A good weekend

Last weekend was unusually productive for me, as I managed to get the brake discs on my car replaced, got a long overdue haircut and replaced the hard drive on my PS3 all by mid afternoon Saturday! It was nice to wander around Alloa town centre on a sunny morning before most people were up.

I have been very impressed with Sony’s customer service, as I had tried to replace the hard drive in my PS3 the previous weekend, but the screws attaching the drive to its caddy were so tight I sheared the threads trying to remove them. I called Sony and they sent out a replacement caddy and screws free of charge by recorded delivery. The replacement then went without a hitch, but if you are doing it and backing up your existing data make sure that you format your backup drive as FAT32 (not FAT, NTFS or the new exFAT format from Windows 7) or the PS3 will not recognise it. That took me ages to figure out. I now have loads of space as the old 60GB drive has been replaced by a 640GB one.

After that I relaxed into some gaming, though the Bourne Conspiracy made me very motion sick so that’s going to be a struggle. My nephew came round and we played Worms for ages followed by Supersonic Acrobatic Rocket Powered Battle Cars, where I finally won a game against him (6-5)! He then hammered me 7-2 so I think he was taking it easy on me :)

Sunday was mostly spent gaming again, playing the beautiful but frustrating Mirror’s Edge. In a fit of game-rage I threw the manual at the screen at one point, then laughed at the ridiculously camp outburst. I managed to complete level 2 in the end, then switched it off in triumph. Set up my own Rock Band 2 band Nostromo (for practicing without affecting our main band – Dynamite Areolas!) and got some practice in.

Also watched Wolverine on Friday night, which was a great film and much better than I expected. I like wolverines, they are badass.

Bad maths

I found an annoying example of bad maths in this BBC story about future Hard Drive issues for Windows XP users, where they stated:

“Each 512 byte sector has a marker showing where it begins and an area dedicated to storing error correction codes. In addition a tiny gap has to be left between each sector. In large drives this wasted space where data cannot be stored can take up a significant proportion of the drive.”

Now, as the sectors are a set size, and the gap is a set size, then the proportion of the drive wasted is the same regardless of whether the drive is 1GB or 500GB. I think what he meant was it could take up a significant amount of data storage space.

Pedantic? Maybe, but I am correct.

/rant