Opinion Road

Corporate-but-Casual: Mixed Messaging

I’m liking this new direction that some corporates are taking with dumbed down messages that take the formality (or the  perhaps better the “technicalities”) out of domestic software error notices. Firefox “Well, this is embarrassing” Restore Page The first time I saw this is, I was mightily impressed by their .. humanity (I guess). Photo credit: axbom (CC) DropBox [...]

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Upgrading an Old Laptop with an SSD: performance?

By upgrading an old laptop or desktop using a Solid State Drive (SSD) from an HDD, what performance improvements can you expect? This article outlines my experience upgrading a four year old Dell 640m with an A-RAM Pro 120GB SSD, the result of which was a snappier machine -measured to be 3-4 times faster across the board. Definitely a worthwhile upgrade.

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Sennheiser Earphones Fakes, or Not?

When I buy a pair of Sennheiser's on EBay, am I getting a knock-off (counterfeit), a factory 'back door' model, or the genuine product? I've gone through quite a few pairs of Sennheiser's CX200, CX300 II and one CX 500 ear-canal earphones, most of which (though not all) have been bought through EBay resellers. For the most part, they have been good quality - with the occasional store-bought pair being indistinguishable in listening or packaging quality.

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iPhone solutions for cold hands in winter

As many iPhone owners who have experienced cold winters know, you often have to make a very difficult choice: keep your hands warm or take off your gloves to use the iPhone to text your best friend about how cold you are. Unfortunately, the iPhone’s touch screen does not recognize gloved fingers. I discovered this [...]

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Dell Zino HD headed for Australia .. ?

The ‘Bloody Hell Dell’ Run-around I had a simple question for a local Dell staffer - “when will the Zino HD be released in Australia?”.  You’d think that calling a local 1800 or local exchange number might actually get you a local , wouldn’t you? However, after several calls during which [I swear] I was transferred between [...]

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HP MediaSmart Servers coming to Australia .. kinda

LX197 & EX490 for Australia - no EX495 Just got off the phone with HP Australia (Melbourne and Sydney) … HP will release LX197 & EX490 Windows Home Server based machines on the 19th October 2009 (less than two weeks).  That’s right, no EX495 (Grrrr! HP).  This is contrary to reports on the OzziCom Blog which [...]

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Website Monitoring Services

Following the migration of a number of my websites from physical servers to virtualised hosting, many of the sites experienced worrying outages. I subsequently went in search of a decent web server monitoring service that could shed some light on the actual downtime. The following is a review of the top 3 of those services, along with screenshots and recommendations.

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Cancelling Rhapsody

I’ve been a long-time subscriber of Rhapsody’s music service (since 2005), but recently I decided to switch because of many little annoyances that finally made it almost unbearable to use. I may do a Rhapsody vs. Napster comparison at some point in the future, but today I thought I’d share my experience with trying to [...]

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Wolfram|Alpha answers life’s tough questions

The new Wolfram|Alpha “computational knowledge engine” is the coolest thing I’ve seen in a long while. My first impression was that this was just a big fancy calculator to help people solve NP-complete problems and complex differential equations and whatnot. Not that this wouldn’t be impressive in its own right, but it’s not exactly something [...]

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HD Resolution Smackdown: BluRay vs AppleTV vs DVD

HD, SD, 720p, 1080p & Upscaling - wheat from chaff I once penned an email to my friend (Sarah) extolling my perspective on the relative quality a range media and TV hardware resolutions.  The data was far from scientific, but it’s based on a reasonable exposure to a range of media and output formats.  The following [...]

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