I’ve decided to stop bleeding money through web hosting. I’m currently spending $10 here, £15 there… a month and all I’m doing is blogging. These days my basic web hosting needs can be pretty much fulfilled by services from Flickr, WordPress, and GMail. Having bought a MacBook Pro also means I have a Unix environment with me all the time and don’t need one supplied through a hosted provider.

I looked at several engines (WordPress, Blogger, LiveJournal, and TypePad) and you can tell by the URL which blogging engine won. WordPress seemed to provide the best bang for zero-bucks. WordPress has lots of usable features out of the box: domain hosting, quick authoring, pages, RSS everthing, and nice looking templates.

Now I need to move my old blogging content over from its customised Typo backend and ijonas.com (which is down for an unknown reason). I also need to redirect my ijonas.com email to GMail.

I guess the moral of the story is that you can get a hell of a lot for free and you needn’t look far either.

From time to time I go back to computer gaming. Sometimes there’s nothing better than spending a Sunday afternoon blowing stuff up. So Sunday afternoon I got myself a copy of Call of Juarez. Its a first-person shooter set in the Wild West. Its a good game but at first seemed very flaky and prone to crashing. So I sent an email to the game publisher’s support department asking if there were any patches available to fix the problems I was experiencing. These days I can afford to buy the odd computer game and have no problems doing so… gone are the days in past when you would make a back up of a mate’s copy.

So I was surprised to see the game publisher recommending that I remove their copy protection by applying a patch supplied by them.

Hello,

If you have the DVDROM version of COJ: Please download the Call of Juarez DVD patch (11.5MB) by clicking the link http://patch.focus-home.com/COJ1.0DVD_Patch.zip
You can now run Call of Juarez without the game DVD on your drive. This is an unofficial patch only for those which have a SecuROM problem (not all CoJ players).

Best Regards,
Technical Support
Focus Home Interactive

I think I’ve seen it all.