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Logitech Harmony 1000 Universal Remote

Published

on 5 January, 2009

. 4 Comments

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

William

on 2 January, 2009

in Blog

. 2 Comments

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

William

on 1 January, 2009

in Blog

. 2 Comments

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!

I really want a Sony Bravia VPL-HW10

Published

William

on 29 December, 2008

in Blog

. 1 Comment

I’ve always liked projectors since I first got to use one back in 2000, during the Sydney Olympics. My dad was given permission from his office at the time to bring home one of the work projectors over the weekend. Actually, he managed to bring home several different models over several weekends, and (bear in mind that this was 2000, when we still had a CRT TV, and a VCR) I hooked it up to the VCR and fed the video output into the projector. It was incredibly immersive watching the Olympic games on a massive screen, and I also hooked up a friend’s PS2 to one, and played GT3 on it. It was impressive driving around on a huge screen, and I became hooked. However, I’ve never actually owned a projector because they cost so much, and the price of bulbs is quite a lot.

Now, bear in mind that the projector that I used back then had either a 640×480 or 800×600 resolution (I can’t remember exactly, but it was one of those), and was designed for office work - plus, this is almost 9 years ago, so the technology has come forward a lot in the time. However, you still need to spend a lot of cash to get a decent unit, even now, in 2008 (well, 2009, since it’s a few days away). I’ve seen a few displays of projectors in stores, but I’ve only ever seen one HD projector in action - a 1080p Sony Bravia model at my local Sony Store last year (2007), which at the time cost a whopping £7000. The quality was stunning though, when showing a BluRay disc, and I felt even more compelled to want one. But seriously, 7 grand? No thanks.

I often read Engadget HD for news, and noticed that Sony have recently released a new model, the VPL-HW10, which is a full 1080/24p projector, and you can get it for as low as £1500-£1800. I know that’s a lot of money, especially for a TV (of sorts), but bear in mind that our 40″ HDTV cost close to £1000 last year, and even Sony’s high end 52″ LCD TVs cost between £1200 and £3000. So, such a good quality projector that can probably give an image double the size of a 52″ TV, and for £1500 is a pretty damn good price in my eyes. Plus, after seeing a blog post by someone who actually purchased one, the photos he took of the projected image are, simply put, jaw dropping. I’d say that it actually looks BETTER then our 1080p TV does, and that’s saying something, especially considering our TV is on the higher end of Sony’s mid-range TVs, and that I’m only saying that after seeing some still photos. I’ve not seen this thing in action at all. Take a look, and have a read of the article:

Take note, especially, of the photo of Cristian Bale driving the Lamborghini. You can see pretty much all the detail there is to see. I seriously am impressed, and I really, really, seriously, badly want the Sony VPL-HW10 projector. Now all I need is a way of aquiring that amount of money, and getting my parents to say yes to putting one into our lounge.

My Top 10 iPhone Applications

Published

William

on 24 December, 2008

in Blog

. 2 Comments

As you might know, I have an iPhone, and I love it very much. It’s only a 1st gen one, but it’s still fast enough for everyday use and serves me well. Since the iPhone App Store has been up and running since Apple launched it earlier this year, I thought I’d post a list of the 10 applications that I use the most. I have not included screenshots, as there are ones on the iTunes store listings, and, finally, this list is not in a specific order - it’s random.

• Twitterrific Premium (£5.99, or free ad-supported version) / Twinkle (free)
These two apps are tied, because I probably use them both equally, and they’re both pretty much the same thing. They’re clients for the popular site, Twitter. If I had to choose only one client, it would be Twitterrific Premium, because it’s the nicest looking and it’s very easy to use. However, Twinkle is also easy to use, but it has in the past not shown some tweets, so it comes second place. It does have one feature which Twitterrific does not have though, which is location-based Tweeting. It works by sending all tweets through Tapulous’ servers, and when you open the app on your iPhone, you can see any nearby tweets. This is handy for meeting new people, however if you live somewhere like me, you might be surrounded by retards.

• Facebook (free)
No guesses as to what this is for - it’s an iPhone client for the popular social networking site. It’s also one of the best iPhone apps that I’ve used - it’s pretty to look at, easy to use, and has yet to crash a single time on me. It does lack some features of the desktop-based Facebook site, but for what it is now, it’s fine for casual use.

• Movies (free)
Again, it’s pretty obvious what this is about. Movies shows current films showing, as well as nearby cinemas, with times, and DVD releases. It’s pretty handy for finding nearby cinemas, and checking times, however I’ve found that more then once, it’s shown the wrong times for a specific film then the cinema’s official website does. Also, the movie dates (such as the “released this week” films) are targeted toward the US market. I think this would be a great app if you live in the US, but otherwise, don’t rely on it 100%. It’s still worth downloading though.

• Night Stand (free)
Simply put, this is a clock. It displays a large LED clock, and does it while looking stylish. It also has the ability to disable the iPhone’s turn-the-screen-off-after-X-minutes function, so it can stay on all night long. However, it WILL kill your battery so it’s best if you use the power adaptor and USB cable to keep it charged.

• 1Password (free)
The iPhone based client that works very well with the desktop based password manager, 1Password. This is an extremely handy app for storing passwords, usernames, credit card numbers, and so on. It’s also protected by a PIN when you open it, and you can also assign a second password to specific entries, such as credit cards. While you don’t need the Mac-only desktop software to use this, it’s handy if you’re an OS X user, as you can sync them both over WiFi. This is also easily the most useful and productive app I have on my iPhone, and I would highly recommend both it and the desktop app if you have a Mac!

• TV Forecast (£1.79)
One of my very favourite apps, this program grabs info from (I think) TV.com, about when your favourite TV show is next on. It’s more suited to the US market, as it doesn’t allow you to choose, say, Prison Break on Sky1 in the UK instead of Fox in the US (season 4 of Prison Break has been shown on Tuesdays here, 24 hours after it’s aired in the US). It can show other shows though - it’s successfully worked with the UK’s “Top Gear” and “The IT Crowd”, as well as “Rush”, which is an Australian cop drama type show. Overall, very useful if you live in the US (or live outside of the US but know what bittorrent is ), and only 75% useful if you live outside the US. There’s also a dashboard widget for OS X, made by the same guy, which I also have. It’s pretty much the same thing as the iPhone app though.

• TV Plus (£2.99)
As far as I know, this is a UK-only app, which is a huge guide of all the TV channels available on Freeview or Sky here. Where the other apps fail though, is where this one is great - it has built in support for Sky’s “Remote Record” function, which allows you to set stuff to record when you’re not at home onto your Sky+ or Sky+HD box. However, this app is buggy, and crashes a lot, so it could do with some bug fixes.

• AroundMe (free)
Simply put - this shows points of interest around you, similar to what a GPS does. There are several categories available, including banks, bars, coffee, gas stations, hotels, cinemas, parking garages, pubs, restaurants, supermarkets, and so on. Data is provided by Google Maps.

• Shazam (free)
We’ve all at one time heard a great song, but have no idea what it actually is. Shazam is perfect for this - hold it up to your speakers (or wherever the music is coming from), and it’ll attempt to identify the track. Most of the time this works fine, but I’ve had several times where it’s failed on obscure music off a TV show. However, it works fine most of the time.

• Moonlight Mahjong (£2.99, or free “lite” version)
Last, but most definitely not least, is this great game. Other people might not like it too much, but I find myself addicted to it all the time. It’s also very pretty, has good performance, doesn’t crash, and there’s a frequent stream of new user-created layouts on the blog that you can load and play.

Note: Prices were correct at time of writing. This post is my personal opinion and is not in any way influnced by the developers of these apps. However, developers, if you want to give me a comission for posting this, feel free to do so.

Stereophonics

Published

William

on 23 December, 2008

in Blog

. 2 Comments

Several months ago, I got a text from O2’s “Priority tickets” service for events at The O2 (because I’m an O2 customer, I get access to tickets 48 hours before anywhere else), asking if I’d like to buy tickets to see the Stereophonics, live, on the 20th December. As I am a fan (not a big fan, but I do like them) of the Stereophonics, I decided why not. So, myself and dad went along to see them on Saturday the 20th.

Both my parents and myself caught a train down to London on the 20th, at about 7:30am, and did a bit of Christmas shopping on Saturday in London. Then, myself and dad made our way down to The O2 via the tube, and had dinner at Pizza Express. Then, we went inside the arena. Up until then, I had never been inside The O2, so it was all new to me - we had a bit of a walk around, and looked at all the shops, then made our way up to the seats we had booked (much to some people’s disappointment ). First of all, The Courteeners played for about an hour, and then the Stereophonics came on and pretty much made me deaf for ~2 hours. However, overall, it was a very good gig and I enjoyed it a lot. I’m not going into detail because 1) I hate reviewing stuff, and 2) I suck at it.

Anyway, on Sunday, we did a bit more Christmas shopping around London, then dad and myself went to The O2 again, because dad had managed to lose his scarf the previous night. However, when we got there and asked the several places we had been if they had seen it, they hadn’t, so, no luck there. On the way out, instead of going back into London on the underground, which is boring, I suggested that we go back to London on one of the Thames Clippers that left from the O2 itself, and went all the way up to Waterloo - right below the London Eye, in fact. That took up about an hour, and was actually a very good journey (if a little cold). You get to see all the touristy parts of London, including the city, Tower Bridge, the Tower of London, and so on. I highly recommend it if you have the chance to do so.

At about 4pm or so, we arrived at the London Eye, and hopped onto that (for free, too, which is awesome - unlimited entry is included in the “Merlin” card I have which I can use for Alton Towers, Thorpe Park, and so on). I enjoyed that, as it was the first time I’ve been on the Eye when it’s getting dark, and it’s superb to see London all lit up. Again, if you get the chance to go on the Eye in the evening, do it! Finally, dad and I got off the Eye, and I noticed an arcade just next to the Aquarium, which had dodgems inside, so we went and had a ride on those. Finally, we got a bus back to the hotel and went to a nice little place for dinner at the start of Kensington High Street, which had very nice food. Can’t remember the name of it though.

On Monday, I didn’t really do much - dad had to do some work, and mum had caught the flu, so I didn’t do much at all until we came home on the train, at 8pm. However, I did enjoy the weekend, and the Stereophonics were great.

Update (24th Dec): Sorry about this not getting published, I wrote it yesterday but hit “save draft” instead of “publish” by mistake.

Sky HD

Published

William

on 17 December, 2008

in Blog

. 3 Comments

Last Friday, on the 12th of December, I had Sky HD installed in my bedroom. I had actually booked it over a month before - Sky had an offer in October for a £75 Sky HD box with free installation (if you’re doing multiroom, otherwise £30 installation), so I decided to go for it and get it installed. Obviously they’re busy, as they didn’t have a single day available for installation during November.

I previously had ghetto-Sky HD installed in my bedroom using a Firewire based DVB-S2 tuner, however since my MacBook has no Firewire, I sold it, and decided to get the cheap Sky HD box. Anyway, a technician arrived on Friday (and, I will add, he looked suspicously like Hamish Blake, which was weird), and got to work. First of all, he drilled a hole in the wall downsairs, next to the master phone jack, and installed a wire going outside, up the wall, and into my bedroom. For those who don’t know - the phone line is used for ordering pay-per-view programs on Sky, as well as to make sure you’re not giving the box to a friend to use. If you take out a multiroom subscription, you’re essentially getting a second box for only £10 more a month. Presuming you have two HD boxes, Sky don’t want you giving that second box to a friend so you can both have the full Sky package for a total of £77 per month - because if you EACH take out Sky, it’s a total of £114 a month (for two HD boxes with all programming).

Of course, there are a few ways you could get around this. If you’re sharing it with your neighbour, you could simply give them the box, and run the telephone wire from your house into the box. Unless Sky actually came and checked, they wouldn’t know any different, however if they did find out, I can imagine you’d get your service cut off or you’d be fined, so…don’t try it.

Anyway, back to my box. The installer guy then removed the old satellite cable to my bedroom, which I had had installed last year for my ghetto-Sky-HD solution, but it was only a single feed, so he replaced it with a dual-feed cable. He also replaced the LNB (the thing on the end of the stick attatched to the dish), as it was looking a little worse for wear from the sun. I also suspect he did it because when he pulled the cover off to access the jacks on the LNB itself, the cover itself snapped in half because it was so brittle from the sun. Anyway, he came back inside, did a few tricks on the box, and within about half an hour, it was up and running with Sky HD!

It’s pretty much the same thing that we’ve had downstairs for the past year, so I’m not going to go into any detail, but I must say that the box itself is nice and quiet - it’s an “Amstrad” branded box, whereas the one we have downstairs is a Thomson box which I purchased off eBay last year. The one downstairs is okay, but it crashes sometimes (I generally have to do a hard-reset about once a month), and the fan inside it basically never stops, and hasn’t stopped since I upgraded the HDD inside it with a 500GB drive last year. It’s also quite a noisy fan, so you notice it when you’re watching TV, even with the volume turned up a bit. I’m tempted to butcher the box a bit to fit my own quieter fan, but I’m not sure if that’s a good idea, because I’m not sure if the box would work with the fans unplugged. If you unplug the CPU fan header on a PC, it complains, and I can imagine the Sky HD box would do the same.

I’m not that fussed overall about it though, as you do get used to it after a while. However, I’m very pleased at how quiet this new box is, as it’s in my bedroom and I like to sleep in a *quiet* place.

Anyway, that’s all up and running and I’m very happy with it so far, and I’m even happier at the fact that Sky switched MTVN HD on yesterday, so there’s FINALLY some good quality HD music showing. Well, there’s not that much at the moment but I’m sure it will get better after a while. I wish all the channels would go HD, even if they’re just showing SD material - the difference between the SD music channels and SD content shown on MTVN HD is amazing, since they absolutly kill the bitrate on SD channels, sadly. You can especially see it if you switch between Channel 4, and Channel 4 HD, during the 7pm news. The HD channel looks loads better, despite it still being SD.

In other news, I finally upgraded to WordPress 2.7 on here and several other places that I manage (with a little help from kudos, because I always break something). Also, I’m going to London for a couple of days from Saturday, to see the Stereophonics live at The O2. As usual when I go to London, I’ll most likely have both my iPhone and laptop with me, so I’ll still be reachable. Just maybe a bit slower at replying. In preperation of the trip I also decided to pick up a cheap laptop slip-case-thing for my MacBook, as I don’t really have anything else that’s good for transporting it in, other then a messenger back which is 1) designed for 15″ laptops, and 2) missing.

Anyway, this post is too long, so that’s it for now.

LittleBigPlanet

Published

William

on 1 December, 2008

in Blog

. 0 Comments

So, LittleBigPlanet. I finally picked up my copy on the 26th November, took it home, put it in my PS3, and…wow. Just, wow. The graphics are amazing, the gameplay is amazing, the music is amazing, and Stephen Fry’s voice over is pretty damn good - he’s the perfect fit for LBP.

This is easily one of the best games I have played, and I’ve only played it so far for about half an hour. Anybody, young, old, child, adult, etc, should be able to get into this game within minutes.

One of the best aspects of the overall game, I would say, are the graphics. The style is both colourful, bright, vibrant, and flashy, and yet it still retains the feel that a hardcore gamer can play it.

My rating: 9.4/10

If you have a PS3 and £40 spare, buy this game.
If you have a PS3 but don’t have £40 spare, steal* this game.
If you don’t have a PS3 and have £339 spare, buy a PS3 and this game.
If you don’t have a PS3 and don’t have £339 spare, steal* this game, and steal* a PS3.

*Don’t actually steal. It’s bad.

Copied from my original review.

HTPC

Published

William

on 23 November, 2008

in Blog

. 3 Comments

I’ve been considering building an HTPC again (I used to have one for the TV downstairs, but I swapped it for a PS3 which I use a lot more often). The reason for this is because since I have a TV in my bedroom now, I want a way to play DVDs and downloaded TV shows on it. I am considering getting a BluRay player, but I think I would use the HTPC a lot more, and I can always use my PS3 downstairs for BluRay, or get a BluRay player at a later date for my room.

Anyway, I’ve poked around a few forums and so on, and I think this would form an ideal one - I can put it in the corner of my bedroom, it’s small yet powerful, has an HDMI output, and should be able to handle 1080p video playback perfectly, on Vista Home Premium (which I’d need another £75 for an OEM copy).

Shuttle XPC SG33G5B (£246.74)
Intel Pentium Dual-Core E5200 @ 2.50GHz (£68.14)
Samsung SpinPoint F1 250GB HDD (£37.59)
OCZ 2GB (2×1GB) Dual Channel DDR2 800MHz PC2-6400 RAM (£25.84)
Pioneer 20x DVD±RW SATA DVD Writer (£19.96)
Total cost: £408.83 (£399.84 if I pick the components up from OcUK)

I think this would make a very solid HTPC, as it’s both powerful and small, and, while it is a tad pricey, it shouldn’t need upgrading for at least another year, if not more. I could maybe bring the price down a bit if I used a cheaper HDD, less RAM, or a DVD-ROM drive, but the price difference would be about £20-30 total anyway so it’s not really worth it. Also, if I added a mid-range graphics card at a later date it could probably handle a few games, too, such as Half Life 2, and maybe Call of Duty 4 at a low resolution.

I did consider an Apple TV instead, but the lack of format support put me off it - most of my movies and TV shows are HD, but they’re mkv files, which, as of now, I don’t think any stand-alone device can play without modification, plus you can add software at any time to a PC to make it even better.

So, anyway, I’m hoping to maybe ask for that for Christmas. I think it would make a pretty good HTPC. Comments?

MacBook Issues

Published

William

on 18 November, 2008

in Blog

. 6 Comments

Up until last week, I had been running Windows XP in a virtual machine, using VMware Fusion, on my iMac, and then, when I got it, my MacBook. However, on Friday, the virtual machine just suddenly gave me a BSOD (OS X itself remained fine though).

Before I go on, some people have asked me why I run a Windows virtual machine on my MacBook. The reason I do it is because I still can’t find OS X alternates for mIRC and Microsoft Visio that I like, and other programs I use, such as mkv2vob, are Windows only. Plus, I keep it running because several people I know are *only* on Steam and/or Xfire for IM. Crazy, I know, I use WLM, YIM, AIM, GTalk, Jabber, MobileMe, and Facebook for IM, and yet a small handful of people still only want to use Steam and Xfire for IM. Oh well.

Anyway, I wasn’t doing anything amazing just then, just mIRC and Steam. That was it. So, I rebooted the virtual machine itself, and that worked fine. Until about 60 minutes later, when OS X itself decided to kernel panic (which looks something like this). And it kept doing it over and over again, even with VMware completely closed. So, I decided to try a reinstall of OS X, and started backing up all my stuff off the HDD. However, by the time I was almost done, I’d had several crashes, and by Saturday night my MacBook refused, outright, to boot up.

If I pressed the power button, it would turn itself on, but the screen didn’t turn on at all. I tried all the suggestions on the Apple support site, including clearing the NVRAM or whatever it was called, I tried booting up in “safe mode”, tried booting to the Apple Hardware Test (this requires the OS X install DVD, which my MacBook decided to eat and not give back, too)…nothing worked! So, I decided to go to the Apple Store where I had got it, at the Bullring in Birmimgham (this was on Sunday). The guy who helped was very friendly, however all the Apple Geniuses were booked for that day, so he said I’d have to come back another day, or, if I wanted, he could swap the machine on the spot for a new one. I chose to do that, but, I took it back home first, plugged the HDD into my old iMac, and got all the remaining files off the HDD first. Took it back on Monday, and they swapped it out for a brand new MacBook, all in about 10 minutes. Easy.

Brought it home, and installed all my apps again, copied all my music to the HDD, and this time, I’m not running Windows XP in a virtual machine. I’ve decided to just use Linkinus for IRC, and if I do need Visio, Steam, Xfire, or mkv2vob, I’ll use my old Vaio laptop for those.

So far, so good. Except for one thing. On the now dead MacBook, I had one issue with the keyboard, and one issue only - the F keys at the top were all slanted slightly to the left. Other people have had the same issue too. There’s a discussion on the Apple support forum too, somewhere, about the same issue. However, I can live with that. What I can’t live with, however, is that on this new MacBook, both the N and M keys keep coming loose. And the O key squeaks against the aluminum.

Now, in no way do I type roughly, I think my typing could be considered “moderate”. I don’t type “super lightly”, but I don’t hit the keys hard either. However, after just 4 hours or so with this replacement, the O key sqeaks (the top of it is rubbing against the aluminum unibody), and the N and M keys, if I type quickly, keep coming loose. This is extremely annoying, as I type fast, all the time. While typing this blog post alone, the keys have popped up about 20-30 times! The easiest way to explain this is that if I type something, and my finger hits either key and slides even slightly to the left, the key pops up! Here’s a pic of them both popped up:

The only way I can seem to get around this is to type slowly (which is annoying), or to not use the N or M keys at all (which is just stupid). It’s easy to fix, all I have to do is push them down again. But doing that over and over and over again is EXTREMELY annoying. And, because Apple class the keyboard as part of the whole unibody, if I get it fixed they’ll probably insist on giving me another replacement. Great. This is also annoying because every time I go to the Apple store, it costs £8.30 in train fares to go from Stafford to Birmingham New Street.

Hopefully though, they can somehow replace the individual key itself (because I think the two clips on the bottom-right of they keys has broken or something). Regardless, I’m going to forward a link to this post to the boffins there, and, HOPEFULLY, they can post me the two keys so I can maybe try and replace them myself. Please, Apple?

I also don’t seem to be having much luck recently. First my PS3 dies last month, and now this. What next?