January 2010 Entries
I finally ran out of hard disk space on my server and had to buy some new hard disks.
I generally stick to Samsung, Western Digital, Hitachi or Seagate as reliable brands with my preference for the first two. At the time of writing, 1.5TB hard disks offer the best space/cost tradeoff and that is usually my first criteria for selecting a drive if other factors are all equal. For big drives, I've started buying eco drives that run at 5400rpm and consume less energy. They're fast enough for serving media. So I quickly narrowed down the choice to either the Samsung or Western...
I recently discovered an iPhone application called MonkeyTunes by Melloware. It's excellent.
It's a plugin for MediaMonkey that implements the Digital Audio Control Protocol (DACP). This allows MediaMonkey to masquerade as iTunes! In turn this allows the Apple Remote application to control MediaMonkey.
It works really well. I can now sit on my sofa rating the tracks in my music collection with my iPod Touch and my wife can control the stereo with her iPhone. Very cool.
This got me wondering whether I could control Windows Media Center with the iPod Touch which led me to discover HippoRemote! It has two components: a VNC server and a VNC...
I struggle when I look to buy a new monitor because I find there are so many things to consider. After quite a bit of research, I bought a Dell Ultrasharp 2209WA for the kids home computer to replace an old 4:3 17" monitor.
One review called it a near perfect 22" monitor. There's a thorough review of it over on Prad.de
It uses an e-IPS panel which provides a wide viewing angle with minimal colour shifts; good when more than one person crowds around the computer. The colour gamut only covers sRGB; not a wide-gamut but that's good enough for a...