Blizzard has announced Diablo III! There is of course no word on a release date yet, but there’s no doubt that it will be one of the biggest games of the year… whichever year that may be.

Check out the official site for trailers etc.

We’ve pencilled it in for late 2009 at this stage, and you can pre-order now.

Who says golf is boring? Tiger Woods’ U.S. Open win this week caused measurable traffic spikes in the U.S.A., with numerous ISPs apparently initially believing the spikes to be a denial of service attack.

You can read the full story here, but here’s the summary:

Starting around 9 am Pacific and peaking at 1:30 pm yesterday, many ISPs noticed an unusual increase in traffic. At first, a few security engineers worried they were under some type of new DDoS attack. But the flood of traffic did not appear directed at any individual customer — the gigabits of anomaly traffic surged to almost all customers from multi-national banks to the bakery down the street and home DSL / Cable users. For several ISPs, traffic into their network grew by 15-25%. In one provider, inbound traffic nearly doubled.

It turns out that the U.S. Open played at Torrey Pines yesterday generated one of the larger Internet-wide flash crowds this year. Traffic dipped and peaked corresponding to Tiger’s initial
misses and subsequent spectacular comeback as millions of office bound fans tuned in to the live NBC and ESPN coverage.

Firefox 3 is out today. I urge you to download it.

To expand on my earlier post about running Freeview to my TV via my laptop, I’ve made some improvements and now it’s actually quite good. Here’s what I’ve changed;

• Dumped MediaPortal in favour of dvbviewer, so it’s now stable and I can actually do other things at the same time;
• Bought a 3m HDMI cable so my laptop can reach the couch and the TV;
• Found a $5 S/PDIF to optical adaptor so I can run digital sound directly to my 5.1 speaker system (hopefully something on Freeview actually has surround sound…)

There’s still nothing on, though. ;(

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.