A large parcel of 48 assorted bowl noodles and three packs of spicy shrimp crackers arrived this morning.
Pip was intrigued.
These ones are Vietnamese.
Kimchi flavour !
November 1, 2010
September 23, 2010
Flaky router
Wife’s mother’s internet was acting weird – it seemed a bit like a DNS problem – slow or partial page loads – but not that DNS problem as she is on the wrong version of Mac OS and Safari to have that problem. And it affected Firefox too. After changing DNS servers and other fiddling around I decided her ADSL modem/router must be faulty so I ordered a basic replacement.
And it fixed the problem. That’s the second ADSL Modem I’ve seen go funny after a couple of years and start giving odd faults.
DVD Home Theatre repair
Time to replace the DVD unit in the home theatre again.
It was a quicker job this time. I didn’t lose any of my settings like region free or speaker delay. Successfully played my filthy rental DVD in time to return it for the next one 🙂
July 3, 2010
D-Link DNS-323
The box containing the DNS-323 and the cheapest compatible drive I could find (which was a 500GB) arrives and is unpacked.
NAS and HD in boxes.
Western Digital Caviar Blue 500GB.
Eco-friendly cardboard packaging on the DNS-323.
It is even smaller than I expected.
Cables, power brick.
It seems quite nicely made.
Side by side with HD before installation.
Another view.
Rear view.
Front cover just slides off to slide in drive(s)
Assembled and hacked in short order. Got lighthttpd mySQL and PHP running. Just a bit of tweaking and hardening and then I’ll find a place to tuck it away out of sight and save some desk space 🙂
Later
Tucked away in the home theatre cabinet with other fan-bearing gadgets.
June 14, 2010
Large box
Mrs Wife bought a new 30l Brabantia bin from Amazon as they had them half price and the 20l bin was just too small. It arrived next day (Prime) in a large box.
May 26, 2010
New Drill
Got a new18v battery powered hammer drill. Two battery packs, one-hour charger and so on. Cheap but much better than the 9.6v toy I had – it could do a few minutes of screw-driving into wood and then needed a five-hour recharge of its sole battery pack. I also got a set of masonry drills since I’m putting a can crusher on the kitchen wall.
After I charged up both batteries of the new drill I used it to drill holes in masonry, drive in screws into masonry and then drive some screws into wood for fitting a latch to keep Pip out of the bathroom. First battery still full of energy!
April 14, 2010
Curries
Ordered Monday 3PM, arrived Tuesday 11AM (free delivery). Yum!
Not enough room on the table for all of them, but every variety in my order is there.
April 7, 2010
feature: Ars Technica reviews the iPad
The iPad isn’t a big iPod touch—an iPod touch is a miniature iPad that restricts the full multitouch experience in exchange for offering greater portability. With the iPad, in contrast, you get multitouch the way it was meant to be done.
That’s one of our many take-aways after having submerged ourselves in iPad land since launch. The larger screen doesn’t just offer more space to work with—it opens up a different and more immersive user experience. Because of this different experience, though, the closed nature of the platform can get under some users’ skin in ways the iPhone and iPod touch do not.
Still, the iPad is likely to just be a starting point for Apple and for multitouch computing in general. There are obvious downsides to the device—we’ll tell you what those are—but it’s clear that it does sit in its own category that floats somewhere between a smartphone and a laptop, and it serves different purposes than either its smaller or bigger siblings. But we’re getting ahead of ourselves.
A large chunk of the Ars staff contributed to this review, either in the form of writing full sections or by offering feedback and insights based on their own experiences. Because the 3G + WiFi version is not yet on the market, we all tested a WiFi-only iPad. We think it’s worth noting up front that the WiFi-only version is probably best if you only plan to use it at home or at Starbucks—you’ll definitely miss not having an Internet connection while out and about, and the (non-contract) 3G data plans are not bad at all, so long as you can stomach the extra $130 you’ll have to fork over for the privilege.
It’s also the case that there are some parts of the iPad “experience” that we didn’t get to cover here, but we think the next several pages will convey more about what using the iPad is like than you ever thought you wanted to know. So let’s get on with it!Read the comments on this post
Pretty comprehensive review. Clearly a hands-on is needed to ‘get’ this. Still not clear if it is going to break out of being a niche product though.
