I really liked my Nokia E65, I’ve had it for ages now and it’s treated me very well but the time came to move on. I opted for a HTC HD2. Yes, I know a Windows Mobile device. Shock horror. Well pardon my French but screw you guys! I’ve never actually owned a WinMo device and I prefer to make my own judgements. There is a new HTC phone I’ve got my eye on, the Supersonic which runs Android but it’s not coming out for months and I wanted to try at least one WinMo device before jumping on the droid fanboi wagon.

I’m not going to review my new phone as there are already a zillion reviews out there which are probably better than anything I can write. This is a post about how I got my phone, was screwed by the original owner and have had to jump through the sim unlock and custom rom hoops to get to the final stage of my phone truely being mine.

Continue reading “My HTC HD2”

The other day my satelite dish went on the fritz and I had to call Sky to sort it out. Turns out the simple fix in the end was to unplug the box from the mains and then plug it back in. The operator told me that sometimes when switching channels the LNB on the dish can get locked in the transition. Sounds a bit flimsy to me but whatever, it worked.

During the call though the first thing he did was guide me to the hidden service menu. This is for the Sky Amstrad HD box, it’s a different code then with the non-HD box. To get to the hidden menu press Services on the remote, then press 0 0 1 Select. You should now see all the new menu options. I haven’t really looked at any of them as I was being guided on the phone at the time. I just thought someone else may like to have a look around sometime. I will the next time I’m watching TV and it hits the adverts.

I bought one of these a while ago. It kicks ass. Like totally. One thing I have run into which is really annoying is that if you have a HDMI input source like an XBox 360. If you then use the optical audio output to connect the TV to an amp it will only ever be in stereo, you’ll receive no DTS or Dolby Digital. It seems the TV has something built in that means it only outputs a stereo signal baring two exceptions . The two exceptions are (a) watching its FreeSat channels or (b) watching something using its built in Media Server channel. Note that it also only outputs stereo for the standard Digital Aerial based channels. I’ve tested this out firsthand. No menu option to control any of this. I tried looking through the “hidden” service menu. Quite dissapointing for what I thought was a highend TV. The annoying thing is that you know it “could” do it but they’ve actually set it not to.

It’s got a youtube viewer built in so naturally the first thing I saw playing on my new TV is a 50″ Star Wars Kid vid 😋

My shiney new Creative Zen arrived today, after the 4 hour initial power charging session I started trying to transfer tracks to the player. All the mp3 files copied as expected but my m3u Winamp playlist files were ignored with the device stating it was an unsupported file type. That sucks since I have hundreds of m3u playlists. I found that the sync tool does the playlist convertion but it means I have to copy the music to my system (from my server) into the sync directory and then manually initiate a sync. It’s not too bad but it does double the file copying time and add a small bit of complexity to the process. On the bright side it does mean all my playlist files are still useful 😀

Continue reading “Creative Zen and Winamp Playlists”

I bought a PSP a couple of weeks ago for a trip down to London. 4 hours in both directions ..ig.. It came with firmware 2.71 installed when I purchased it. If you turn it so the back is facing you and open the UMD drive it has 1009CT printed on the circuit board on the left hand side. The “CT” is horizontally flipped. Mine is not what is known as a TA-082 model.

I’d decided to switch to the Open Edition firmware by Dark_AleX before I’d even bought it. At the time and for the first week of ownership I was under the impression that I would need Grand Theft Auto: Liberty Cities to downgrade the firmware. I found out that this is no longer the case.

Continue reading “Upgraded my PSP to Open Edition 3.40”

So the title is a bit over dramatic but it got your attention didn’t it 🤣 I recently did a Windows Update to receive this months bounty from Microsoft. Along with the usual bunch of security fixes and updates there were two hardware updates. One of them, which I chose to install was entitled “Via Bus Master Controller” which turned out to be a total screw up which luckily I was able to fix.

Continue reading “Via Hyperion 5.11a hates Abit AV8-3rd Eye”