Mac Mini

“Dear Mr Jobs, When I said “Your work here was done”, in my previous post about my iPhone, I may have been telling porkies, as I still had a Windows machine in the house, however you’ll be glad to know, that I’ve done the right thing, and replaced it with a Mac Mini. Sorry for the porkie, and I am now 100% Apple. Your ever faithful disciple Darren.” As you can probably tell from the above, I’ve replaced my last remaining Windows machine with a Mac Mini (Really ? No sh1t Sherlock). To be honest I’ve been toying with the … Continue reading Mac Mini

ted (Television Episode Downloader)

If you are anything like me (and god help you if you are :)), and use the internet as a PVR, then this software will be a god send to you. I’ve just recently ordered a Mac Mini to replace my last remaining Windows machine, and thought I’d better check if I could still do what I do now. Currently my Dell machine, sits in the corner, and is used as my media server, my iTunes server and my torrent machine. Currently I have uTorrent installed, which downloads each episode using the RSS Feed option. Each of the RSS feeds … Continue reading ted (Television Episode Downloader)

1password

For years now, I’ve been experimenting with different types of password management/virtual wallet software, but never found one that I’m 100% happy with…well, not until now ! When I bought my iPod Touch a couple of years ago, I found the most painful part of browsing, was entering my username and password into websites (as you can imagine the email address of ub3rg33k.co.uk isn’t very iPhone / iPod touch friendly). I tried many free and cheap iPhone apps which sort of did the job, but at best I could copy and paste the details to the site, 1password however just … Continue reading 1password

Dropbox

I discovered Dropbox only last week, as I was looking for a solution to sync my 1Password software between 2 Macs, as mentioned in my 1Password post. Now I’ve been using cloud storage in 1 way or another for a while now, and do believe it’s the future, as the internet gets faster, there is going to be less of a need for keeping data locally, and everything will be stored and accessed from the Cloud. Dropbox is a simple piece of software, and essentially give you access to 2Gb of free storage (you can pay a monthly fee for … Continue reading Dropbox

New Speaker setup

If your read my New and Improved Computer Room post, you may notice on the 2nd video that a Technics SCDV290 seems to have appeared from nowhere ? This was our orignal Hi-Fi that we used to have downstair, it was an extremely powerful system however it had 1 major drawback….no optical inputs ! When I bought my PS3 a couple of years ago, I was kinda gutted that I could only hear it in Pro-Logic, and it felt a bit of a waste, so upgraded to the Onkyo TX-SR606 so I could get TrueHD. After forking out for the … Continue reading New Speaker setup

How to hide items on your Facebook news feed

Ok, just a quick blog post, but some people may find this useful . If you are like me and have a number of friends of facebook that play a lot of the facebook apps such as Farmville, Mafia Wars, Cafe World, etc and tend to hit the publish button every time they fire up the game, or what seems like every 30 seconds, your Facebook news feed, like mine can get a little crowded. You could un-friend them, but that’s not very friendly, and if they enjoy playing the games, and I’m sure they have other friends that may … Continue reading How to hide items on your Facebook news feed

Harmony remotes FTW

As time goes on, and I buy myself more and more gadgets, these obviously come with more and more remotes. Over the last couple of years I’ve tried various “All in One” remote controls, from the cheap “enter the device ID, and hope for the best”, to a Cambridge Audio MI+ “Smart Remote” I’ve been more than happy with the Cambridge MI+ however I made the mistake of leaving another remote on top of it, which drained the batteries…. As I couldn’t really be bothered reprogramming it all (which took me ages to get everything how I wanted, also all … Continue reading Harmony remotes FTW

M-Audio Fast Track Pro

Over the post 6 months or so, I’ve become heavly involved with recording audio for a number of projects we work on, over at Fictionshed. If you listen back to the earlier podcasts (Fictioncasts), you’ll here me say, that you don’t need any specialised equiptment to record your voice, and a standard PC, with cheap mic will do…..the rest of this post will be me eating my words. Due to getting a not the quality I wanted from the cheap headphone/mic combination, Tony kindly lent me a mixer and a couple of mics. This did improve the quality, however gave … Continue reading M-Audio Fast Track Pro

How to stop spam bots on phpbb3

Over the past couple of months I’ve been having a bit of an issue with spam bots signing up, and posting spam all over my forums. I spent the best part of 2 days trying to combat this but to no avail. I was just about to tear my hair out, when I stubled accross a brilliant idea over at awesomestyles.com The idea was to create a custom field which was compulsery on signup. Custom profile fields are a feature of phpBB3. They allow you, as admin, to easily add fields that a user can fill out to their profile … Continue reading How to stop spam bots on phpbb3