Tramore is by the sea, so it is less likely to snow there than midlands. But no snow in dublin which is more northerly.





Dave and Mick should have stayed in Ireland, because apparently there is no snow in Andorra. Oh, lol.

A few months back I was looking for a good torrent site. I don't be bothered searching the internet for these sort of things as Google results are mostly flawed for these things because of SE spamming and cetera.

So, I just mail a service I like to call "Blackie and Luke might know". Looking back the mail now, which i refer to every so often, I noticed a key difference in Lukes reply to Blackies.

Here's what I sent.

What's the best torrent search sites out there for music and tv mostly?

To which blackie replied:

http://www.torrentscan.com/

A few moments after this, luke replied:

below is the list of torrents i use.

best for tv shows, updated every morning with shows from usa:
http://eztvefnet.org/ (currently down, but should be up by monday)

use this is know whats on usa tv and when so you can expect torrents to be posted:
http://www.pogdesign.co.uk/cat/

good for any torrents, in order of preference:
http://www.mininova.org/
http://www.torrentspy.com/
http://www.torrentz.com/
http://thepiratebay.org/
http://www.torrentz.ws/

good for naming any tv shows downloaded with the correct episode name:
http://epguides.com/

Can you see the difference? I can. Not sure why there is a difference tho.

I like Ice cream. And I know you like Ice cream. Don't lie to me. I fucking know it! Just own up, you glutenous bitch.

Apologies to my lactose intolerant friends.

Kieran Murphy’s blog - all about making, eating, pondering about and enjoying sweet things by an Irish ice cream man and chocoholic in Dingle, Ireland with recipes included.

Ice Cream Ireland. It's got loads of recipes, and I found it because I Googled for a brownie recipe which Donna is going to bake for me. This site came up number 10 so, its doing quite well with Google.

I say "on it's way", because I have been hurt before and am still finding it hard to trust any broadband provider.

You will remember an earlier post about getting broadband from eircom. This is the second stage of that.

After my raging rant from before, Luke put me in touch with a nice gentleman in eircom. He will remain unnamed as if I were to name him, he may get barraged with emails. He checked out my line with a little more conviction than [mary] on the phone last time. He said that it was capable and forced the line to pass. Yay! One question tho. Refer back to the earlier conversation with [mary].

"I SEE, AND WILL I EVER GET IT?", "NO".

"EVER?", "NO".

"LIKE, FOREVER?" "NO, BUT YOU CAN RING PEOPLE, AND ASK THEM TO DOWNLOAD YOUR PORN FOR YOU!".

So, what's going on then? Well, I'm not sure. But it would be nice to have this service on a public front, like an escalation system. If I'm not happy with the first line service i'm getting from the sales rep, I should be able to talk to a more senior technical person and they can look into the issue in more detail. Just a thought. Eircom, I hope you're listening.

Anyway, moving on from that, eircom are pretty much the worst value for broadband and phone services in Ireland at the moment, and my original plan was to move to EsatBT who provide a much better service at a cheaper price. But as mentioned before you still have to connect to eircom first before going to any other provider. This intial connection cost a total of €145 (€110 connection charge + 1 Month line rental).

I called EsatBT today and have ordered 1Mb Broadband and Talk. Blackie has 2Mb and says that it is more than he needs so I'm going with 1Mb for €35/month incl. tax. There is a €45 charge for the Wireless Modem and free connection, so it's a pretty sweet deal.

But the total cost so far for Broadband in ireland for is €145 + €70 = €215 just to get connected. And timewise, at least 2 months. I'm still trying to find where the government is getting off saying we are a broadband enabled nation.

Some Related news on Broadband penetration in ireland: Ireland Lags in broadband league, Govt. urged to fund broadband, Eircom on target in 2004 (I think not), Broadband Initiative for Rural Areas, Ireland drops one place in broadband league.

BTW there are people to go to if you are not happy with what you're get from a tech provider. ComReg will listen to all of these kind of issues and you can get all your money back from some providers just by mentioning comreg in a letter/email.

It's Tuesday. Dinner is cooked, eaten and washed up. The girlfriend is watching some shit on the telly. What do you do? I dunno, but here's what I did. I took my mac mini apart.

Alright, there is some motive for my decision. Luke bought me a Mac Mini about 18 Months ago as a "gift", in return for some work (not done yet). This is reason enough to rip it apart, because little did I know at the time, but a substantial gift in exchange for work done means that you cannot charge for that work afterward. You bastard Luke!

Back to the Mac. The Mac is great, I've made the switch, and I no longer have a PC. But it's pissing me off a bit lately. There's no wireless, and the usb ez connect wireless dongle I have doesn't have mac drivers. The ram is 512Mb and is getting a bit hammered at the moment, especially when iPhoto is open (jesus that app sucks almighty).

I wanted to see if I could get that Airport Extreme Card, because there was nowhere on the web that would tell me for sure. The tools needed for this are a a little phillips screwdriver and a putty knife. The manual I was using said to sharpen it, but I got away without doing that.

Below is the Mac with the top cover off, the cd slot thingy unscrewed and in the top left, and the putty knife on the left.

Check out this arty photo below. It's all angle-ey and the lighting mental and cool and shit. Wow. I should get paid for this. You can also see the little screws that I took out of the top casing to remove it. One note on this, they are initally not very tightly screwed so be sure when replacing them not to tightly screwed. The only reason for this is at a later stage you may want to take them out again, so ringing the screws will not help.

There was one little thing I noticed. I am not sure if it was intentional, but the power cable is taped to the top cd slot thingy. I think this may have been intentional, so to remove any part of the internals, the power must be removed from the mainboard. This is a nice little thought from apple. Well, I think so anyway. Obviously, most people would have it plugged out before doing this, but just incase.

When you are taking a tiny machine apart. A tiny machine with tiny screws and delicate bits and bobs, what's the best thing to do? That's right. VACUUM. My girlfriend starts up the hoover and is lifting the table corners and my feet to "clean up". It looked f*cking clean already. Jees!

I found the slot where the Airport Extreme card sits, so I am confident I can buy it and install it without any bother. My OS (10.4) already has the airport configuration software for it, so it should be plug and play. I'll update you in a few weeks on this front.

I also wanted to double check the ram, so I could find a suitable replacement. A cheap one from a third party vendor. What's great is that it is a full size ram chip, so not too difficult to replace. Here are the details: 512Mb DDR - 400MHz - CL3. Note that the Mac Mini is will only take a max of 1Gb Ram and there is only 1 slot, so the 512Mb chip will be made redundant unless eBay can do anything with it.

I successfully got all the internal parts back in without any issues. I did find it a little difficult getting the outer casing back on the base. Simple clicking it back in didn't really work, so I clicked in the front joints first and applied a bit of extra pressure to the get rest clicked back in.

For such a compact device, it isn't too difficult to take a look inside, but it is important to take your time and consult some sort of intructions with photos. The photo below shows the back of the casing. I clicked in the further side from this first and then the rest sat easily enough.

Below, back where she belongs. With my 19", my Icy Box and Bob Marley. Don't you love Mac keyboards, they're so trendy and white.

To summarize, not too difficult to take a peek and easy to upgrade. BTW, my new mantra, one which has come from a bit of a personal budget crisis. Don't buy new, upgrade what you've got.