You hear of people buying LCD monitors only to find they have a dead pixel. Well beat this, I have 4 dead pixels, 1 dead sub-pixel, around an inch square of damaged pixels and intermittent horizontal lines flashing across the screen.

What did I do to deserve that? Needless to say it's going back the sooner the better.

On the plus side this thing is huge! going from a 17" CRT screen to a 19" LCD screen makes so much difference. In case you don't know CRT's are measured from corner to corner of their case. LCD screen's are measured from corner to corner of their screen so my 17" CRT screen was really around 15".

The display is great, the 16ms response time is fine and the contest and brightness are easily settable to my likings. All in all this a great screen for it's price especially if you take into account that it comes with DVI, something I see as very important There is of course one major draw back. My two Linux penguins and centre satellite can no long sit on top of my monitor .

I can't wait till I get a working one lol

At last the 8th is here, the day you have all been waiting for I'm sure Ubuntu Linux 5.04 "Hoary Hedgehog" was released today and is available from the newly updated Ubuntu website which has had a lovely graphical/layout makeover.

I'm downloading as I type and will running hoary on my home machine in around 7 and a half hours when I get back from work I can't believe I have to wait that long lol.

As of Tuesday April 12th XP users will no longer be able to block SP2 so if your running an XP box and don't want SP2, get ready to have it forced upon you becuase Microsoft are giving you no say in the matter!

Here is what Microsoft have to say on the matter:
Because of these significant improvements, Microsoft views Windows XP SP2 as an essential security update and is therefore distributing it as a "critical update" via Windows Update (WU) and the Automatic Updates (AU) delivery mechanism in Windows. Microsoft strongly urges customers with Windows XP and Windows XP Service Pack 1-based systems to update to Windows XP SP2 as soon as possible?

Personally I think this out of order, many people I have spoken too do not wish to use SP2 for various reasons.

Source OSnews.com IT Observer

After recent talks with Bwongar (http://bwongar.com) about his new LCD Montior I decided to review the question of whether to buy one or not once more. After a little browsing this time round I opted to buy one. I have ordred a 19" 16ms screen from Amazon.co.uk (Link) which should arrive before the weekend which nicely coincides with the release of Ubuntu Linux "Hoary Hedgehog" .

I'll give you my opinion of it when it arrives

I originally thought Google was increasing their email service Gmail's storage to 2GB as this is what I had read on the Gmail site. However it seems that the counter that is currently incrementing (see my previous post) has not stopped at 2GB. Perhaps this is an error or perhaps Gmail have decided to increase their storage further.

Currently Gmail is the best Email provodier there is, it is infact so good that it has taken over my domains email account that had 20GB of storage simply because of such a great Web Mail interface and the POP3 features.

Gmail have recently added WYSIWYG formatting and a nice toolbar to select the standard bold, italic, text colour etc options. As well as this they also have a faster improved spell checker that nicely highlights misspelt words.

If only Google could provide an Audioscrobbler service!

Yesterday I got my hands on some Nitro fuel and managed to get my R/C Car running.

I must admit it was not without problems. It took me two hours to start due to a flooded engine and the fact that the engine was really stiff being so new. It took me a while to work out how to clear a flooded engine. The useless instructions told me to remove the glow plug and pull the cord 20 to 30 times. Well removing the glow plug was obvious and so was pulling the cord but what they didn't tell you is that you have to turn it upside down. Well at least that's what I ended up doing. After that it was a lot easier to get it going. In fact once I had started it a few times starting it again was easy. It's like you get a feel for starting the engine somehow.

Anyway this car is fun . It really has some decent power, I use it in a car park opposite my house. It's around a 150ft by 300ft space and it's covered in loose gravel so there were spins a plenty. I admit I found breaking it in rather hard to do when it was so tempting not too. Beings as the manual said that the engine didn't need breaking in I didn't spend too much time breaking it in.

I never managed to put the body on the car, I was having a problem with the idling speed so it would cut out if you left it still too long resulting in frequent restarts. I never managed to take a picture of it either but there's a good reason for that. I was using my rechargeable camera batteries (4xAA) in my car. I have brought some more batteries now however and so will take a picture of it today if I use it again today.

Just got to clean the air filter and the heat sink and tune the engine as the mixture is too rich at the moment. These Nitro R/C Cars are great fun and I recommend them to any big kid.