Archive for the ‘review’ Category

After switching to using my tablet PC as my main machine I was missing the local storage and optical drive from my desktop. The solution was to get another HP Microserver to be a sort of sidecar when I want the extra drives. As the HP cashback deal is still on this is a surprisingly […]


I ordered an iPad 2 on the day that they were made available in the US (and had it shipped to a friend I was visiting a few weeks later). A few days later I got a note from one of the R&D guys at work saying that a Galaxy Tab was on its way […]


This might well be the bargain of the decade, and I must say that I’m quite cross that the news took so long to find me. A couple of days after I bought my NAS a friend tweeted: I asked Leslie how it was so cheap. It turns out that the (ex VAT) price was […]


One of the great frustrations for me with my iOS devices (and PSPs before them) has been the need for transcoding of video files before watching. This was always a time (and CPU) consuming and fiddly process, and for some insane reason the files often ended up being larger than the original. When I got […]


For quite some time I’ve run my main PC as a hybrid workstation and server. When I built the machine (over 5 years ago) I got a fancy motherboard with onboard RAID5 and popped in 4x300GB drives. It got a mid life upgrade to 4x750GB (which gave a usable 2TB volume), but that was bursting […]


Despite knowing that ‘free 3G’ is a trap I still ordered a Kindle 3G. There was nobody home when the postman came yesterday, so I had to pick it up from the depot this morning before rushing for my train (depot opens at 0800, train leaves at 0803, I just made it). This isn’t intended […]


It used to be that I could sling the kids bikes into the boot of the family car, and strap mine and my wife’s onto a cheap two bike carrier on the boot. Life isn’t that simple any more. Now that the kids have their own little mountain bikes they don’t fit into the boot […]


The arrival of my EFM connection meant that I needed to find some way of balancing load (and failing over) between the new EFM and the existing ADSL. Thankfully there’s a healthy market in low end load balancers, and after digging through some reviews I went for the DrayTek Vigor 2820n. ADSL The device is […]


I watched this film last week, but it’s  taken me a while to find the time for a quick review. I guess I must like Michael Moore‘s films, as I’ve watched most of them, though I know from experience to expect a certain political perspective that I might not entirely agree with. I think he […]