Life, the Universe and the Internet

My ramblings about making a living on the internet and life in general

Archive for the ‘Gadgets’


Optoma Themescene HD80, My Newest Toy

Optoma Themescene HD80This is a bit off topic for this blog, but I just have to post something about my new toy. As anyone whose read this blog enough will know I’m a bit of a film nut and I have a large screen and projector set up at home to get the full cinema effect.

Recently I’ve upgraded my projector, I didn’t really have any intention of doing it but I got to hear about a new full 1080p projector that had just been released, was getting rave reviews and was incredibly low priced compared to other 1080p models. The projector in question is the new Optoma Themescence HD80 and is available for under £2000. For this price I got the projector, and eight foot screen and a free replacement bulb voucher.

And boy what a projector it is, I was totally blown away with it. I managed to arrange a demo at Sevenoaks Hi-Fi in Bristol. They were demo-ing it with a PS3 and some Blu-Ray disks and it is just incredibly detailed, really bright, rich deep colours and amazingly quiet too. I’m running it with a Xbox 360 and HD-DVD Drive and the Xbox is very cool at this size and detail level.

In terms of value for money, I really think this projector is unbeatable, when you think that much of the competition at this level is up over £6000 or more there really is no beating it. If you’re interested in getting one, I really recommend seeking out a demo, you will love it.

My Latest Uber Gadget

Buffalo NASFor a while now I’ve been building up a media center PC as a kind of all in one media delivery system for the house. The idea is that all my music, digital photos, recorded TV and some of my favourite films can be played across the network on the media center PC, any other PC on the network and an Xbox.
The media center PC itself uses Windows Media Center and so far it is working well. All the music I own is know on MP3, and a lot of my fave films are now on there two. However I have started to become concerned recently about backing up this huge amount of data.

So here in comes the Uber-Gadget of this message title. I recently purchased one of these babies from Amazon: Buffalo HD-H1.0TGL 1.0 Terabyte Network Attached Storage.

This is basically a network attached big disk box, so instead of storing all my data on the PC I store it in this box and access it across the network. The great thing apart from the large amount of disk space is that I can set it up to use raid 5 mirroring so I can feel comfortable that my data is now very safe.

I love this little box, it works like a dream and even serves as a print server at the same time.