Delmorpha.com live now!

Delmorpha.com is officially live now! It will be the home of everything thanks to 250GB of data... if you need anything online (like your own Flickr style photo storage etc etc) just give me a shout.. i have plenty of bandwidth and you can even have your own sub domain!

I will be dual posting for the next few weeks until everything is designed nicely and all my content is over there but update your bookmarks as it will be my only blog soon.

Who the fuck are these douchebags?

"Look at me.... I'm a giant cock!"

I fucking hate stock photographs. One thing guaranteed to make me close your website down and to then go to a competitor, even if they have higher prices, are stock photographs... especially when the models look like these fuck nuggets...

How do these people live with themselves... I mean, photos like this are like a permanent bad hair cut cast into cyberspace for everyone to see... take the guy on the left for example. This is what will happen when his friends see it.

"Isn't that Peter..??"
"Yeah... what the fuck is he doing?!"
"I don't actually know... it looks like he's sucking off a dog, or perhaps even a horse... its definitely a large mammal of some description..."
"Did you know he did animal porn?"
"No.."
"I bet you did... "
"...I didn't... honest.."
"Lets avoid him in any case.. what a fucking freak.."

Seriously... have some self respect... stock models unite and just say no to stupid fucking poses!

Moving to my own webserver soon... watch this space...

I've been publishing online for over 10 years now and have been to and fro with my own websites and web servers, whether they were crappy 50mb web spaces, blog spaces or my own Linux ones, I've always been tinkling with online content. Having access to my own has usually been relative to my job/financial situation and once I move on, nothing ties me back to a definitive location. I feel now I need my own again.. I mean I have 2 blogs that need backing up ASAP, and a laundry list of domains I've registered that need content, and I also need to start work on a website for my aunts shop, so a $7 a month webserver with a few terabytes of bandwidth is definitely needed, and needed soon.

I will be posting at delmorpha.com once my domain registration goes through and double posting here until the new server is working correctly and looks good - this is more of a heads up that I will be moving onwards and upwards in the near future, and to keep your eyes peeled for an all new site... at least this way you'll have one less word to type when visiting me...

Winning Eleven X Achievement Translation - ヨーロッパチャンピオンシップ優勝

There is one difference in the achievements to Winning Eleven X (Japanese/Asian) and Winning Eleven 2007 (US Version) on the 360. The American version has "The Puma Cup" whereas the Japanese version has ヨーロッパチャンピオンシップ優勝

A Google translation of ヨーロッパチャンピオンシップ優勝 is "European Championship Victory" and I assume you do this in the Master League. I am missing a few of the WEX achievements at the moment and this was the only one I didn't know what it was... once I get online at my new place I will be giving anyone who wants some a run for their money on XBL, and hopefully gaining some more achievement points!!

My Xbox profile is on the right, if you want a whooping, just add me to your friends list and I'll see you online!

A New Colour of Wiimote Strap - Now in Navy Blue!

I recently saw someone who had used Rit Dye on their Wiimote strap on Kotaku and thought it looked pretty cool so I decided to give it a whirl myself today. I have to say it looks frigging awesome and got me to thinking about doing it on the actual joypad, both a Wiimote, and a Xbox 360 controller!

As you can see from my pictures, the dyeing works really well, and gets into the plastic brilliantly leaving no streaking or banding. It really could be an official Nintendo Navy Strap... you wouldn't be able to notice.


I have been told explicitly from the eBayer we bought the Rit dye from that you are best using US branded Rit dye as it is much stronger than the European equivalent, especially when it comes to fixing. As its plastic too, I would definitely recommend a US Rit dye (thats what I used) as the results are superb!

As it worked so well, I was intrigued as to what else would dye perfectly. My first thoughts are Amys Xbox 360 joypad.. which is going to look amazing in Rose Pink. Unfortuately Microsoft were kind enough to use pinned Torx 8 screws in the pad, so I need to send off for the screwdriver head before I can start on that. Next is the Wiimote itself, but again custom tri-directional screws stop short term tampering, until I get that screwdriver in the post too.

Both the Wiimote and the wireless 360 pad are going to look awesome in pink when I can get them apart, and both should be relatively easy to do. The joypads both lend themselves to a pastel pink given the things I wont be dyeing (i.e. the bumpers and grey dpad/analogue sticks on the 360 and the buttons on the Wiimote).

What this example is one of the cover bays cut in half with a hacksaw. I dyed one half in my boil bath and used the other half to stir and flip it. The results are astounding.

The dyed side is superbly rich in colour and the finish is consistence and streak free. The dye doesnt come off the plastic when i rub it with my finger, so long term use in gaming should be fine. Dying a full joypad with Rit dye is going to be the dogs bollocks! Watch this space for my how to guide on how to change the colour of your Wiimote or your Xbox 360 joypad coming soon!

"Advanced" Networking on the Wii - Fixing Error Code 52130, 52131 or 52132

I've had my Wii since December 2006 and to be quite honest its had at most, 20 hours of on time. Considering in the time since Christmas I've spent 60 hours on Oblivion on the 360, the New Nintendo Super Console hasn't had much action at all from what you might call a hardened gamer.

Today I'm on "Leisure Support" from home, which gives me a chance to catch up with all those nerdy jobs I never get around to, like installing this new PCI SATA controller in my PC to boost me up to half a terabyte of storage, and sorting out the WiFi issues I was having with my Wii.

To be honest, the Wii online for me is a bit like having internet access on the phone. Its a bit of a gimmick every now and then, and more frustrating because of the crappy 480p screen on my 1080i capable TV. Whats even more frustrating is I can't even use the Wii as a Wireless Pandora box thanks to Opera not utilising the limited amount of memory on the Gamecube Wii well enough, but somehow it manages to play YouTube content.. oh and Last.FM seems to work too.

In any case,wireless on my Wii has never really worked properly, probably due to the advanced setup of my network, or so I assumed until today. I've updated once or twice but its been insanely slow when it has worked and rather than Google for the problem, I've left it as I was really that bothered in the first place. The Virtual Console being the CashCow/joke it is can fuck right off and everything else online-wise is just shit.

I run a Linksys WRT54G with the custom DD-WRT firmware on it.. and what an excellent piece of firmware it is too. My wireless network is setup with Mac filtering and encrypted with WPA and I assumed thats what the Wii was having trouble with... that or the fact I only have about 40% signal strength according to the DD-WRT for the Wii when I tried to fix by assigning an IP address with DHCP.

What I've found worked with the Wii was for me to switch the router to channel 1 and to change the DNS to an external range... *shrugs* .... god knows why it worked but it did... maybe the Gamecube Wii has issues with non-unique channels on a network and doesn't like to query an internal DNS..who knows..

If you are having problems with the Gamecube Wii online with the error codes 52130, 52131 or 52132, you will already know the Nintendo official explanation is practically useless telling you to "ensure your wireless interference is not causing the problem". How exactly could you do that without some advanced tools for detecting the signal strength or noise levels, things that most standard router firmwares don't actually have... and the fucking Gamecube Wii certainly doesn't have anything other than that shitty error code!

The real solution is to try and change you wireless channel to either 1 or 11. Either of those channels should solve any potential interfering external networks as they are solus wireless channels. For some reason my Gamecube Wii spits the dummy out on channel 6.

I also changed my DNS to an external DNS like 62.69.64.134/135 for example. As I did this at the same time as changing the wireless channel Im not 100% sure which solved it! :) (Im also too lazy to delete one and see it was the other that did it...)

Finally, from a network admin point of view, I would also recommend using static IP addresses, turning off DHCP on your router, setting up Mac filtering and limiting the amount of connections you can have at once to the amount of wireless applications your household needs.

This is just good advice for wireless networking security in general and is infinitely better advice than just turning on encryption and thinking you're secure.. and if you're only using WEP then god help you!

Consider this wireless networking analogy. You have a nightclub with protection to get in. WEP Encryption is like having bouncers on the door that will let you in by SHOUTING the password at them... the trouble is it makes it pretty easy for anyone listening to hear the password, say it to the bouncers and get in.

By turning off DHCP, setting up MAC filtering and limiting the amount of connections you can have, your bouncer has now boosted his IQ by 30 points, putting him just over the "retard" boundary! He now checks peoples membership to the club (MAC filtering), he won't just give out free membership to hot sluts who just asked for a membership card (DHCP) and even knows when the club is full!

You still might want to have a club password that can be either SHOUTED (WEP) or whispered (WPA, WPA2 or ideally WPA2 with RADIUS detection) for that added protection, but if we can limit who we actually let in too, rather than letting any old fool in with the right password, were going to have a much safer nightclub. Encryption will also black out the windows so no-one can see how bad your dancing is from the outside... you can hopefully now see why you might want to learn a bit more about wireless networking, and consider changing your password thats still set to "password"..

The MAC address of the Gamecube Wii can be found in Wii Settings -> Internet -> Console Information.

My blog looks great in Vista................ I'm such a whore... :(

Thats right, I'm triple booting my laptop between XP Pro, Ubuntu Feisty Fawn (which I'm still having issues with on this Aspire 1600) and now............ Vista Business Edition. The worst part; I actually kind of like Vista...

The first obvious point is its quite pretty as far as a Windows OS goes, and once you get most of the grubby things turned off and classic views up, it actually looks a lot nicer and is much easier on the eye that the "My First Operating System" that was XPs interface. I still use Classic View in XP to this day, but I can see me leaving Vista View on and actually missing it when I have to boot into XP.

My 4 year old laptop has no issues with its hardware either. Old XP driver worked for the SigmaTel soundcard and the Agere modem which weren't installed by Vista, but even the Mobility Radeon 9000 drivers were installed and working correctly.. something XP didn't even do.

The install wasn't without its hiccups however. I recently lost one of my RAM modules to Corruption and have been running the laptop with one 256mb DDR module. After installing my Corporate version of XP from my offices Action Pack, I grabbed the Vista upgrade DVD and stuck it in. It wouldn't even consider my machine as it had less than 512mb of RAM. This pissed me off given one of the better features Vista can do is to use a pen drive as a cheap alternative to RAM/accessing a slower HDD. Microsoft want people to upgrade their RAM as well as buy XP "Service Pack 3" apparently...

I mean what a fucking stupid test in the first place. My laptop has a 2.8Ghz processor and a Radeon 9000 graphics cards, which even by todays standards is a pretty good spec for a laptop. Its a bit short on memory because of the fault, but why should the base install of an Operating System give a shit that I don't have 512mb of RAM? I'm the one who chooses to run the programs in its environment and I'm happy for them to run from the page file albeit a little a lot slower. It quite literally wouldn't let me continue... I had to borrow a 512mb stick from works storage before I could upgrade to Vista! I then took that out and Vista still continued to run fine with 256mb.

The install took forever... almost 2 hours. If we have to continue forward with Vista in the future for clients, the first machine install before creating an image to build with is going to be like pulling teeth. Its not even interesting nor does it relay helpful information to let you know whats going on. There were two occasions I actually thought the machine had crashed, only for it to jump back to life again moments later to the screen it was previously on.

Another thing is its fucking huge... like 7 gigabytes huge. I can accept a good Linux distribution like Fedora Core being around the 4 or 5 gigabyte install range knowing that practically every application I will ever need are installed from the get go, including OpenOffice, programming suites, photo editing tools, movie and music players, games, hell.. even a 3D modelling package or two, but seriously... Vistas install is around the 6 gigabyte mark and is just an Operating System shell - it even commented on the partition I was using wasn't big enough - it recommended I used another partition as my 8000mb partition was 500mb too small for optimal performance, but unlike the start of the install, it didn't throw its rattle out of the pram and allowed me to continue.

Some people might turn around and say "big whoop, I have nearly a terabyte of HD space, 6 gig is nothing" but when a clean install really doesn't have that much in the way of extra software, it makes me paranoid about all the extra crap thats buried deep in this Titanic. I remember thinking that 200mb for Windows 98 was a bit big and was forever finding ways to get rid of unneeded files back in the day. Granted that PC only had a 2GB hard drive, but still.... 6 gigabytes is taking the piss...

We'll see how Vista goes with it for a little while... I haven't tried to do anything interesting with it yet, like run a DivX movie, MP3s I may or may not legitimately have acquired or come across any of the other DRM demons I know they've built into it... but I'm sure I will, and when I do I'll be straight back to dual booting!

Scum of the Earth - Harvesting Email Addresses for profit

If you ever believed that some people are pure evil shat from the very depths of Hell then I had proof of it today.

Chain emails are a regular thing in my mailbox, and being a bit more IT savvy than most I just ignore them. I'll take the gypsy curses, the bad luck and risk not getting my millions from the widow of a Nigerian Queen to protect the email addresses of my nearest and dearest. Today I received one that turned even my own stomach to the levels of depravity some people will go to make money.

The email was entitled FW: Help find Madeleine McCann and entailed the following heart felt story :

PLEASE READ THIS MESSAGE AND FORWARD IT TO EVERYBODY IN YOUR ADDRESS BOOK...

Please read this message and pass it on!!!!!!!!!

As you are aware my niece, Madeleine, is still missing and I am asking everyone I know to send this as a chain letter i.e. you send it to everyone you know and ask them to do the same, as the story is only being covered in Britain, Eire and Portugal. We don't believe that she is in Portugal anymore and need to get her picture and the story across Europe as quickly as possible. Suggestions are welcome.



Phil McCann

Unfortunately this is not an attempt to find this poor little girl, it is a scam being ran by some very sick individuals, using other peoples pain and the face of something very much in the public eye to harvest email addresses. If there was ever a time to wake up and stop forwarding this kind of email, now was it..


Why is this a scam?

Well for one, if suggestions are welcome, why are there no contact details on the email. They spent the time to get a picture, but Phil McCann who is so desperate for suggestions according to this email forgot to add his own email address and telephone number. There isn't even any of the obvious places to start, including the obvious Portuguese Police/MET Office/Home Office/Child Protection Agencies. There is even an official Find Madeleine website at http://www.findmadeleine.com/ which these douche bags aren't even good enough to make reference to.

This is tried and trusted trick employed by 419 scammers who start most of the shite forwards everyone has seen. The email I received probably had 500 email addresses in it and although most email forwards stay between a "5 hop" social group, eventually someone unwittingly forwards it to a "friend" from MySpace/Yahoo/etc who is actually a 419 scammer in disguise. They then have a nice catch of how ever many hops it took to reach them with X^Y email addresses in and before you can say "No thank you", you are already wanting to buy viagra, inherit Brewsters Millions or you've won the Spanish Lottery and forgot to claim.

The sad truth is some scumfuck is going to make money out of that email, money that most definitely won't go to help find that little girl.


What can I do to stop this?

One thing - STOP FORWARDING EMAILS LIKE THIS! Use a bit of common sense when forwarding anything, including jokes, chain letters, etc. If you are going to forward emails, make sure you actually know every person on your mailing list.

In this case, yes, we all want to find this little girl alive and well (as well as reprimand the parents for their own idiocy, but lets find her before we lay into them..) but it only takes one person to forward that email to a 419 scammer and you've unwittingly exposed a huge quantity of people to potentially get ripped off.

Scam baiting is a technique where the person who was originally sent the email reverses the scam on the send and tries to goad the scammer into wasting their time and sometimes even their money with the false promise of a big return.. in exactly the same way the scam artist was trying it on with them. The law is a bit ropey when it comes to this and it is potentially dangerous so if you are thinking of "prison justice" for these scumbags, you didn't get the idea from me...


Further Reading

For more information about 419 scammers and scambaiting visit http://www.419eater.com and Shiver MeTimbers will give you the lowdown on how they work, and how you can get back at them. I will reiterate his warning that if you're thinking of going after these fuckers, be very, very careful. As my post shows, they really are the Scum of the Earth.

500 Words really isn't enough for me to moan in - BBC News Have Your Say Comments

I still like to have my say so I thought I would share just in case you don't spot my comments on the BBC! 500 words really isn't enough for me and I had to reword what little I could fit in several times, but here it is!

Do you support road pricing trial plans?

Are pay-as-you-drive road charges the right way to tackle congestion?

It doesn't take a genius to work out that this is an attempt to generate more cash to plough into something that needs addressing at the source rather than at our pockets.

Tighter controls need to be placed on how Road Tax is used to maintain our roads and regulate the work being done thus saving time and money. Roadworks companies make a killing at the tax payers expense and we do nothing to address that. I can't remember the last time I drove through road works and saw some work being done.

As it currently stands at 5000 votes, 80% of which do not support the governments bid to introduce PAYG road pricing. There was a major petition recently regarding it on the official government website too that received over 5 million 1.8 Million registered votes, but the government continues to put its fingers in its ears and go "la la la la".

Seriously, when will they listen (never) - road tax goes up and up every year and the problems get worse and worse. As one commenter says "The proposal has nothing to do with tackling congestion - it's just another tax." and this is damn right.

That and the increasing Nanny State that is the UK - the government would have little black boxes in every car in the country tracking your every move. Cross reference that with the DVLA database, biometric data on your passport/driving licence and that seems like the perfect surveillance tool. All we need now is the cameras in every room telling us not to do that when were scratching ourselves...and even thats almost in place in some towns...

The Axis of Evil - North Korea, Iran, Iraq and Tesco...

Having been downgraded from the Blackpool Tesco Mega Store to a local Tesco Express for my lunchbreak I was expecting to have a little less choice. What I wasn't expecting was a totalitarian choice of items...

I recall watching a documentary recently that stated Tescos market share as a supermarket was over 50% and fast approaching "monopoly" status due to their constant expansions and blocking of other retailers building on sites that might otherwise be good for a supermarket by buying land at overinflated prices and simply sitting on it.

As my more active blog readers will know, I'm not a fan of Tescos own brand Cup a Soup to say the least.. and what did I find was the only choice of cup form soup. Tescos. So this got me interested in product placement in these smaller "express" shops that are replacing the smaller outlets in towns and villages.

Tescos can obviously afford to run small losses in these shops in view of the bigger picture. I just worry were inadvertently becoming slaves to Tescos and what they deem it acceptable to buy. As a society though, we will only have ourselves to blame if it does happy.. no one cares about anything other than price when it comes to consumables, without a single thought to where its come from or how its been produced.

In any case, I had a shufftey round Tescos Express to see if there were any other totalitarian style buys and they do it with a lot of the little non-essentials that you might want and not be so disappointed they don't have your favourite brand. It probably would've gone under the radar if it hadn't have been that god awful soup...

This probably goes a big way to help control the losses they must be making in these smaller outlets.. Tescos own brand products (besides the Finest range) are hardly renown for their quality and they're usually only slightly cheaper than the products their attempting to clone.

So George, if you do happen to stumble across my blog when you're reading, do me a favour... next time you're referring to the "Axis of Evil", stick Tesco in there too when you're reaming off the nations you probably shouldn't be pissing off... when you're impeached/voted out/have to step down, it might be one of the only things you will be looked back upon to have got right...