Andrew Beacock's Blog

I've found a flash game that I just have to share! It's called Fantastic Contraption and it's brilliant fun for anyone with an engineering mind, it's just so addictive. The goal is to transport a red ball from it's starting point into a red goal area using your 'contraption' - your self-built vehicle made out of wheels, sticks and water power. Below is a screenshot of my 'flatbed' truck in mid-flow: Give it a go but don't try it at work, you will not be able to do anything else for the rest of the day! I found this via the Arantius blog, thanks Anthony Lieuallen! Technorati Tags: Engineering , Flash , Game , Fantastic Contraption , Anthony Lieuallen , Arantius , Andrew Beacock

I recently upgraded my television from a Philips 28" widescreen tube to a 1080p Panasonic 42" plasma . My old Sony PlayStation 2 was now looking a little weak when upscaled to 42" so I decided to invest in some component cables to take advantage of the best output that the PS2 had to offer as well as enabling "Progressive Scan Mode" in some supporting games (Guitar Hero 2 for example). Here are my step by step instructions on how to HD-enable your PlayStation2. Buy a quality component cable My PS2 came with some SVIDEO-style connectors and a SCART block to plug them in to. The image quality on my old TV was fine but needless to say on a 42" HD plasma things looked a little different! I spent a lot of time reading all sorts of reviews of PS2 component cables and it seemed that people were having mixed results with the cables in the £5-£15 bracket. After some searching about I found a PS3 to 5 RCA (component) cable from IXOS which also works with the PS2...

Reverend Anthony over at the DESTRUCTOID gaming site has written a great set of beginner guides to the different classes of the rather excellent Team Fortress 2 game that came out of beta today. He's provided some tips for each class as well as a general post full of common tips. I've found them quite invaluable in getting to know the game quickly! Demoman Engineer Heavy Weapons Guy Medic Pyro Scout Soldier Sniper Spy General Tips Technorati Tags: TeamFortress2 , Valve , PC , Gaming , Andrew Beacock

In my last post I talked about how to check your gaming mouse polling rate with a Windows utility called mouserate . You may have noticed that my polling rate was way above the standard 100Hz - in this post I'll tell you how I did it. This obviously only works with USB mice but there are not that many PS/2 gaming mice sold these days. Important Disclaimer: Although I have not had any problems since running this patch, there have been reports on various gaming forums that people's mice or other USB devices have stopped working as a result of applying this patch. For some people it was fixed by choosing a slower patch rate but I wanted to mention this, as if you follow my instructions below and something goes wrong with your setup - your on your own... (it might be best to have a PS/2 mouse handy or know the keyboard shortcuts to revert the patch). Ok with that disclaimer out the way, let's get stuck in and really ramp the polling speed up. First download USB Mouserate...

I'm not a big PC gamer but I do enjoy the odd hour online playing ET (Wolfenstein - Enemy Territory) . Recently I've been disappointed with my accuracy and aiming, I just seem to always miss when in the middle of a frantic firefight. I had read on an ET forum that a good way to improve your aim was to download and consume 'Aiming by RaZiel' . After reading some of the documentation and watching a couple of the movies in this pack I wanted to try and 'tweak' my mouse configuration. One tip was to increase the mouse polling rate within Windows so that it would be read faster and therefore give a more accurate reading on the mouse's position. One way that you can check your mouse polling rate is with the rather handy 'mouserate' by Oliver Andreas Tscherwitschke . It's a tiny download that contains a simple executable file that pops up a window which gives you an area in which to move your mouse around, and a list of the polled rate on the right-...