I read a book once where the main baddie was called The Remover of Inconvenient Obstacles. It was a good book and the name stuck with me. We could currently do with a Remover of Inconvenient Obstacles because every way we look there seems to be an insurmountable obstacle.

Yesterday I took a car load of crud to the dump and was there for about an hour and a half queuing, dropping large pieces of chipboard in to skips and individually flatpacking about 40 8 and 16bit computer game cardboard boxes, removing the plastic inserts, and flinging them into a cardboard recycling skip.

It was a large car load too. I now have a company car, a Honda Civic Tourer, which is a posh way of saying estate. With the seats flat, like they were yesterday, it has a boot capacity of over 600 litres. I still had stuff in the passenger foot well.

After that we filled the boot with several hundred (probably somewhere between three and four at a guess) books and drove them round to the Oxfam Bookshop. The staff looked a little shell-shocked as we did about 8 trips to bring them all in.

Next up was six bin bags full of clothes to be recycled. I got rid of some that I have pictures of me wearing on our honeymoon. We were married in 2004. I did find some nice newer stuff that I had forgotten I owned, which was good. Basically I’ve been wearing the same 4 t-shirts on rotation for about a year as anything else requires me to have my section of the wardrobe out in it’s entirety because it’s rammed past capacity with clothes. There is still room for improvement though. I still have 5 pairs of shorts and ten jumpers, which seems a little excessive.

So all this stuff removed, a car full of junk, 3-400 books, 6 bin bags of clothes, it’s transformed our house right?

Nope. While we have almost cleared one bookcase, we still have about 3 ft of books on it and most of the four other bookcases are double stacked. We could easily fill it over again and still not completely un-double stack everything. The garden does look a bit tidier as the horrible plastic toy car has gone but that’s about it.

I keep telling myself it must have made a difference because I can see physically the amount of stuff we’ve removed but it really doesn’t look much different. I suppose the only way forwards is to do it again. And again. And again, until we’ve got next to nothing but space.

I was twiddling around in Star Wars Battlefront the other day. Twiddling around in is about all I tend to have time for at the moment when it comes to games. I’ve never really played first person shooters on consoles but not for the reason you might expect. Many many years ago, I was quite good at shooters. We’re going back to the days of Doom and Wolfenstein, through to Unreal Tournament and Quake 3 here. All on PC, using a dial up modem.

It’s not that I don’t like playing shooters, it’s more that I can’t face the chore of learning to play shooters with a joypad when I used to be so good at them with a mouse and keyboard. View Full Post

This is question that a scant 12 months ago would have had one obvious answer- you need to buy a Playstation 4. 12 months on though, and the question is anything but easy as Microsoft have spent the year working hard to make the Xbox One every bit as appealing, and in some areas more appealing, than Sony’s mega popular offering.

In many ways the Xbox One S, which hit the shelves a couple of months ago (you can read my review here was the console that MS should have launched with. It’s compact, has an internal PSU, great controllers, a fast intuitive user interface and even plays Ultra HD Blu Ray discs (okay, that’s the one thing it obviously couldn’t have had at launch).  View Full Post

In part I of our Xbox One S adventure, we went through what the Xbox One S is and why it’s as cool as ice, especially the version that Microsoft sent us that came bundled with Minecraft!

Part II is now here and you can watch the boy give me a lesson on what Minecraft is and how it works in the video below:

If you got the impression that he loves Minecraft, that’s probably about right! I understand it a bit more now too, Minecraft is more about using the resources and fitting stuff into the game world than just building things out of context.

The beauty of the Xbox One version is that you can easily record what you’re doing and make cool in picture videos if you have a Go Pro or even a smartphone. This made the lad feel one step closer to being like his hero Dan TDM (Daniel Middleton, one of those YouTubers that your child will no doubt have heard of and contributed to his wealth by watching lots of his videos).

Minecraft lends itself well to a controller, I’ve never managed to suss the touchscreen controls when the boy has tried to show me on his iPad before but once he relinquished the controller (you can do split screen on the Xbox One), I was soon whizzing around like nobodies business.

The Xbox One S is Microsofts most powerful console to date and it’s more than a match for running Minecraft at top speed. The Xbox One S Minecraft pack retails for £249 RRP but there are some crazy prices around at the moment and if you’re considering buying what I consider the best console on the market at the moment, you should snap one up now while they’re still going for £199 at places like Argos and John Lewis.

Given the number of 5 year old birthday parties I’ve been to in the last month or so, there must have been something in the water back in February ’11. Yesterday saw the second one in a fortnight at the Sapphire Gym in Hemel. First time round, my satnav struggled with the magic roundabout, so I was relieved to be able to actually know where I was going.

This time round, I managed to find the main car park. This time round, I knew where we were going in the main building. This time round, I knew I’d have to follow Ned around in my socks to ensure he didn’t have a catastrophic accident. This time round, one of the staff gave me an odd look and asked,

“Are you sure you’ve got the right party sir? Do you recognise anyone here?” View Full Post

I know I’m getting old. It’s not just that my birth certificate stubbornly refuses to say anything other than 1975 as my year of birth, or the calendar keeps upping the year count by one with depressing regularity, no it’s more that I don’t understand stuff like Minecraft and it’s a bit alarming. I started playing computer games back in 1982 when I was 7 and I haven’t really stopped in the intervening 34 years. Yes, there have been spells where I’ve not kept up as much as I would have liked (93-96 was a bit of a fallow period, as was 2008-2013 as we had too many babies to spend time doing anything really) but by and large I am still a gamer.

But I simply don’t get Minecraft.

Oh, I understand that it’s like a virtual LEGO, and that ironically you can even buy Minecraft LEGO now, but I’ve spent many many hours bashing my head against a brickwall trying to set it up properly on the PC for my kids to play. All the *.jar stuff, the impenetrable installation of mods, that fact that every incremental version of the game won’t work with the majority of the mods, it drove me utterly up the wall. I’m no n00b when it comes to PCs either, I’ve built several from scratch, and I’ve built a homemade NAS box with a custom operating system on a compact flash card before.

Fortunately the very fact that Minecraft is ubiquitous now has counted in my favour as it’s now on Xbox One, and Microsoft, in their infinite wisdom, offered to send the kids an Xbox One S Minecraft bundle so they could finally teach me what the heck is going on with it all. View Full Post

I remember buying my first Xbox from GAME in Watford. I’d owned a PS2 since launch but since my wife and I had recently bought a house, I couldn’t really justify going multi-platform. Fortunately (for me, not for them obviously) GAME was closing down and flogging everything else off on the cheap.

Hurrah!

The X Brick as we affectionately knew it was a great machine and had some truly stand out games. These are a few of my personal favourites I’m reminiscing about to help celebrate Xbox’s 15th birthday. I’m by no means a huge gamer now days, I’ve got three little kids, a full time job and other things to keep my free time to a minimum but still like to game when I get a chance.

Here are my favourite:

• beat em up;
• racing game; and
• shooter.

There’s no real point doing a sports game as it’ll be FIFA 200X :) View Full Post

On ‘Fries-day’ last week, Fifi helped me cook some yummy homemade chicken nuggets to go with our McCain fries. As I said then, cooking is part of the wind down routine we have for the weekend, we live such a hectic life during the week with swimming lessons, drumming, Brownies, guitar lessons and everything else, it’s just nice to start the weekend with a ‘Fries-day’ that is simple and slows things down a bit. Of course once the food has been made and scoffed, things tend to pick up pace a bit as we look to wear everyone out so we can have a bit of lie in on Saturday morning.*

This week it was the boy’s turn to pick what we were having on our McCain fuelled ‘Fries-day’and he didn’t disappoint- it was burger and fries! The boy is a fan of a certain popular fast food outlet when it comes to burger and fries, so the McCain Crispy French Fries are a perfect substitute for you typical restaurant french fries. For burgers we went for some Aberdeen Angus premium burgers but really, the secret is in what you garnish the burger with. View Full Post

I think I probably blame Horrible Histories because “Literally” is now the most over used word in our house. Even the four year old litters his conversation with it. Gone are the days when he’d say something like, “If you don’t give me sweeties I will punch you in the nuts!” because now he says, “I will quite literally punch you in the nuts if you don’t give me sweeties!” This is on top of the constant exclamations of “For God’s sake!”- I have literally no idea where he get’s that from mind you.

It could be worse, he could be dropping the f-bomb but it is an annoying verbal tick that has spread like wildfire among all three kids.