Monthly Archive for January, 2009

I want a SILENT PC, not a noisy one

Published on 30 January, 2009. 5 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , .

Dear Shuttle,

When I spend over £200 on your high end SFF PCs, I expect them to be quiet. I do not expect to have to order a £12 fan from somewhere such as QuietPC.com to make it silent.

Kind regards,

William Hook.

This includes the many other noisy components I’ve ever had, including the incredibly noisy PSU I had in my old PC, which was a Coolermaster model. How hard can it be to put quiet fans in your damn products?! Oh, and I didn’t actually send the above message to Shuttle, but I feel tempted to. The rest of the components are top notch though, it’s just the fan that’s disappointing.

Update (3rd Feb): New fan arrived. It’s sortof halved the noise but overall it’s still noisy. Shuttle sell a fanless PSU, which is 200W (current one is 250W), called the Shuttle PC62, however that costs £95. Annoyingly, I want a silent PC, so I guess sometime soon I’ll be getting one of those. *sigh*

iStat for the iPhone

Published on 24 January, 2009. 6 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , .

Since I first got my Mac mini several years ago (which I don’t own anymore), and more recently, my iMac (which, again, I don’t own anymore) and MacBook (which I do own), I’ve always been a fan of two handy utilities on my Mac – iStat Pro, and iStat Menus, both of which are developed by iSlayer. Simply put, they’re two system monitoring utilities for Mac OS X. iStat menus sits in your menu bar, and iStat Pro is a Dashboard widget. iStat Pro, the Dashboard widget, shows common stuff about your Mac, including CPU and RAM usage, network activity, uptime, disks and disk usage, battery info, and your internal temperatures and fan speed(s). iStat Menus shows much the same stuff, but on the menu bar, however I myself only use it for the CPU meter, and the Calendar. They’re two of the handiest utilities I’ve come across on OS X, so if you have a Mac, I highly recommend you check them out.

Anyway, I’m not reviewing those, I’m reviewing (or attempting to review it – I’m not the best at that :P ) iStat, for the iPhone. This app was announced a while ago, and I first became aware of it while reading TUAW. It’s developed by the parent company (I think?) of iSlayer, which is called Bjango. The iPhone version of iStat is pretty handy, in that in can monitor your Mac while you’re away from it.

The app itself is available on the iTunes App Store, for £1.19. Now, an quick look at it overall.

Note: The screenshots in this post include some non-standard iPhone UI elements – my iPhone has a different font and keyboard theme applied, so if you’re on an unjailbroken iPhone, you’ll see the normal keyboard and font. Continue reading ‘iStat for the iPhone’

Bosch IXO III Screwdriver

Published on 19 January, 2009. 3 Comments Tags: , , , , , , .

Bosch IXO III Screwdriver (by William Hook)

On all the previous stuff I’ve ever had from IKEA, there’s always been one thing I hate – assembly. So, when I picked up the chest of drawers from IKEA last week, I went into B&Q (UK version of Home Depot / Bunnings, for the American and Australian readers) and picked up a very neat little device – the Bosch IXO III Screwdriver.

Simply put, it’s like a mini version of a drill. It’s very light, simple to use, and is very useful for if you have a lot of screws to do, but don’t want a full sized drill or anything expensive / large. I wouldn’t recommend this to a builder, because it’s not designed for that type of use, however I would recommend it to someone who does a fair amount of work around the home / office, but not enough to warrant a proper drill. While my dad does already have a drill, it’s a hammer drill designed for drilling through stuff like bricks, and I wouldn’t even try it with a screw. Plus, it’s not cordless, so you have to plug it in whenever you want to use it.

Pros:

  • Small and light (and kinda cute, too :D ).
  • Moderately cheap.
  • Extremely easy to use.
  • Ideal for the occasional job at home or an office, where a proper drill would be overkill.
  • Small base station for storing the screw heads, and charging it using a nearby plug.
  • Comes with all the screw heads you’ll likely need, including two torx screw heads (if you’ve ever opened an Xbox, you’ll know what these are).

Cons:

  • Lithium Ion battery takes a while (5 hours) to charge.
  • …and you can’t remove it.
  • Screwdriving only – even if you did manage to bastardize it into a drill, the RPM isn’t high enough to be useful for anything other then paper.
  • It’s moderately cheap – but so are full-sized drills, so for another £25 you could get a pretty good budget cordless drill.
  • Not ideal for someone who works as a builder or handyman – the battery isn’t all that big, and I somehow doubt it would work for a full day of use – whereas with a cordless drill, you can swap the battery within seconds, and most builders and handymen I’ve seen have at least two fully charged batteries for a days work.

Overall? I’d give it about 8.5/10. Very useful for around the home or office, but it does take a while to charge.

New Bedroom Furniture

Published on 17 January, 2009. 5 Comments Tags: , , , , .

Went to IKEA on Thursday and picked up some new furniture – the big chest of 6 drawers, and the 2-draw bedside table. :)

New Bedroom Stuff (4)

New Bedroom Stuff (3)

HTPCv2

Published on 16 January, 2009. Closed Tags: , , , , , , .

HTPC Overall

In 2007, I decided to build myself an HTPC, however it wasn’t much of a success – first of all, the case I had chosen was too wide for the cabnet where our TV was (and still is), and the BluRay drive I later got for it never worked, because it wasn’t compatible with the AMD chipset or something. I eventually sold it, and got my PS3, but it was a bit of a failure.

However, since I got a TV late last year, I decided to build myself one again, but this time, 1) it would be for my bedroom, and not the lounge, and 2) I decided to base it off an Intel CPU, and using a Shuttle SFF PC as the base. So, I went ahead and ordered the parts, one by one, and I got the last order yesterday, from Scan – the CPU, HDD, DVD burner, and a few other bits I wanted for other stuff. I was actually going to get a Pentium Dual-Core CPU, and Windows Vista Home Premium OEM, but I decided to get a more powerful CPU instead, and use the Windows 7 beta until the final version is out, and I can buy that.

I set about building it today, and, got it up and running successfully – almost. Windows 7 installed without a hitch, and almost everything worked – except for the ethernet card. Because the Shuttle has no WiFi, I *had* to get this working somehow, and the included driver CD wasn’t much help – despite including Vista drivers, it simply refused to work. So, I did a bit of Googling and found someone else who had tried Windows 7 on a similar model, with no success – however, by getting the drivers from the Marvell website, they fixed the problem. So, I did the same, and boom, it worked! I then installed my usual must-have apps for every install I do (Firefox, Wakoopa, Whatpulse, Last.fm, and Steam), and since this is the first Windows box I’ve had for a while, I installed Xfire too, since there’s no Mac-alternative for Xfire, and of course, since it’s an HTPC – the K-Lite Codec Pack. I know codec packs are generally a bit crap, but I’ve never had an issue with the K-Lite one, and it’s one single installer, so I’ve always used it.

So far, I’m pretty happy with it – it handles 1080p video no problem, and Windows 7 is very stable so far, so no problems there. I also ordered a Microsoft Media Centre Remote off eBay, so I can use my Harmony Remote with it (the remote itself includes an IR reciever, which is what I wanted). It’s not arrived yet though.

It seems that Microsoft have actually discontinued the remote, which is a great pity, because it’s a good remote overall (I had one with my last HTPC) and the only way to get an IR reciever otherwise is to order another brand remote, and all the ones I’ve found look pretty cheap – plus, only a few of them offer true Media Centre compatibility.

Anyway, the all important specs:

  • Shuttle XPC SG33G5B SFF PC
  • Intel Core 2 Duo E7300 @ 2.66GHz
  • OCZ 2GB PC2-6400 DDR2 RAM
  • Samsung SpinPoint F1 500GB HDD
  • Sony DRU-V200 DVD Burner
  • Akasa Internal Card Reader
  • Microsoft Media Centre Remote

I also had a rather clever idea – I could make my room even more minimalistic (and a bit quieter) if I put both the HTPC and the Sky+HD box into the roof – it’s cooler up there (better cooling), and they’ll be out of the way. Only, it’s not exactly easy to do this, since I would have to 1) get a power source up there, 2) get the Sky wiring into the roof somehow, and 3) route two HDMI cables down to my TV. If we owned this house, I can’t see that being a problem, since I could just drill holes all over the place, but we don’t own it, and I don’t want to make the landlord angry. I’m guessing they’ll already be slightly cross for the hole in my bedroom wall for the Sky+HD cabling, so I don’t want to make it worse. :P

Logitech Harmony 1000 Universal Remote

Published on 5 January, 2009. 8 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , .

In June 2007, I purchased a Logitech Harmony 525 remote from eBuyer. Simply put, it’s a universal remote. It takes all your five million existing remotes and crams them into one simple remote that can control pretty much anything via IR. However, since I recently got a new TV, I wanted the 525 in my bedroom for my use, so I suggested to my dad that he get another one for the TV downstairs. One week later, the Harmony 1000 arrived from eBuyer. :)

The 1000 is a rather high-end universal remote that can control up to 15 devices. That might not seem a lot, but think about it, if you have a TV, projector, screen, AV receiver, BluRay player, HDDVD player, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, HTPC, DVD recorder, and a DTV/cable/satellite box, well…that’s already a lot of devices, and that’s only 11. Throw in a dimmer for your lights, and that brings it up to 12 devices – for a dedicated home cinema setup, 15 devices is more then enough.

So, the 1000. It’s Logitech’s top of the line model, and the first thing you notice about it, is that it’s not shaped like the average remote. This is both a good and bad thing. You kind of need two hands to control it, but I think it’s a good size, and it’s very light too. I was expecting it to be heavy, but it’s not at all heavy. It also has a 3.5″ touch-screen, which is a very unique feature, and a very useful one too. The touch-screen is used for activity-specific controls, however there are still your usual physical buttons. To the right of the touch screen, you have volume, channel, back, mute, previous, next, and the usual up/down/left/right/OK pad. Below the touch-screen is the Activities button, and on the top left is the power button. On the side is a USB port, and on the back is the flap for the battery, plus a small speaker (which is pretty useless, since it just beeps at you sometimes, but you can mute it). The 1000 also feels a lot more solid then the 525 does. The 525 feels like I could easily snap it in half, whereas the 1000 feels very solid.

Continue reading ‘Logitech Harmony 1000 Universal Remote’

RSS ftw!

Published on 2 January, 2009. 2 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , , .

Up until about the middle of 2008, I’ve always followed sites simply by visiting them from bookmarks frequently. While this is good in some ways – you can keep up with a couple of sites, and see whenever they have a redesign – for most other reasons, it’s not very good at all. If the site in question only has an update every couple of months, like some personal blogs, you waste time visiting them every so often to find nothing has changed. This is where RSS feeds come in handy.

Around the middle of this year, I discovered a website called Netvibes. This is a service that you set as your browser homepage, and it displays snippets of information using widgets, much the same as you would on Windows (using the Sidebar) or OS X (using the Dashboard). I setup my page with a small selection – my Gmail inbox, recent Flickr uploads from my contacts, and feeds from a few sites, including Digg, Gizmodo, Lifehacker, Neowin, and TUAW – you can add any site that has an RSS feed, basically.

However, after a while I found myself not liking it all that much – sure, Netvibes is great if you follow a few personal blogs, and can keep up with the new content, but if you follow sites like Gizmodo and Lifehacker, that have quite a few updates per day, it becomes tedious to use. Netvibes is great as a general-use homepage though, if you just have the Digg, Flickr, and Gmail widgets. Continue reading ‘RSS ftw!’

Happy New Year!

Published on 1 January, 2009. 2 Comments Tags: , , , , , , , , .


Image: New Year Eve London 2008 (Fireworks) on Flickr.

Just a quick post to wish everyone a happy new year for 2009! 2008 has been a very interesting and somewhat sad year, and hopefully 2009 will be a bit better, ie, the economy, the war in Iraq, etc.

Anyway, if you haven’t seen it already: Jibjab – 2008 Year in Review.

Happy 2009!