I’m not having a very good week when it comes to breaking stuff. While removing two tuner cards from boron for the fantastic new pc for the living room (details coming soon) I decided to blow some of the dust away with a can of compressed air. It certainly did the job, but when I [...]
The test of the audio matrix switcher prototype has failed on two fronts: the multiplexers refused to work the amplifier exploded Of the two problems, the second is clearly the worst because it’s cost me a £50 amplifier. It may be repairable (sounded and smells like a capacitor exploding) but I’m not going to assume [...]
Before we moved into our new house, I lifted some of the carpets and floorboards and installed some runs of cat5 and speaker cable. In total there are 24 cat5 cables and 4 pairs of speaker cable. I’m not sure the length of network cable that was used, but a rough estimate is 400m – [...]
This project is intended to investigate the possibility of, and hopefully build if successful, a home-made externally-controllable matrix switcher with 8 inputs and 4 outputs using parts that cost a total of < £100 (excluding the external equipment such as amplifiers, speakers and cabling). The quality of the audio must be acceptable, but I’m not [...]
This project started off as being a cheap way to have a 19″ rack in which to mount my growing amount of equipment and future projects. It turned out to not be as cheap as I’d hoped, and it’s taken several months of intermittent work to (almost) complete, but I’m pleased with the results. There [...]
Several years ago I bought a 2.4KVA UPS for the bargainous price of £90, and it’s still working nicely. It’s kept my computer running for about an hour in the past, and I’m glad I have it since power cuts used to be quite frequent around here. Now I’m looking to get it hooked up [...]
Recently I have upgraded from a P4 3Ghz (S775) to a Core 2 Duo E6550 (2x 2.33GHz with 4MB cache). The difference in performance is astounding. I’ve not managed to find anything yet that will slow it down to cause any noticable problems with performance. The cores also run incredibly cool. Before the upgrade, my [...]
… When it refuses to restore for no good reason. I am of course referring to Vista’s disk image backup solution.