Gadgetry and IT

Documenting a clean install of OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard

13 September 2009 | Category: Gadgetry and IT

I’m one of those obsessives who likes to reformat his hard drive and reinstall everything from time to time. Even if it doesn’t speed the system up with Macs like it so obviously does with Windows, I just feel better knowing that my machine only has on it what I need to have. With major [...]



Why I bought a Panasonic Lumix DMC-GH1

12 August 2009 | Category: Gadgetry and IT

Well, here it is, my brand new Panasonic Lumix DMC-GH1 camera, which has just arrived here at Cherry Hinton Blues Towers. It took me several weeks of research and indeed soul-searching to opt for this groundbreaking camera, and I thought I’d pass on the information which helped me choose one here. If you’d like to [...]



Sandwich Toaster deals at Amazon UK

29 July 2009 | Category: Gadgetry and IT

Sorry, we were just talking about sandwich makers, toastie makers, Brevilles, whatever you like to call them, and we wished ours was still working. I was surprised there seem to be so many on the market, so here you go… help yourself to a Sandwich Toaster at Amazon. Click the picture below to see everything [...]



GeekChart – more pointless fun

23 May 2009 | Category: Gadgetry and IT

Cherryhintonblue’s Geek Chart This is fun. GeekChart reckons it shows your activity on all sorts of social media sites in the form of a pie chart. I’m not quite sure about the accuracy of what it’s come up with for me, but it does say it gets more accurate over time, so we’ll see how [...]



Apple Time Capsule – cheap at the price

11 May 2009 | Category: Gadgetry and IT

I won’t do a full review of my new Apple Time Capsule here because there are millions of reviews all over the place which you can read, but I want to address perhaps the only problem which most of the reviews bring up: the price. All I’d say is: “Have you ever set up a [...]



Sky HD remote control and Yamaha YSP receiver

10 May 2009 | Category: Gadgetry and IT

This is one of those blog posts which is more for my future reference as it is for general interest, but hey, if you’ve found this on Google and it’s helpful, glad to have been of service. Firstly… What I did when my Sky HD remote control stopped working I’ve no idea why, but the [...]



4-20mA Aerospace Widgets news

10 March 2009 | Category: Gadgetry and IT

This post is a bit silly. Sorry. Apparently, the 4-20mA current loop standard is important in widgets for the aircraft market. At least, it is as far as this page about 4-20mA Aerospace Widgets is concerned. I made the page up just now, to show how companies can build an authority page on search engines [...]



VAT, the Flat Rate scheme, AdWords, AdSense and confusion

9 March 2009 | Category: Gadgetry and IT

I’ve just spent far too long (as is always the way) trying to find out what I should be doing when it comes to accounting for VAT with my AdWords, Amazon affiliate marketing and AdSense activity. The confusion stems from two things: firstly, these services are supplied from other EU countries (with different VAT rates) [...]



MacBook Pro power cable splits and frays

14 January 2009 | Category: Gadgetry and IT

The power cable on my MacBook Pro started to show a few problems after about six months. Firstly, the little charging light didn’t come on properly until you waggled the ‘MagSafe’ connector around a bit in its socket. Then, eventually, you could see the cable cover was beginning to come away from the plug, exposing [...]



Sky HD box shows FAILED a lot, and broken picture

22 December 2008 | Category: Gadgetry and IT

My second gadget-related failure of the weekend was my Sky HD box, which had spent the last two days showing a couple of problems: scheduled recordings were showing “FAILED” even though their transmission time hadn’t been reached yet; and the picture was breaking up, but oddly only on certain channels. Of course, nobody buys Sky’s [...]