Tom Fotherby
Living Room (02/Jun/08)
We’ve finally finished the living room: Before: After: It is much more laptop and console friendly. It used to have 1 socket, now it’s got 10. It used to have 1 storage heater, now it’s got 2 central heating radiators. It used to have nicotine coloured wall-paper, now it’s got new plaster and fresh paint. […]
Interface (Neal Stephenson)
Sci-Fi, 7/10 – Apr/May 2008 I didn’t know anything about US politics until I read this book. I’m not much interested in politics let alone US politics but the book did an excellent job of hiding any potential boringness in character descriptions, a fast plot and a single super interesting sci-fi concept which any cyberpunk […]
MyBook USB External Hard Drive – 20/Mar/2007 (Birthday present from Kix)
This quality half-terrabyte Western Digital external hard drive is to replace our now broken NAS drive. Instead of using a NAS drive we have created a Samba share on our server which we find more convenient. This 2nd drive is for backing up our files using rsync to mirror our primary hard disk. We map […]
Downstairs Plastering (19/Mar/08)
We are having the dining room and sitting room re-wired and re-plastered: Before Plastering: During Plastering: After Plastering: After Painting: It’ll be nice to not have to look at the bare brickwork any more. Plus having more than one socket in the room will be a real luxury.
French Door (07/Mar/08)
Since we are having our dining room re-plastered and have stripped the wallpaper, it is the right time to have our window replaced with French doors. We have planned to do it ever since we were looking round the house when it was still on the market: Before: After: It has made the room much […]
Charmeleon (03/Mar/08)
Chloe’s company, Panasonic, have made the whole Thatcham mobile phone development site redundant and are giving the staff their PCs which I’m thinking of as a leaving present. It is a Dell Optiplex GX270 which is a good upgrade but exactly the same form factor as the previous GX260 : CPU: Pentium 4 3GHz RAM: […]
Progress with the new bathroom (Jan/07)
We’re raising the floor to get a better fall on the waste pipe. Under floor plumbing will hide all the pipes. We’re converting the radiator into a towel rail. The new floor is nice and solid (25mm Ply) The Bath is now fitted and ready. We chose quite a clever design: no taps and a […]
His Dark Materials Trilogy (Philip Pullman)
Northern Lights Children’s Fiction, 8/10 – Dec/Jan 07/08 I love reading children’s books, you know you’re in for an adventure. I watched the movie at the cinema the same day that I finished the book – I can understand why they sweetened the ending because it’s horrible in the book. I find doing the comparisons […]
Cable Organiser Box (Jan/08)
We have a charging area in our house where the chargers for our phones, camera, Gameboy and Bluetooth stuff live. It’s always a mess of cables and adaptors so I decided to tidy it up. A bit blue peter – But it’s better than before: Before: After: 1) I bought a box from B&Q that […]
“Pegasus” – 15/Jan/08
I crashed poor Lance in a nasty high speed collision. I was driving down a duel-carriageway, came round the corner and saw the road was blocked with cars from a previous accident, couldn’t stop in time, went into a skid, spun 180 and crashed going backwards into a stationary van. There were 8 cars involved […]
Sony Vaio Laptop – 15/Jan/08
I feel sad that I’ve finally replaced my old PC which my dad gave me as a 21st birthday present. It was just too sluggish, even for browsing the web. I bought a widescreen Sony Vaio. It’s interesting to compare the specs because it shows how much technology has advanced in the last 7 years: […]
Change the Opera start page on the Ameo (Jan/08)
One problem with the Ameo is that the webbrowser doesn’t open at your homepage, it opens with a useless T-Mobile page. To change this do the following: Install “PHM Registry Editor” (smartphone edition). This is a free program that allows you to edit the registry values. Once installed, Run it and go to the root […]
Freedom Universal Keyboard – Dec/2007 (Christmas present from Grandpa)
One of the reasons for getting my Ameo instead of a normal mobile phone was so I could write my journal whilst on the coach to work. But the keyboard that comes with it turned out to be inadequate. So I got a replacement: The HTC website for the Ameo has a link to a […]
Netgear Aerial extension (Dec/2007)
We bought a Netgear aerial extension on Ebay because upstairs doesn’t get a reliable signal. But… It looks ridiculous: Original Aerial Custom Aerial I measured the wireless signal strength on our two Squeezebox’s, one is in the room next to the router, the other is upstairs: Original Aerial Custom Aerial Downstairs signal strength: 81%-83% […]
Moved ISPs to bethere.co.uk (Dec/2007)
We Changed ISPs from “Freedom2surf” to “Be” because it is a faster and cheaper connection. The connection details that Be supply are minimal to say the least. This is because they expect you to use their pre-configured “BeBox” that they send you for free. We didn’t like the way the BeBox looked and we didn’t […]
