AL2671W Stuck in Standby

Hey - I fixed a TV! It' s been a long time actually since I did something useful for someone. I got asked to look at an Acer AL2671W LCD TV. Bought for about £500 five years ago, and that was cheap then, recently it has regularly refused to come out of standby. Now it is stuck in Standby and won't work.

So where do you start? Google of course! Some results showed that this was a common fault on these TV's. One guy in a forum said 'easy fix, replace C280 100uF 16V on the main board'. Good enough of a clue to take a look. You have to firstly remove the SCART socket block before the back will come off and then the inner metal cover over the PSU, audio card and main card as mentioned before. It looks just like a mini ATX card. It is a multi layer, double sided PEC with surface mount and traditional components. Bad news though, no C280 to be found. I buzzed through the front power switch to check it wasn't stuck and traced the cabling to the socket on the main board. Very close by the socket is C380, this is an electrolytic 100uF 16V. Too much of a coincidence? Anyway worth a punt I thought so I changed it for an 100uF 40V I think it was and re-assembled the TV. It worked! the TV now comes out of standby and has been returned to its owners. Result!

STOP PRESS!

We did a car boot sale not too long ago and I watched 2 scally's knocking out dirt cheap audio visual gear on a blanket. Where the hell do they get that stuff from? Probably stolen I surmised. Anyway, With a bit of research I've found out and pretty soon I will have my own stock of totally legit cheap gear to sell, DAB radio's, phones, MP3 players, etc.

Watch this space if you want some cheap Christmas pressies!

HD2 Update

It's been a while I know, I've been so busy since July it's wearing me out. Anyway, the HD2 is great, it has a massive bright screen. it's fast, quite light for its size and slips easily into your pocket. It makes the wife's iPhone 3Gs look old. Interface wise, HTC have done an excellent job of plastering over Windows Mobile, you hardly notice it's there until you have to delve deep into the setup screens. Is it better than an iPhone? Nope, close but no cigar. The Apple still wins due to its super slick interface and app store. Not iTunes though I hate that with a passion.

The HD2 does have seamless integration with Microsoft Exchange which just works. Bluetooth to my car also just works, no issues. I've also swapped over to Co-Pilot Live instead of TomTom because there are no USA maps for the Smartphone version of TomTom. DOH!

Bye bye Vodafone Hello O2!

After 11 years we're making the switch to O2 from Vodafone. As we get more staff in the north, the patchy Vodafone signal has become too much to bear.

With the switch will come a shiny new HTC HD2 for me, formally known as the 'the beast'. We thought about getting iPhone's, everyone wanted iPhone's but we decided against it. Too many people downloading all sorts of stuff and apps from the internet was too scary on our corporate network. This coupled with the many reports of Bluetooth problems in cars and that was enough to kill that dream. I also considered a HTC Desire on Android but again the relentless development of the platform renders it a potential security risk at every new update. So sigh, here we are again with windows Mobile albeit 6.5. At least it will have HTC Sense hiding the useless Windows interface, that looks pretty cool. So we will see, I should have the HD2 in the next week or so it will be interesting to see how that goes. Fingers crossed for a trouble free migration.

By the way, shame on Vodafone for 'losing' my bulk PAC request and making me hold for over an hour in total while they sorted it out!

Siesta Flow Review

I was looking for a media player for my bedroom, something that wouldn't look out of place on a bedside cabinet. I happened upon the Siesta Flow and it looked to be just what was I was looking for, DAB, internet radio and UpNp compliant. I used to have the Pure Siesta which is very similar but after a while I sold it due to the terrible display and over complicated way you had to set it up using too many (loud) clicks to get anywhere.

Anyway to the Siesta Flow. Firstly the display, this is a vast improvement over the old Siesta, it's still auto-dimming but this time you can actually see it in the dark! Good news. Wifi se-tup was easy enough no issues there but the front panel touch buttons are a bit of a pain. You just don't get that tactile feedback from them which gives you the confidence that you have pressed it. They need a light touch and do work OK, but they can be a pain and make navigating the menus very slow at times. The buttons on the top are much improved over the Siesta not too loud and you get direct access to the alarm settings so switching one of the alarms on or off is easy. A good feature is the alarm display that shows you the next active alarm and which ones are on or off, very handy.

The DAB radio is good, again no issues, I live in Oxford so I get good signal strength. Sound output is fine, stereo speakers, slightly tinny but better than expected. You won't get hi-fi sound out of it but it's only small and costs less than £80 so I'm happy with this aspect.

The Pure Lounge was a bit odd, you set it up on the internet and enter a code into your radio to store your favourites. It took me a while to figure this bit out but when you do it works fine, again no issues. But this isn't a key feature for me and I don't use the internet radio much.

My main use for the Siesta Flow was going to be streaming of my music from my UpNp compliant NAS drive. This isn't so good. It works flawlessly streaming from the Flowserver software installed on my PC but refuses to play from my NAS. The Pure Helpdesk was no help saying my NAS AV Server had 'incompatibilities and inconsistencies'. However both my Xbox 360 and my O2 Joggler stream from my NAS perfectly so I know where the problem lies. Anyway it works from my PC, but this has to be powered on. Not ideal and was almost a deal breaker for me. I tried everything I could think of to get it to work with my NAS but no joy. Installing a twonkyserver was not an option for me.

Oddly you can't wake up to the Lounge Flowsounds, which is a bit strange, you can only listen to them like the internet radio. But there are plenty of 'stock' sounds to choose from on the unit itself. I chose a soft chime to gently but firmly wake me from my slumber but you can equally have a barking dog or an air raid siren if that's what you need.

In summary, an improvement over the old Siesta, the soft touch buttons are not for everybody and Pure need to listen to their customers and actually fix something that doesn't work very well (like the display in the old one!)

HD Video camera bargain!

A chap at work was looking for a new battery and charger for his old camcorder. The pair were going to cost him nearly £100! I'd seen some new point and shoot cameras in Stuff magazine in particular a Kodak sport model for about £140 that was waterproof to 3m.

Anyhow, while looking for that on Amazon I found this older model, 720p HD shooting camera currently selling for £48!!!!! Get one quick before they all go!!!! No optical zoom but they take SD cards and shoot stills and also comes with a free silicon case.

http://www.amazon.co.uk/Kodak-Zx1-Definition-Pocket-Camera/dp/B001SN72TK/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=electronics&qid=1273391991&sr=8-1

or Dixons/Currys/PCworld & Comet all seem to have it at about the same price!

Siesta!

I think I finally found my bedroom gadget I was looking for, ooheer Mrs!

Strangely enough its almost back to where I started. Some time ago I bought and sold a Pure Siesta clock alarm. This had DAB, FM and multi alarms but I sold it because the display was almost impossible to read in the dark due to the auto-dimming and number of very loud clicking presses required to set/unset any alarm. Anyway pure have come out with the Siesta Flow, this is a re-vamp of the original with a new display, an internet radio, UpNp and an Mp3 line in. It gets mostly excellent reviews on Amazon from some former Siesta owners. So I've ordered one, check back for an update!

The Nasmare is over.

I got a new caddy delivered yesterday, I say new, but it wasn't exactly 'new'. Anyway, after all the bother I almost couldn't be bothered with it to be honest. Anyway I fitted the hard disk, it recognised it immediately and asked me if I wanted to format, which I did. That was it it took five minutes. I now have a 320Gb Storage and media server after two months of trying.

Do I need a Squeezebox?

For ages now, I've struggled with obtaining a decent bedroom media player. Yes we have a TV in there but I've always wanted to be able to play my music collection in there without spending too much money.

I bought a Philips Streamium Network player, but the interface was clunky, the display was too bright to be left on at night and it needed speakers. It was just too much trouble, so I returned it. Undeterred, I rigged up my old laptop, it has speakers, could store music and had its own display and could obviously access the internet as a bonus. But this comes with a hefty PSU block, runs hot as hell and it's not the sort of thing you want on your night stand! So back to the drawing board.

Recently I saw a thing called a chumby http://www.firebox.com/product/2595/Chumby. It's a tabletop streaming gadget thing that replaces your alarm clock. Links to internet radio and streams music. Trouble is the speakers look tiny and it looks a bit well, daft. It also has no mention of it being UpNp and being able to stream from your PC or NAS. So back to the drawing board.

So enter the Squeezebox radio. http://www.ebuyer.com/product/184791. It has its own decent speaker and colour display, is UpNp compatible and will also play from Last.FM. Downsides are that you need the Squeezebox server running on a PC/NAS (if I had one) to stream your music but not for the internet radio. It has an auto dimming display and daily alarms. Could this be the one for me? All I need now is £130.........! Mmmm what can I sell!

NASmare update.

Finally, after threatening Pluscom with legal action I got an email back saying 'who are you and what do you want'! So after I politely explain who I was (by pointing them to the foot long email trail) I get another email,

"Hi,

We issued you replacement for the item today 27April you will get item soon."

Mmmmm, we'll see.

NASmare update.

Finally, the eBay suppler, Safekom, have come back to me with how to hard reset the caddy. Link two holes on the board, wait 10 seconds and the software should be reset. I tried it and it worked first time, it was just a case of knowing which two points to short. So the caddy reset and the default user name and password worked, after two weeks I logged in! Here's the pic of how to reset the caddy:-

Sigh -just when I thought I was getting somewhere the caddy still doesn't recognise the installed drive in NAS mode. It works fine as USB and details of the drive can be read and Windows 7 recognises the FAT32 format. So now what? I had another trick up my sleeve and against my better judgement and with much trepidation, I removed the 250Gb drive fitted in my Windows 7 pc and fitted it in the caddy. The plan was that I could check the function of the caddy to see if it recognised the drive without formatting it. Seeing as there is a format function included in the caddy you have to assume that this should work. The drive powered up OK but still no joy. With much relief I re-installed the drive back in my PC and Windows fired up again without issue. Phew!

Anyway, sent another email off to Safecom. Surely they have to replace the drive now? Trouble is I flashed the firmware and they will be able to see that I had done it. Mmmm, tricky.

NASmare continues.

Having a NASmare!

I haven't posted for a while. This is because my life has been stolen by a NAS drive caddy.

I got the caddy last Friday, a week ago today. It was unpacked and fitted with the 320Gb SATA drive in about 10 minutes. Plugged in and powered up 5 minutes later.

Problem #1

I logged into the NAS via my Chrome browser. The NAS came with a nifty piece of software that found out the IP address of the NAS on my network. Looking through the setup screens I noticed that the fitted drive wasn't recognised by the NAS. I thought this might be the case as the NAS stated it would only work with FAT32 and not NTFS drives. Luckily there was a format utility within the NAS so this should be easily fixed. But no, some sort of error was reported.

I tried the NAS drive by USB. Success! Windows 7 recognised the drive and mounted it without a problem, I could read and write files so I new the drive was OK. So time to format it to FAT32. The only option other than NTFS was exFAT, that should be OK, or so I thought. I took advice from a mate of mine (the one who gave me the drive) and he advised flashing the NAS drive's firmware with an Icybox version of the same NAS which was 'much better'.

Problem #2

Keen to get going I followed the supplied link by my mate to the Raidsonic site to download the Icybox IB 903-N firmware. I flashed the firmware on my Pluscom NAS. This basically overwrites the installed program with the new version. I wasn't too worried flash updates usually go fine although there is a risk of 'bricking' your device. If it doesn't work all your left with is a brick! The flash went fine, it updated and rebooted, so I tried the login again as usual using admin as the user and my password that I had set earlier. The password didn't work, again I wasn't worried, obviously it has reset to default because of the update. The default was 'admin' also but no, that didn't work either...........gulp! Bricked!

Now, going back to problem #1, I realised after a bit of research, exFAT is Microsoft's updated version of FAT32 and is not the same! Ha, so I downloaded another utility called 'Penknife' to format the drive to FAT32. That will sort it! No, it didn't. Sadly I realised all along that initial problem was the lack of a FAT32 format and the update wasn't necessary.

I emailed the seller on ebay for help. I needed to know how to hard reset the NAS as unusually, there is no reset button fitted. They responded, but not with anything I didn't already know. I emailed Raidsonic who wrote the new firmware, they advised the NAS is faulty!

Over the past week I have spent many hours trying to sort this out, trying to log in and to hard reset the NAS so it loads the default password. Nothing works. I'm now trying to return the drive as faulty but the ebay seller has gone strangely quiet........I may have to sell the NAS on ebay as an external drive only without the NAS bit working. Luckily as I got the 320Gb drive for free, I might get most of my £40 back at least.

What a NASmare.

NAS Storage Drive.

I've decided I really do need a network hard drive! A chap at work has given me a 320Gb hard disk he wasn't using so its a shame not to! I've ordered a NAS drive enclosure from Ebay, it should come tomorrow. So £40 for a 320Gb NAS drive is a real bargain. It should work as a backup drive over my network, iTUNES server and Bit Torrent client. I'll let you know howI get on when it arrives!

http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&item=310149670263

ITV1 HD on Sky+ HD

Don't forget you can watch ITV1 HD on your Sky + HD.

Follow the guide here http://www.tellytoad.com/page/itv-hd-on-sky-hd.aspx

it takes about 5 minutes to set up. You don't get any Sky+ features but you can watch ITV1 in HD!

Enjoy!

It's a mad world....

Tonight, I had to show my Mum how to rip a CD and sync to my Dad's MP4 player. Its a mad, mad world......!

Blown PC Update #4 - Final

Like I said, this was a whole new learning experience for me. I've learned all about SMTP and Port blocking. So, where were we. The new PC was sort of working with the new email account settings, whereas it was working perfectly before. So I decided to put the old hard disk back in my Linux machine to have a look what the settings were. However, Mr Microsoft was having none of it. The activation time for the XP license on the drive had expired so it wouldn't let me log in. Great, the XP Pro trick described earlier doesn't work because this is XP Home. Great. But all was not lost.I rebooted the PC while holding down F5, excellent! Its still boots into Safe Mode! This was enough for me to view the old email account settings. The answer was kind of obvious, but there was no reason for me to know before hand. The old email setting point to wanadoo servers! I did try this from my PC but it would never have worked due to Port 25 blocking by Sky..........!

Google Chrome History

Have you tried Google Chrome yet instead of Internet Explorer? If not, why not? It's so much better, faster, slicker and never crashes or leaves you waiting for the second tab to start. One feature of chrome that was always a bit odd is that there is no history button. Weirdly it seemed the only way you could look back at your history was to use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl H or select it from the setup drop down menu. However, today I had a eureka moment! Firstly, either press Ctrl H or pick History from the setup drop down menu, then click the favourites star and History can then be added to the bookmark bar or other bookmarks folder! Easy!!!

Blown PC Update #3

The new PC reared its head again this evening. Not surprising really as I hadn’t managed to configure an email client before it was whisked back up the motorway. So I expected the usual trouble with setting up an email account to work with Windows Live Mail. What I didn’t count on was a whole new learning experience!

The user had downloaded Windows Live Mail and installed it, great. But no email was coming through, no surprise there then. So I enquired for the email address so that I could look up the POP and SMTP settings for their account, easy, or so I thought. The email address was and old user@user.fsnet.co.uk address. Now here’s where things got tricky. I didn’t find out exactly what the order of events was, but fsnet started off as Wanadoo and that started off as Freeserve and whole lot now belongs to Orange. So a quick search around the web provided me with the Orange POP and SMTP addresses, pop.orangehome.co.uk and smtp.orangehome.co.uk. Sorted, or so I thought.

So I walk the user through the account setup process on Windows Live Mail. They hit the sync button and hey presto email arrives in the account and the folders are replicated, hurrah! My joy was short lived, outgoing email fails. Mmmmm tricky, so we go round in circles checking the account information and everything looks fine. So I spend the next hour on the web searching for a solution. Its then you heart sinks as you realise it’s a problem lots of people have, and there’s no sign of solution. With a headache coming on I give up after an hour. However, later on I get an email from the user saying everything was OK. This is followed by a phone call to say it’s not working again now.

This is odd, how can it sort of work? It should either work 100% or not at all. So I do some more research and its then I find out all about ‘Port 25’ blocking of many of the ISP’s we use. This means that if you have Orange as your ISP, you must have an @orange email account or the server will block your email! Apparently this is to stop virus infected computers spewing spam out into the internet through Port 25, all well and good, but you are in trouble if your ISP doesn’t always match your email address like we have here. So here’s the rub, why did it all work OK before the blown PC? The email setup must have been using either a different SMTP server or a different port on the Orangehome server. Neither of which I can find details of on the web. So there’s only one thing for it. I will have to pop (no pun intended) the old hard drive back into my Linux machine and have a look. There are other ways to sort this out but I’ll try this first.

Technical Support

I got home today to find two frantic messages on our answer machine. One was my dear old Dad, the other from my Mum. My Dad spends 12 hours a week hooked up to a dialysis machine so he uses a tape walkman a lot, well he did. The one he has used mostly is Sony and they don't tend to have a high volume output, so he started looking for a new one. They tried several from Argos that either didn't work weren't loud enough. So today they have been to Comet and come home with......wait for it........an MP4 player. God help me, what have they done. Apparently it has a radio that he can use while they learn to put music on it from the PC. Like I said, God help me.

The second call from my mum, apologising for the first call and also informing me that my old Toshiba 32" Picture Frame TV (the first one) has switched itself off and wouldn't work most of the day. Strange. Anyway sounds terminal, and old Toshiba CRT TV's all suffer from a common failure of a component that costs around £100 to fix. This one also has a scratch right in the middle of the screen so its not worth saving. So time to buy a new LCD TV, £300 for 32" or £400 for 37" to 42" should do it. Toshiba/LG/Samsung or something similar. Anything but a Tesco special will suffice. I will have to wait and see what the budget is first (and the urgency).

Blown PC Update #2

I'm shocked. Shocked at how easy it was to defeat the Windows XP Pro log on screen. We had a change of plan, the owner of the blown PC managed to blag a couple of old computers from their work IT manager. One was on old 667Mhz Celeron Windows 2000 Machine that didn't look promising. The other was a 2.6 Ghz P4 Dell with a gig of RAM and an 80Gb Hard drive that didn't look too bad.

First problem, the DELL wouldn't boot! That's a blow, the other one is a bit of a dog. So I took the vacuum to the innards and pulled out the 2 RAM modules to re-seat them and tried again, success! Then I was confronted with the XP logon screen and guess what , no passwords. After a quick search in Google I found a couple of people suggesting a scarily easy way to bypass the logon screen and get in as an administrator. Not believing it would work, I tried it. 30 seconds later I was logged in. So I immediately set about removing the password from the old user account. So here's today's lesson kids. Never, ever leave anything on a PC you don't want somebody else to read. It's scarily easy. And, if you ever change your PC, take out the hard disk and hide it, smash it, whatever, under no circumstances leave it in the PC. Better still, invest in a hard drive enclosure that costs about £20 and use it as a back-up drive.

Anyway, I deleted the old account without looking at any files (honest) and set about rebuilding it for home use. Windows downloaded about 50 updates that took a couple of hours to install, I installed Google Chrome over Internet Explorer (try it you'll like it), Google Picasa and Microsoft Security Essentials. I then connected my back-up drive and copied over the pictures from the old PC. The whole setup took maybe 3 1/2 hours on and off.

Well this job is done (yeah right). The Dell has gone to be installed but there is no email program installed as I didn't have the relevant information to hand. This might (will) be the subject of the next Technical Support Call I'm sure!!!

Blown PC - Update

I'm having a re-think on the blown up PC. Maybe I have given up too soon. I've offered to rebuild it with a new MOBO & processor to help save some cash. This will cost about £120 all in. But maybe a search around ebay would find a second hand MOBO that would work with the processor. In theory, all I need to do, is find out what model MOBO is fitted. Then I will know what socket type the processor is. Then a quick hunt round ebay for soemthing similar will do the trick - in theory. This still leaves the problem of XP needing to be reactivated but a call to Microsoft should again in theory sort this out. BUT - there is no guarantee of success, I could be chucking away money if some other random unseen fault it to blame. Hmmm, tricky.

Watch this space.

Technical Support

I also had a digital picture frame boomerang its way back to me today. It was a Christmas present for a family member full of family photos. We had some power cuts in our area the other day that fried the memory card. Luckily the picture frame is OK. I'll just have to reload all the photos onto a new memory card, all 700 of them.......Sigh.

Trouble was, I only had a 128MB card left, the old one I used originally was 1Gb. I used a 1Gb card because I wanted to use large picture files for the frame to keep the quality up. I must say, the Philips 8FF3CDW/05 picture frame we bought is EXCELLENT. The only 'fault' I can find with it is that the 'random' slideshow feature isn't truly random. It show about 6 slides in a row before popping in one out of the numerical list. Nobody seems to have noticed though.

Anyway, I used Google Picasa's export fuction to resize smaller the files for the memory card. I kept them to 1000 pixels and managed to get the 700 files back onto the 128Mb card. Popped the card back into the frame and the quality is..........EXCELLENT!

Technical Support

The new PC power supply came today, shame it wasn't the power supply that was faulty. Turns out the power trip fried The MOBO or something else. The only thing I could do was to rip out the hard drive and install it in my old PC. It booted into Windows XP and is currently copying all the photos over to my external USB drive, all 14Gb of them! So new PC required and a back-up hard disk.

So kids, what's today's lesson. BACKUP YOUR PC BEFORE ITS TOO LATE!!! Yes I am shouting.

Saved another £50

I had a bit of time this afternoon after work, so I decided to liberate the 120Gb hard drive lying idle in my old Sky+ box. It could be better used in my IDE caddy as a back-up drive. The incident with the PC power supply (not arrived yet) has set me thinking about doing a regular backup of our laptop where all of the photo's and music reside. I've already got some CD's scattered about the place but my back-up regime is erratic at best.

I removed the hard disk from the Sky+ box and swapped it for the one in my caddy. The 120gig drive was set at Cable select and the 40gig drive was set as a master in the caddy. So I made the necessary adjustments using the jumpers on the back of the drives and did a swap. The caddy worked first time and a quick format later I've now got a 116Gb USB back-up drive. I've no idea if the drive now in the Sky+ box actually works, they're a bit fussy about which drive work and which don't. I may never know as I don't see me using the the old Sky+ box again any time soon, if ever. Back in the garage for that one then.

Just saved £100

For a brief few minutes today, I decided that I needed a NAS drive to put our CD collection on. How much space do I need? So I did a quick count of the CD's we had sorted out to keep. We have about 100. So each disk will need on average 60Mb stored as MP3 at 128kbs. Ahh, that's about 6Gb on the disk. So, not that much. No need for that 1Tb NAS disk then. I just saved £100!

Gadget Tip

So here’s a good gadget geek tip. Whenever you buy something, keep the box. Be careful when you open something, note how it was packed and keep everything for as long as you can. Then later, when you find something new or you want to upgrade, selling on your old purchase is easier, people like to buy boxed stuff plus you have the advantage that you already have the best shipping container you could get!

Also, buy from the internet (in the UK) and not only will you probably get the best price with a bit of research, if you don’t like it you can just return it as 'change of mind'. You can't do this in the shops unless they have a generous returns policy. But the current UK Distance Selling Regulations provide you with 7 working days in which to cancel your contract with them and return the item in a saleable unused condition. You may have to pay the postage, but that’s all.

A new obsession

Well, a new self imposed task has been brewing in my head these last days. We've got this box of CD's, we've been through them and weeded out the one's we don't want. So what do we do with the one's we do want? We never play them, they might as well be in the boot sale bin with the others.

So here's the thing. So that we might play them I need to get them onto iTunes, or at least ripped to MP3. Trouble is there's like 80 of them. The next problem is where do I store them digitally. If I put them all on iTunes this is gonna take up some serious space on my laptop for CD's we probably won't listen. So, I could rip them to an external hard drive, I already have but its only 40Gb since I used a £15 caddy with an old drive in it. It works fine but 40Gb is not enough to play with. I do have a 120Gb drive in my old Sky+ box, I could rip that at and replace the 40Gb drive in my external caddy. BUT if I'm not going to play the CD's what's the point in all this! They may as well go back in the garage as they are. But wait, what about a Network Access Storage (NAS) drive. That could hold all the CD's we have including those on the laptop already............

Technical Support

I had a call from a family member today. Their oven has blown and it looks like it has taken out their PC with it. I'm guessing Power supply, so seeing as they are so cheap I've ordered a replacement off eBay. It didn't take long to figure out what we needed, the original was a JNP 400P ATX unit. The important part is the ATX bit which tells use which power unit to buy. They're generic so any ATX one will do as long as the watt value is the same or higher. A quick Google confirms the original to be a 400w 20+4 Pin power supply. The replacement cost £12 off eBay so with any luck this should be a cheap and easy fix. I'll let you know by the weekend how it goes.

I am a gadget guy.

So where to start? Here’s a list of things I have bought or acquired (legally!) over the years that I can remember. This is probably going to be embarrassing, but here goes. This list doesn’t include the array of adaptors, cables, software and games I’ve bought, sold and lost along the way!:-

Sky+ HD (current)

Toshiba 40ZF355D LCD TV (current)

Toshiba 22AV616DB White LCD TV (current)

Toshiba 19AV615DB White LCD TV (current)

Panasonic DVD Recorder DMR-ES10 Multi Region (current)

Sony STRDG820 7.1 HDMI Receiver with Onkyo Speaker set (Current)

Samsung Blu Ray Player BDP1500 (current)

EKE Multi Region DVD Player (current)

Microsoft Xbox 360 (current)

Nintendo Wii + Wii Fit (current)

Pentium Dual Core 16” Widescreen Acer Laptop with Vista (current)

AMD Athlon x64 Desktop Tower (self built Media Centre) with Windows 7 (current)

AMD Sempron self built Desktop Tower With Linux Ubuntu 9.10 (current)

iPhone 16Gb 3GS (current but belongs to the wife!)

Alstec Lansing T612 iPhone Dock (current)

HTC TYTN ii Phone (current)

Edimax wireless N Draft WiFi Extender (Current)

O2 Joggler (current)

HP Photosmart Wifi Printer/Scanner C4580 (current)

Cheapo Portable DVD Player (Current)

SUUNTO X-Lander Wrist Computer (current)

Citizen Skyhawk Eco Drive Watch (current)

Oregon Scientific Projection Alarm Clock (current)

Oregon Scientific Weather Centre with remote Sensor (current)

LCD Weather Centre with remote sensor (Current)

Panasonic Lumix TZ3 Camera (Current)

Casio 4Mp Camera (Current)

Cheapo Robot Vacuum (Current)

Ebuyer 7” LCD Photo Frame (stored)

Tomtom Wireless Bluetooth SIRF Star 3 receiver (stored)

Tomtom Wired GPS Receiver (sold)

Fuji 2Mp Camera (Sold)

Creative 6Gb MP3 Jukebox (sold)

iRiver H320 20Gb Jukebox (sold)

Toshiba 32” Picture Frame CRT TV(Damaged, gave away)

Toshiba 32” Picture Frame CRT TV (Faulty, gave away)

Toshiba 28” Widescreen CRT Dolby Pro Logic (Damaged, Sold)

Toshiba 24” NiCAM CRT (Gave away)

Panasonic 28” Nicam Widescreen CRT (Sold)

Technica Brand Multi Region DVD Player (gave away)

Samsung DVD Player (paid £10 & never used! - stored)

Samsung Freeview box (sold)

Sky+ upgraded to 120Gb (stored)

Olivetti Wireless Printer/Scanner (Faulty, Stored)

Canon i500 Printer (Faulty, retired)

Aiwa Tower Stereo System (Stored, waiting retirement)

Maplin MP3/Cd Player (stored, faulty)

Citizen Digi-Ana Watch (stored)

Pure Siesta Radio DAB Alarm clock (sold)

Matrix Deluxe 4 person Hot Tub (sold)

Philips Streamium Network Music Player (returned)

HDMI Cables

Important tip for the day - DON'T WASTE MONEY ON EXPENSIVE HDMI CABLES.

HDMI carries digital signals, 1's and 0's in electronic terms. Shops that rip people off selling cables that costs £30 for a 1 metre lead should be ashamed of themselves. If you plug a cable in and you get a picture and sound then job done. It will make no difference if it cost £5 or £50!

Hi, my name is Andy chambers, and I thank you for reading my blog.

I have a passion for 'stuff', gadgets, tech, whatever you choose to call it. I like stuff that has a purpose or can provide fun or interest in a novel way; although these tend to only stay interesting for a while. I don’t like all gadgets, novelty rotating bottle openers, flying aliens or small plastic pieces of LED covered crap do not interest me.

So I have decided to write a blog. This may be of no interest to anyone but myself! But it will serve as an online record of things that obsess me for a while and people may benefit from my opinion on the things I have bought and experienced along the way. Feel free to email me with questions and I will do my best to answer them. I can’t comment on things I haven’t bought or used, I’ve never used a MAC for example so I can’t reliably tell you whether it’s better than a ‘PC’ with Windows. Although I will have a personal opinion probably, and if I have, I will happily share it with you.

I am a time served Electronic Instrument Mechanic, this isn’t in the league of your stereotypical boffin electronics engineer. I never understood the theory enough to be able to design electronics myself, but I certainly have enough experience and affinity with electronics and computers in general to see me through most of the situations I come across.

So, come back and see what I am up to, what I am trying to fix or researching to buy. You never know what I will be into next.