28
Jul
Gone Dark
I’ve not posted in a while as the last couple of weeks I have been busy moving house back to Stafford and during the last couple of weeks I have been without Internet at home. Work has been rather busy so I’ve not had the chance to get a sneaky post in at all. This changed yesterday when Virgin Media came around to install our new 50Mbit service. Seems to have gone well but it seems they had a little trouble getting it up to speed so it hasn’t be signed off yet as working, however later in the evening we were reaching some nice super fast speeds so its all looking good. Its quite nice and fast, I think the main benefit I’ll have from the service is it’ll allow faster remote access and we won’t see the strain when others are watching iPlayer etc. I hear Virgin are looking to roll out 100Mbit that would be awesome but I think now I want better upload speeds.
During this time of darkness though my house mates and I took ourselves to Cannock Chase. Its a forest with great landscapes and perfect for mountain biking. Non of us had ever been or done any kind of mountain biking before but we thought it would be a change and there is only so much you can do without the Internet. It was an awesome day and riding downhill was extremely fun, we headed down some steep hills which required a little bit of skill but we made it and didn’t break any bones.
29
Jun
Arduino
My latest purchase came in the post today, although it was rather late. I got my self a little starter kit for experimenting with an Arduino board. Arduino is an open source programmable PCB. Its quite jazzy and this evening before it got too hot in my room and I headed for the pub, I setup my first circuit using the handy manual that came with the kit.
The kit its self if quite cheap, £55 and it comes with everything to get started, lots of cool LED’s! A mini servo and motor, push buttons as well as photo resister. I’m not going to reel off the list of its contents you can check it out here.
I’ll leave you now with some nice photos from my iPhone but more on this later and what my plans are with it!
28
Jun
PC Upgrade
I’ve been without a desktop machine for about a week because I had the brilliant idea of upgrading my PC. It was a simple cheapish idea at first. I thought I’d get a new motherboard as the one in my PC is quite limited. My current desktop set-up was a free computer from University its been a good little machine I only added a beefy graphics card to suit my gaming needs but that clock has been ticking away in my mind saying “Upgrade time!”. I’ve not built myself a new computer for quite sometime now due to having this free machine. It was well spec’d out but now I’ve decided to upgrade.
I didn’t feel the new to buy top of the range parts so I thought I’d get a new motherboard which is more compatible with better RAM and CPU for when I found a second hand deal I just had to grab. Although I’d been thinking about this for a while a motherboard appeared on the OCUK forsale forums which seemed to fit the bill. A Gigabyte GA-EP45-UD3p arrived in the post pretty soon after I handed over some funds. I thought Great! but I soon hit some unplanned fails.
First fail was just after I took apart my PC I realised that the new motherboard would not fit in the case which wasn’t so bad because I also wanted to add another harddrive and the case only accommodated for 2 hard drives so I got a new case. A pretty cheap one I don’t really see the need in expensive cases so I purchased, from OCUK, an Xigmatek Asgard for £25. Next fail was while I was waiting for the new case to arrive was that I found the CPU cooler would not fit on the new motherboard due to it having 2 large cooling pipes extend outwards and conflict with the 3 heatsinks on the motherboard surrounding the CPU socket.
At this point its not so bad a quick £65 upgrade has turned in to a not so quick £100 upgrade however..
The case came and I grabbed a new cooler from Maplins in the city. I built the new machine and as I was connecting the power supply I thought oh wait. My power supply wasn’t of ATX 2.2 specification and didn’t have the extra 8 pin motherboard connection. I thought it would work anyway so I connected the 4 pin connector to the 1st half of the 8pin socket and booted up..
Beep Beep beeeep!.. Is what I half expected and I was right, quick look at the trouble shooting page in the manual and it appears short beeps related to a power failure. I put two and two together and order a new power supply. To be fair it was probably for the best, its not wise to run a demanding graphics card of a cheap and nasty power supply.
Well it came today and I slot it in and ruin my nice cable job in the new case, boot up and I soon find I have the same problem a power error. Hmm as I start losing the will to live and wish I’d never got in to computers the techy in me started checking all connectors and I start to do minimal configuration.. I get to the RAM and take out one of the two sticks… Still no post, just beeps. I switch the sticks and hit the power button once more.. Success!! the monitor flashes with crazy BIOS image and I am greeted my the Windows 7 Setup Wizard..
Which brings me to now after a rather quick installation. As it appears one of my memory sticks is faulty I’m looking at a new set but I think I’ll hold off until a bargain comes around else this upgrade is going to hit the £200 mark..
The lesson learnt here is that nothing is simple and you’d ought to plan upgrades carefully or they’ll kick your bank balance in the nads.
20
Jun
The Canal
Been down by the canal over the weekend taking advantage of the nice weather but mainly to escape Microsoft Word and my placement report. On my travels yesterday I saw quite a lot of wildlife including 4 Herons, here is a picture. 
16
Jun
June
I don’t like to say I’ve not posted for a while but I haven’t really updated the site on my ongoings lately just my new gadgets and tech which actually reminds me I’ve not reviewed or posted about my new quite awesome laptop.
We’ve had some new tech at work too. I’ve had my hands on a HTC Desire this week, I’ve been quite impressed with Android and the HTC phone but its not something I’ve got used too but then I’ve not had my sim in and my iPhone as always been in reach. I could though see myself hopping over to Android in the future. Looking at the iPhone 4 details nothing really shouts awesome which is good as it won’t make my iPhone 3gs to obsolete. I can however see future Android phones having some quite epic features and being able to root it and unlock more sounds pretty cool add-ons like tethering for free just seals the deal!
Last week marked a slight milestone for me on placement last week as well, firstly I kicked off my report for University but also I started the hand over period with my replacement. Although its 3 months of hand over it marks the time where I start taking a step back and sharing my knowledge.
I’ve also started preparing for going back to Staffs. I’ve got my moving date in the bag which is quite soon so I’ll be commuting for the final part of placement but I’d also been brushing up on my programming skills as I’ve had a tip off with regards to next years assignments and reading up on IPV6 as its likly that’ll be the subject of my final year project. I’m getting quite excited really it’ll be great to get back to work and