New technology!
Jan. 6th, 2008 07:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rhythmaningIn general, I am not one for acquiring things (possibly because I have all the things I think I need), but over the past month I have acquired a couple of new pieces of technology kit.
Yesterday, I went out and bought myself a hard-drive video recorder. I have actually been thinking of this for some time. I used a video recorder for time-shifting - recording programmes that I otherwise couldn’t watch; the length of time it took to actually view the recorded programme was a measure of how much I wanted to see it (and there are several series that I recorded and never actually bothered to view). In contrast, I never – not once – hired a movie from a local or national!) video store – although in part this is down to my dislike of watching movies on tv – I almost only watched programmes I had missed on tv. (There are two, very significant, exceptions: Buffy and Angel; I had a complete set of both.)
For the last few months, I haven’t had digital tv, and I have barely watched any tv at all. This may however change, because I have been playing around with my new Grundig digital recorder, and it really is rather fun. I have also set it to record a whole load of movies that I missed at the cinema (yes, it doesn’t make sense to me, either), plus the Simpsons every night (because I am rarely home by the time it is on). I think I could also set it to record the Archers as well…
It really is a nice piece of equipment, plus it was a bargain… (One irritation, though: the box didn’t say that it contained a SCART cable, so I bought one, unnecessarily. At Christmas, my brother gave my mother a DVD player, which didn’t contain a SCART cable, so we had to go and buy one. I wish electronics manufacturers would let us know what we actually need to buy to get their kit to work!)
Back in December, I also bought a really rather wonderful mini laptop - href="http://eeepc.asus.com/global/">the EeePC. It is tiny, very light, and has a pretty good spec. It doesn’t have a hard drive, relying on 4Gbytes of flash memory instead, so it is light and very fast to boot up. It runs a version of Linux, comes with Open Office rather than MS Office, and I love it.
There is – of course – just one problem: I can’t get the WiFi working. It finds my router, so that’s all working ok, and I can connect to the internet using a network cable, but when I try to connect it to the Wifi connection (including putting in the password and all that), a system window tells me it is “pending” – and then nothing happens.
Anyone with Linux experience know why this might be? Any thought appreciated! (Oh, and the instruction booklet is no help at all, and neither is the online support!)
Yesterday, I went out and bought myself a hard-drive video recorder. I have actually been thinking of this for some time. I used a video recorder for time-shifting - recording programmes that I otherwise couldn’t watch; the length of time it took to actually view the recorded programme was a measure of how much I wanted to see it (and there are several series that I recorded and never actually bothered to view). In contrast, I never – not once – hired a movie from a local or national!) video store – although in part this is down to my dislike of watching movies on tv – I almost only watched programmes I had missed on tv. (There are two, very significant, exceptions: Buffy and Angel; I had a complete set of both.)
For the last few months, I haven’t had digital tv, and I have barely watched any tv at all. This may however change, because I have been playing around with my new Grundig digital recorder, and it really is rather fun. I have also set it to record a whole load of movies that I missed at the cinema (yes, it doesn’t make sense to me, either), plus the Simpsons every night (because I am rarely home by the time it is on). I think I could also set it to record the Archers as well…
It really is a nice piece of equipment, plus it was a bargain… (One irritation, though: the box didn’t say that it contained a SCART cable, so I bought one, unnecessarily. At Christmas, my brother gave my mother a DVD player, which didn’t contain a SCART cable, so we had to go and buy one. I wish electronics manufacturers would let us know what we actually need to buy to get their kit to work!)
Back in December, I also bought a really rather wonderful mini laptop - href="http://eeepc.asus.com/global/">the EeePC. It is tiny, very light, and has a pretty good spec. It doesn’t have a hard drive, relying on 4Gbytes of flash memory instead, so it is light and very fast to boot up. It runs a version of Linux, comes with Open Office rather than MS Office, and I love it.
There is – of course – just one problem: I can’t get the WiFi working. It finds my router, so that’s all working ok, and I can connect to the internet using a network cable, but when I try to connect it to the Wifi connection (including putting in the password and all that), a system window tells me it is “pending” – and then nothing happens.
Anyone with Linux experience know why this might be? Any thought appreciated! (Oh, and the instruction booklet is no help at all, and neither is the online support!)