Archive for the 'Toys' Category

Tech Gadgets that Work (for Me)

Sunday, March 18th, 2007

I’m a bit of a gadget lover.  Okay, a full-fledged gadget lover.  I tend to pick up the new toys and play with them, and generally try to integrate them into my life.  I’m not a professional reviewer or sponsored by anyone, which makes what I say here perhaps a little more trustworthy than what […]

Mio C310s Again, and the Mio C310sx

Friday, January 5th, 2007

After a few days of dithering, I decided that I could live with the C310s GPS I blogged about a few days ago.  Even though the device itself doesn’t support geocaching, I believe you can manage points of interest using the PC software that you use to transfer things to it, and I figured I’d […]

PC Gaming vs Console Gaming

Thursday, January 4th, 2007

When I bought the XBox 360, part of the justification (every big purchase needs justification, of course) was that I would not upgrade the video on my new desktop PC, so really $500 on a console is close to a wash (maybe I even came out ahead, depending on what video card I would have […]

VoIP to VoIP

Saturday, October 7th, 2006

I’m using VoIP at home through Vonage, and while there was a time that I was having bad luck with it, since I switched ISP’s, I haven’t had a single call whose quality I haven’t been happy with. Something occurred to me a couple of days ago – at work, we use Cisco VOIP phones.  […]

Thoughts on the XBox 360 HD DVD drive

Wednesday, May 24th, 2006

Microsoft has announced an HD DVD drive for the XBox 360. I’ve got mixed feelings about this. Being an external drive, and therefore not a core peripheral, games can’t depend on it being there. In fact, I believe Microsoft has stated that games will *not* use the HD DVD drive. I wouldn’t be surprised if […]

Blu-Ray, HD DVD

Monday, May 22nd, 2006

At E3, Microsoft announced HD DVD support for the XBox 360 in the form of an external peripheral drive that you’ll be able to buy and hook up to the XBox 360’s USB port. I took a look at the the Blu-Ray and HD DVD formats a while ago, and at the time, concluded that […]

A Point in Microsoft’s Favour

Friday, January 6th, 2006

I’m using Windows XP Media Center Edition (I should set up a macro to expand $MCE into the full name for that product) and have it recording shows for me. I just naturally assumed that these shows were DRM protected. Last night I tried playing one from my PC just to see what would happen, […]

Choppy Audio

Monday, January 2nd, 2006

I had a problem this evening with choppy audio – but this time my problem turned out to be something simple. The optical audio cable connecting the XBox 360 to the receiver was dirty, and so it wasn’t making a good connection. This caused the audio to drop out for a few milliseconds every now […]