Nikon D5000 – First Images

Posted by Paul Farrow - Under: Hardware, Personal

Decided it was time I got myself a digital SLR and saw the reviews on engadget of the new Nikon D5000. The price was good and I have been fed up with the camera on my HTC mobile, especially as I have been taking a lot of photos on my visits to the states.

Jessops this weekend had a sale on so bought the camera, extra lense, 8gb SD card and you got a free bag as part of the deal. I ordered the GP-1 unit for it as well (although have to wait 28 days for that) so that I can store the gps position of the photo as this seems to be the latest fashion in the world of photography.

I even negotiated about 50 pounds off the sale price. :)

Here are the first images taken with the camera…..

Found Some Old Computer Photos

Posted by Paul Farrow - Under: Hardware

Was looking through my pictures and found two of my very old machines that I built a few years back.

Antec Fusion Remote HTPC Case – Audio Control Doesnt Work

Posted by Paul Farrow - Under: Hardware, Media Center, Microsoft Windows, Software, Vista

Just upgraded my media center case to an Antec Fusion Remote.  Now its a very well made case and has 120mm fans in them with variable speed control which is why it took my fancy.  It has full size slots as well as my older case could only take half height cards which is always a problem finding them.  I bought the silver one, disappointment here is that only the front is silver the rest of the case is black which is fine if you stack your machine with a silver av receiver that is silver as you wont see the rest of the case but if your like me that has them side by side its a little annoying that they didnt choose to do the whole case in silver but I guess its all because of cost and to be honest its way cheaper than say a zalman htpc case so I guess thats why.

I run an asus p5e-hdmi micro-atx board in it.  It isnt one of the latest micro atx media boards because i have had it hanging around at the house for nearly a year now.  I then push the audio out via coaxial to a sony av receiver running a 5.1 tanoy speakers.

The only problem I had with it was that the remote and variable control on the front of the case didnt adjust the sound / audio.  Having researched the Antec support area, they suggested upgrading the latest driver software for the vfd (lcd panel) and your motherboard.  Both of which still didnt make it work.

Then I saw that on the Asus support site that there was a realtek driver for the audio.  I then replaced the microsoft standard driver for the audio with the Realtek one and bazaaam it all works.

The only outstanding problem I have is that Microsoft Media Center doesnt control the audio when playing a dvd, but I have had this problem on my older media center so think Media Center cant control it as the ouput just seems to off load it out the coaxial audio cable to my av receiver.

The results are outstanding just need to upgrade my lcd tv to a full HD (1080p) one now rather than a HD-Ready (720p) but that will have to wait.

Front USB Ports not working on my Shuttle running Vista x64 Ultimate

Posted by Paul Farrow - Under: Hardware, Microsoft Windows, Personal, Software

After taking the Cypress update my front usb ports stopped working.  How did I fix it well if you go to the device manager (right click the computer icon in file explorer, click properties then click device manager [left hand side]) under Universal Serial Bus Controllers (right at the bottom) there is a device shown now called HX2LP kit (3.03.0000.2) I believe this is what causes the problem so I just uninstalled mine and rebooted.

After the reboot I get a generic USB hub appear and the front ports on my shuttle SD37P2 are now working.

Also when I run windows update again I dont see that update any more.

Getting Rsyncd, Vista and Backuppc to work

Posted by Paul Farrow - Under: Mini-ITX, Personal, Software

Recently upgraded to vista and for the life of me couldnt get the vista to work with rsyncd running from cygwin.  Would always stop with a code 12 error and not alot else.  I just run rsyncd or rsync with the daemon option as I dont belive the cwrsync works as a service yet on vista. 

Now in the backuppc config options for rsyncd and rsync there is a hard link option I just removed that and it seems to work not sure why vista cant deal with that option but if you remove it, everything works as it did before on windows 2000 / XP.