Another year, another christmas

Merry Christmas, and a happy New Year!

So anyway, another christmas is over, the room is full of chocolate wrappers, and I may have finally cured my SafeDisc problems! The cure involved stopping the SecDrv service, killing the file and registry information, and rebooting the computer. That has cured a long-standing problem involving 100% cpu usage when using some advanced functions on the CD-RW (anything that involved writing or raw reading). Oh how I hate copy-protection - it hurts the end user a lot more than the pirates.

I'll follow in what looks like the LJ tradition of listing out my pressies:

• Enya CD (Paint the Sky with Stars)
• Chocolate
• Mini r/c hovercraft (fast once it gets going, but has a tendency go go in a circle)
• LEGO Bionics kit
• Electronic dice kit (velleman MK150, soldering iron not included)
• More chocolate
• Swiss Army credit-card-sized penknife thingy (Swiss Card Quattro)
• Discworld 2005 calendar
• Mini Pacman game (beep beep bip beep boop...)
• Did I mention chocolate?

Plus I got my dad's old digital camera, and a wodge of smartmedia cards to feed it. All I need are a wodge of AAs to feed it with as well (it fairly guzzles them, and takes 4!). It's better than the Kodak I got at my birthday, but a bit bulkier so I'll keep the Kodak with general day-to-day stuff and use the Olympus for real stuff (as it actually has a zoom, auto-focus (as opposed to no-focus), and full manual control) (I'm not a pro or even an amatuer but I do like to play with exposure and arpeture settings - you can get some interesting effects).

That's about it for my haul - other notable presents included a very unusual radio for my dad (made out of random bits of wire, thicker wire, coiled wire, and the remains of a Coca-Cola can), some more musical instruments for my mum, and a tamigotchi (sp?) for my sister.