Soniq QPi600B DVD Player June 23, 2009
Posted by graciek in Computing, Life in General, Television.Tags: soniq QPi600b
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So, our 11 month old has shown us her supreme technology skills by knackering up our old Wharfdale DVD player (it was brought over from the UK and had a DVD recorder and freeview integrated – but neither were useful in Oz anyway). She’s obviously seen those testing machines at Ikea and decided to repetitively test the drawer open/close mechanism. So hubby popped to JB Hifi in search of something fairly el cheapo off-the-shelf with the best specs he could find 
We ended up with the Soniq QPI600B DVD player at just a smidge over $80. It has HDMI and also a nifty iPod dock that pops out at the front (hmm not sure this is a good feature or not with the “DVD Destructo” around). Annoyingly the DVD was locked to region 4 – rubbish if all your DVDs are UK region 2!! Hubby couldn’t find a hack online for unlocking it and was going to take it back to the shop. I however said let’s just try a few off the internet, and yay, one of them worked. So if you’ve bought one that needs to be unlocked here’s the instructions:
Switch on the unit
Open tray
Press 5168
Change the region code to “Test 0″
Exit
Hubby is delighted as now he can watch his Sharpe DVD marathon!!
Advent K300 Review August 2, 2008
Posted by graciek in Computing, Life in General.Tags: advent K300 review
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Well, what with all the commotion of Baby Evie arriving I’ve not had the time to do a blog entry about hubby’s new laptop. Sadly the news is not good. Essentially we’re sending it back to be refurbished yet again! It wasn’t a bad spec for the price but was useless for my hubby to use. He wanted to use it running linux (Ubuntu) but unfortunately, the way the DSG Group (Dixons/PC World/Currys) set up their computers means that some of the advanced options are disabled on the BIOS and hence only some of the functionality is working in Ubuntu (according to hubby’s random geek rants it’s eomething to do with the power management). [More details on Ubuntu Forum here for other geeks]
In terms of styling and other things, it is fairly chunky but was quite robust looking also it has higher feet so doesn’t tend to get as hot underneath. The fan is really really loud. It does have a button to reduce power usage/fan speed but this button seemed to do nothing at all. I quite liked the interchangable front covers (more of a kiddy thing but still fun for about 5 mins).
Indulging My Inner Geek April 28, 2008
Posted by graciek in Computing, Life in General, Musings.Tags: personal websites
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Started rewriting my personal website last night and continued this morning before work (v naughty – didn’t get in till after 10am). I think I wrote my first website back in 2000. I don’t think my programming skills have improved much but I am getting better at doing the graphics. It’s not that I don’t have the skills, but I just haven’t had to program anything for so long I can’t even remember how to start (hang my head in shame)!! My personal website was created in 2003, originally hosted on brinkster (cos it was free) and last updated in 2005 – hmm a bit out of date as it didn’t even contain stuff about our furry baby Mocha or the wedding! Also it had… shock horreur… frames. It’s funny how things go in and out of fashion. When I was first learning about websites frames were very de rigeur, now they are shunned by almost everyone. We have our own server at home now so I can load things up nice and quickly and if it breaks hubby will go hit it with a hammer (the official Physicist’s solution) I would prob Ctrl+Alt+Del and reboot.
Summary of the day: Played with my website, Went to work, Printed out a whole tree’s worth of handouts (I have a lecture to give to 40 students tomoz), Caught up with emails, Lugged all the stuff home, Made an “interesting” potato gratin (somehow it baked for an hr and the potatoes were still a bit raw), Played with website again (doing the boring bit with all the photo galleries).
10 Blog Statistics January 10, 2008
Posted by graciek in 10 Things..., Computing.Tags: Blog Stats
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This week’s 10 things are random statistics from my blog (as of today).
1. 133 Posts
2. 24 Comments
3. 18 Spam Comments
4. 234 Hits on 25/09
5. 2 Days with No Posts
6. 19 Categories
7. 165 Tags
8. 700 Hits on One Page
9. 178 Word Average per Post
10. 13 Ping Backs
Summary of the day: Work again, Analysed questionnaires, Created summary presentation, Made Cassoulet for dinner
Wii-ing Myself November 23, 2007
Posted by graciek in Computing, Life in General, Parties.Tags: dinner party, wii
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We bought our Nintendo Wii back in June. At the time I found one in Argos and they had an offer where you got £10 off Wii Play (which included another wiimote) think it was about £205 for the console, Play and Sports. We don’t seem to play it as much these days but it’s great when we have people over. We have a small selection of games (Sport, Play, Harry Potter OOTP, Far Cry, Wario Smooth Moves , and hopefully The Simpsons for Christmas). Wii Sport kept my parents occupied (mostly the golf game).
Strange how there seems to be a big rush for Wiis in the runup to Christmas. They haven’t been overly plentiful in stock over the year, but they weren’t hard to find over the summer. If we hadn’t got one, I would prob have held out for the next version of Wii (think it’s coming out some time next year) which plays DVDs as well.
Summary of the day: Work, 2 student meetings, Catching up with emails, Extremely large fish (with some chips and bean juice – I like the baked bean sauce but not the actual beans), Supermarket shopping for last minute stuff, Had a dinner party with steamboat, Played trivial pursuits (I won – w00t) and then Mario Smooth Moves (v surreal graphics).
Addicted to Facebook October 12, 2007
Posted by graciek in Computing, Life in General, Musings, Under the Weather.Tags: facebook addiction
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I think I am actually addicted to Facebook (signed up in Feb this year and it’s slowly built into a full blown addiction). Even though I know that nothing has happened (i.e. I have no emails notifying me) I still find myself checking it whenever I’m bored (which today was about 10 times as I was off sick from work). So, what is this addiction and why? Is it really because I just can’t wait to see if someone has been bothered to do something, or could it be that I just want to see if I actually have any friends to validate my social networking skills? Eventually I’m sure I will get bored of it or get invited one too many times to become a vampire/werewolf/pirate/ninja/whatever. What’s with all the poking too? First there was normal poking (soon got bored, but still end up poking people back once in a while), there’s also superpoke (the more you poke, the more types of poke you get with little piccies), then there are a whole load of other X me, Super X me, Superduper X me Pro type ones where you can do virtually anything to anyone. Then there’s also those gift type ones (where you give other people things; plants, stars, fish, eggs, etc) which annoy me as I don’t really want to clutter up the profile with them, yet every week I seem to get something really random or other (always seemingly from a relative for some reason).
So, what I’d really like to know is are there certain psychological profiles/categories of people based on the types of applications/usage of facebook? Wouldn’t that be interesting, they already collect all your usage stats, an interesting social networking experiment theory there.
Summary of the day: Woke up – couldn’t speak, Stayed home from work, Made some buk poh, Slept, Played on facebook, Answered emails, Slept some more, Cried a bit (feeling miserable and ill), Cursed at students for making me ill, Ate an entire box of throat pastilles in one afternoon, Got an abstract accepted for yet another conference
Banking Woes October 3, 2007
Posted by graciek in Computing, Life in General, Money, WTF?.Tags: internet banking woes
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So I’ve been a happy internet banker for the last ten years. Randomly last week my account details weren’t being accepted (strange as I use a money manager hence know that the details entered hadn’t change). So I re-register in case it’s randomly forgotten (on 3 of my different computers). 5 days later the new details come and they don’t work either. Telephone banking doesn’t work either. Spend 30 mins on the phone this morning and can’t get through the security check (answered 5 questions, then was stumped by the last question about the month and year the account was opened – who can remember that after such a long time?). I was seriously beginning to think that my account had been hacked so went down to the bank. All they told me was that I must be entering the details in wrong, and that I have to re-register again tomorrow! Apparently when the new details come you can’t actually use them till 7 days after you register (as opposed to what it says on the letter which says it will work that day). Thankfully the accounts seem to be intact as there’s no transactions that shouldn’t be there. Phew. Had forgotten the total convenience of remote banking – how did we cope before phone and internet banking?
Summary of the day: Went to work, Had meetings, Got stressed and went to the bank, Rewrote a magazine article, Went to archery (form a bit pants, but nice to be back shooting)
Being a Door Mat September 26, 2007
Posted by graciek in Computing, Life in General, Musings, WTF?.Tags: being taken advantage of, ranting
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I’m usually a very easy going person, who will help others as much as I can. Why is it that sometimes people just take the piss and expect you to jump? I don’t often get very pissed off, but today I am feeling totally used. People expect you to go out of your way to do things for them, and you have plenty of other things to stress you out to do with your time, yet because you’re such a mug you want to help them and you make time. I don’t think people realise just how annoying it is, or perhaps they just think I have nothing better to do then to pander to their every need and wait around. Grr!!
Summary of the day: Went to work, rewrote a presentation, came home early to get software loaded onto home laptop (need to bring home laptop in for a meeting because work laptop still hasn’t been fixed since nuking itself 20 days ago), fight with Vista (it seems to think it’s acceptable to take 6hrs unzipping a 120MB file), download 7-zip instead (great bit of software and best of all free, unzip now takes all of 2 mins), blitzed house, made wontons for dinner.
Laptop Specifications September 25, 2007
Posted by graciek in Computing, Life in General.Tags: Gateway MT6722b, Laptop, Tesco
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So I bought the Gateway MT6722b from the Tesco website last week. There’s very little on the web about it, so I thought I would post a bit of a review on my blog. Also to warn people that it’s not necessarily the right specification that they are expecting.
On the whole I am very happy with the Gateway. It’s not too big, much lighter than my other Toshiba (M70). It has a nice brushed aluminium plate below the keyboard too (my previous laptops were just painted plastic that wore off after a while). The specs (at today’s date) on the Tesco’s website are incorrect 
The differences are namely:
It has 120GB hard drive, not 160GB
It has 1GB of RAM, not 2GB
There is no Bluetooth
Makes it in my opinion pretty much equivalent in price to a lot of the other makes/models of the same price (~£400) apart from this also has a built in webcam.
I sent Tesco customer services an email to check and they have passed it on to their relevant departments to update the details on the website.
Summary of the day: Sat in lots of meetings (yawn), programmed, had another meeting, went to buy extra last minute birthday presents (happy birthday Hubby!), played Wii, had a quiet night in.
Mp3 Fiddling September 24, 2007
Posted by graciek in Computing, Life in General, Music.Tags: iTunes, mp3, Songbird
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Have spent the last few evenings trying to work out the best thing to use with my music and iPod. Luckily most of the music was already ripped off the CDs and stored on our shared drive at home (thankfully didn’t have to do it all over again) so I didn’t have to fuss with that. Previously I just used iTunes, but with a totally new laptop I thought I would try and actually sort out/organise all the different formats of music files we have (some were M4A, some mp3, some wmas, etc). So now I have the built in Windows Media Player, iTunes and Songbird. Question is now, which should I use?
A few stats…
# of media players : 3
# of mp3 players : 1 (80GB iPod Video Black)
# of songs : 2446
# of artists : 383
# of albums : 129
# of GB : 6.32
Summary of the day: Went to work, programmed all day long (wow a tutorial that actually teaches you something), played with music files
