It looks like my experience of awful customer service from iRobot’s UK service center, Domotec, was an anomaly. Either that or the spotlight of publicity, combined with my emailing a number of iRobot’s senior management caused someone to ensure policy – and warranties – were being properly applied.
I called Domotec’s service number this morning, after…
iRobot come through (eventually)
By Howard | Published July 18th, 2008Sony Vaio Z Series
By Howard | Published July 18th, 2008I’m lusting after the new Sony Vaio Z Series which doesn’t come out in the US until mid-August, and I’ve no idea when it comes out in the UK. Annoyingly, while the US site allows you to configure your system from scratch – including putting in dual solid state drives – Sony UK limit us…
Three Handy Sites
By Howard | Published July 16th, 2008Three handy sites for people who need to manage the volume of email coming in.
Don’t want to be included on the latest “funny” forward, let your correspondent down gently with www.thanksno.com.
Or do you have a contact who doesn’t know how to use BCC and reveals your email address to everybody else they’re sending the message…
ZX Spectrum nostalgia
By Howard | Published July 15th, 2008I can’t remember when I first played with a ZX Spectrum. I know I must have come to the party relatively late since I was only 4 when it was released, unlike Chris who was old enough to have one at launch. This weekend he rescued one from his mum’s rubbish bin, complete in the…
My 1080p HTPC: Movie and TV management
By Howard | Published July 14th, 2008What do we buy the birthday boy who has a no-media policy?
That’s what Phil asked me before my birthday last month. He was referring to the fact that I have no CDs, no DVDs no optical media of any description cluttering my living room. All our TV and movies are stored on a variety of…
My 1080p HTPC: Freesat with Vista
By Howard | Published July 13th, 2008Having ditched Freeview for signal quality reasons, it’s time to talk about getting the satellite cards to work under Vista Media Centre – something that until MS release the “Fuji” update is not as trivial as you’d think! Vista’s tuning architecture doesn’t understand DVB-S (or -S2), so can’t natively tune satellite cards, so we need…
My 1080p HTPC: Multiple Freeview Tuners
By Howard | Published July 12th, 2008When I originally built my HTPC, I used 2 Freeview cards. Each Hauppauge WinTV-NOVA-T500 has two Freeview tuners in one PCI card. By installing two of these (and with some registry tweaking) it is possible to build a device that can record/watch 4 Freeview channels at once.
Out of the box the Vista Media Centre GUI…
Bandwidth Graphs
By Howard | Published July 11th, 2008I’m a metrics geek, I can’t help it. Once again I have to sing the praises of Zen’s Office 8000 Max ADSL service. When they say unlimited they really mean it, and since I’m only about 350m from the Exchange, I actually get the full 8Mb.
Check out the graph (click for bigness) which shows my…
Disable Windows Desktop Search Explorer Integration
By Howard | Published July 10th, 2008Another post from the “helping future Howard” category. I use Outlook 2007, which is great, but in order to be able to search your email with decent performance you must install Windows Desktop Search. Unfortunately when you do this it integrates with Explorer without asking permission to do so. This means that should you hit…
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