Monthly Archive for December, 2007

So. I got a Fon box (thanks to Dazzy ). It’s pretty freakin awesome, basically, I plug in their little router to my ADSL modem and then it shares my WiFi connection out to anyone. It might seem stupid, you pay money to let people use your WiFi, but it isn’t. Why? Well, here’s the awesome part. By sharing your WiFi connection, you open up the ability to use other people’s WiFi connections in other places. For example, if you travel a lot, you might know that some hotels like to charge you stupid amounts to use their WiFi (one hotel in London that I stayed at earlier this year charge £15 per day for internet access). With Fon, yes, you have to share your own connection, but you can use other people’s connections! How freaking awesome is that?

It’s a great service if you travel a lot, as long as there’s a hotspot near where you travel too. Plus, you also have the option to earn money off it, because for every person that purchases a day’s access from you, Fon keep (not sure how much it is exactly) some of the money, and you get to keep some too. Clever, huh?

You can see all the hotspots in the world here.

Another upside – if you don’t yet have WiFi, the Fon box creates an additional private (and unrestricted [as in no speed limit]) WiFi network for you, so you basically get two SSIDs – one public, one private. Of course, this now means I have three SSIDs as I already have a WiFi router.

I got myself a nice shiny Antec P182 case yesterday from Overclockers UK – went with dad in the car to Stoke-on-Trent to pick it up. The TomTom GPS was almost correct, but it sent us one road too far based on their postcode.

It’s a fantastic case, I must say, very well designed and it feels nice and sturdy. The whole layout is pretty good, the only thing that I find might be problematic is the location of one of the fans (in the lower chamber, it’s coming rather close to the PSU and HDD cables), and I would have liked the door to fold all the way around and magnet-ize itself onto the side panel. Otherwise the whole thing is pretty good, apart from my PSU being crap and needing an extension for the ATX12v 4-pin cable, as my PSU’s one is too short. At the moment it’s stretched across the whole case.

I also got a Zalman VF900-CU cooler for my graphics card, as the old one was extremely loud – the whole PC is still loud but it’s half fixed now. Currently the only loud thing is the PSU. However, the Zalman presents another problem. The screw things on the underside of the card are too big, so they basically hit one of the capacitors on the motherboard. Which is a problem (which I’ve solved by making the card slow by putting it in the lower 8x PCIe slot, which now means I can only play Crysis with everything on low ). However, it’s the perfect excuse to get a nice new 8800GT, so I’ve asked dad for a Christmas present, but I’m not sure if he’ll get it as it’s rather expensive. :p

Anyway, while we were at OcUK, dad also got another Western Digital WD5000AAKS drive for our Sky HD (satellite TV) box (300GB is just too small for HDTV). It’s actually quite easy to swap the drives out, it’s a simple matter of undoing about 15 screws, replacing the old drive with the new one, and putting it back together again. Plus I got a free 300GB drive out of it, so I now have a total of 1210.98GB of space in this PC. In comparison, my dad’s laptop has a 26GB HDD, and his work-provided one has a 60GB HDD.

In non-PC-related news, I also got a new “Cateye Strada Wireless” speedometer and rear light for my bike. I used to have a speedometer, but it broke a few months back when I fell off my bike, and my old rear light doesn’t fit on my current bike, as the pole is too thick.

I’ve also come across a trailer for a new game called “Afrika”, which is coming out soon on the PlayStation 3, and so far, it looks spectacular. I have absolutely no idea what it’s about yet, but it looks very nice. Discussion and trailer about it is on Neowin, here.

Well…that’s about it for now. I would have posted some photos of me going to Alton Towers today as I wanted to go, but I didn’t, as they’re closed for the winter.

Update: The ATX12v extension arrived from OcUK today, so I’ve finally got the case pretty tidy. Also, I’ve taken the one nut thing off the graphics card, so it’s gone up a few degrees, but it looks pretty secure still.