joshwaller (baboba)

"ERROR - Your request could not be processed. Please try again." I'm getting this error message every single time I create a new post and click publish. I then click publish again, and it goes away. Anyone at Google / Blogger aware of this?!? Been happening for several days now... Some people having the problem here . This only seems to happen in Opera (I'm using v9.23, and 9.26), but not Firefox (v2.0.0.12), IE7, or Safari (v3.0.4 PC version)... Update: this appears to be resolved in Opera 9.5

I'm pretty sure I've spent many an hour thinking about cheap cars, and the cheapest way of running a car... mainly in the " bangernomics " region, where you buy the cheapest car possible... but now that you can run your own diesel car on vegetable oil and not have to pay tax on the fuel, which would be the cheaper option? Assuming you're running the car as a second car (because old cars aren't as safe as new cars, and you don't want to potentially explode an expensive car), and assuming you'd do an average of 5000 miles a year... Option 1 would be the cheapest small petrol car possible eg a Renault 5 1.1, which on average would get you 35mpg with a mix of sensible town/city/motorway driving. Cost of car: free - £150 Tax /year: £115 MOT /year: £50 basic Servicing: £50 basic Fuel (5000miles, 35mpg, 642litres): £674 (@ £1.05/l) Insurance: £240 Total cost year 1: £1129 (assuming free, alternatively £1279), year 2: £1129 Option 2 would be the cheap small...

The VW Scirocco Scala has gone to a better home . Click to embiggen . Lots more pictures here . Sold for the same price I bought it for, so that worked out quite nicely.

There are some things that are fundamentally flawed on the Nokia N95 :- 1. It's sold as a "Carl Zeiss" 5mp digital camera - yet it can't even take good photos with flash without making all the people look blue . I initially thought that this was because it uses an LED flash, instead of a 'real' flash like on the Sony K800i , but the Nokia N73 uses the same LED flash as the N95, and is capable of taking better flash photos with much more colourful skin tones (although admittedly there is still some blue ). 2. Nokia Maps - it's utter rubbish. Navigation should be FREE, there is no way that I would pay to use this software, I would much rather pay for TomTom. On a 5 minute journey, I had to enter / reset the journey from and to points 5 times! The Nokia software update removes the "tracking" feature making Nokia Maps practically un-usable and useless when driving. Nokia make a huge deal about GPS, navigation etc, yet charge you to use it. 3. The ...

I used Sweet Maria's oven roasting method - Gas mark 9 (500 degrees) to roast the green beans for about 10 minutes - the roasted beans and grounded coffee came out looking roughly the same colour as store bought beans / ground coffee, but the taste! WOW! Soo smooth and divine, with LOTS of crema , when compared to store bought beans that tasted SO bitter. (Admittedly the store beans were a couple of weeks old). Definitely a must try if you are setup with your own bean grinder and coffee maker then you absolutlely HAVE to try roasting your own coffee beans! You can view the original photos here .

... photos added to the gallery ... cars page updated with more details Related Links: Bangernomics (now with a forum !), Reject proposals to ban cars over 10 years old

I've never really had many wifi problems before, apart from a cheap brandless wifi router that packed in after 5 months a couple of years ago... but just this last week my laptop wifi stopped working, my Linksys wireless router stopped doing the wireless, and a £10 edimax PCI wifi card I bought also wouldn't work properly... so I bought a new Linksys router - but the PCI wifi card was running dog slow, so I suspected the router had poor range - and then bought a Netgear 108mbps wireless router with 108mpbs USB dongle... only to find the PCI wifi card was faulty as the new router and dongle walked flawlessly, however, the PCI wifi card was still as slow as snails. So everything was running fine (with the new netgear router and dongle), until the PC with the USB dongle was knocked over, and the dongle was damaged, and now that wifi connection seems dodgy! grrr. I now have: 1 faulty Linksys router (wifi doesn't work) 1 spare working NEW Linksys router 1 faulty built in wifi in...

Looking for a new photo quality printer? I was, and decided the Canon Pixma ip2500 seemed like a good choice, from £32 (£45 in PC World). Print quality and features appear to be very good for the price, offering "Photo lab quality". Black is very black. Colours seem overly saturated on default settings. Installation on Windows XP is very easy - on Vista I had much less luck, ie it didn't work. If you want cheaper running costs then the Epson D92 may be a better choice due to cheaper replacement cartridges (£6 for the Epsons, vs £12 for the Canon). + Price - around £30 online, amazon, ebuyer + 30 Matte photo sheets included free + Very quick printing (22ppm black, 16ppm colour) + Borderless photo quality printing + 100 sheet doc feeder + Fairly quiet (night quiet mode also available) + Colour and image quality good on basic paper - No USB cable included (annoyingly the standard for printers) - Doesn't want to install with Vista (XP fine) - Colours appear overly satu...

We're off to home 2 rome! The car we are taking (a Mazda 626 1.8 LX) has made it to 140,000 miles on the clock! If you feel like giving some money to charity, then you can do that here . More details on Facebook !

The usual "new car" syndromes are apparent* - you can't see the front of the car, the ride height is high (and the seat can't be lowered very well), the visibility through the back window is poor (perhaps the estate version will be better), quite a firm ride (although it doesn't seem as overly firm as the Golf), the seats aren't especially comfy (overly firm)... BUT they are very supportive and there's a lot of nice things too: USB socket for ipod / pen-drive full of mp3s, spare power point up front, good grip even in the wet, copes well with speed bumps even though the ride is quite firm. Performance: the 1.6 litre petrol engine manages to produce 120bhp, which is quite impressive (for a 1.6 litre engine - compare that to the 115bhp produced by the Golf's 1.6 litre petrol engine), the gearing seems quite high / long (?), with 30mph reachable in 1st, 60mph in 2nd! And the engine revs up to 6500rpm quite happily and quickly with a fairly decent sound. ...

We should be picking up this 1.3 litre Skoda Favorit GXLi bad boy tomorrow on Tuesday, it even comes with it's own Haynes manual, alloy wheels and radio cassette! Update: This fell through in the end. You can follow progress on our Facebook Group (registration / logon required).

We're moving house, so until our internet connection is sorted out, joshwaller.co.uk (and images) will be down, although you should still be able to browse the blog , until the site's back, please feel free to visit DigiCamReview !

The Kia Ceed comes with a 7 year warranty, perhaps it should be renamed the KIA Seven, as it's the only car available in the UK with such a long manufacturers warranty! I took one for a long weekend test drive, and while I'm still writing up the "review", you can have a look at the photo gallery here . Previously: KIA Ceed 7 year warranty .

... taken with the Casio Exilim EX-Z1050

But I've finally found a use for the broken 486 IBM Thinkpad 755c Laptop I've had lying around all these years... taking the speaker out and putting it into a Furby with a broken speaker! I followed the guide on phobe.com and just need to solder on the replacement speaker. The original having died from being placed directly behind the front "rub tummy" switch. Unforunately the internet doesn't go back far enough to provide any interesting information on the 755c, in fact, the only thing you'll find nowadays is about running lunix on the 755c , yawn! Unfortunately the same goes when you're trying to track down Windows drivers for random modems, you're more likely to find Linux drivers! Grr!

The screen showing the date and time (screensaver view). The stylish new Creative Zen Stone Plus is an upgrade to the 1Gb Creative Zen Stone . The Plus features 2Gb of memory, an FM Radio, a small screen, a stopwatch, built in microphone etc. It's available in the same six colours. Creative Zen Stone next to the Creative Zen Stone Plus (roughly actual size) - the Plus is slighter bigger (in length), and is much more feature packed, although it has a shorter play time of 9.5hours compared to the 10hours on the Stone. Microphone, top controls (right is quick / shortcut menu, middle is on/off, and left is play/pause), blue LED, headphone jack. Box contents, the headphones look better, and look like the ipod earphones, but sound worse than the ones that come with the Creative Zen Stone , and I find the Stone's earphones more comfortable. You get an ultra-short USB cable, the MP3 player, earphones, and a quick start guide. For software or documentation you have to go to www.creative...

1996 - Dave Mustaine got together with Lee Ving (Voice, Harmonica, Lyrics), Kelly Lemieux (Bass), Jimmy DeGrasso (Drums) and played Guitar and wrote lyrics to record the album called MD.45 - The Craving, creating a "punk metal record". It was at a time when Dave was unhappy with what Megadeth were doing (Cryptic Writings, Risk). Musically great, however, fans of Megadeth / Dave Mustaine, were somewhat disappointed with the vocals. Fast forward to 2004 - Dave Mustaine is remixing and remastering all his albums, one of them is MD.45 - The Craving. Unfortunately half the recording (Vocals, Harmonica) was recorded in a different studio, which had since shut. Unable to remix / remaster from the original recordings, Dave Mustaine decided to re-record the vocals and harmonica by singing himself and simulating the harmonica parts on guitar. MD.45 The Craving - Dave Mustaine Vocals (2004 Remastered) - Fans of Megadeth will enjoy this album. I listened to the original '96 versio...

The front managed to stay scratch free as I left the plastic cover on at all times (only removing it for this photo). The back, however, wasn't so lucky, even though it was kept inside the free case all it's life. You can click the picture below to view a much bigger version. So with that, it's time to say goodbye, I like you, Ipod, but I don't love you. I like itunes (on the PC) a lot, it does pretty much everything the ipod does, like letting you rate all your favourite songs, and create playlists, but I simply don't use the ipod enough to justify keeping it. Instead I think I'll stick to my Creative Zen Stone and simply use iTunes to organise my music.