Simkin.Org

Category: Tech stuff

  • Blue Ray or HD ? Worry no more!

    You just have to love LG. For those of us without an Xbox360 or PlayStation, the HD format wars are a pure spectator sport. But now thanks to those electronics wizards we can get involved in a very grown-up way.

    Introducing the LG GGW-H20L.

    LG Blue-Ray and HD DVD

    Not a very catchy name I know but what it does is awesome. Want to play a Blue-Ray movie ? Yep. Want to play an HD-DVD movie ? Yep. Want to record to a dual-layer Blue-Ray disk ? Yep. Want to record to any DVD or CD format ? Uhuh. Yep. I bet it doesn’t do lightscribe. It does. In fact this would be the ideal drive to stick in a living-room Media Centre PC.

    Assuming your PC has a decent DVD-player application, the world of high-definition just became easier to reach. Sure the drive currently costs just under £200 but give it a few months….

    Don’t say I never tell you anything.

  • Telnet control of Windows Machines

    If you understand the title, you possibly already have a solution. If you don’t, then go take a trip to this link and get a copy of RSM. It is a nice little utility which runs as a service and listens on port 40 for Telnet connections. Once connected, you can stop and start services or bounce the machine. I occasionally cannot get onto a server or desktop remotely and just need to bounce Logmein, VNC or RDP and this utility is a wonderful, simple, just-does-what-it-says solution.

    But if you run Vista as I do, your Telnet command has disappeared. Rather than walk you through going into Programs and Features and clicking on the Turn Windows Features on or off, I’ll point you at this very erudite article.

    Besides the work going on to replace/modernise our kitchen, I’ve recently built a spare server (“Goblin”) in case this one (“Pixie”) breaks and played around with MySQL import and export to transfer the content. It works but I need to really find a decent auto-backup solution. Ideally one that can dump the backups to a NAS – mainly because I don’t want my “spare” server running constantly. It is basically a “park in the corner until I need it” machine. So the NAS box is on the Christmas list.

  • Getting Movies onto the Nokia N95

    I thought it was about time I got some movies onto my Nokia N95. So what I need is something that can take a DVD, squish it down and output a suitable movie file. The tool of choice is a bit of software called Handbrake

    It is basically a command-line video encoder with a simple GUI front-end for building the command. I’ve tried a few settings and got the following to work:

    Encoder = MP4
    Audio = AAC
    Width = 320
    Height = Blank (For 16:9 it will be about 150. For 4:3 it will be 240)


    Average Bit Rate = 500  (For smaller files, 200)
    Frame Rate = Auto
    Audio Bit-rate 128 Sampling 44.1

    For a full widescreen image, a height of 150 can look a bit wasteful of screen estate. Setting 320×180 will fit better but crop & squeeze the image slightly. A better option is to tick the Loose Anamorphic box if the film is widescreen and leave the height box empty.

    You can squeeze a DVD down to 300-750MB depending on how low you set the ABR(Quality). Which is pretty good if only you could get some more storage into the Nokia. How about the new 6GB microSD card then ?

    Nice.

  • Leopard is released

    Apple have released a new version of their nice-looking Operating System. It is good news for Apple users but apparently it breaks some systems. It wasn’t very long before somebody decided that if you can run Windows on a Mac, why not run Leopard on a PC…

    Apple are going to hate this.

  • Home Server or Small Business Tool ?

    I’ve seen that Tranquil PC have adopted the Home PC as a product and have done a really good job of it. What you get is a silent, wall-mounted appliance that draws very little power and generates almost no noise. It gives you backup, PC health monitoring, windows updates and remote control.

    This is all good stuff for the power user at home but what about using it as a business tool? For all those small businesses out there that need IT support but can’t afford an in-house guy, these save a lot of mucking around with management tools and third-party solutions like logmein or VNC. Really should investigate this idea for my off-and-on IT consultancy, OrangeTeapot.com. A managed service around one of these devices would easily pay for the unit within six months and provide much needed backup and desktop recovery for a lot of businesses that today don’t have that.

    You heard it here first.

  • Ripping the Linksys WRT54GS apart

    I’ve been looking at low-end, hobbyist VoIP for the last couple of weeks and also the customisation available for the trusty Linksys WRT54GS router. It turns out that there is a custom Linux distribution called OpenWRT available which allows for different modules of functionality. To be honest there are lots of different options from the likes of Sveasoft and DD-WRT which do similar things.

    But flashing the software off the router and dropping OpenWRT allows for a build of the Asterix PBX. So my trusty wireless router can also be my phone system. Why do this at home ? Is it going the same wayy as my Xbox/Linux project? Well luckily Martin has said he is going to do the R&D this time before I trash a perfectly good router. Watch this space.

  • Google Flight Simulator

    Wow! Google Maps. Wow! Google Earth. Wowsy-wow-wow Google Sky.

    Yep. Google are launching lots of free Apps. Even better if you have some artistic talent, you can use Sketch-up and render your house for all to see when flying around. But if flying around is what you really want to do, Google have though of that too. Apparently there is a secret flight-sim built into Google Earth. Read all about it here.

  • BT Packet Data

    I know I really shouldn’t but my employer foolishly allows packet data on our mobile SIMs knowing full well that we won’t ever use it. Why would we need to as we have the charming Blackberry 7230 for email (and web browsing for the brave). Those who know me or who read the rest of this sentence will know I have the Nokia N95 as my weapon of choice. But getting it to work with packet data has been a bit of a challenge.

    Until now that is.

    Jon-Paul, sales guy and motorbike nut pointed me at a wonderful site for those with a corporate BT mobile contract. Now my N95 happily downloads maps. It dutifully let’s me surf the web. And it somethingelsingly allows me to read my Imap4 mail whilst on the move.

    I wonder if the Accounts department will spot my increased usage or if I’m actually staying below the radar – I don’t use it too much to be honest. Useful to be able to have a decent web browser on the move but too fiddly to really run-up a huge data bill.  He said hopefully.

  • z5500 Delight

    Logitec shipped a replacement set of speakers to me. That makes box #3. The difference this time was that the labels on the back of the speakers identified the unit as R720 not R710. The effect of these magic stickers is to make the speakers work perfectly. I am VERY happy. I recommend Logitec as a supplier because they didn’t flinch at shipping me a third set of speakers just to be sure I had a working set.

    I finally have the warm and fuzzy feeling of owning some speakers that don’t get over-warm and are definitely not fuzzy.

  • z5500 Hot under the collar

    Apparently there is a faulty batch of these things that causes the controller to overheat. So blowing gently in the back of the controller will keep it working. Not ideal. Hopefully either Amazon or Logitech will come to the rescue….