A few weeks ago my Tassimo started having problems.

It wouldn't completely empty the contents of the disc, it would sometimes switch to manual mode instead of automatic, and well, most importantly the coffee starting tasting like crap.

After doing some research I found out that the problem was that the unit needed to be 'descaled', essentially cleaned. You are supposed to do this after so many weeks of use. Apparently there's a cleaning disc that comes with the unit that you put in which initiates a cleaning routine in the machine. Well I must have thrown it out when I unpacked it so many months ago.

So I went on eBay, found someone selling these cleaning discs and ordered them (all the way from the UK).

In the meantime as I got the shakes from not being able to make my coffee I justified to myself the purchase of Tassimo version 2. I first noticed these new versions months ago when we were at Home Outfitters. I got all excited when I saw them but Chris just gave me 'the look' and I forced myself to walk away.

So now that I have one, what's different you ask? Well first off the new ones are made by Bosch (the old ones were made by Braun). They are much smaller, quieter, and come with a replaceable water filter. But best of all they actually tell you when they need to be cleaned - plus they have a spot in the back that holds the cleaning disc so you don't have to worry about ever losing it.

A good overview of the new model can be found here.

Now excuse me, I'm off to make a Chai Tea latte.

Chris got me this for Christmas and I just finished playing the Single Player campaign.

Overall I enjoyed it - I mean you just can't go wrong with killing zombies. I haven't played the original so I can't comment on how it's different although all the reviews seem to agree it's much improved. For me there wasn't much strategy involved other than not to get to far ahead of my computer controlled players.

Some things were fun such as setting up exploding canisters at likely attack paths and then blowing them up when a horde would run by. But for the most part you just mow everything down in front of you. Time to complete was fairly typical. I'd estimate that I spent roughly a week playing an hour or two a day.

Technically the game is pretty good. It uses the same engine that's used in Half Life 2. Although unlike that game the physics model has been definitely dialed down. One of the things that delighted me about HL2 was just going around manipulating objects. Sadly in this one you can only interact with so many items. Still this game is about killing hordes of zombies, who has time to throw things into water to see how they realistically bob up and down?

For the first half of the game I was totally engrossed in it, but after that I found gameplay to start to get repetitive and predictable. I played on the 'Normal' difficulty setting and generally found it to be balanced nicely. The end of each chapters were definitely 'white knuckle, screw my teammates, just get me the hell to the end point' fun. I only found the very final one (at the Bridge) to be exceedingly difficult. I tried multiple times without success before turning the difficulty down to 'Easy' in order to finish. Even then I barely made it.

In summary, L4D2 is a good bit of Zombie slaughtering fun.

A more in depth review can be found here.

Well I finished upgrading the video card in my Mac Cube.

While not hugely painful there was still a number of unexpected issues I had to overcome. The biggest surprise was despite the replacement card being the Mac Edition and the Cube being a supported platform the end bracket was completely wrong.

So I had to end up doing some bracket surgery by clipping off the parts that didn't fit and drill new holes so that the screws would align properly. Once that was done the hardest part was getting the damn thing back in again. After many attempts and a significant amount of swearing I was able to get it back in place.

I fired it up, installed the latest driver that ATI offered for that model and everything is tickety boo. So I've now gone from the stock Rage 128 card to the 7500 Radeon card. Besides being generally faster overall it also has double the memory, to 32MB. Yes I know, that doesn't seem like much. The card I having in my gaming PC has 1GB of memory for instance. But keep in mind the age of the Cube. This is a significant upgrade for it.