November 2005 Entries
Some bored Canadians raised money to buy an Xbox 360 and then made a video of them smashing it. The point? None. Just entertainment and a way to get attention. Seems stupid to me but, hey, it's that kind of world.
I plan to buy an Xbox 360 but not until the Sony PS3 comes out. I don't want a PS3 but you can be sure there will be a significant price drop of the Xbox 360 when it does come out. And until then, I have more than enough games to play.
I've been researching audio solutions lately and ran into this website of a fellow who used a PC to implement the speaker cross-over. Wow. Similiar to the Meridian approach of doing the cross-over in the digital domain and using an amp for each driver.
Last Sunday, I went down to the Novotel in Hammersmith with a friend to poke around the What HiFi Show. We spent the afternoon wandering around three floors of A/V toys.
The big theme was HDTV. It was my first look at HDTV and it's brain-dead obvious that any future purchase of a TV or projector will have to be HDTV ready. Sharp was showing off a 65" LCD HDTV that was jaw dropping gorgeous. I asked about their dead pixel policy and didn't get a very satisfactory answer.
What I'd like in my living room is a modest HDTV LCD display...
I've written an article on putting together my latest quiet pc based on the VIA EPIA SP13000 and a Tranquil T2e case.
You're know you're getting pretty geeky when you start making your own Ethernet cables. Yep, that's what I've been doing.
Bought a crimper and a 100 RJ-45 jacks on ebay for £10 from some supplier in China. It arrived in only a week. Works perfectly but it's quite a pain getting the eight wires aligned perfectly before you insert them in the RJ-45 plug for crimping.
Why? Well, I got fed up with wireless being too slow and drilled a hole through a brick wall to connect all the PC's together. I want to move big files fast! Forget Super-G....I want to go...
The IBM 40Mb Deskstar in my server died a couple of weeks ago. Lost a few downloads but that was about it. The next day, my other IBM 40Mb Deskstar in my new Media PC died as well! Arrgghhh!! Must have been lonely. I knew the Deskstars were not very reliabled and it was just a matter of time. They were both four years old. Model IC35L040AVER07-0.
The odd thing was that one had been used a lot often running 24x7 in my server (despite IBM issuing a warning that they should not be run in a server). I wasn't surprised that died....