The Background (Why no love for WHS?)
As I have blogged about many times before, I have been an avid WHS user at home for a good few years (in fact since it’s first beta version) using a Tranquil PC server for its very low power consumption.
But in the last month or two, and after a few tricky recovery situations, I have become less and less of a fan of the solution I had. My demands are simple… no hassle, redundant backup of the things that are valuable to me. Which can be summarised as photographs, home movies, documentation and serial numbers (all other types of data can be replaced!).
The thing that finally pushed me into action was a recent power-cut or thunderstorm that caused the network card in my Tranquil Home Server to be fried beyond repair (no surge protection … stupid me!). I looked into the options for replacement, but because of the extremely limited space in the server, even the smallest network card on the market would not fit, and wireless is certainly not an option for a machine serving a lot of media files and performing full machine backups.
So I started looking into NAS solutions, which it seems, have come a long way in the couple of years since I was last in the market.
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Sometimes you still get pleasant surprises when fishing around for a game to play like I did this week. I was firing up Steam to play Arma2 (heavily flawed genius just like Operation Flashpoint was I am sad to say) when a Steam promotion popped up offering Warhammer 40,000 Dawn of War 2 for half-price. I ummmed and arrrred and then clicked buy.
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Mar31
The Mac Pro is ‘Out for Delivery’ according to the TNT tracking page so that means, with luck, it should be in my sweaty anticipatory palms by this evening. In between refreshing the tracking status every five minutes I will start off this article which will cover many things. continue reading »
Mar4
Total War with extra musket!
Time to try something new, I thought. Maybe it will suck, maybe not, who knows, who cares?
A live blog review of Empire Total War starting with my pre-release expectations through to some point in the future where I get bored of the thing – genius right? We will see, but here it comes 
2nd March 2009 13:00 – Expectations
I am a big fan of the Total War series, not to the point of building my own mods and doing the virtual equivalent of painting my own soldiers, but I have thoroughly enjoyed almost every one of the series.
Starting all that time ago with Shogun Total War where my breath was taken away by SO MANY stick figure soldiers on the battlefield and being introduced to that seemingly vast campaign map. continue reading »
Feb18
Low power consumption doesn't mean low performance
So Windows Home Server is a chunk of code I have been very impressed with for a long time, even in Beta I trusted it completely and it has filled several needs in our house without a single hiccup. But the time came when I needed to run it on some decent and well considered hardware. continue reading »
Sep26
So I was coerced by some work mates into trying Warhammer Online this week. It was, in all honesty, a game I was planning on skipping because I have never been the warhammer type. I imagined myself not really being able to stomach thousands of brats with their painted figuirine history berating me for not knowing about waaagghh. I have also never really been a big pvp’er (Eve Online excepted) because normally PvP means gank versus victim in my experience.
So a couple of days ago I was persuaded and hopped on the WAR-wagon, creating my first character on a core server. continue reading »
Sep17
Is that there is no reason for the DRM to even exist in the first place.
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Jul7
It’s been a very long time coming but finally I have the time (thanks to a sleeping baby!) to finalise my words on these headphones with the thought they deserve.
As previously mentioned on the site, the goal is to finally find a pair of headphones that are top quality in terms of build and sound, whilst also being fully compatible with the iPhone. By fully compatible I mean that they fit into the recessed jack without the need for an adapter, they have a microphone for taking voice calls, and the little rocker switch for the same basic control of the phone that the standard Apple headphones have.
Additionally, from a personal point of view, I need headphones that solve an old problem for me. In over 25 years of looking, I have never found a pair of ‘bud’ style headphones that stay in my ears. I must have tried somewhere in the region of 50-100 models in that time and not one is capable of staying in my ears for more than a few minutes, even when I am stationary! The record for when walking is somewhere in the region of 45 seconds, let alone jogging! Believe me when I say that if a pair of headphones stay in my ears, I guarantee they will stay in anyones!
So how did these headphones stand up to the test? Read on to find out!
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Apr8
As I have lamented previously here on the site, the iPhone is a great piece of hardware let down (very surprisingly) so far by one thing, an almost total lack of fully compatible and functional headphones! Apart from the worthless white buds you get with the phone, there are very few headsets on the market which offer the full functionality the iphone should be blessed with.
So I dugg around and managed to find a few alternative headphones that offer superior sound quality to the standard headphones whist being fully compatible with the iPhone functions. Before I start the reviews let me just define what I mean by ‘compatible and fully functional.’ continue reading »
Jan30
Adobe Lightoom is the premium Digital Darkroom for photographers. It combines a multitude of library features and combines them with some very powerful editing and processing tools in the package. Having got my first DSLR camera almost one month ago, I became quickly aware of how much I needed something to keep track of all my pictures, and something that I could use to process them, especially when shooting in RAW format. I looked at many options, Picasa2 from google, Expression Media from Microsoft, Windows Live Gallery which is part of their Live packages, CaptureNX which is Nikon’s own software, GIMP combined with ufraw, and so on.
But I found every package lacked something. Here is a very very quick overview of the four better packages I tried and my ratings on the things that were important to me.
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