A week ago my car without warning decided that it was no longer capable of 300 horsepower and reduced itself to an unresponsive shuddering mess at anything past half-throttle.

I had replaced a hose a matter of hours before this occurred, but after spending far too much time ruling that out (I was convinced I must have caused it so I retraced my steps several times) the next course of action was to change the spark plugs… it’s difficult to get this sort of thing done during the week, so I had to put up with the shadow-of-its-former-self for several days before doing this.

The old spark plugs were indeed pretty well worn and the gap was twice the distance of the new plugs, but replacing them didn’t fix the problem. Having wasted too much time already, I took the car into the mechanic and left them to it. Turns out I was close - the problem was the coils, which basically convert the car’s 12 volts into a stupidly high voltage (over 35,000V) so that the spark plugs can do their business.

My assumption is that allowing the spark plugs to age for too long was what fried the coils; it seems logical that an excessive spark plug gap will cause the coils to do more work which resulted in their demise.

Moral of the story? Check your spark plugs. If I’d spent $60 replacing them a year ago I might have saved myself $550 today.

On the bright side, though, my car feels awesome again.

Over the last couple of evenings I’ve got my geek on and set up my laptop - an Asus G2S - as an overpriced TV tuner so that I could take a look at the Freeview TV service. The setup basically consists of the following:

• My laptop is running MediaPortal, a decent but so far unstable media player. I have Vista, but Windows Media Center can’t handle the display codec Freeview needs. What a surprise.
• The UHF aerial plugs straight into the laptop
• The HDMI port on the laptop is finally proving useful, as it carries the video and sound to my LCD TV

The whole set up is a bit mickey mouse, really - my HDMI cable is about a metre long, so the laptop has to sit immediately beside the TV thereby rendering it useless for any other activity whilst it’s broadcasting. What’s more, even if it was within reach it wouldn’t be usable because whenever I move focus away from MediaPortal the TV picture vanishes and the program needs to be restarted.

It works though, and getting it working geek-style was fun. Unfortunately, once the novelty wears off, TV still isn’t worth watching.

As an aside, Freeview’s choice of domain name is slightly perplexing. They chose to go with freeviewnz.tv, which freeviewtv.co.nz conveniently redirects to. They also hold the domain that would be everyone’s first guess - freeview.co.nz - but this isn’t set up as a redirect or a virtual host so most people looking for the site will needlessly miss with their first attempt.

Sad, but true (bit like that pun, actually) - this is now officially my most anticipated game of 2009. \m/

Now, talk of Guitar Hero: Metallica is no longer a case of wishful thinking or idle speculation–it’s fact. When sifting through an SEC filing of Activision’s over the weekend, Wedbush Morgan Securities analyst Edward Woo–associate of the highly visible Michael Pachter–uncovered a gem in the section where the Santa Monica, California-based publisher discussed its upcoming game slate.

“In fiscal 2009, we plan to publish Guitar Hero: On Tour for the NDS; Guitar Hero: Aerosmith, Guitar Hero: Metallica, and Guitar Hero IV across multiple platforms,” the company said in its report. Activision’s fiscal year ends on March 31, 2009, which means that the game will likely follow the holiday release of Guitar Hero: World Tour (nee Guitar Hero 4).

Thanks, GameSpot.

I can’t believe New Zealand is jumping on yet another television bandwagon and creating its own “…got talent” show - New Zealand’s Got Talent - based on the hugely successful American series.

From an easy money standpoint, this might seem like a good idea. Unfortunately, like New Zealand Idol, Stars in Their Eyes and various other Kiwi-made bandwagon shows, this is doomed to be a failure for the simple reason that New Zealand hasn’t got talent.

Here’s my predictions:

• Performance distribution:
  • 60%: Rapping, beatboxing, hip-hop & breakdancing
  • 20%: Singing
  • 10%: Band/instrumental
  • 10%: Other
• The first season will have fewer acts and fewer episodes than its American counterpart
• There won’t be a second season.

Looking forward to it.

I quite liked this.

Thanks, digg