Having already dipped my toe in the water of Chromebooks with an HP Chromebook 11, I knew that I liked Chrome OS. The very fast boot time, stable and full featured browser together with a real physical keyboard make these great devices for people who like to create content, rather than just consume it. I […]
The GB3IM-S amateur radio repeater on the summit of Snaefell was brought back into service on 17th March. This led me to discover that the output frequency of 433.125 MHz becomes unusable when driving through Ballasalla, due to some strong interference on that frequency. Now, in these modern days where everything has a computer inside […]
Today I offered to help a friend with their new Lenovo Ideapad S205 which they’d bought a year or so previously, but not got round to using. It had come pre-installed with both Ubuntu 12.04 and Ubuntu 12.10 but wasn’t quite behaving properly. I thought the easiest option would be to start again, with a […]
I bought my significant other an HP Chromebook 11 for their birthday this week. I’ll admit that part of the reason for my choice of gift was my own curiosity. I wanted to see how good a Chromebook was, and whether it would be a better choice to use in schools than the current (expensive) […]
The Isle of Man has arable land. It has farmers. It has crops. It has livestock. It has a slaughterhouse. It has a dairy. It has the potential to feed itself. However, because of the crazy world we find ourselves in, economies of scale mean that Isle of Man milk and cheese can cost more […]
It’s Christmas time, and family are coming to stay. I realised that they would probably want a TV in their room. There isn’t much choice for TV retailers on the Isle of Man, but I figured that if I was buying a TV at the end of 2013 it should have at least an LED […]
While I was in the UK recently, I took advantage of an Argos store to acquire a USB Wireless dongle. I bought the TP-Link TL-WN725N because it was cheap, and very small. The plan was to use it with my Raspberry Pi, and a quick Google search suggested the TL-WN725N would run directly from the Raspberry […]
My Dell XPS 13 Developer Edition laptop is a lovely machine. It’s slim and light, very very fast and has a beautiful screen. It also came from the manufacturer with Ubuntu linux pre-installed and ready to go. I do wish more manufacturers would sell their computers without Microsoft Windows. However, it did have a tendency […]
While I was out walking the dogs today, I noticed that GB3GD is back in service. GB3GD is the callsign of an amateur radio repeater, located on the summit of Snaefell on the Isle of Man. A repeater is a radio receiver and transmitter (combined with some control logic too) that takes weak signals from […]
I bought a 300 GB NAS box about 10 years ago, and although it still works fine it had finally filled up. The thought that it has all my digital life on one spinning disk was also making me feel uneasy – especially given that it has been spinning for a decade. So, I was […]