Not long before Christmas, as part of a new AV system, I installed an Acer Aspire Revo as a frontend for my now well established MythTV setup. This works great, but it did set me back a fair amount. Today I took a look at the Rasberry PI website and found this video:
The SqueezeBox series of devices from Logitech has got to be one of the best media streamer ranges out there. Not long after I moved into my flat I bought a SqueezeBox Boom and it is awesome. Fantastic audio quality with an almost impossible amount of bass from a small single-unit stereo now sat next [...]
Over my many years of computer enthusiasm I have collected many bits of electronic stuff. I am now flogging the things I no longer need on eBay. There are some bargains in there, so please take a look: 56k v.90 Serial Dialup Modem 4 port Lindy PCI serial card Zalman High Perf. Ultra Quiet VGA [...]
One day I decided to try out Windows 7 public beta. I had a spare 500 gig drive lying around, so I thought I’d put that in my main machine and disconnect the normal 2x 250gb drives which house my day-to-day Vista install. So I hooked up the spare drive, got Windows 7 installed, played [...]
This morning I really struggled to get out of bed. Being very tired still, in a nice warm bed while outside it was -7 °C and my room probably wasn’t far off that, it took some convincing that I really did need to go to work. While laying there, between drifting in and out of [...]
A few months ago we were given a couple of old laptops by some relatives. I cleaned both of them up, gave one a fresh install of XP Home and the other Ubuntu. The former has now become the family PC and the latter is sitting on top of some draws in my room unused [...]
The CurrentCost power monitor has become very popular amongst amateur home automators and those technically-savvy who want to keep an eye on how much electricity they are using (and ultimately how much they are going to have to pay in bills). A couple of months ago I purchased the CurrentCost device and a USB cable [...]
Over a year after it began, the whole-house-audio project is complete. 4 rooms around the house can now be filled with the sound of any of (currently) 4 audio devices thanks to a mixture of hardware and software.
One thing that has been lacking since the first build of the rack is ventilation. With both sets of doors closed, the inside can get quite warm, especially when iron is turned on. Not any more though, having just completed the installation of 2 active ventilation zones, lighting and a low voltage power supply system [...]
The audio system that I’m building requires 2 low-power computers: 1 for the touchscreen controller (not using an iPod Touch for the moment) and 1 to act as a webserver and serial-console server. Once again eBay has come to the rescue, and by searching for ‘geode’ – a low-power processor for Thin Clients & Small [...]