smufflersStuff
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Showing posts tagged gadget
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Kitty Cat Hitches Ride on Back of a Roomba
Welcome to the anthisis of the previous post … a cat sat on a running Roomba. Now I don’t know if I’m just overly anthropomorphisising (real word or too many endings?) here but it looks to me like this cat is perfectly happy accepting this lift, but is somewhat bemused that he’s not ending up anywhere new or interesting, like at the food bowl.
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HomePlug PowerLine PL-85PE 85Mbps Ethernet Adapter
Do you own a really big house?? No, me neither … OK, so do you own or live in a 1950’s council house that seems to have unfeasably dense walls that mean from one room to the next your full power 802.11G wifi network is down to 20% 2 rooms away from the base station? Ahhhh, now we’re talking.
I’m running an Airport Extreme basestation capable of transmiting 802.11N and the one thing in my house that’s capable of using it is my AppleTV. Unfortunatly unless the planets are in some particularly strange alignment we always seem to suffer from breakup or stuttering when watching programs on it. This is particularly annouing when you realise that I’ve spent quite a lot of time ripping my entire (OK, so I’m still working on it) DVD collection into iTunes and have at my disposal just inder 1.5TB of films and TV to watch on it.
Enter the HomePlug PowerLine series of gadgets. Now I know broadband over powerlines has been promised for many years and seems to have spectacularly failed to deliver, but using these devices as a localised for of that seems to work really nicely!
You simply plug one of them in near your network and connect it with a standard ethernet cable. Then you plug a second device in right over the other side of your house and take the network back out of it using another standard ethernet cable … magic!
The blurb that comes with the devices and on the website claims that it also encrypts your network just so that your neibhors can’t access it, but I think I’ll be locking mine down by MAC address or something similar in the next day or so, just to be sure.
Other than that the results were perfect. I’ve been flicking around on AppleTV like a madman earlier today without even a hint of skipping … w00t!
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GelaSkins, Protection with Style, not Bulk
If you’ve currently got one of the more traditional covers or wallets for you iPhone/iPod etc and you’ve only got it in order to prevent scratches, then you might want to look at these GelaSkins.
They are, aparently, easily removeable, have some great artwork on and seemily fit just about anything. I might have to get myself a couple, I’ll let you know if I do and report on how they work out …
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Playing golf can 'damage hearing'
I was in the market for a new Driver sometime soon (actually about 3 months ago but other things got in the way). I tried some new drivers last year when the square drivers first came out and they were not only very loud but sounded horrible … fingers crossed that my search for a new model won’t permanently damage me.
