Monthly Archive for December, 2006
I wish you all a happy new year. As we roll into 2007 in the next few hours, in Europe that is, I hope that you all have fun during this next year, and I hope to see a lot of new technological advances. I didn’t make one oif those prediction lists for 2007, but there are a few things I wish to see from various big name companies, *cough* Apple *cough*.
For Christmas we decided to get our dad the new SonyEricsson watch (made by FOSSIL). In more than a few not so unobvious ways he pointed out that he wanted the black version, and it was damn hard to find. I looked everywhere on the internet and I couldn’t find one that actually had it in stock. Or so I thought. On SonyEricsson’s online shop, they said that they had it in stock, which I was quite surprised at, and the price was cheaper than anywhere else (which surprised me even more). The key thing is it arrived before Christmas. It was great to see my dad’s face at Christmas, because he thought that we wouldn’t be able to get one.
I took some post-christmas photos of the unboxing, it didn’t seem fair to take photos while my dad opened his present 
. All of the following is based on my dad’s opinions of the watch.
The actual box of the watch (not the packaging), is designed like a real watch, so you can stow it away safely. It is really versatile and looks really sleek. The watch itself is extremely cool, and not surprisingly it is only compatible with selected SonyEricsson phones. However the phone does excel at what it does, as it displays the name of the person who’s calling the user as well as being able to play/pause the music being played on the phone, and skip a song. What is extra special, is the the watch can display accented characters (ie, á and é), which is important, as we are Hungarian and a lot of names have accents in them.
A feature, which my dad pointed out, is that if you have a bluetooth headset also paired with the phone, you can chose to accept the call, and the voice is forwarded to the headset. This means the watch doesn’t interfere with the headset, and you don’t need to even touch the phone. It also needs to be pointed out that although the watch itself is relatively heavy (~150g) it doesn’t feel heavy at all when it is on your hand, and you really don’t notice that extra weight. The digital time and date on the watch is received from your phone, so you don’t need to enter that in manually.
You can head over to my Flickr page to check out all of the photos of the watch, as well as the certificate card that comes with the watch to show that you own a genuine SonyEricsson watch.
This past week has been quite busy for me, as I have been away on a Medical Conference at Nottingham University. However, I wish you all a Merry Christmas, or Happy Hannukah, or whatever religion you are following. I do have free time off school, but with my presents, studying for my exams in January and lack of news during this time, there probably won’t be many posts.
The way I connect my Xbox 360 to my LCD Screen, is using Elgato’s EyeTV Hybrid tuner and the EyeTV software. This works fine, however the picture produced is only SD. I wasn’t happy with the way the picture looked, especially on my 17″ Dell Monitor. I looked around the net and I found a page with lots of details on the wiring on how to connect a component (PbPrY) to a VGA out. After spending lots of time working out what pins go where and stripping all the cables, connecting them all together, it ended up not working. I double checked the leads with a multimeter, and everything was fine, all the cables were connected the right way. My Dell screen just showed: “Error: Cannot display input mode”.
I searched over the internet, and I found the problem was listed on the original page I visited. The problem is, the cable doesn’t convert the PbPrY signal to a VGA, it just hooks it up to the VGA. This means your input device has to support component input, which my LCD obviously didn’t. Converting the signal is much more complicated and requires IC’s and software. All that work for nothing! I even cut my finger! Let’s hope I can put the cable to good use somehow else.
A friend of mine informed me today that she got a iMac for her birthday. So far only one non-techy friend of mine has had a Mac, so now it is two! She said she got the “huge one” and commented that (on Mac OS X) “It is really different“. I hope she enjoys using it, with that massive screen, it really is humongous. I guessed it was the 24-inch one (judging by her comments), but it could have been the 20-inch one as well. I’ll make sure to ask her. I don’t think I even blogged about the release of it! BTW: That is not hers above, just some random one I found on Flickr. Now to somehow get all my other friends to get Macs (James, Ben I know you’re reading this!)… There should be a word for a person that has transitioned from Windows to Mac. I should invent one…
Score:
(4/5)Sadly this isn’t the Nintendo Revolution. It is however a brand new, and fantastic mouse! It’s fast, responsive and uses a laser. The best feature though, not including the fact that it’s cordless, is its scroll wheel. This is a unique wheel which can do both the normal ‘click to click’ mode and a free scroll mode. The free scroll mode allows the wheel to spin on its own for easy navigation where you have lots of pages. It truly is very ergonomic. You can also change it so that after a certain speed, it will automatically change from click to click, to free scroll mode. I use this all the time, and I love it!
I have been using it for around a week now, and is much better than the Mighty Mouse. I got rid of it after the scroll wheel failing me, and after trying to fix it numerous times (and replaced by Apple once, after which it worked for a while). I have configured the thmub button to turn on expose, and the forward and back buttons move through the tabs in Safari. The supposed ‘search’ button I didn’t have a need for, so I re-routed it to skip to the next new news item in NetNewsWire. When I press down on the scroll wheel, it triggers the desktop in expose. One minor annoyance, is that you can’t actually set Expose functions. You have to set it to a key (ie, I use F8, and F10) which you then change in OS X’s Keyboard System preferences pane to activate Expose, or whatever you want it to do. This does have the added benefit, that in any application, you can customise any of its shorcuts to a button. Another neat feature, is that you can customise these settings on an per application basis. So one click may trigger forward tab in Safari, but that same could activate the Cut tool in Photoshop, or something similar.
Click on to read the rest of the review, or to see the unboxing photos, go to the flickr page.
Continue reading ‘The Logitech MX Revolution: Review’
I know it’s later than the actual end date of the contest, so sorry! But James you have won the contest. Please send me an email to contest [at] theminiblog [dot] co [dott] uk with your choice of prize. Would you like the £15 iTMS voucher or the £10 by paypal. Make sure to include an email that I can reply to with your details and confirmation. Enjoy your prize!