February 2007 Entries
I recently bought this case and yesterday moved my Athlon gaming PC into it.
It's good value for only £33 but you need to be a familiar with building PC's if you buy this case. There's no documentation. The drive cage feels a bit crude but it does the job and comes with rubber grommet mounts for up to five hard disks. I don't like the air vents in the side panel; it seems to allow the internal resonance to be heard more. The 120mm fan on the back is quite good with three speed settings. The highest speed is too...
Jenny, my wife, finally ran out of space on her 40Gb laptop hard disk so I upgraded it. I liked the reviews of the Seagate drives and eventually settled on a Seagate Momentus 7200.1 100Gb UATA drive. It's real sweet. Very quiet and zips along at 7200rpm. Highly recommended.
I also picked up a Sumvision USB 2.0 2.5" Aluminium Silver Caddy to turn her old disk into an external drive. For only £6, it's excellent. It'll take Jenny a while to fill them both up. Both items purchased on Ebuyer.
While installing Windows XP on the new drive, I discovered a new trick....
I recently helped the local Boy Scouts club source a wireless router and modem and install it. After a bunch of research, I concluded the best value was with either a Netgear DG834G or a 3Com Office Connect 3CRWDR101A-75. After several failed bids I finally managed to grab a DG834G on ebay for only £32. It's a version 2 rather than a version 3 which is a little unfortunate. The main difference is RHOS compliance although I hope that they will still be providing firmware upgrades for version 2.
I went to the BETT show a couple of weeks ago. I don't know what BETT exactly stands for. British Education Technology something or other. It's the definitive educational technology show in the UK and probably Europe. It's huge. It took up almost all of the Olympia conference center. Jenny and I got there by around 10:30 and spent five and a half solid hours wandering the aisles. That wasn't enough time to cover all of it. We didn't even take in any of the seminars.
I found it pretty inspiring. There's a great match between ICT and Education. It's been...
Last December I spent two days in Paris doing some HD-DVD technical training put on by Microsoft. It's a long story but the idea is to do some work for a friend that has a fledgling media company.
The training wasn't great as it mixed high-level talks and low-level talks without linking them very well. One day was spent on the VC-1 codec - not my area but interesting none-the-less. The other day was spent on covering the interactive layer. Very interesting but not much more was covered than you can find in the HD-DVD Interactivey Jumpstart Package. Overall, I like...