I really need to make sure this blog doesn’t turn into one of those 1 post a year wonders that always starts with “I haven’t blogged in a while”. They give me the irrits.

So anyway, I haven’t blogged in a while, I think Twitter may be taking up a lot of the time that I would/should spend on this site. This post is going to be a bit of a catch up rant.

I’m seriously backed up with web dev stuff to do, and I really want to get them all done and get a decent portfolio up and running, it’s looking rather stale at the moment, I tend to be a bit of a rollercoaster when it comes to web dev, sometimes I can find my creative side and quickly whip up a nice wordpress concept design, then I have a brain fart and struggle with making that concept into a theme, or vise versa, I think it depends on the music I’m listening to at the time, it has a big effect on the way my brain works. I might need to look at tagging songs for creative and for coding, I’m convinced it has an effect.

I recently bought a new toy to take my attention away from my iPhone, a nice Samsung 46″ LCD TV, it’s big and beautiful, and looks perty as hell, the purchase of this TV has given my xbox new life, through the HDMI cable I can finally play the games how they’re supposed to look, and since buying the TV I’ve bought 3 games for the thing; Guitar Hero III, which I already have on the Wii, but I wanted downloadable content and HD niceness. Project Gotham Racing 4, having heaps of fun with this one, haven’t got into a console racer in years, probably since the first Gran Turismo. The third game I’ve bought is Mass Effect, which is ok, only just bought it, not overly impressed.

I’m currently looking at Blu-Ray player prices, they are going for around $400 in the places I’ve looked, definitely a future purchase.

On to other Gadget goodness and me and my housemate have decked out the house with 2 airport expresses for streaming music, we’ve had one for a while but the things really shine with two, perfect synced streaming music throughout the whole house, one in the lounge, and one in the outside stereo with our recently partified deck, which proved to be awesome on Grand Final Day.

And Finally, just a bit of iPhone stuff, even though I’ve saturated this blog with it, I’ve finally hacked my iPhone, it was a breeze and the stuff I can do now is fantastic, live last.fm scrobbing, direct to device podcasting, themes, soundsets and video recording, particularly Qik.com streaming, which streams live video to my Qik profile, I’ve always been impressed with this service and now that I use it, I’m super impressed, check out my profile for some of the vids I’ve made.

I think I’ve rambled on enough, what a stupidly long post, oh well, kudos to you if you actually read it all!

So me and my friend Ben replaced the LCD panel of my Macbook last night, and it went pretty damn smoothly. There were some scary bits where we had to pull out plugs that didn’t look like plugs and strange plastic tidbits, but all in all, we simply followed the guide on ifixit.com and it worked quite well. AU$419 for a 120GB hard drive and a 13.3″ LCD panel, not too shabby, bought from Macfixit.com.au. Here’s some piccies.

Before

After

So, as per an earlier post, I broke the LCD panel of my beloved Macbook. At the time I was thinking, way too expensivc to replace, just buy a new Macbook. But a couple of factors have come to play since then. For one, I didn’t want my next Mac to be a Macbook, I wanted a Macbook Pro, and 2, I found a place called Macfixit Australia, who sell LCD panels for DIY install for AU$379, which is damn cheap, you can get them to install it for you for $179, but that (however small) extra fee just makes me think I might as well go buy a new one for $1449. There’s an awesome guide at ifixit.com which has a 23 page guide in replacing the panel, which is quite involved, but me and a mate were thinking we could do it, so long as we follow every single step. The only tools I need is a screwdriver, a spudger and a beer to cool my nerves. And hopefully the DIY gods smile down on me.

My God I had a big bender last night, don’t remember coming home, don’t remember a lot of things, but I did wake up to this:

Not the nicest thing to wake up to, I guess all I can do now is turn it on, get all my data off it, and eventually, go buy myself a new laptop, it’s gonna take some time though. So kiddies, when your elders tell you don’t drink, it’s bad, listen to them, or things like this can happen.