Monthly Archive for December, 2007

Sorry for it being so late but I have been busy!

Hope you all had a Merry Christmas and got everything you wanted!

I certainly did, from Santa I asked for Logitech Z5500’s and I must have been good as that’s exactly what I received! The box was not that big but the sub-woofer is about 3 quarters of it and is for a lack of a better word giant! Even getting it out of the box was a struggle as it is also extremely heavy. Once I managed to get it under the desk I began to wire it up. The speakers still use old style analogue wires which was a bit disappointing as for the price I was expecting optical output to all the speakers but the wires are low profile so not much of a problem. Once all wires had been plugged in, I plugged in the control centre which uses a connector that looks like a VGA cable but it warns not to extent the wire using such devices as it could cause damage. Plugging in my Mac was no problem at all since this uses optical, although the wires required were not included which again seems a bit stingy since the speakers quite expensive. I bought a high quality optical cable with a pack of adaptors, connected the power and turned on the sub-woofer power switch which provides power to the whole system. Turned on the control centre which shows 6 channel direct on the screen, this was wrong. Pressing the input button quickly got me to optical where detecting.. showed for 2 seconds and then I heard the Mac sound.

The volume at two bars was pretty impressive, defiantly loud enough to hear. Went to turn down the Mac volume but its controls had been disabled. Apparently this is normal via optical but was still a bit annoying to start with but you just get used to it. Once I had some music playing in iTunes I turned up the volume up to 4 bars out of 20 and boy is this system loud! I don’t even know why their are 20 bars because I imagine after 10 you would be deaf anyway. The sound is perfect, everything is just at the correct levels and bass is deep meanwhile the highs remain crisp and all the layers of the track can be heard rather than just a merged sound, quite weird to hear everything at first but again you would never go back after hearing it.

Overall a major upgrade from my previous speakers and well worth the money (in my case I didn’t pay for them but I would have after hearing them!) and I would recommend to anyone looking to upgrade their audio set-up, especially if your device has optical output as it makes things a whole lot easier both to set-up and to configure. As if the package wasn’t enough they also include a nice remote which has every operation that the control centre has without being massive and allows you to control everything from anywhere in the room.

I also received an engraved Swiss Army Knife from Jamie which is fantastic, really original gift (even with all his hints I still didn’t guess what it was) which will come in useful for a range of things and a Power-Ball from his Mum which is rather addictive and really hard on your wrist but who cares since you will always trying to get higher RPM’s, my current high score is 12050 RPM, if you have one leave your score. Also got money (£120 GBP) which will be put in the bank as I have nothing to buy (it’s quite bad once it gets to this stage) and a cool AA Maglite which is handy and works with my USBCells!

Unfortunately the USBCells are dead so I will charge them tonight and get some pictures up tomorrow, I will post here as well as on Flickr so keep an eye out for a couple of pictures of my new stuff and my all new set-up!

Thanks to HD-Bits also, due to the Christmas and New Year time they have decided to run free leech until the end of the year thus allowing me to download LOTS of HD stuff which look great on my monitor (Dell 2007WFP) and sound even better on the new speakers (Logitech Z-5500’s). I downloaded so much that Sky phoned me! They said I had downloaded my whole months usage in 1 day (40GB) and that I should move to the Max package (it isn’t yet available in my area), I agreed and told them to sign me up! Finally he came back to me and told me it wasn’t available in my area, could have saved him time and told him myself but that’s what he gets for phoning me and interrupting my HD viewing! He then told me that I had already used another 25GB today, he said no action would be taken as they have no FUP’s (Fair Usage Policy) and the download limit could not be avoided as there was no higher package available to me, he also asked me if I could please calm down the downloading! Sure did, started another 25GB torrent. Pretty good for £5 GBP a month if you ask me, the no limits policy has been great as torrents have been running at line speed for 3 days 24/7. Any other ISP would have throttled my line during the day if not all together. So thanks to Sky for providing me with my top notch internet and I promise I will calm down after December as free leech will sadly be over!

Well this morning I went down to our local post sorting office and picked up the remaining parts of the BiOrb that are going to be upgraded today.

I now have an “upgrade package” consisting off:

1 x New light unit (should make my light look white again instead of yellow).

2 x Offical Baby BiOrb spare bulbs (to stop damage to the new unit).

1 x Blue Swap Tops (to change the look of the top and bottom of the tank).

1 x New packet of ceramic media (allows the water to stay clearer for longer due to a larger surface area to filter the water through).

1 x Cleaning pads (to bring back the scratched BiOrb to its new bought glory).

1 x Feng Shui Pebbles (to give the tank some character).

1 x Offical BiOrb service kit (consisting of a new filter pad, bacteria pellets and some chemicals that do magical things).

2 x Offical BiOrb easy plant plants (allows the fish somewhere to hide from the light which apparently they quite like, and it looks nice too.)

All this cost quite a bit of money but it should be worth it and should last a good amount of time.

I will be doing all the upgrading today and once I am done I will post a picture of how the new and improved (hopefully) tank looks.

Well I have been thinking of doing this for a while but was always scared of opening the case and also never seemed to get round to buying the parts. On Friday I bit the bullet and went online to Crucial and ordered 2GB of PC2-5300 RAM for the Mac Mini, this would be used to upgrade from the factory installed 1GB. I knew the case would only be opened once as its basically asking for it to be broken when opening it so I ordered a 120GB 7200RPM SATA 2.5″ HDD while I was at it as-well, this was getting used to replace the factory installed 80GB 5400RPM SATA 2.5″ HDD. All this should make the Mac Mini as fast if not faster than the base model iMac.

That night I went along to B&Q and purchased myself a few “paint removing tools” as they didn’t stock putty knifes, when I got these home they were a tad thick but with some mucking about with credit cards and most of all a bit chunk of bravery I managed to get the case opened without breaking anything. Although this is not for the faint hearted as the noises that it makes when the pins that hold it all together open make you shit yourself and think that your 400 quid computer has just broken.

The B&Q tool used to pry open the Mac’s outer casing:

Once I actually got inside I was shocked at how cramped the case was and how every single component had its own place and there was not a single bit or room left. All these little cables and such about the thing. I sat the case on top again but not fully locked as I thought the parts were not coming to at least Monday.

Inside the Mac Mini:

Inner side of the lid:

When I woke up this morning there was a parcel sitting for me, I couldn’t believe it, it was the RAM that I had ordered from Crucial UK less than 24 hours ago. Talk about quick delivery. I opened the box and found 2 small sealed anti-static bags containing 2 x 1GB sticks of RAM. One of the bags had the wrong label on it and I though I was going to have to return it but luckily it was only the outer label the actual label on the RAM stated it was the correct specification for the Mac Mini.

The bags of RAM:

I was going to wait until my HDD arrived (due for Tuesday) before upgrading both parts but I got impatient and started to fit it tonight with the help of Jamie. We managed to get the top section off (containing the fan, HDD and Combo Drive) and reveal the motherboard which had the all important RAM slots. We slid out the old RAM and insert the new sticks without too much trouble, as the Mac used the same pop up and out method as most laptops do. We sat the top on and powered up, bad idea, the fan immediately went to full speed of 5500RPM and was making a terrible racket and because we hadn’t screwed down the top section it created that much force that it managed to pull the top section out of the motherboards slot and caused the Mac to hang. We turned it off and screwed down all the edges and powered up again. Again the fan ran at full pelt but this time the Mac booted and the 2GB of RAM was present and healthy but the fan was still running full power. We looked up some websites and they suggested we reset the SMU and PMU (Power Management Unit) and that should solve it. Unfortunately this just made things worst and the fans were running even faster and worst of all the Mac had now lost contact with all fan controllers and temperature probes. Jamie noticed the IR (Infrared) port has not been plugged back into the motherboard so we done so and rebooted and surprise surprise the Mac started without any of the previous fan problems, don’t ask me what the IR port has to do with fans but thats how I fixed my case of fan speeds.

Since then we have had a few teething issues but all is good now and the Mac is running much quicker with the new RAM which is great, I have still not closed the case as I have still to install the new HDD coming on Tuesday but all I can say is I am looking forward to it as if the Mac runs this fast with some extra RAM, how fast will it be with a much faster HDD. Will post to let you know when it comes and its all fitted.

Sorry about the shit quality pictures, they were from my phone (Sony Ericsson K810i), any questions feel free to comment and I will help as much as possible.

Thanks to Sky for not telling me!

Well today I plugged in my Netgear DG834PN into the phone line expecting nothing but to my surprise the ADSL light flashed orange and then lit steady green meaning it had successfully synced with my exchange, I checked the web configuration page and I had connected no problem but had not been authenticated. This wasn’t a surprise as Sky doesn’t allow you to use your own routers with their service and has the password and username hard coded into the routers firmware, so I swapped it with the official Sky box and sure enough it worked without any problems.

The router they provide could be greatly improved but to my surprise their was no major problems so far. I have plugged it in and it worked without any user intervention, would like the wireless to be greatly improved but this isn’t going to happen so I will have to wait until the new 2nd generation routers have been hacked and I can retrieve my username and password from it and use my trusty Netgear DG834PN.