Saturday, January 23, 2010

Engineering FTW!

Here's some of the most impressive engineering I've seen in a while. This is why we need engineers - either that, or a hell of a lot of very poorly paid manual labour (thus china's rise).

Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Sunday, January 10, 2010

A new toy!

Went to Dick Smith today & bought a Logitech Harmony One universal remote.

The most surprising thing about that was that Dick Smith actually had one of the cheapest prices in Oz for it... for those who don't already know, Dickie Schmidt's been moving away from it's electronics/hobby store roots, and heading more down the white-box Harvey Norman / Good Guys / Retravision style path. Most of their stores even had a clearance recently where they offloaded all the hobbyist electronics stuff for low prices. Such retail strategy doesn't normally lend to low pricing, but a few online searches revealed there were only a few online stores where I could have got the remote cheaper, and most of them didn't have any stock. Plus I wouldn't have been able to bring it home today. :-D

Have only partially programmed it. It'll allow us to watch TV & play DVDs (turning on the TV, AV receiver, and DVD player and selecting the operational modes as approriate) so far, but I still need to configure it correctly to allow us to run the PVR (a chinese cheapie that nevertheless works quite well) and the WDTV. Also have to get a DVD player for the TV in the front room, so I can move the WDTV into the loungeroom.

Now that I've finally finished (no, really!) the speakers, we've got things somewhat re-arranged... those of you who have been here before wouldn't recognise the place! If nothing else, we've finally gotten rid of that old cane furniture we never did like. :-)