5.1 ish

Bought a 5.1 surround system for £10 at a boot fair a while back. Only now just had a chance to fit it out in the bedroom.

I can see now why it was going so cheap. Although it's complete, because it's for a PC so it has no amp, so anything I plug into it comes out in Stereo :(

However I had a brainwave... Why not run it through a PC?

Sound from the PC comes out in glorious 5.1 and oh my god it's powerful... Only have to barely turn the dial to fill the room!

Sadly though the sound card can't process the stereo signal from the TV into virtual surround :( so that problem still exists. So question is whether to buy an amp, or wire the PC video out to the TV?

Gwiz

Saw my first Gwiz on my way into London... the picture doesn't do it justice... it is truly tiny!

Thery're a good concept, especially for London, given the premium on parking spaces; like their distant petrol cousins the smart cars they can park in inconceivably small spaces.

Only problem is they're Electric, and electric cars require charging which takes all night for not a lot of mileage.

However that's about to change with new technologies in Li-Po batteries allowing them to charge at speeds of x500. To put that in real terms a mobile phone battery (Roughly 1000 mAh) will charge from flat in 7.2 seconds. However this comes at a price... current loading... taking the same example the phone will draw 500 A whilst it's charging from the mains socket, nearly 17x more than your average house can output before blowing a fuse (Average ring main is 30A, average house total is 100A).

Suffice to say it's impossible to charge something like that from a regular house. However that's not the point, the point is to have a power cable at a garage that can hack a huge current so you can charge an electric car in several minutes, rather than several hours.

I'd love to see the cable that could handle that... It'd have to be a solid copper wire as thick as your arm!

Jim'll Fix It

Nomis best friend has a DS as well as Animal Crossing (It's a rite of passage into the upper escutcheons of Nomis circle of friends that she buys you a copy of Animal Crossing). Sadly the screen has broken (1cm wide patch of dead pixels), Nintendo not being interested in fixing it at all (Bad Nintendo) I stepped up to the plate to fix it.

And fix it I did... except I broke something else in the process :-( Que soldering on a microscopic level, once I get the parts that is! More on this in the future.

Now I seem to be getting a reputation for fixing things... which I don't mind, as being an Engineer I'm fascinated by how things work... my next project is a Netbook with a hardware password. My first thought was to take it apart to remove the bios battery and hopefully clear the password:

Well after completely dismantling it (Bloody battery was right in the bottom under everything!) and leaving it for 2 days to discharge I fired it back up again... only for it to inform me the battery had failed, followed by the dreaded "what's the password" Grr... time for a different approach. More on this later (Again)

Yet Again The Assholes At Orange Bugger Up A Perfectly Good Phone!

Oh such a joy I thought the W995 is out I can upgrade my phone again :-) This time I won't fall into the same trap by getting direct from Orange and it having mucked up software... I'll get it from Phones 4 U instead.



FAIL

It's had the software modded again!



This time it's really bothersome to me... before there was a workaround in the form of me blogging via email. Which actually turned out rather useful.



This time they've deleted the menu for RSS feeds... argh... why? Are these people that write the Orange software incompitent? Are they unable to add something without removing something else. I mean I'm sure that I'm in a minority here of people that use there phones like this. But why remove a manufacturers default feature?



I never had this problem on O2... or is it just coincidence that I switched to Orange when mobile phones started to get this complicated?



It's not Phones 4 Us fault (unlike the rather unhelpful people at the Orange store last time), they get given what they can sell. only hope that someone comes up with a new homebrew firmware sometime soon... I'll be watching this space for any news.



On a side note I've found an app that may help solve my woes (Not tested it tho).

Awesome Retro Lighting!

This is truly amazing... I'm intrigued as to how it was done. I have too much faith in humanity to say it was faked, but given the speed it must've been done using computer controlled light switches, even so it's an awesome feat to put together, and an awesome sight.

Computer Cooling

Recently I built a computer solely for storing my masses of media on to playback through my PS3. It was scavenged from bits and kind of did the job, except it was far too hot... like surface of the sun hot! 70degC at times!



As you can see from the photo it's rather cramped, and has really bad airflow.

So I invested in a Antec 900 case as it has room for all 9 of the hard drives with 3 x 120mm fans blowing directly over them.





Before I shoved it all in... and after:



The advantage with this design is the PSU is mounted on the bottom so doesn't get heated by all the processor etc, the cages for the hard drives have 120mm fans that blow directly over them and then get sucked out the top and rear fans. It's so cool I don't even need a CPU Fan now :-) And it runs at a nice 35degC. What a change a decent case makes :-)

Solar Powered Lamp

I kid you not... This is indeed a solar powered lamp... It's not totally daft. As it has batteries. It produces a weak light that is somewhat useful.




Under a strong light though it looks quite impressive. Now if only the photovoltaic cells were 100% efficient it could be a perpetual machine :)

Shiny Black Monolith

I like Ikea furniture... It can be good quality stuff. Like this for example. This has got to be the most awesome TV cabinet known to man!

Not a Wii

Spotted another fake Wii. It's cheer and cheerful... I dread to see the face of the child that get's one of these... It's gonna be the total opposite of this:

Adsolutely mad... this is gonna haunt him in later life

Dumping Camera

The video just speaks for itself. Only the Japanese could think a camera that "dumps" a picture could be cute!

Accessable Keyboard

My first thought when I saw this was "It's a Fisher Price keyboard!"... Then I read the sign... And thought what a good idea, why's there not more of these about? If I had the balls to go freelance I'd be designing and making all sorts of "accessibility" products. I think it's there's a market for stuff like this. Everyone needs their independence.

Upgrading a PS3s Hard Drive...

... Is not as easy as it seems!

All was going well... I backed u[ the HDD on a new portable drive I purchased just for the job. Then come the trauma of fiddling with such an expensive piece of equipment. I fiddle about with computers all the time, but this is different, If I break something I can't just go down Maplins and get a replacement part!

I was warned that the screws that hold the drive in place were "soft and over torqued" little did I know that it must've been done with an air spanner! Crikey... I stripped the head off of three of them trying to get them undone.

Try as I might I couldn't get them off. So I decided to use a Dremel with a cutting disc to slit a groove into each screw and undo them with a large flat blade screwdriver. Thankfully this worked brilliantly :) tho taking a cutting disc so close to a hard drive made me very nervous!

I've now replaced the screws with propper computer case screws that are a lot tougher... Not that I'll be trying this again anytime soon!

Restoring the backup was a piece of cake, and now I'm sporting plenty of HDD space :-)

For those of you that are brave enough to copy me you can find a useful how to here and another here. If you need to back up loads of data, you'll need a USB HDD, but it's not as easy as just plug it in and go... fol ow the guide here to see what you need to do, an essential piece of software you'll need is a FAT 32 Formatter for large HDDs. And a dremel if those screws were made from blue tac like mine :-)

That's Not a Heatsink... Now That's a Heatsink

On the right is a factory standard Socket 478 Heatsink... On the left is my new Heatsink :) as tall as my PC case is wide... And 150mm square this is one hell of a Heatsink. It's the second I've installed. Naomi wanted her PC to be quiet so installed one of these (without its fan), and removed all the case fans, leaving only the integral temp controlled PSU fan. Boy does it run quiet. It's difficult to tell it's on if the monitor is off! So when it came to me building what is essentially a NAS with bittorrent and media server capabilities, I knew it'd get very hot and a standard heat sink just wouldn't cut it. I tried it out with the standard heatsink... And it wouldn't even last 10 mins at full load before the thermal cutout kicked in. With the new heatsink however it's been running for several days now, and although hot it's way below the thermal cutout temp. So I'm happy. Next I'm going to install a blower into the expansion slots to improve airflow... Hopefully that'll bring the overall temp down a bit. Annoying thing is the case has no mounts for front fans... So I may have to make some if the HDD's still remain hot.

Techno Caravan

As you can imagine I travel with a lot of technology in tow... Holidays are no exception... I only wish I could bring my TV with me... As playing the PS3 and Wii on a 14" portable TV results in having my face pressed up against the screen.

Faux-Wii

I knew you could get the faux Chinese Wii called the Vii, but this is the first poor knock off I've seen in the UK. It look's ok I guess from the box art, but it only plays the games pre-loaded onto the laughably written "3rd generation, 16 bit console". I only hope no one buys one expecting a Wii, as there children will be sorely disappointed.

Just Plain Pissed Off

Haven't ranted in a while... so fear the wrath of my spleen!

I love computers... especially fixing them. Sure they can be a bugger at times, but I like the challenge.

So for the last week or so I've been fixing some of the older computers at work. And much to the delight of many I managed to get one aging dead computer to fit inside a newer computer (Thus saving the space of an extra monitor etc) and all the weird bespoke software to work. Not only that But I managed to set it up so that it backs up, something that was never done before (Highly dangerous considering it has CNC programs for a lot of our stuff on it, representing hundreds of hours of programming time). That was all good.

Now here comes the bummer... a new PC was playing up, it was far too "powerful" for the software we was trying to run, so I downgraded it, removed the fancy graphics card and went back to the on board Intel extreme drivers (Which was the best it required). All ran perfectly... still a few glitches, so I connected it to the network. Unbeknown to me in doing so it ballsed up the hardware keys (Somehow tied to the network ID) preventing the software from running... ARSE. Now instead of them calling me and screaming WTF have you done they spent 3 hours trying to fix it! Which they couldn't.

So I get in get an ear full about it told not to touch it and basically placed in the dog house.

I've of course now fixed it... using a simple system restore... why our IT expert didn't do this is beyond me... tho why they didn't call me is also beyond me.

So now I'm really hacked off about being bad-mouthed when a 30 second phone call (Or a tiny bit of IT knowledge) would have fixed it.

ARGH

Right my spleen is satisfied and I'm off my soap box... I shall return to my corner and grumble away like a active volcano.

The Universe

A good friend of mine sent me these in an e-mail. When you look at the grand scale of things it shows exactly how insignificant earths place in the universe is.

iPhony

Saw the iPhone for the first time today... now I'm a total gadget geek... I have a PDA, Satnav, DS, PSP, PS3, Wii and a whole host of other stuff. So this is gonna sound weird. i think the iPhone is rubbish.

Now it's not without its merits... its stylish, has a superb capacity for MP3s and does everything else you could want out of a phone... but at that price (When most handsets are now free on contract) I think it's a total rip off. If you can't find a phone with the same MP3 capacity, but a real iPOD at a fraction of the cost... that being said you can... only simple fact is it does everything the iPOD does but it's 3G to boot and that's the Sony Ericsson W960. I am slightly biased, as I've always had SE phones... but it does everything and more... plus it's free. So why buy a iPhone... tell me that? And if you dont like SE phones... what about the LG Prada just as nice... with even more style.