Category: Tech


Inside the 2TB Western Digital My Book Essential

Filed Under: Tech by ian — 9 Comments
January 5, 2010

Bought a couple of these from PCWorld for £139.97 each – pretty cheap for a 2TB unit – in fact, its cheaper than buying the bare internal drive unit alone.

Bit of a job to open the unit up but inside its fitted with the WD20EADS model. This is a single 2TB unit with 32MB cache, ‘green power’ and spins up to 5400RPM.

I’m pretty impressed with the unit as a whole – VERY quiet and good power saving mode where the unit seems to shut itself down completely when not in use.

Toms Hardware has a reasonable review of the unit HERE – although I disagree with their noise figures – my unit is almost silent.

The drive:
WD 2TB My Book Essential internals

Case opened:
WD 2TB My Book Essential internals

USB to SATA interface PCB:
WD 2TB My Book Essential internals

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XBox 360 only £119.99 with 3 games in Argos !

Filed Under: Tech by ian — Leave a comment
December 30, 2009

Bargain Arcade version of the console and includes the following bundle for free:

Forza Motorsport 3
Scene It 2
Your In The Movies (with camera included)

Reckon the games bundle is worth between £50 and £70 so its a good deal.
It was £129.99 for this very bundle yesterday.

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Love the WPtouch plugin for WordPress…..

Filed Under: Tech by ian — Leave a comment
December 30, 2009

…so much I might have to donate to the developers.

http://www.bravenewcode.com/wptouch/

Formats my blog for much easier reading on touchscreen phones such as Android and iPhone types.

From this:
iphone1

To this:
iphon2

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BBC iPlayer on Freesat Foxsat HD

Filed Under: Freesat, Tech by ian — 3 Comments
December 22, 2009

I have been playing with the Beta version of BBC iPlayer now available on the free to air Freesat service and am very impressed.

Currently only available by entering a passcode (5483) after accessing BBCi through the red button available on BBC channels. The BBC may change this to limit the number of people on the Beta trial of course.

While the menu system is a little slow – not surprising given the limited resources available on the device, the stream quality is rather good – even in high quality mode while I’m downloading newsgroup content over the same shared internet connection.

Well done BBC.

Homepage:
22/12/2009

Channels:
22/12/2009

Categories:
22/12/2009

By Genre:
22/12/2009

Ready to Play:
22/12/2009

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New Toy – Cisco 7970G Colour IP Phone

Filed Under: Tech by ian — Leave a comment
August 27, 2009

Cisco 7970G
Another EBay hobby aquisition.

I have enjoyed learning a reasonable ammount about IP telephony through the purchase of some cheap Cisco 7940 and 7960 IP phones on Ebay.
To the extent where I had built a small Asterisk (open source PBX) based exchange in the house with several of these phones dotted about the place.

A source of constant frustration to my wife and amusement for my work colleagues when I tell them my wife was getting fed up of dialling 9 for an outside line just so I could experiment with dial plans.

Anyway, I have offloaded a few of the older model 40′s and 60′s and bought one of these colour touch screen 7970G’s.

Blimey – they are much harder to configure than previous versions. It doesn’t help that Cisco like to keep the configuration data file formats to themselves. As you are supposed to deploy and configure these phones using their VERY expensive unified communications software suite.

I am endeavouring to configure the SIP based settings to work with my Sipgate Internet telephony service subscription. This is something that was reasonably easy to do with previous Cisco phones.

If anyone has managed to get the 7970 working with sipgate behind a NAT firewall/router I’d be very glad to hear from them.

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