Then Sony’s stock may be up your street, With the rumoured delays of the PS3, and the near 1000$ cost tag that is being touted by the recent Merrill Lynch report the Sony stock price has dropped around 3.6% in the last couple of days (FT Chart) now down to the $46 mark.

Sony will probably not live down the hype that has been generated about the 360 ‘killing’ PS3 if the rumours are true and it is delayed.

The make or break part of Sony’s future could well be Blue Ray and if the market accepts it or not (personally I believe that HDDVD will probably be the VHS in this battle). Sony always seem to back the wrong platform, the technology is possibly better in Blue Ray, but so was Beta Max and that did little to help them ;)

I have just read this blog posting about the ‘fuel crisis’ in the USA.  Us poor Brits could only wish for the price of fuel to be that cheap!

We pay currently (on average) about 92pence per litre! that works out to £3.49 for a US gallon of fuel, that means with the current exchange rate we are paying $6.08 for a gallon of fuel!

All I can say is consider yourself lucky that you are ‘only’ paying a third of what we are for your fuel.

And they wonder why European and Japanese car manufacturers make ’small’ engined cars. It also explains why diesel is practically unheard of in the USA (around 5% of cars are diesel in the USA) where a high proportion of the cars on the European roads are in fact powered by derv (50% of European cars are diesel).

That the UK government were taking the mickey with speed bumps over here!

It seems that the Dubai government are even worse. This speed bump (see video courtesy of AutoBlog) was setup without the government informing anyone, to add insult to injury, there are no sign’s.

The reason for the bump is obvious, cars are travelling very fast on the road and probably should not be doing that sort of speed in a built up area, however the repair bills for the Lamborghini Gallardo (last car in the video) are going to be substantial

Wonder where he would stand on the whole ‘no win no fee’ thing …….

Blogburst has been getting a fair bit of blog time recently, not sure what it will bring to the blogosphere, but I’ve asked for my invitation (currently it’s an invite only process).

What will it do for me? probably very little besides drive some more traffic this way, but hey I’ll give it a try

All I would like to say is Here Here! (See Link) Nice one S

Koenigsegg have shown off some pictures of the new Koenigsegg CXX. Rumour has it that this is Koenigsegg’s attempt to regain the ‘fastest car’ mantle currently held by the Bugatti Veyron at 253Mph.

The pictures showed up on the Geneva Motor Show website and indicates that Koenigsegg will launch the new CXX at the show.

Spec’s and details of the car obviously have not shown up yet, but to beat the 253Mph mark they are going to have to be decent.

Thanks to AutoBlog for the lowdown

I noticed over at Dan’s Blog that he is having problems converting the MCE 2005 recorded TV format into something usable.

I present AutoDVR Convert this kewl little tool will convert your DVR recorded titles into standard MPG format automatically (watches the Recorded Television folder).

It is an ongoing project and future versions will allow you to set rules as to what to convert and what to leave alone.

While on the topic of MCE, here are some more of my favourite plug ins that have not yet been mentioned.

• Garfield Comic Plug in (Not currently ‘available’)
• Web Radio
• My Outlook (Shareware, some functions require registration)
• MCE-YAC (Caller display if you have a modem that supports it)
• MCE Customiser (change the items on the menu etc)
• GameEx (Mame front end)
• DCut (see below)

I’ve just thought about it (going through my installed plug ins to make the above list) and this may actually be what Dan is actually looking for, DCut (Website) allows you to edit (i.e. remove ads) and re-compress your recorded TV directly from the MCE interface. I have not actually tried it via 360 yet (will do later) but cannot see why it should not work.

Just thought I would post another useful tool, HDTV Pump. It allows you to ‘pump’ .TS files (DVD structure files) into any media player you fancy.

Today I have been mostly playing with My Movies for MCE 2005.

This little toy allows you to index (including details from IMDB), and rip your DVD collection to your MCE PC so you do not have to go digging around for the disks every time you want to watch a flick (it also integrated with DVD Profiler!).

If you want it to work with the 360 as an extender then you have to add the mcx1 user account to the local admins group on the MCE PC.

I just bumped into this great article about sky (Link). As you may know if you read Dan’s blog he is looking at replacing Sky+ with WindowsXP MCE.

I’d love to know what people make of Sky and their practises, let me know by the usual means.