Of course, the frame supports many other ways of transferring photos including the traditional “bung in a memory card of photos” method, but being Wi-Fi enabled you can also log in to the Kodak Pulse web site to manage the frame’s contents, upload photos from your PC’s collection, group them, enable/disable groups of photos, adjust the frame’s transition settings or power management, or any other setting which you feel needs a tweak. The interface is pretty well thought out and requires very little actual device interaction – the frame will just sit there happily accepting remote commands and images.

One of the neatest features of the photo frame is the Facebook integration. You can link the frame to a Facebook account, and then choose which albums on Facebook you would like to be displayed on the frame. You can choose to display specific albums, all albums, or just recent images from your feed. In my case, I chose to link the Kodak frame to my mum’s Facebook account and display two specific albums – one managed by me, the other managed by my sister with both albums set to limit permissions down to just the three of us. The frame happily cycles around the images, displaying new ones as we amend the albums online. My one criticism of this integration is due to the low quality of the images – they appear highly compressed compared to images which are directly uploaded or emailed. This is a shame as it is one of the most convenient ways to manage photos on the frame.

For the power conscious among you, you’ll be pleased to hear that the frame has a built in motion sensor to power the screen on or off depending on whether is senses people are around. I can’t honestly say whether or not this is working because it’s always on when I’m around…
it might be turning off when there’s no-one there but who knows. We might have to set up a camera to watch it when we’re not around just to prove a point!

To summarise, this is an excellent photo frame and I am really tempted to buy one for my use too – the Wi-Fi connectivity and remote management has been implemented excellently so even the most amateur of consumers should be able to set this up.Similar Posts:

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My poor old Canon Pixma ip3000 printer, it’s a couple of years older than my daughter (who is 5) and has been through a lot. Sadly, it is well past its best, the print-head needs replacing because it prints in stripes, and it’s not reliably connecting to my computer any more. I’m upset to part with it, mainly because it takes four cartridges which can be purchased for as little as 65p and I still have a stash of them. In its prime, it was fantastic – photos quality images at a very low cost, as well as CD/DVD printing and a duplex unit built in. Time to go, though, and it’s because of my happy experience with the ip3000 that I have replaced it with another Canon Pixma, the MG6250. Now, strictly speaking this isn’t just a printer. It’s a multi-functional device, which basically means it’s a printer AND a scanner. My old scanner, also a Canon, isn’t longer compatible with Windows 7 and I had to resort to hacked drivers to get it even sort of working. This new printer will replace that device too.

Now, I’m a regular reader of PC Pro magazine, and the Canon range of printers has been topping their A-list for years – each successive model knocking the previous Canon model off the list. This applies for both the inkjet printer and multi-function categories, so I knew that when the MG6250 came out it would also do well (and indeed, in the January 2012 edition they reviewed it fully). My first impression of the device as I took it out of the box was “wow, this is big”. Thinking about it sensibly though, of course it’ll be bigger than the old one – it has a scanner built in to it too. It is taller than my old printer, very slightly wider (which means it only just fits on the table), and deeper too. Now, deeper isn’t a problem at all really because it means that the paper tray, right at the bottom, runs the full depth of the printer instead of sticking out of the front by 4 inches like on the ip3000. Although I push the printer right up against the wall behind it, I will have to pull it forward to use the manual paper feeder because this requires extra space once extended.

You may have noticed the fold-up colour screen on the top of the printer, well this is a necessity because this printer, although it can just connect directly to your PC via USB, is actually designed to connect to your home network instead. The printer supports standard 802.11bg wireless and also has what I consider to be even more important, a standard Ethernet port for hard-wiring it to your network. If you go down the network cable route, installation is very simple – plug in the cable! The first time you power it on, it runs through a self-setup procedure. It asks you to install the SIX ink cartridges one by one, with simple illustrated instructions shown on the screen. The cartridges light up with a red LED when installed correctly which is a helpful and space-age touch. Then, it does some unknown configuration inside itself for about 5 minutes, after which is politely tells you it is ready to go.

Everything is controlled from the touch panel next to the LCD screen. The display itself is not touch-screen, but instead the surface of the top of the printer contains touchable buttons which light up when enabled. It takes a bit of getting used to as they are very sensitive, but it is actually preferable to getting sticky fingers over the display. If you wish to use the wired network connection, visit settings and choose the LAN options – choosing the wired LAN option instantly enables your printer to work on the wired network. If you wish to use it on a wireless network, visit the LAN options and configure the wireless network that way. The printer supports various easy configurations, but I tested it with a standard WPA2 802.11g network and it was very easy to do. My one criticism it the input method for typing in data. The display shows either all lower-case, all upper-case, or characters and numbers. If your SSID or WPA key includes a mixture of lower-case, upper-case and symbols then you’ll be switching between the keypads frustratingly often. Fortunately you don’t need to do this often though! Now, if you are running Windows 7, all you need to do to install the printer is open Windows Explorer and take a look under ‘Network’ on the left-hand side. You should see a section labelled Multifunction Devices under which is a device. Simply double-clicking on this device automatically installed both the printer and scanner driver. Job done. In operation, I didn’t notice any difference between using it wired or wireless, I just prefer the wired option to keep my airwaves free for laptops, and as I have plenty of spare wired network capacity within easy reach of the printer there was very little point in using wireless.

If you are a bit more technically inclined, you’ll find the printer has its own configuration web page on which you can change the display name of the printer amongst other things. Right, now on to the good bits: how does the printer perform in operation?

The printer uses six ink cartridges: the standard cyan, magenta and yellow; a pigmented black for text documents; a standard black for photographs; and a grey for improved grayscale printing. I think the grey ink may be a gimmick, but I’m no expert! Filling it up with original ink costs around £50, however cheapo ink will cost about £20 so I’ll let you know about that in a future post. Sending a standard text document works the same as with any other printer – just print it.

 The front panel will fold down on its own, and providing there’s paper in the tray your print will appear. If you send a larger text document you can choose to print multiple pages per sheet, and also print on both side. The printer will automatically duplex for you so there’s no re-feeding the paper just to print on the other side.

As for photo printing, the printer was supplied with a few sheets of 4×6 glossy photo cards as a sampler. If you feed these in the manual feeder at the top, the printer auto-detects the paper size. Using Canon’s supplied Easy-PhotoPrint EX software, you can very quickly choose a photo to print, select the type of paper to print it to, and adjust it if necessary. It takes a couple of minutes to send the large amount of data across the network, but once it reaches the printer it spits it out in no time at all. Quality is very good and as good if not better than that produced by the machines in supermarkets. The printer includes a CD/DVD/Blu-Ray printing tray and the same software will talk you through that process too.

Okay, so on to the scanner… You can scan from the PC using Window’s built in “Windows Fax and Scan” software, but truth be told I found the easiest way to scan was to stick a memory card in to one of the printer’s card slots and use the printer’s control panel to scan.

The interface for performing a scan is excellent – you choose the scan option from the first menu, choose a scan type (document, photo, etc), then you choose scanning options such as media size (A4, 6×4, automatic, etc) or resolution. Then you choose where to save it which can include PCs (if directly connected) or a USB or memory card.

Once scanned, you can access your images over the network because the printer shares your memory cards as if they were network drives. Sadly it is read-only, so you’ll need to take the memory card out to erase the images eventually. I’ve left an old 2GB SD card in my printer and my only issue with doing this is that the blue LED to tell you there’s a card installed is distractingly bright.

As a demonstration I decided to print a 6×4 photo, then rescan it. I can’t of course show you the quality of the printed image, but I can show you the original file. The printout was very close to the original image as displayed on my monitor at least. I then scanned the photo in order to test the performance of the scanner. Comparing these images side by side gives you a good indication as to how the device performs as a whole.

You can see the original image on the top, and the scanned image underneath – I have re-sized both images the same and introduced the same JPG compression too. The colour loss happened in the re-scan and not in the printing and can easily be edited back to normal. Where the scanner does fall down is in focus and definition. You can clearly see a loss of clarity meaning that this scanner is perfectly good for most people, but will never match the quality of a higher end dedicated scanner. Ideal for me and my occasional use though.

This has now become the longest blog post ever, so in the interest of completeness I may as well carry on. The printer will connect to a couple of online services. One of these is Canon’s own photo gateway which is exclusive to Canon camera owners. I don’t have a Canon camera therefore couldn’t use this service! The other is Google’s Picasa. Now this is a service I could test. Connecting to my Picasa account was simple, if a little frustrating because of the aforementioned keyboard issues. Once signed up, visiting the Advanced Photo Print menu allowed to me connect to the Picasa web service. The printer displays your available photos on the screen and a simple tap of the COLOR print button spits out 6×4 print. It’s clever, but I can’t see me using it. My photos are either on Facebook, or local on my server.

I’d better summarise this then because my fingers are starting to hurt. Overall this is an excellent printer. It has many features and for the price is one of the best value. As for reliability I cannot comment yet, but I’m hoping it follows the track record of its predecessors and reputation.

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• The head itself is spring loaded which is useful and the same as the ProGlide, however it doesn’t exert enough pressure and when dragging it across my face, the blade frequently fold away. I think this is due to there being too much friction at the foot of the blade.
• The blade includes a special “Advanced Hydrating Gel Reservoir” which if you look at the photos is the line of small white dots at the head of the blade. This makes the blade quite bulky, and very difficult to get a close shave under my (large) nose. I liken this problem to the one touted by numerous vacuum cleaner manufacturers – gets right to the edge, and it doesn’t.
• Clogging! When Gillette introduced 5 blades per blade (??? you know what I mean) I was concerned about it clogging quickly. The ProGlide doesn’t clog easily, but the Hydro 5 does. Now I have no idea as to which scientifically magic effect is causing this difference but the spacing between the blades on each razor might be causing this. The blades on the Hydro 5 are larger and spaced apart a lot more than the more compact looking ProGlide.

I’ve moaned about the chunky blade head, and one reason for this is that you can flip open back of the ‘hydrating gel reservoirs’ in order to get a shave closer to the edge – neat touch! A side effect of this is that the head is also locked in place allowing you to exert more pressure which also addresses another one of my complaints. Anyway, if you’re quick you can get yourself a free Hydro 5 with Men’s Health magazine (January 2012 edition), or just buy one online to test it out. Personally, if you’re going for a new razor, go for the ProGlide and swallow the extra running costs in your pride.Similar Posts:

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I chose KeePass for a number of reasons. Firstly, it is open source, meaning that the source code for the application is available for anyone to look at. This has a number of advantages, the main one being that it increases the trustworthiness of the application. If everyone can see the source code, then it’s unlikely that the application will start sending your usernames and passwords to unscrupulous scammers without your knowledge because someone would have probably spotted that by now! The second advantage of using a popular open source program such as this concerns the re-use of the code – the basic file format and application operation can be inspected and ported to other platforms such as mobile phones, which is where the latter part of this blog post will concentrate.

My other big reason for using KeePass was the simplicity in which it operates. You create a password database on your file system (Documents library, etc), protect that file itself with a Master Password – yes you’ll still need to remember ONE password to unlock all of your other ones, and start creating new passwords. You can organise them in a folder structure, categorise them with different icons, and even store additional information such as the web site it’s associated with or notes and file attachments. KeePass even has its own built-in recycle bin to prevent accidental deletions of important credentials. All of these details are encrypted by default with an AES 256-bit cipher, currently one of the strongest commercial grade algorithms out there. Did I mention it is FREE?

If you want to get really geeky, then you can also protect your password database using a certificate (.key file). Only when both the key file AND your password are combined can you unlock your database.

If you want to get really, really geeky then read on, because I’m about to tell you how I have my password database set up. Obviously I’m going to be leaving certain details out for security reasons, but this story is about how I’ve managed to synchronise my password database with my mobile phone – two way over-the-air synchronisation.

You’ll be aware that my smartphone of choice is Windows Phone 7, and it just so happens that there is a KeePass port on that platform. 7Pass is an amazing little app, available with full functionality for free, or 79p if you’d like to help support the developer, in the Windows Phone Marketplace. It supports a protocol known as WebDAV. WebDAV is a little-used feature of many web servers which enabled them to act as a file server over HTTP/HTTPS – you can browse the contents of a WebDAV enabled web server as if they were a mapped network drive.

My configuration is best expressed in diagram form I think, so I’ve drawn up the diagram you see above. My PCs all run the standard desktop version of KeePass Professional. They all point to the password database stored on an ordinary Windows-based network share located on my Home Server. Now all of my computers can access the same database wherever they are. To add to that, my laptops run Offline Folders which mean that even when I’m away from home I still have access to the database which is automatically synchronised when I return.

Now for the tricky bit, my Windows Home Server runs IIS by default in order to provide the remote access features of that operating system. I created a new virtual folder in IIS, pointing at the folder hosting the password database. I configured WebDAV globally in IIS and specifically targetted the new virtual folder. At this point, it’s a good idea to make sure that WebDAV is working – to do this you simply map a new network drive in Windows Explorer to the URL of the WebDAV folder you are trying to access. Make sure it’s protected by a username and password (I’m using plaintext authentication for compatibility reasons, but utilising windows security), and that you are using the SSL (https) URL for basic encryption. If that works, you’re ready for the next stage.

Because my server is already accessible via the Internet, my WebDAV share is also accessible with no additional effort. I installed 7Pass on my mobile, and set it to open a new password database located on a WebDAV share. I gave it the location of the WebDAV folder I created previously (the folder, NOT the file itself), and the app then allowed me to select the database file from the list of available files. That was it! All I needed to do was enter my password safe password to unlock it and all of my credentials are there for the viewing wherever I go. Because it is located on a WebDAV server, 7Pass is able to upload anything you add on your mobile to the master database on the server.

If, unlike me, you don’t have the infrastructure to do this, you can still happily use KeePass on your Windows PC, Mac, or Linux PC. There’s also mobile versions for the iPhone, iPad, BlackBerry, old style Windows Mobile, Android, PalmOS and even ye very olde Java based mobile phones.Similar Posts:

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#5 TBS6984 Quad-Tuner DVB-S2 TV Card
Intended to be the core of my ultimate home TV system, sadly I haven’t yet sorted this out. To be honest I’m having a few issues getting the card to play nicely with MediaPortal’s TV Server software on Windows Home Server 2011. It’s an unusual setup I have, and once the hardware works it works perfectly. But, there’s the annoying 30 second delay when tuning to a channel over the network. As a local TV card it is perfect though, and I have plans to sort these issues out.

#4 APC BackUPS ES 700
Here in sunny South Wales we get quite a few power cuts and blips. This UPS has saved my server several times over the last few months by keeping it alive at the times the power companies aren’t able to. It hasn’t yet had to perform a graceful shutdown, with the longest power cut being just over 10 minutes and well within the 20 minute battery life. It is also providing lightning surge protection for the network connection coming from the router, and ordinary surge protection for the switch and monitor in my server rack.

#3 Sony STRDH820 AV Receiver
This is a recent purchase to replace the old Onkyo AV Reciever (which was recently repaired). Aside from providing support for far more speakers than I ever believe I’ll need, it also makes my home cinema system 3D-ready. I have a 3D-ready PS3, and a 3D ready amp…. just need a TV now. Sound quality is amazing, and the price of this amp makes it a bargain. Upconversion from analog to HDMI works seamlessly and the customisable display names is nice touch. My two gripes with the amp concern the static noise you get when the amp switches between audio sources (DD to DPL etc..) for a brief second, and of course the fact I now have a redundant Wii-HDMI adapter.

#2 Parrot MKi9200 Bluetooth Handsfree Car Kit
My birthday present, which was supposed to be a new car stereo, ended up as this Bluetooth car kit. I use it on every commute, listening to podcasts on my way home from work, and to answer phone calls to mobile phone companies in India who want to sell me another contract. I’m told that sound quality on the other end is quite good – still noticable that I’m on a handsfree kit, but audible. I don’t use the fancy screen which is kept hidden away in the dash, and I don’t use the SD card reader, USB port or iPod port either. I just stream music and other audio from my phone via Bluetooth and it works extremely well. The wireless remote strapped to my steering wheel took a bit of getting used to, but once positioned slightly more recessed than shown in the review photos it was much easier to live with.

#1 HTC 7 Mozart – Windows Phone 7
And of course, at #1, it has to be my new mobile phone. The HTC 7 Mozart running Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 operating system is amazing. It has its pitfalls: hardware-wise, why limit a phone to 8GB??? Not enough at all and I plan to pull the thing apart and upgrade it this year. As far as the software goes, my main gripe is the lack of built in navigation. It does now have a form of navigation but using this in the car is dangerous. It doesn’t auto-reroute if you go off track, it doesn’t speak the instructions, and it relies on the data connection with no option to cache your maps for the journey. Other than that, it is awesome. Using it is simple – everything you need is integrated in to the phone. Facebook, Twitter, Live, LinkedIn are all natively supported, pulling in contact details from all sources and linking them together. The number of apps available are increasing by the day, and it’s no surprise given how easy it is to develop for – of all the mobile operating systems I am developing for, the Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 environment and C# language are the smoothest combination of all. If only Microsoft would stop trying to compete with Apple’s iPhone, and instead concentrate on converting Android users from their inconsistent user interface they might just achieve the market penetration required to make this operating system a stayer.

Gadgets not making the top 5 include the excellent BenQ G2220HD Monitor which I use every day, my wife’s Fujifilm Finepix AV130 camera which cost under £50, and the useful LG BH10LS30 Blu-Ray burner which proves itself extremely useful for backing up up the massive collection of HD home video footage. There was also my new watch for Christmas 2010 which appeared as a 2011 review – this doesn’t count towards 2011 though.Similar Posts:

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Right then, replace the capacitors? What are they then? I found these two images on a forum (so they’re not my photos, I’m not taking credit!) detailing the top and bottom of the HDMI circuit, the capacitors to replace have been marked with a blue marker pen. In the video, these surface-mount capacitors are replaced with similar surface-mount capacitors. Most forums however suggest you buy the barrel-type capacitors specified as “100µF 25V”. I decided that these latter ones would be a lot easier to solder, and purchased these ones from Hobbytronics.co.uk. Once they’d arrived I assembled the rest of my tools: some solder (which I already had), metal tweezers to hold the components and (importantly) act as a heat sink during the solder process, a marker pen, and some pointy nosed pliers.

Now, I’m going to assume you have already opened up your amp, unscrewed the HDMI ports, removed the ribbon cable from the HDMI board, removed the strange 4-wires from that other port on the board by pushing the port down and pulling the wires out of the grippy thingy, then unplugged

Step one, use my marker pen to mark up the capacitors to remove – I didn’t want to remove the wrong ones because that would be far too much effort in the long run.

Step two, remove one of the old capacitors from the circuit board. This is easy, get your pliers, grip the capacitor and wiggle until it comes off. You’ll end up with two pins sticking up, so wiggle those off too, and finally remove the plastic base that was underneath the old capacitor.

Step three, work out which way around my new capacitors needed to go – I needed to make sure the polarity is correct or things could go bang. Turns out that the existing capacitors have a less-than-semi-circle black section marked on the top. This black mark corresponds with the squared edge of the border on the circuit board underneath the capacitor. Take a close look at this border and you’ll notice it is a square with two corners cut-out. Now take a look at your new capacitors and you’ll see one side has a grey stripe. The pin on the capacitor on the side of the grey stripe needs to be soldered to the contact nearest the squared edge of the box (opposite to the edge with the cut-outs).

Step four, trim the excess from the pins on the capacitor. I went for about 15mm on each pin.

Step five, use your soldering iron and solder to weld the new capacitor to the correct pins on the board. I can’t really give you many tips here because this bit takes practise – just make sure you use your tweezers or a crocodile clip attached to the contact you are soldering to act as a heat sink otherwise you could blow something else up. The ultimate aim is to make sure the capacitor is attached securely to the contacts on the board. You may want to practise your soldering on something else beforehand to make sure you have your technique right.

Step six, repeat steps two-five for the remaining four capacitors, then put your circuit board back in the amp, screw it back together, plug it in and test it. In my photo, you can see the new capacitor attached to the circuit board in the centre of the image. Also note the two old capacitors yet to be replaced top left and bottom right coloured red with marker pen, the fourth capacitor has been removed (just to the right of the new one – you can see the box marked out on the board). The fifth and final capacitor is on the reverse side of the circuit board.

Mine worked straight away – well chuffed. No including the cost of the soldering iron, I spent £2.30 on the capacitors, £2 of which was the delivery charge. I also spent an extra 30p on spare capacitors just in case I made a mess of things. My Onkyo TX-SR606 is now as good as new.Similar Posts:

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My first stop was the TFA 60.3504 Radio Controlled Wall Clock. This looked perfect, and can also be classed as a gadget! The radio-controlled feature of the clock means that once the battery has been inserted, within 5 minutes the hands had automatically spun around to display the correct time (in the UK…). The unit itself looked really nice, but there was a problem. The Amazon description advises that this clock has a sweep-second hand. For those not in the know, a sweep-second hand is a seconds hand which moves in a smooth sweeping motion, as opposed to an abrupt stepped ticking motion. Clocks fitted with a sweep-second hand are usually considerably quieter than a ticking clock. Sadly though, the TFA 60.3504 (a nice simple name to remember?) ticks. It’s not a loud tick, but it’s certainly not bedroom friendly. I’m afraid it had to go back.

That’s when I discovered clock #3: Acctim Yoko Quiet Silent Sweep Second Hand Quartz Wall Clock. Wow, such a long name. This clock doesn’t have any fancy radio controlled auto setting sadly… If it did it would have been perfect. Importantly for its intended use however it is very very very quiet and has the all important sweep-second hand! When you insert the battery, it does make a very quiet grumbling sound as the mechanism strives to provide a smooth motion, but this is well below audible levels from a few metres away in bed. Physically, this clock is on the large side though, measuring 32cm in diameter. For my daughter though that is probably an advantage – she’s learning to tell the time and the large face and numbers make it very clear to read.

To conclude, if you want a quiet night, go for the Acctim. If you want subtly cool gadgetness, go for the TFA 60.3504. They’re both superb wall clocks.Similar Posts:

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Sadly this isn’t my new toy: it belongs to the Father-in-law whose aging Freecom NAS was no longer up to the job. The brief was reasonably simple on the surface of things, to be able to store a large music collection and enabling that collection to be streamed to a wireless music player, whilst also being accessible from a laptop both online and offline. Well, seeing the LinkStation Duo 2TB available for a comparatively low price on Amazon I suggested he go for it. Why the Pro Duo version and not the standard Live? Mainly because the 2TB Duo NAS consists of two 1TB drives and lets you run them mirrored (RAID1) for resiliency. If one drive were to fail, your data is safe and sound on the other one – all you need to do is buy a new 1TB drive and swap it over with the faulty one. The NAS should then rebuild the array and resiliency is once again restored. It’s a simple but effective concept which I have relied on for many years and protects you against the failure of a single hard drive at any one time. It doesn’t of course replace the need for regular backups off-site somewhere which will be the subject of a future blog I’m sure.

After plugging the NAS in, ignoring the supplied CD, I went straight to the web interface. Setting the hostname and giving it a static IP address was simple enough, but a word of advice to anyone deciding to run the automatic firmware update process: don’t. The upgrade was about 250MB, with no progress bar whilst the download or install took place. I’d suggest you browse to the Buffalo Tech web site and download the firmware manually that way first, then apply it to the NAS afterwards. Once I had updated it, I proceeded to the RAID configuration. This could be simpler in my opinion, but I figured out how to remove the default RAID0 (striped) partition, and then create a new mirrored one afterwards.

Creating folders is the easiest task of all to complete and I won’t discuss that here, and creating new user accounts to protect those folders is also pretty simple. Keep in mind that by default a user is given read-only access to each folder and you’ll have to make sure you select read-write in the appropriate drop-down list if that is what’s needed. Another general tip for NAS users is to make sure you create user accounts exactly in-line with the user accounts you log on to Windows with. If you click on an icon labelled ‘Bob’ and then type in a password to get in to Windows, make sure you create a user account called ‘Bob’ (note the capital) with the same password to enable seamless access.

The NAS supports Windows offline folders, which is handy for laptop users, and also boasts DLNA capabilities (works okay if a little un-customisable) and acts as an iTunes server (I didn’t test this one). More interestingly though is the bittorrent server built in to the firmware – this is becoming a standard feature of many NASs lately and allows you to download, from a legitimate source of course, peer-to-peer hosted files without leaving a computer on. Just think of all those Ubuntu source disks you can easily acquire in that manner. An even more useful feature, which I’d often thought was daft not to include on all NASs, is a web server and database server! Your NAS is running a web server anyway, so why not allow you to upload your own custom files in a virtual folder on that web server? I couldn’t suggest using the NAS as a production web server, but for test and development it should be ideal.

Physically, the NAS is not one of the smallest around, but then again it does pack in two standard 3.5" drives and a hefty processor by comparison. It’s a sleek black unit with three bright LEDs on the front and in operation it is remarkably quiet. I’ve been advised that it can make quite a noise on occasions which I have tracked down to being drive re-synchronisation – basically, don’t power the NAS off unless you’ve done a graceful shutdown by sliding the off switch at the rear of the unit and waited for the lights to go out. If you need to replace a hard drive, you just pop the front cover off and slide one out – simples.

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The router is shiny and black with wall mountable screw holes on the back which is always a nice touch… if it was going to be a permanent installation I’d have used these but in the interest of keeping my walls clean I have propped it precariously in the corner of my lounge instead so as my 2-year-old son can ‘test’ it fully. Installation of the router was very straight forward – I’ve used a lot of Netgear ADSL routers over the years, mainly the DG834G varieties and the interface in the DGN1000 is more or less the same. The router automatically detected the line parameters and prompted me for my credentials which were duly supplied… and there we are, all connected! Of course I had to make a number of changes to default configuration to align it with my existing network infrastructure: the LAN addressing had to be changed to 192.168.1.0/24 from 192.168.0.0/24 and of course this means re-addressing the router to 192.168.1.1 – a very easy task; the DHCP scope needed to be adjusted in a similar manner, and limited to fewer addresses which prevents overlap with the statics on my LAN; and a few inbound traffic rules needed to be added forwarding to my server for remote access. All this was easy to do and quite intuitive, but the most important thing was the Wi-Fi configuration. Now, I don’t make use of Wi-Fi on my router because I have a dedicated access point elsewhere in the house, so I usually disable it straight away. This time I decided to test it out specifically for this review. Netgear, quite stupidly in my opinion, enable Wi-Fi on their routers out of the box. Not only do they enable them, but they give them a standard SSID of NETGEAR and turn off all encryption leaving the router completely open. The DGN1000 includes Wireless-N support across a single radio meaning it can theoretically support up to 150Mbps. More expensive models sport double antennae meaning they can go up to 300Mbps if you need that kind of bandwidth. After locking down the configuration to WPA2-AES I gave the wireless connection a good hammering. Compared to my existing 802.11g network which normally connected at around 40Mbps, the 802.11n access point gave me connection speeds of 64Mbps. Of course in real life this doesn’t necessarily mean anything, but transfer speeds to my server generally felt a little nippier by comparison although I didn’t bother with anything scientific. If I ever get hold of a 300Mbps access point then I’ll do some proper playing for you.

I do have a couple of beefs with the router. Firstly, connection speeds are a little lower than my late Huawai router, syncing at around 3.8Mbps instead of the previous 4.5Mbps but I’m not noticing the difference really – I’m getting enough to stream BBC iPlayer in high quality. My second beef concerns the manner in which it deals with internal requests to services which are hosted internally to the LAN, but using an Internet facing DNS name / IP address. Not following me? Well, my Windows Home Server sits on my LAN, and if I wish to connect to the server when I’m out and about on someone else’s Internet connection, I simply open a web browser, type in the special secret URL associated with my server, and the web browser goes away and hits my router at home, which port forwards me through on TCP 80 to my server inside my LAN. All fine and dandy, but what if I’m sitting at home on my LAN and I do the same thing – you’d think that the router should be able to understand that it is actually supposed to port forward you to a specific host on your LAN, but what it actually does is ignore its ruleset and connect you straight to the internal web interface of the router. I haven’t had this issue since I first made use of a Netgear DG834G v1 many years ago and even then the problem was resolved after a few months via a firmware update. Why Netgear have allowed this problem to creep back in I’m not sure but I’ll update this review if it gets fixed.Similar Posts:

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Samsung Galaxy Europa, also known as the Samsung I5500. And why have I purchased an Android mobile when I have a perfectly good Windows Phone 7 mobile? Well, it’s for development. If I’m to create decent mobile apps, I need to be able to test them on an actual piece of hardware. I’ve chosen the Europa because it’s one of the cheapest around – I paid under £40 for this bad boy, plus of course the obligatory £15 top-up they make you buy too from mobiles.co.uk (aka Carphone Warehouse – see the advert at the top). It’s running Android 2.2, also known as Froyo, which is just one version above what I consider to be the minimum Android software release you should run – v2.1 is the baseline version I develop my apps on but more on the software in a bit. It has a 2.8 inch capacitive touchscreen which is very responsive, only let down on occasions by the sluggish 600Mhz processor which struggles to keep up at times. Build quality is average, it feels solid but very plasticky especially the faux metal silver edging and the extremely rounded corners. My biggest complaint about the device though is in relation to the hardware buttons. The buttons for menu, home, back and search are easy to use, but very difficult to read. The problem is they don’t light up so in low light you can’t see the logos on them at all. After a few days you will get used to it, you’ll easily remember where back and menu are because you use them all the time but that isn’t the point. The screen resolution is also very low at 240×320 pixels. Putting aside the quality of images it displays because of this low resolution, which I don’t consider to be a problem, the low resolution causes the display to become cramped when performing tasks such as surfing the web or viewing information within apps. If you can afford extra for a phone with a higher resolution then go for it. The low resolution does have its advantages – games such as Angry Birds run very smoothly despite the slow processor. What can I say about the camera? Well, it has one – a rear facing one. There’s no flash, but it doesn’t need flash because all that would do is further illuminate the awful image quality it produces. It’ll be good for AR, barcode / QR scanning etc, but for actual precious memories you can forget it.

And now to the software: Android. I’m still undecided about this mobile operating system despite having used it in anger now. It’s very piecemeal and requires apps for almost every aspect of functionality. Each app has a different approach to the user interface which leads to a level of inconsistency throughout. However once again you just have to get used to them, oh, and use Gmail or Hotmail instead of the built-in email client which sucks big time. Apps such as Hotmail, Gmail, Facebook and Twitter integrate neatly in to the ecosystem synchronising with the calendar, contacts list and providing push alerts to the status bar at the top of the screen. There are tons of free apps, even more so than the iTunes App Store from what I see (Angry Birds is free on Android, costs money on iTunes)… but for me at least, apps crash at random sometimes and there’s weird slowdowns too. Then again seeing Google Streeview in action on a mobile phone is awesome.

Overall, for £40 it’s amazing. For that price, it’s locked to the Three network (I believe you can unlock it for about £15 by calling their customer services). This phone will do anything so long as you are prepared to search for the facility or an appropriate app. From an app development point of view it has certainly been very useful to see the operating system in action, helping me produce a more consistent approach to navigation.Similar Posts:

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