Awesome lawn mower!

This heat is killing me!

This is insane. 35.5 degrees celcius today, in the fricking shade!

Ofcourse, the new pool that we bought is not yet heated enough to be able to stay the entire day in it. 16 degrees, it’s hard enough to keep just the feet in there, but after a while you don’t feel them any more.

The kids pool is perfect, so Miss F was having a blast in there today whilst me and A was trying to get into the big pool without freezing to death… I didn’t really manage, A did though – amazing.

Heat, pool and mosquitos!

It’s been over 30 degrees in the shade today, and the kids have outgrown the old inflatable kids pool that we got. So, after talking it through with A, we decided to buy a Bestway pool with a steel frame that the entire family can use. Can’t believe we didn’t invest in one last summer, but it’s said that this will be one of the hottest summer we’ve seen in a while – atleast for those few weeks of summer that we have …

While assembling it, we realized that what used to be a little bit annoying really was a massive problem.

We live about 200 meters away from a little pond, that apparantly is a very good nesting ground for mosquitos. Ofcourse, being surrounded by alot of trees, the wind doesn’t move them elsewhere either.

Nasty buggers, they are. Shivers.

So. We also ordered something called Amplecta AMT 64, which seems to be a pretty awesome thing in attracting and killing mosquitos in an area of up to 1000 square meters! I hope it works – was cheap, but could still be good!

Fear!!!!

Xbox Live information resources!

Okey,

It seems like the Xbox Live Operations team finally got together and launched (another) blog where they will post updates about what is happening. Hopefully, this will stick around a bit longer than the old one that stopped updating back in 2007.

There are a bunch of Xbox Live resources as of where one can find information about what is going on. These are:

• Xbox Live Operations Blog

• Major Nelson – Larry Hryb, Xbox Live Director of Programming.

• AceyBongos – Graeme Boyd, Community Manager, Xbox EMEA, London.

• @AceyBongos – AceyBongos on Twitter.

• @majornelson – Larry Hryb on Twitter.

• @thevowel – e on Twitter.

Other interesting people that I tend to look to in case of other problems or cause I’m curious:

• Robert Bowling – fourzerotwo at Infinity Ward.

• @fourzerotwo – Robert ‘fourzerotwo’ Bowling on Twitter.

• @teamxbox – teamxbox.com on Twitter.

• @feliciaday – Felicia Day on Twitter, known from The Guild and the Facebook/Twitter presentation on E3.

Turtle Beach X4

There’s been alot of posts about Xbox 360, Xbox Live and Microsoft lately. Shame on me, I have so much more to give! I got the perfect excuse for blogging about these things instead of my biking though – the weather! It’s been raining for days! Bläh. Then again, I guess the Xbox stuff is a bit more intresting than my biking, right? :p

Anyways, I’m convincing a couple of friends of mine to buy the Turtle Beach X4 – THE ultimate gaming headset for Xbox 360, and I thought I’d extend that “couple of friends” a bit. HELLO!

If you’re in Europe, you have probably been cursing over Turtle Beach only being sold in the US – or well, extremely hard to find outside the US anyways.

Not any more!

If you’re in the UK, you probably want to visit Lime. However, beware of long lead times for the X4 headset. From what I understand, it’s the EU distributor madcatz.com that is slow in delivering.

If you’re in Norway, Denmark, Sweden or Slovania, you need to visit Ultimate Gaming Xperience for your Turtle Beach products. They have been having some issues with delivery times aswell, but are working together with Turtle Beach US for fast deliveries directly from the US.

Both resellers are serious, trustworthy companies, and I have a very positive experience with both of them.

“It’s too expensive, £140 (~2400 SEK) for a headset!!!!!!”

It’s 5.1 surround, light weight, very comfortable to wear, awesome game chat functions… and it changes the way you ever listened to the game audio. On top of that, to differ from X1 and X3 that only works on the Xbox 360, the X4 headset will work with your TV, blu ray and other sources aswell. Watching a horror movie with the X4 headset is NOT recommended, even if you think you are not easily frightened!

If you’re not playing your favourite game with the Turtle Beach X4, you have absolutely no idea what you are missing.

6.5 down, 17.5 to go.

Xbox Live has now been down for little over 6.5 hours, which leaves another 17.5 to go before the scheduled window is closed.

Couldn’t care less about it just yet though, but …

I wish that they will have brought everything up by this evening, I can stretch myself to about 22:00 CET, but anything after that is going to be happening way past my oh so needed bed time.

Preparing for the winter.

Just checked in on the progress on the wood outside here, and it’s looking good! This is ~3 hours worth of work for 2 16 year olds. I can’t help but be a bit amazed, but I guess they are aiming at being ready by midsummer.

Intresting interview with Shane Kim / Project Natal

Q: Do you have a window for release that you’re targeting?

Shane Kim: Yes – not 2009. That’s the only thing we’re saying.

The interview with Microsoft’s Shane Kim can be found here.

Command and Conquer Red Alert for iPhone!

OK, might be a bit slow here, but this got me all happy – finally a decent game for me that might be worth buying for a mobile device other than the Nintendo DS or PSP !

- All the menus can be collapsed easily to the side of the screen to allow you take advantage of the entire iPhone screen.
- You will be able to have up to 4 control groups in the final version.
- You will be able to select multiple units (duh), but we dont quite know how since it hasnt been built yet!
- Units automatically attack-move.
- You can easily zoom in and out by pinching.
- You can navigate the battlefield by touching and dragging on the mini-map.
- You drag to move along the map otherwise. You cant just drag and hold to keep moving.
- The graphics looks fantastic, even up close!
- There will be two factions to play (assumingly the other one is Allies).
- Multiplayer wi-fi and 3g connection
- Its currently looking at a Fall release, but nothing sure yet.

Xbox Live downtime 16th of June

Just found out that Xbox Live will be down on the 16th of June, starting at 9 AM CET – and will be down for up to 24 hours. (I’m hoping ~12h at most, meaning my nightly CoD4 session would not be affected!)

During that time, you won’t be able to sign into Live from your console or xbox.com, the forums or Marketplace.

It’s planned maintenance (duh..) and there will be no visual differences when it’s done.

As usual, no other information has been given from Microsoft about what the maintenance is about. It’s annoying – giving out information about what they are going to fix in the backend is very much intresting for alot of geeky users, such as myself …

Update: This service maintenance is to prepare for some of the recently announced features that will be available later this year.