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Showing posts with label media. Show all posts
Showing posts with label media. Show all posts

Monday, 17 November 2014

TalkTalk Gobble Virgin Media’s UK Copper ADSL Broadband Users

That'll boost TalkTalk's subscriber base while increasing Virgin Media's average Download speeds no doubt (while possibly decreasing Virgins operating costs also). 

http://www.ispreview.co.uk/index.php/2014/11/uk-isp-talktalk-gobbles-virgin-medias-copper-adsl-broadband-users.html

Saturday, 25 May 2013

HP ProLiant G7 N54L 2.2GHz MicroServer deal on @ eBuyer

eBuyer has their next HP micro server promotion up. Its a slight upgrade over what I think was the N40L (Could be N45L).  The price is currently £209 with a £100 cashback (you'll be waiting a month or so for this).

The specs are pretty basic, but this is ideal for my intended purpose of it being a NAS box to share all my videos and music across multiple devices. I haven't bought any upgrades for it as of yet. I want to experiment with it first as it'll be my first NAS box. The 250GB hard disk should suffice for the mean time until I am ready to use it properly. Its interesting to see what people have done in terms of running the OS off a flash drive on the internal USB port or their set-ups with RAID arrays.

I'll also need some sort of Dynamic DNS service as I'm on a residential Sky broadband line with a dynamic IP. Free ones can be had from www.no-ip.biz, but there is also dyndns.com which is $25 a year. Then again with the O2 purchase, Sky has been hinting at rolling out a static IP address to some customers. My guess is probably at an extra cost which is fair enough as it isn't a business service I guess.

Other concerns are noise. I want it to be dead quiet as its going to sit in the living room. I recently upgraded my Shuttles graphics card (a whole different beast) and it's noticeably louder these days.

http://www.freenas.org/ is looking like the OS of choice from what my colleague suggested.
From what the site says it looks pretty versatile which is what I need running a variety of OS's in my household.

I've not used a Windows server in a long while now, but it might be worth a download of the trail version to have a look. I've heard some good things about Windows Server 2012.

Link to the product is here:
http://www.ebuyer.com/430446-proliant-microserver-turion-2-2-2gb-250gb-nhpl-sata-lff-in-704941-421

Friday, 1 February 2013

Awwww MinDisc format goes off to die quietly..

I LOVED the miniDisc format.
It was small. Had decent audio quality and had a protective casing. Everything I wanted.

I never felt like Sony pushed the media enough. Being the empire that they were at the time. They could have  killed off the CD if they were daring enough.

It has slight comparisons with Blu-ray in some respects. Obviously Sony has had better luck here with market penetration as their PlayStation 3's come with built in. They were very slow with movie industry support like they were with MiniDisc with the music industry.

Who remembers SACD ? Again, failed by their developers (although Phillips were part to blame there) even though its a much superior format to current CD's. Even worse so is Hybrid SACD which has a level of backwards compatibility with conventional CD players.

http://www.engadget.com/2013/02/01/sony-says-sayonara-to-minidisc-will-sell-its-last-players-in-ma/

Tuesday, 17 July 2012

Valve brings steam to Ubuntu Linux

Well the rumours have been going around for months so now we have an official confirmation and blog:

http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/linux/steamd-penguins/

There were also rumours about them going into hardware development so a linux derivative in a custom made console maybe coming our way in years to come. They sure as hell have the right platform for it in steam.