I’ve never used a Mac for day to day tasks before so I’m more than a little daunted. I took it home to get it all set-up and to get used to it before I deploy it at work (as I can’t afford to lose any productivity).

On first impressions the build quality is superb and adding the extra 2GB RAM that I bought from Crucial was a doddle as was adding two additional ’spare’ SATA disks that I had and then creating a striped RAID array out of them.

I also installed VMWare Fusion as it seems to do all of the things that Parallels does but is free (currently anyway); it seemed very happy with a Win XP x64 install but then it should as I gave it 1GB of my 4 GB’s of RAM).

Anyway, back to being productive.

P.S.

After a year or two of indecision I’ve finally taken the plunge and bought a Mac for use as my primary workstation.

Should be interesting.

Thankfully interweb://google says maybe not:

Hopefully if you ever encounter LCD burn-in, it will be reversible, but sometimes it is not. In these cases, you should contact the manufacturer and see if they are willing to replace the screen. I have heard conflicting accounts about the replacement policy for different companies regarding image persistence.

http://www.dslwebserver.com/main/fr_index.html?/main/lcd-screen-burn.html

I’ve set my backround to white, set my monitors to turn off after 20 mins (2 hrs before) and set the screen saver (photo slideshow) to come on sooner.

Hopefully that’ll sort it.

My family have been heavy users of the *fantastic* Roberts RD6 DAB radio (the older version without the pause feature) for the last 18 months or so which lives in our kitchen and is rarely off but I’d always wanted something that I could move around the house easily.

The Devo Freeplay contains 6x AA Ni-M rechargeble batteries which are charged from the supplied 9v adaptor or - check this - the wind up charger built into the back. Interestingly 60 seconds of winding will give you 1 hour of FM (a tuner which it also has) but only 3-5 mins of DAB, I never knew how much power it was drawing.

Anyway, the radio has a great sound and importantly has composite audio outputs to allow stereo output to a separate amp and as a nice touch when connected, the in-built speaker is disabled.
On top of the 5 presets another nifty feature is the “Station order” tuning mode which remembers which stations you have listened to and orders the station listing by the number of times one has tuned in to the stations.
Not much more to say really other than the build quality is good; it has a faux carbon fibre look, the standard two line (blue) LCD display and a headphone socket.

A great buy.

Related:

http://www.freeplayenergy.com/

According to the FAQ (which I can’t link to because it’s embedded in a stupid flash movie) it can transmit up to 30 meters if you want to be able to use a remote control to change the channels and up to 100m in total without the sound degrading.

It contains a battery that runs for about 8 hours that gets charged from the supplied docking station which is where I guess the transmitter sits.

I think it’s a fantastic idea: In the Beale household Radio is on in the Kitchen most of the time and I’ve been looking at ways that I could get to listen to footie upstairs in my office when I’m working or in the garden without having to rely on 5 Live on medium wave. With this little thing I’ll be able to listen to Match of the Day, Sky Sports and 5 Live in digital quality without having to shell out on a second DAB radio.

At the time of writing they are £69.99 and I want one.

Related links:

• http://www1.sky.com/skygnome/
• Digital Spy article
• Engadget review

Anyway the point is that I HAVE A REEL TO REEL TAPE RECORDER. I’ve wanted one since I was a kid and now I have one; the best bit being that it cost me nothing other than a drive over to Hampstead a few weeks back. I got it by placing a wanted ad on London Freecycle and I got one (unexpected) response from a couple that had recently had a kid and who now needed to free up some space. It came with the original box, instruction manual and a tape (that I ditched).

From the cover of the instruction manual the Akai M-8 has these highlights:

• Cross Field Heads
• Vertical Center Speakers
• Sound on Sound
• 4 - track — 4 - Speed
• Stereophonic sound
• Record and Reproducer

Tonight’s the first time that I’ve really done anything with it as I was waiting for some tape. I’ve given it a really good clean using cotton buds and meths; the crap that came off the transport mechanism and the heads was shocking. It still needs some work as there is a hum so I’m hoping that Cathie’s Dad who has been doing up old 50’s radios for years can give me some advice here, I’m guessing that some valves might need replacing. That said, I’m really suprised with how good the sound quality is and that’s just coming from the built in speakers. It has a 5 pin DIN socket so I’ll need to buy a DIN -> phono lead and then I can plug it though my amp and also try recording.

I think that it also needs a bit of blinging up: I might stretch to one of these metal reels one day, but they are going for silly money, so for now I’ll stay with plain plastic.

Related:
1965 test report
http://rummageads.com/tstereo/akaim8/
http://home.planet.nl/~oomen118/M-series.html

I’ve a

Minimo, sounds like the perfect replacement, though it’s still heavily in development (I guess) and on my first install seemed to be slow and to not always load the pages I was looking at. Still, free software rocks so I’m going to keep using it and (if applicable) post bug reports.

Related:
Project Homepage
Main developer

It has Net play, which is a bonus, but the previous ones in the series were superb without it. Depends if you like games where you control a squad of soldiers (in first person) running around (and sneaking) shooting and blowing stuff up. I do so I can’t wait to get home tonight to play it.

Suprisingly the Bethnal Green Woollies had tons of copies (two shelves worth) and it was sat next to FIFA 2006 so their distributors are obviously doing their job. When I mailed him earlier apparently they hadn’t got their copies in the office, though.

Related:

• Official Site
• Pivotal Website
• Review

They replace my nice-but-huge second hand Sun 21″ flat CRT and a cruddy 19″ Nokia CRT which are taking up too much room so we’ve bought some flat panels to free up the space in order to make my home office into a guest room. My wife is driving this decision but I get the flat panels, so who’s arguing?

So, I’ve bought 2 Dell Ultrasharp 2005FPW 20 widescreen LCD Flat Panel Monitors and so far I’m extremely pleased.

I plugged them both in and rebooted. Windows brought them up at 640×480 (or the widescreen equiv) but I was able to select the native 1680×1050 and that was it, all sorted. The first thing that was obvious is the huge difference between the DVI connected one and the second, which attached to the S-VGA out. It’s not that I have a pants video card either as it’s a Radeon 9800 XT which is only about 6 months old. The DVI one is ultra sharp, almost too sharp to my eyes whilst the S-VGA seems a bit fuzzy, in comparison. I’ve probably got them the wrong way around with my primary monitor being the landscape S-VGA one and the portrait (see below) one being the DVI. I’ll swap them around later.

Very soon after I got them all working I rotated one of the screens 90^o and used the ATI software utility to flip the display. If you’ve ever ran two different sized monitors at differring resolutions then you’ll know how inportant it is to get their positions relative to each other picked up by the OS a.s.ap. so you don’t keep knocking the cursor into a ‘wall’ of non-screen on the other. Well with these two, one portrait and one landscape, as soon as I software flipped the display, under Windows screen properties the screens showed up the same way so I was able to drag them to the correct position (e.g. their bases lining up)

The portrait setting is fantastic. Doing a search on Google I no longer need to scroll to read the results. I write code and now there’s so much more on the screen at any given time. A long word document, again so much more on the screen, it’s great and I can’t imagine I’ll be having them both in landscape, ever.

Other good things:

• The monitors support dual input. Apart from the DVI/S-VGA ‘channel’ there is also S-Video and composite video in and with the hardware driven options for two inputs I will be able to: switch between inputs, do 50/50 split screen or, most importantly, picture in picture. Read: I’ll be able to watch the cricket whilst working. When it’s tested I’ll do a mini write-up.
• The stands are excellent quality: surprisingly heavy and with excellent grips on the base. Almost too good as it’s hard to slide them around for the optimal position. They raise up and down and allow for the screen to be rotated. There’s also a handy cable tidy at the back of it.
• Usb hub built in.

Relevant links:
Review comparing it with the Apple 20″ widescreen one
http://www.fstop-blues.com/2005/05/my-best-buy-dell-ultrasharp-2005fpw.html
http://maingi.com/blog/articles/296.aspx
http://forums.mikhailtech.com/showthread.php?t=4842
http://www.neowin.net/forum/index.php?s=facc4d6f544f2aaace24b20179ef8dac&showtopic=246836

As unique as Apple’s Cinema display might be in the world of 19″ to 21″ flat panel displays, it shares the same LG.Philips panel as the Dell UltraSharp 2005FPW. There happens to be only a single panel manufacturer capable/willing to mass produce wide screen, high resolution flat panel displays for the PC market. Since these two displays are so similar, we thought it only necessary to review both side by side

Signoff from Cathie was easy: to make my office into a seldom used guest room we *need* the extra space, so my two huge 20″ CRT’s have to go. Ah well