Update 18th July 2008: I called Domotec today and the difference in response was like night and day. New component on it’s way to us now. Horrah!
If you’d spoken to me or Lindsay recently you might have thought we were on comission from iRobot, the manufacturers of the Roomba vacuum cleaner. We’ve been raving about how easy it is to keep the carpet clean when it can automatically trundle around the floor every day. Indeed in the past couple of weeks we’ve convinced two other households that the Roomba sounds like a good idea.
It’s a shame then, that we’ve discovered this weekend that the 500 series (we have the 560 UK model) has a glaring design flaw and is backed up by simply terrible customer service.
Continue reading ‘Poor Customer Service from iRobot UK (Roomba)’
As I mentioned in the last post, I’m running the Media Center (yes, that’s how they spell it) interface from Vista Ultimate to drive my HTPC. Out of the box Vista Media Center (VMC) is capable of playing DVDs and MPEG2 broadcast content - such as the output of a Hauppauge DVB-T or DVB-S TV card. What it can’t do is play the more esoteric formats such as DivX, XVid and hidef containers such as the Matroska (MKV) files. Continue reading ‘My 1080p HTPC: The Software’
Part one of a series of posts where I record how I built my 1080p capable Home Theatre PC.
Having ditched the increasingly expensive and irrelevant SkyHD last year, we’ve been watching what little broadcast TV we see via a Windows Media Centre machine upstairs connected to an Xbox 360 front end. This was fine for the odd episode of Doctor Who or the Apprentice, but we wanted an interface that gave us access to all our music, archived TV, ripped DVDs along with live TV. Since the old XBMC can do neither live TV nor HD content and since the Xbox 360 in Media Centre Extender mode can not play back the more esoteric formats (such as MKV or XVid) it was necessary to build a true Home Theatre PC. Continue reading ‘My 1080p HTPC’
As regular readers will remember, I ordered the first generation MacBook Pro within hours of Steve Jobs’ keynote. That was January 2006 and at the time the spec - 2 GHz Core Duo with 2GB of RAM - was monster. The promise of dual booting OSX with Windows in a machine only an inch thick was irresistible. The reality was somewhat different, partly down to how my real world usage differed from my original expectation, and partly my disappointment in first-gen hardware. Continue reading ‘New Laptop Time’
Recent Comments