameSpot’s own validity checker.

This doesn’t happen all the time, but it’s enough to make you not bother posting when it does occur. I’m surprised it’s not been fixed, there are dozens of posts on the GameSpot help forums about temporary solutions (which don’t work), but GameSpot’s techies seem to have ignored it.

Call Of Duty 4 is an awesome, awesome game. Like seriously, brilliant. So good, in fact, that I’m still playing it online. I’ve been addicted to it since mid January, and have managed to reach around level 50 or 51. I can’t quite remember. Unlike games like WoW, the increments of required XP aren’t as vast as each level progresses, so it’s not too hard to level up.

Level 55 is the top level, where you unlock the golden desert eagle (which I found from a guy who died on a level - it didn’t look so great), but once you’re 55, you’re given the option to go “Prestige” which means you start all over from level one. You lose all your weapons, weapon kills, weapon items and so on. In return you get a prestige icon. Once you get to 55 again, you can do it again and you get the level 2 prestige icon, and so on. Some people have already got the level 10 prestige. How much must they play?

There are some really horrible levels though, like Bloc, which is a Russian compound. It’s set like two main buildings, one on either side, and it plays out so your team is in one building and theirs is in the other. It normally turns out to be just a snipe-fest, which I would normally relish. I love sniping, and I love snipers in real life. It’s the epitome of patience and skill. However on the game, there’s a problem where the crosshair doesn’t align properly, so you might have a marine’s face in the middle of your sight, but when you pull the trigger, nothing happens - you miss completely. According to some posters on GameSpot’s community forums, it’s a bug in the game. But sometimes it does work so I’m not sure. Also, there’s no zooming. You’re stuck with the stock magnification of the rifle, which makes it a lot harder.

It’s not hard to see why Call Of Duty 4 is so popular online, and despite frequent connection problems and minor bugs, it’s fantastic. I just can’t wait for some more maps, but I can’t see that happening for some time.

What a great blog title. Anyway, I recently acquired a shiny new guitar and amp, and they finally got fitted onto the wall (which is apparently made of a mixture of breeze blocks, bricks, and sand, strangely enough). I should stress the amp wasn’t fitted to the wall, before I continue… So I decided to get a new guitar since my old one didn’t really perform too well, and was top heavy. I needed a new amp because…well I had bummed a tiny practise amp from the loft, and really needed my own big one with better distortion capabilities.

So without further ado, I present to you a rather compressed photo of the beasts.

The two on the left are my brothers (left handed) BC Rich Warlock with pretty much every single part black. Then the new Epiphone Les Paul. Then my new beautiful cherry Epiphone SG Special, then the old flying V, which still looks nice as a display piece. It looks to be a strange lumpy shape, but that’s the guitar strap hanging down. I tried in vain to clip the straps higher up so they won’t hang down, but no dice.

A fairly cynical look at the newly announced Macbook Air, and it’s (lack of) features, from Digg.

Following on from the Resistance Online Adventures post, here’s a brand new one related to Call Of Duty 4: Modern Warfare. I’ve played around a third of the way through the single player campaign, but started playing online, on the PS3 version.

Initially I wasn’t particularly impressed, because it failed to connect to any games, and only managed to do so when we left it for five minutes on the game lobby. Even then, it just started loading. You don’t get to pick which game you join, the only choice you have is what type of game mode you want to play (e.g. team deathmatch, free for all etc). I found myself being put into one of the two 6-person teams.

The great thing about COD4 is the ability to level up online. It doesn’t make you any stronger, but you do unlock more weapons and items to use. Unfortunately, it didn’t seem to employ any match making system. I was thrown in with level 30’s and 40’s, and nobody else under 20. I was 0. But technically the only advantage they had were different weapons, which I could steal once they were dead.

I didn’t get much play, since the connection dropped a few times. I was told it was a server problem, but I reset my router anyway. After a while it started to work as it should, and I really got into the game. I started to see why online play was so addictive, especially in such a deep game like COD4. I was ranking up, and unlocking new content after every game, pretty much. When I got to level 4 I got to create my own class, which meant I could select my starting primary weapon and sidearm, and also some perks like more powerful bullets. I even added a camouflage pattern to my MP5, but I’m yet to unlock a laser sight for it. You need to complete one of the many challenges to unlock it.

Understandably, most of the people who play online are pretty damn good, since they spend a lot of time playing. Each time you’re killed you get an immediate replay from the killer’s perspective, which is a good insight into their movement and shooting abilities, and it’s just fun to see. Initally I was dying left, right and center, since I didn’t know the maps or the best techniques, but I gradually got the hang of it. You get quite an adrenaline rush when you come face to face with an enemy, and take him out with a knife to the face. There’s nothing quite like it.

I started searching for a wireless adaptor for the PS3, so I didn’t need to plug in the ethernet cable every time, and I eventually came across a post saying that the 60gb version has wireless built in, like the Nintendo Wii. The 20gb version doesn’t. I had absolutely no idea, and I’m not sure how I never knew that. So we tried it out, and sure enough it scanned and found the network, asked for the details, and connected - no problem. So I should hopefully be playing a lot more COD4 online.