Boys Toys & Electronic Gadgets
Every self respecting bloke likes his toys, and apart from cars, my passions involve computers and video games and electronic gadgets. The gadgets I've been playing with recently are more often than not, usually Audio Visual related; digital video recorders, players, media systems, video conversion software etc.
Things to see...
Ruby / Ruby on Rails: Ruby is one of the fastest growing languages at the moment; it has a natural syntax, and encourages the use of short, simple coding. Rails implements a web framework for Ruby using the MVC (Model, View, Controller) methodology much more cleanly than say, the similar Django framework for Python (ick!.. messy). I've had some success porting Ruby on to Windows CE / Pocket PC devices, my first real Rails app (an inventory management for my computer and video game collection) is also available here. (Read more)
HD Media Players - Dueple 350D: With the amount of new High Definition tv's coming on to the market, it was only so long before MPEG4/DVD playing set top boxes started supporting the new format. I bought myself one of the latest models in order to play AVI and MPEG files on recently purchased HD set. Here's useful some useful resources and encoding information specific to this player. (Read more)
Pace Twin DVB-T DVR: The Pace Twin was one of the first DVR's to come on the market in the UK several years ago. These recorders capture a terrestrial Freeview digital signal to hard disk as the raw MPEG2 format that is broadcast - so you don't get any quality loss. It has dual tuners (record one channel and watch another, or watch one recording while another is taking place!), excellent sound and audio quality and is pretty easy to use. However, it does have problems. (Read more)
Xbox in-car entertainment system: Several years ago, when the Xbox had been around a year or two, I picked one up and got interested in the Xbox-Linux scene (as I'm a natural geek at heart!) and started thinking about putting a new stereo and media system together for my car at the time. Here you can see the system I put together, how it worked, and links to sites and magazines the setup was featured in. (Read more)
This page updated: 23/Feb/2008