Things I can live without.

2 weeks ago my hoover broke. At first I was fuming as it was only 2 weeks old but through borrowing the neighbours hoover and the Vac Shop in Taunton, I made it through the 2 weeks and this evening Henry came home and sucked like a pro.

This made me think about the tech and gadgets I have in my house and how I would cope without them. First of all if my PC broke then I would fall back on the Raspberry Pi, in my previous post I talked about the best pi in town but due to my external HDD and the pi not talking to each other it sits in reserve. OK so the pi goes down and the PC is down, er, well then its onto the Xbox 360 for iPlayer and 4od but the Xbox and the HDD are not talking either so if that goes down as well then I'm watching everything on my TF101. So 4 solutions to that.......

But what are the chances of that happening? Well I thought I would give you an insight into my tech, from my previous post you should be familiar with the pi, the PC however was purchased from eBay for £49.99. What does that get you you might ask? Well it got me a pentium 4, XP PRO, 40gb of hard drive and 2 GB of ram. Why you might ask did I buy an ancient used PC with German bios? Am I a hipster? No I'm cheap! It works for me! XBMC plus chrome browser and that's all it needs, why XP? That is the only os my HDD will talk to!

The Xbox 360 was purchased in 2009, my amp is a £89.99 Cambridge audio bog standard with no remote teamed with Hyundai multi cav speakers again from eBay.

So its all old or cheap. I am now bracing for the critics views..... But it all works, perfectly. Even the £250 Toshiba led backlit LCD TV has never missed a beat.
I used to have an all singing all dancing LG TV and an iomega screenplay director HD and a Denon amp and HP PC and  this and that and the next thing! But the one thing I learnt very quickly is that just because its expensive and someone else thinks its the bomb well it might not be.

Next week I'll give you some more details on the Iomega screenplay director. That was expensive and awful.

How would I cope if some of my tech broke? Fine. Ish, adapt or die. Could I live without any of it? No.

Tor to the Rescue

A few weeks ago it was announced that certain ISP’s here in the good old UK were going to block certain file sharing sites, like they did with probably one of the most famous, pirate bay. I was shocked to see that one of my favorite torrent sites Kickass was going to be closed to me by my ISP. Today it happened, I tried to enter the site and bang, locked out.

This forced me to think of a way round or alternative, straight away I remembered a clever little program i’ve used in the past called Tor. Some of you may have heard of it before but for those who haven’t it is a secure browser that lets you browse the internet anonymously, basically  hiding you from your ISP. Its far too complicated to go into, but you can click HERE to find out more about Tor.

This program is great for occasions such as these so i tried it and it worked, allowing me to access the site again.

So for those who are interested it is very simple to install.

1. Head over to the Tor Website HERE
2. Download the program and install
3. Find the folder where the program installed and run the Tor browser
4. Thats it your done, go to the site and see if it works

Head over to thekugelblitz.com to read more from +Chris Monks 

The best pi in town.

The best pi in town

I needed a media device at the beginning of the year and with a limited budget as always, I looked for the cheap option. Now for those of you who have not heard of such a thing this is a shockingly simple device that has limitless uses! Seriously have a look at the Raspberry Pi site for just a few of the uses for this amazing piece of kit.

                      

Model B Raspberry Pi

Now I use mine for a simple task, as a home media server, the set up was as simple as plugging in a pc, which it sort of is. Once connected it was a simple task of dropping the OS onto the SD card and away you go, or at least that is what we thought, the instructions supplied with the device were not up to much but after an hour or so of faffing we had it up and running RaspBMC.

Screen shot of RaspBMC playing Qi from the BBC iPlayer

                      

This media centre software is based on the original XBMC software and is so easy to use and customize it makes me think why did I not have this before??? Not only will it play full 1080p HD movies from a removable device but with the 1channel  repository installed you can stream pretty much anything, literally. There are hundreds of add ons for XBMC and Rasp from You Tube to BBC iPlayer and even Netflix. 

The device its self is powered from a micro USB which they suggest you plug into the mains but if you have a USB on your TV then that will work fine as well, this also means that you are using significantly less power than having your PC powered up for media duties! So its Green, cost effective and with no cooling fans quiet too! The only additional cost was the case which cost  whole £4.95 from Ebay and there are loads to choose from. Call me scrooge, call me cheap but this little Gadget with its £30.00 price tag is a no brainer! Couple it with the Yatse remote for your Android device and you have a budget media centre that is extremely hard to beat for the cost and you can always re-program it to be the control module of a UAV if that takes your fancy!  

Pi in its home on the back of my TV with External SD reader, Total cost £40.00

                       

   To summaries, its cheap to buy, run and mess about with, Why wouldn't you get one? 

Coming soon..................