Sunday, February 17, 2008
The last week has been rather difficult.My computer died... not sure if it was a hardware issue, a virus, or just generally corrupted system files, but whatever the case, it was mostly non-functional.
Anyone who knows me will know just how much time I spend on my pc, and so will understand just how distressing this was.
So... I bought a nice big 750gig external hard drive, and with the computer in safe mode, backed up all of my doccuments and transferable software.
Next I disconnected all non-vital hardware, ie card readers, webcam and gfx cards, and did a full reinstall of windows.
This worked just fine, right up to the point that I tried to re-fit my gfx cards. I have 2... one rather better than the other, but neither would install for reasons that fail me.
What this meant was that while I could have a perfectly functional workhorse of a computer, games were now out of the question.
Oh well.
On the upside though, now that everything was backed up, and my OS installation was fairly minimal, I could take the risk of repartitioning the hard drive, and setting the whole thing up as a dual-boot system.
So now I have a nice clean installation of Windows XP on one partition, and a very funky, not to mention quirky, copy of Ubuntu Linux on the other.
I'm finding this Linux malarky quite fascinating, having never used it before.
It seems to me that modern Linux OS's have something of a split personality.
On the one hand, they can be quite intuitive and very clever, allowing you to automatically install software from a huge list of compatible programs, without even having to launch a browser to find it.
On the other hand, installing things like drivers, which don't appear to be installed automatically, is like going back in time, to at least MSDOS era computing.
Very very odd.
This external hard drive thing is a cool piece of kit.
I'd been planning to buy one some time soon anyway, so the pc failure just prompted me to get the thing a little sooner.
The thing is... it can be accessed by my PS3.
Why does this matter?
Because the PS3 can play mp4 and DIVX video.
So think about it.... PS3 plugged into a 32 inch TV, with a massive hard drive containging my entire DVD (and later, VHS) collection.
No more searching for the right disk or tape... it'll be all right there, available at the touch of a button, not to mention being viewable all round the house (and garden) from my PSP, via wifi streaming.
And there's more....
For Valentines day, Andrea and I bought each other presents.
I gave her a Swarovsky crystal bracelet, which she seems very pleased with.
What she gave me pleased me no end.
It's a watch, but not just any old watch. This watch is also an mp3 player, and better yet... a video player.
It comes with software to convert your typical digital video file into 128x128 SMV video files. These are fairly tiny... 35meg, compared to a 150meg avi, and with the screen being so tiny, you don't notice the lack of quality.
So, I can fit my entire collection of Invader Zim videos into it's 2gig storage capacity, still have room for a load of tunes, and have the whole lot strapped to my wrist wherever I go.
Yay!
Labels: computers, consoles, gadgets, video
Steve 8:11 PM [+] (0) comments
Tuesday, July 18, 2006
Testing 'Pocket Blogger' on my MDA Pro.The trial version of Opera I used to blog on this thing expired, and I figured rather than go right ahead and pay for the full commercial version, I'd give this free blogging program a try... especially since The built in version of IE works fine for most other sites I may want to use while on holiday.
So here goes....
Testing, testing....
Labels: gadgets, MDA Pro, phones
Steve 1:40 PM [+] (0) comments
Saturday, May 13, 2006
Following up from yesterday's post, I've found a really cool piece of software for my MDA.I haven't tried it yet, but if it works, it would enable a potentially very interesting/popular feature on my new website.
What is it?
Mobile webcam!
Eh?
You've seen my home webcam. Imagine something similar, but outside... wherever I happen to be. How cool would that be?
More details as and when I've tested it.
Labels: gadgets, MDA Pro, phones
Steve 3:37 PM [+] (0) comments
I have a new toy... probably the ultimate toy for your everyday gadget freak.
The T-Mobile MDA Pro... this thing is a 3G videophone, a camera, a sat-nav unit, a movie and music player, and an entire internet connected pc in your pocket. It's actually easier to list what it doesn't do than what it does.
So it doesn't make toast or do the laundry, but it's got pretty much everything else covered.
I bought it for 3 main purposes, largely related to the frequent siteseeing trips and short holidays Andrea and I are going on lately.
The Sat-nav will get us there without getting lost, and then I can blog our visits and journeys, including photos, while we're still there, instead of having to wait till we get home.
I also wanted to be able to go into irc chat from wherever I feel like... such as in the middle of a field out in god knows where. So when I get my new chatroom set up, you may find yourself chatting to me while I'm sitting at the top of a hill out in the peak district... assuming I can get a signal.
The only faults I can find with it are the backlight, which has an annoying habit of not turning on when you power up, so you have to go into settings... and the browser. Pocket Internet Explorer may look nice, but it has no java script support, which makes it impossible to use blogger. Duh!
Obviously I found a way around this. I installed Opera.
I could go on all day about this thing but bleh. Just go out and buy one. Your internet usage will never be the same again.
Labels: gadgets, MDA Pro, phones, photos
Steve 11:41 AM [+] (0) comments
Thursday, January 20, 2005
In preparation for new recording projects, I picked up a pair of EDIROL MA-10A powered speakers yesterday.They aren't very big, standing a smidge under a foot tall, and while total volume is modest, they're more than loud enough for my needs. What I really need though is a good tonal range and clarity, and in that respect, they're absolutely brilliant... best sounding speakers I've ever owned.
Next on the shopping list is a mixer and decent mic.... then we get onto the guitar and effects.
The money is there.... though the motivation to go out and get them is somewhat lacking today.
I'll do it tomorrow... or something.
Labels: gadgets
Steve 11:09 AM [+] (0) comments
Tuesday, November 30, 2004
Bleh! Mobile Phones.I picked up a new one today, just coz the battery life on my old one is now so low as to be next to useless.
So this new one has a battery life of around 400 hours (nice). Thing is, even though this is one of the most basic phones out there (Sendo S360), the manual reads like War And Peace... just menu after menu after menu. No doubt I won't use a fraction of these functions, but I do feel I should know how to use all the features, just so I know how to fix it if I mess it all up.
It''s still charging at the mo (12 hours for the first charge) so I haven't had the chance to tinker with it yet. Should be interesting.
Steve 5:53 PM [+] (0) comments
Thursday, November 25, 2004
Oh god that's better... 10 hours of really solid sleep, and boy did I need it.I pretty much ran myself into the ground over the past couple of days, to the point where I was feeling quite ill.
My sleep pattern being what it is, I often reach the point where my body clock can't decide if I should be asleep in the daytime, or at night, so I wind up sleeping through most of both... but this time around it couldn't make up its mind again, and refused to sleep at all.
Still stuck between day and night mode... crashing out in the middle of the afternoon and waking up around 1am, but it's cool, coz I'm still awake at the times I need to be to get things done.
Oh yeah... I'm absolutely loving this MP3 player thing. It's almost like having my launchcast radio station in my pocket. All my absolute favourite tunes, non-stop... never repeating the same tune... no having to get up and change a disk or turn over a tape, and battery life so long that I just don't have to worry about it. The only time it ran low was during heavy hard drive usage while I was transferring tunes onto it, and that was easilly fixed by just plugging it into the charger while I worked.
Just another hundred or so CDs to rip and transfer now... then I'll probably pay a trip to the library and see what good music I can borrow.
The one thing having this widget has brought home to me is how much good music I used to have, but don't any more... or just can't access coz I don't have a record deck. Once upon a time I had a massive tape collection, hundreds of albums that I don't have on CD, so I know there's *lots* of songs that I love but don't have available to rip.... and I can't remember the titles to download them.
I abandoned the tape collection when I left an old gf a few years ago... it was just too much to take with me, coz I had limited transportation facilities available to me, and I figured I didn't listen to tapes any more since getting a CD player. (yeah... it was that long ago)
Yeash... am I ever rambling.
Steve 2:05 AM [+] (0) comments
Wednesday, November 24, 2004
Yesterday turned out to be quite interesting.I went into town, just to pay in a cheque and do a spot of window shopping. So I was stood in the 02 shop and after chatting with a sales assistant for a bit decided bugger it... I'd buy an XDAII. All was fine right up till the point she needed proof of signature. They don't accept the card I use, and I didn't have any of the other things they'd have accepted. Talk about stupid. For the sake of some dumb beurocratic red tape, I couldn't buy my widget, 02 lost out on a regular income from the data tarrif, and the shop lost out on the sale of a not altogether cheap piece of kit. Idiots.
In a rather poor mood, I wandered off to a games shop and picked up a copy of Half Life 2. (Bitch to install, but it looks great. Haven't spent much time on it yet.)
Anyway... that would've been it, but I figured I'd do my usual lap of the shopping centre before going home, and in doing so I walked past...er... into a gadget shop.
Oops.
For the past couple of weeks I've been looking at this Rio 5gig MP3 player... and walked away every single time. So I was stood in the gadget shop and looking over the MP3 players in there... some that I'd not seen before elsewhere... when this sales assistant who really knew his stuff approached me and proceeded to explain in great deal the finer points of various of the MP3 players. Now this was very refreshing, coz in Dixons, you're lucky if the assistants even know their own name, much less any technical details about the stuff they're trying to sell (though it actually seems they aren't trying to sell anything at all, they're that disinterested in serving the customers).
Anyway... after about 15 mins of listening to the guy, being given demos of each one, I looked at the guy, chuckled and said "Right... I need to go to the bank. I'll be back in 5 mins."
5 mins later I was £200 poorer and in possession of a very nice Creative Zen Touch 20gig MP3 player. I struggle getting my head around the fact that this tiny little thing has the same storage capacity as my laptop, but there it is.
So most of last night and this morning has been spent transferring most of my MP3 collection onto the thing, and then working my way through ripping much of my CD collection. It's heavy going and my eyes are killing me now... but boy is it worth it. Nearly 2 gigs, and 426 tunes done so far. The idea of having *all* my fave tunes to hand wherever I go is very appealing.
Labels: annoyed, gadgets, games, music, phones
Steve 11:48 AM [+] (0) comments
Friday, October 15, 2004
That's a pity.After much messing around with wires, cables and whatnot, I've managed to hook both my vcr and freeview box into the WinTV widget.
Trouble is, even though it accepts the signal from the vcr, for reasons that elude me, it struggles to encode and display it. It's possible to watch a vhs movie on my monitor, but it stalls and stutters every 20 or 30 secs. It's not catastrophic, but it's not really good enough quality to bother recording the tapes digitally.
Oh well.
While messing around with the tuner, I stumbled across a whole load of scrambled channels on my cable, so went for a hunt around the net to see if I could find any descrambler software. Naughty, I know... but it's gotta be done. I found absolutely loads, and some seemed to do 'something', while others simply crashed or hung, but I couldn't find any that actually worked in any way that was gonna be useful.
It was worth a try though.
Labels: gadgets
Steve 8:19 PM [+] (0) comments
Thursday, October 14, 2004
Ahhh, how I love gadgets, widgets and toys.Today's toy is WinTV USB. A little tv tuner that plugs into a usb socket on my pc, so I can watch (and record) tv programs on my monitor.
Yeah, I know... it's old hat and they've been doing it for ages, and yeah, I could get a PCI card to do the same thing and look much more tidy, but since I only have one free PCI slot, I dont wanna use it for something I could do externally.
Why would I wanna watch tv on my monitor, I hear you ask? Well, I don't, specifically, though it's a nice bonus. What I wanna do is copy all my vhs videos onto disk... either on my HD (gonna need to get a BIG slave drive, coz 200 gig ain't gonna be enough) or burned to dvd.
You've never seen my video collection, but believe me when I say it's rather extensive, and as such, takes up a lot of space. The idea of saving all those films onto one big HD, or even a load of DVDs is very appealing when you realise how much living space it would free up in my flat.
Time to go look for a 500 gig HD, methinks.
Labels: gadgets
Steve 11:27 PM [+] (0) comments
Wednesday, July 14, 2004
Well it's about bloody time.Tripod's been screwing around, so my blog's been down for at least a couple of days.
Mind you, now it's back up again, I don't think I have a single thing to blog about.
I've rather woken up like a bear with a sore head today. Too much sleep, lousy weather and no milk for my coffee... so I'm feeling kinda grumpy right now.
There's this 'widget' I keep looking at it town called an XDA II, basically a cross between a PDA and a mobile phone.
Now I have absolutely no use for a PDA and not much more for a mobile phone either... but both together in one self contained package... it makes the PocketIRC software I saw online a few days ago look very appealing.
I know, I know... what possible reason is there to want to sit in a field and chat on irc? It's the absolute ultimate in geekiness, but... I love the idea.
It can wait though, for now. There's other more worthy things to spend my money on in the pipeline.
Steve 10:16 AM [+] (0) comments
Friday, June 06, 2003
I have a new widget.A Samsung dvd player.
Nothing too impressive about that you may think, but it's rather more than that. The number of formats it can handle is impressive to say the least, and means I can mothball several other players.
It'll play dvds, cds, vcds, svdcs, mp3s and displays jpegs on photo cds. Sadly it's unable to play mpeg or avi video files, and the conversion software I have doesn't seem able to convert them to vcd, so I guess I'm gonna have to hunt around a few bittorrent sites for .bin and .cue files and burn movies direct to video cd.
Heavy bandwidth usage here we come :-)
Steve 7:26 PM [+] (0) comments
Thursday, January 23, 2003
I have a widget.No, seriously, I do.
Look, stop sniggering like that, just because I tell you I have a widget, your perverted little mind comes up with all kinds of silly ideas. I guess I'll just have to show you.
Look... stop giggling, damnit! It's nothing like that.
Here it is...
This 'thing' that looks rather like a bottle of typing correction fluid is in fact a solid state 64 Meg USB removable data storage... er... thing.
I first heard mention of these when Batgrl spotted one a few weeks ago and rather raved about it. Sounded like a great idea, and something I could certainly use to transfer a whole load of stuff with from my old tower system to my laptop. The trouble is, there just didn't seem to be any about in this country... at least, not without ordering online, which I never do. So anyway, I spotted this thing in a shop I generally tend to avoid, and decided bugger it... I want it, crappy shop or not, and bought the thing.
It's totally plug and play on XP, though I had to install drivers on Win 98, but it was pretty painless, and has already saved me much grief, transferring two websites, a bot, and some music software all in one go, instead of having to upload and then download via the net to get everything onto this system. The tower doesn't have a CD writer, and using floppies just wasn't viable, so the widget seemd like the best option. Needless to say, I'm a happy geeky chappy.
Steve 9:58 PM [+] (0) comments
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