Anyone who knows me will tell you that I am a gadget mad and like to have the latest and greatest toys to play with. So imagine how I was when I saw this device – the Asus Eee PC 701 – a 7″ laptop running a variant of Linux with 16gb of memory and “only” £200? I got myself into a right lather reading through the review in Stuff magazine. However, I have been brought somewhat back down to earth with trying to find the device at the stated price. Nowhere (in the UK) seems to have the … Read the rest

Is it just me or does everyone have problems with Outlook closing? I have started trying to put my laptop into Hibernate mode as it takes soooooo long to start-up. However, I have found that on nine out of ten tries Windows refuses to hibernate as Outlook is still running and connected to Exchange. A quick look at Task Manager shows that although there is nothing showing in the Applications tab the OUTLOOK.EXE process is still running and consuming huge amounts of memory (300mb+ on some occasions).

Sometimes if I am patient enough the memory will slowly comedown and the … Read the rest

I have been playing around with Windows Live Maps today and doing a comparison with Google Maps. On a pure mapping front there doesn’t seem to be much between them but the aerial views are much, much better on WLS. The quality of the view for our house for instance is just stunning. It was clearly taken a couple of years ago at least but the clarify is almost frightening.  It’s not as good for every area but is still pretty good. As an example of the level much seems to be at take a look at the aerial of … Read the rest

The BBC has finally released it’s iPlayer, albeit still in beta form. The iPlayer allows users in the UK to download and watch programmes from the last seven days. Officially launched yesterday but the BBC are still limiting the number of people who can download the player – I registered in the morning and receive my invitation at 10pm, not sure how many are being allowed through at any one time.

My initial reaction was how similar to was to channel 4’s 4OD and the reason for that is that they are both based on the same underlying third … Read the rest

I always like it when something goes wrong with IT and it uncovers a human side to the company. In this case it is YouTube. I was setting up my account to allow me to upload videos from my phone when the following appeared. At least it is going to get looked at…

 … Read the rest

I had need to set up a blog for Jim the other day. Previously I have always used Greymatter but I knew that what was needed was something with simple picture upload and Greymatter didn’t fit the bill. So I did a search on Google and quickly identified that WordPress was likely to fit the bill. That was the easy part out of the way, next was to get it installed and up and running. What I had not banked on was it being so quick. Once I had set the parameters in the configuration file correctly I was up … Read the rest

Friends think that I keep this blog simply to have an outlet for all my complaints against the world at large. That’s simply not the case, that’s only partly it’s use. Then again, when I see things such as this it does begin to make my blood boil.

I upgraded to the latest version of Adobe Acrobat Reader this week and during the installation process I was presented with the following screen.

One of the questions asked was “Please select a language for the Licence Agreement” and there was a dropdown which had helpfully been set to a default of … Read the rest

Sorting out a friends computer last night that had become infected with the very annoying CpvfeedPopup spyware I tried all sorts of tricks to try and get it cleared. I find that a combination of Spybot and Adaware are usually sufficient to deal with most things. In this case neither of them could manage it. So searching the net I came across Adware Away which claimed to remove CpvfeedPopup or you got your money back. Seeing as it was only £16 it seemed like a no lose situation. Anyway it is not really for the beginner as it needs to … Read the rest

During the storms in January the aerial got blown off our roof leaving us without any telly for, as it turned out, a month. This allowed us to to try out the iptv service from Channel 4 called 4OD. This allows you to download programmes from it’s catalogue and watch them on your PC. During the month we watched probably eight downloads, all of which costs us 99p a go.

My verdict? Well it still has some way to go yet. For a start the software was pretty flaky regularly crashing when searching for programmes and, on one occasion, … Read the rest

Multiple remote controls are the bane of any gadget lovers life. In our house we have the usual remotes for the TV and DVD along with others for the TiVo and Freeview boxes. It was all getting too much for us trying to keep them in one place and find them when you needed them. So I took a look for an all-in-one remote that would not only deal with all the devices we had but any we might get in the future. It was while surfing the net for something suitable that I came across this beauty:

The Logitech … Read the rest