Price: £135-£180 (Purchased for £140 from HomeCinemaTV)

Rating:

Demo

Purchase Motivations?

Here’s my predicament. I don’t have enough space in my bedroom for a PC (and I can’t do with the temptation!) so what do I do for music en mi dormitorio? Ok lets look at what I do have:

1. PDA (HP iPaq rx3715 wireless enabled, 2GB SD)
2. iPod (4th Gen 40GB)
3. W810i Walkman phone (built in radio, 2x512MB Memory Stick Duo)

So I’d be listening to music mainly on my HP Bluetooth headphones with my iPaq, or with earphones on my iPod, or even with my headset on my phone (2x512MB).

What’s missing? Yep, speakers. I always recommend that one does enough research before investing in anything, and everything you buy is an investment in the short and the long term. So what do I need to be able to do? What are my requirements?

“Connect all of my devices through a central system in order to output the sound at a higher quality and volume using speakers. Need a good wattage with facilities for heavy bass and treble.”

Where to look?

A few years ago, it would’ve been a trip down to the nearest shopping centre or town centre. Now its a trip down to the PC. I usually look at a wide variety of sources before making any decisions. Start with functionality, expandability and likely long term usage (i.e. won’t have to be replaced in a year). Then look at aesthetics, sizes and ergonomics. Usually you don’t get much choice once you’ve gotten the exact specification you’re after.

I start with mainstream places like Amazon, eBay, Froogle and other sites which will give you a basic idea of what you’re looking for and the price range you’ll need to be targeting. When you see something you like, make sure you look for the criteria you have specified.

My criteria were around – Relatively heavy bass, less then £200, Auxillary input. It’s a good idea not to make them too specific, you don’t want to limit yourself too quickly.

Why Auxillary (AUX) Input? This was my solution to inputting all the different devices. Things like this are very important when purchasing a Hi-Fi.

Found a product you like?

Once I find my product I’ll check out the detailed specifications on the products website. In this case, I checked the brochure of the Hi-Fi on the Philips website. Try not to become too attached to the product, this happens a lot.

Analyse critically, if your satisfied, its time to price hunt. Kelkoo is a useful resource for this, although in this case there wasn’t really much selection. Once your certain you’ve got the best deal (and that the company looks reliable etc), make your purchase and be satisfied – if you did you’re research you have nothing to worry about.

So, the product!

As you can see, I’ve given it a very high rating. Why? Because it satisfied all of my criteria, wasn’t too expensive and it has more then I was after.

Features

Auxillary – Of course I checked for this before I bought it, so I was sure I’d be able to connect my essential devices. I bought 2x3M AUX wires from a website for a couple of quid thanks to the online manual.

USB connectivity – One of the first Hi-Fis to have a built in USB port which enables you to play music off a memory stick. This enables me to a) connect my iPod directly using the cable b) connect my memory stick from my PDA using my card reader. Furthermore, you have the ability to record from your CD to your USB drive! How cool is that?

Standard Spec:

- Single CD
- USB Hosting With CD Ripping
- 75 Watts RMS Per Channel
- Single Auto Reverse Cassette Deck
- FM / AM Tuner With Digital Presets
- CDR/RW, MP3 & WMA CD Playback
- 2 Way Loudspeakers With Neodymium Ribbon Tweeter
- Clock / Timer

How do I use it?

Wireless streaming. Excellente. I always say that my best technological purchase was my PDA – why? I bought it in 2004 and to this day I’ve used it probably every single day since I bought it! See that is a worthy investment. So how does it work? Time to do some poor Photoshop work:

So I have lots of music and audio etc on my PC downstairs. To get it to my Hi-Fi I don’t need a cop out ‘wireless media player’, or a ‘streaming station’, nope all I need is an my trusty PDA and an AUX cable and I can potentially listen to 500GB worth of music (if both my hard drives were full of music!).

As you can see in the second picture above, I can also plug in my iPod directly to the Hi-Fi. The only problem there is it can only handle 999 tracks (strange limitation…). I really like the way that when you do plug something in via USB it shows all the tracks names as it would do with an MP3 CD.

Pro’s

- USB handling
- AUX input
- Tape Deck (still useful!)
- Excellent sound quality, bass and treble
- Very attractive, especially the blue lighting

Cons

- Perhaps a little on the large size (like a mini PC)
- 999 songs limitation from USB

Evaluation & Conclusion

So, overall I’m very happy with my purchase. It does exactly what I needed and a little more on top of that. It seems that the future really is in the computing world, with Hi-Fis having USB and what next? Built in WiFi, hard drives and much more. So the futures bright (and full of radiation).

I’ll leave you with a neat picture of one of my speakers

EDIT 3rd July 06

Haha, title edited to ‘M$ FAIL to Strike Back! From that you can probably work out what happened. No one was having it, sorry this topic really amuses me for some reason (i.e. the ideologies behind this ridiculous idea).

If you don’t know what was going on, basically M$ come out saying they’re going to change their WGA (windows genuine advantage) tool in the next release so that it checks if your using a legal version of windows and sends that back to them, and then shuts you out after a period of time. As if this wouldn’t be cracked? Anyway the point, especially after reading the comments on slashdot – is that this idea would only disadvantage Microsoft who might not realise just how many people are using illegal versions of their operating system. Not only that, people were going as far as saying that people would, logically, switch to open source alternatives (LINUX). Well, even though Microsoft have ‘dropped its pirate checks‘ I still hope that there is an awakening towards open source alternatives which I am certainly making a move towards.

• Intel Core Duo 2Ghz T2500 CPU
• 200GB (2×100GB HDDs in RAID 0)
• 1GB DDR2 667Mhz RAM
• Rewritable Blu-Ray Disc Drive
• TV Tuner (Freeview/Analog)
• Windows Media Centre 2005
• 256MB nVidia 7600GT
• 17″ X-Black TFT Screen
• HDMI Out (High Definition TV Cable)
• Media Centre Remote and Receiver

The Blu-Ray discs can store about 50GB of data (about 10x what a standard DVD can hold at the moment) and is the new format Sony is backing to store high-definition film and television media.

In my opinion, it looks really good and comes complete with a webcam in the lid! On the downside, it is big and heavy – but what do you expect from its RAW POWER!!! And this cool laptop will set you back £1,999 (although it’s on SavaStore for £1781 here). It’s coming out in the UK sometime in mid-June (a date hasn’t been confirmed by Sony yet) so get saving!!!

• 300 GB Maxtor DiamondMax 10 lead free 7200rpm 16MB ATA133 – Yeah not amazing but surprisingly cheap and it will do the job.
• Exlixir 512MB DDR400 PC3200 RAM – Again cheap and good enough

And of course some blank DVDs and CDs since were there.

Now to make the hard disk transfer. I thought it’d be easy enough to stick the new drive into the new PC, format and install windows from there. Not happening, not matter how much I messed around in the bios I couldn’t get it to run my Windows XP CD. Great. What I usually do when I encounter such a problem is to go for the old skool floppies. Looking at the new pc I realise that there is one flaw in modern day computers and yep – that is the lack of a floppy drive. So I go and rip out a floppy outta another pc I have lying around and connect it up and guess what – it doesn’t work. I then tried the FDD from another PC and had the same result. Multiple attempts and more fiddling in the bios and we’re still at stage one. Remember that this is over a period of hours, and it’s times like this when you really want to give up! It was at this point that I say to someone on MSN, “I hate working in the pre-OS purgatory!”.

So I’m thinking and finally I decided to transfer the HD back to the other PC. Amazing – the CD will not run. Cursing Windows XP we go for the boot disks. Strangely there is some I/O error with the Windows boot up disks but the good old Windows 98 boot disk got me into the command prompt. Using the nasty fdisk tools I partioned and formatted the HD, a few more hours. Thinking that all is good now I transfer back the HD to the new PC, I wanted to install XP from there just to make sure all the hardware is recognised. Boot up and guess what, XP CD works. Great, we get to the stage where you can choose the partition and yes – there is a problem. The new drive was showing as 130GB, that’s half of what it actually is. Figuring it might just be a miscalculation in XP I go through the installation anyway with a quick NTFS format. Booting up into a fresh XP and unfortunately XP wasn’t just being stupid – it still showed as 130GB. Where is the other 170GB?! HD comes out again and into the other PC. Trying the setup in there was no better, XP still showed it as 130GB. Searching on forums was great – really – when people think that all your problems revolve around something being physically damaged it really makes you feel great, especially when your 99% sure that there is nothing broken. So we work around it and finally after like a hundred different things (more hours) we find the culprit – an old XP CD (no service packs) was causing this. I tried another one of our XP CD’s which had come with SP1 and it showed it as a full 289GB. Great, time to get going. We installed XP onto there and we were finally getting somewhere.

Day 3: Well from now on it is more or less straight forward. Well yeah, it would be if you have a CD with drivers on it. Advent (yak) had provided some nasty recovery CD which would only work if you used the recovery console. My dad strongly advised against it from a past experience from that. Ironically the ethernet driver wasn’t even recognised so I had to find that on the other PC and then onto my SD card and into the new PC (i’m loving built in memory card readers). So once were here I’m searching high and low for drivers. It really doesn’t help when the manufacturer of that piece of hardware has a rubbish website with no drivers and it feels like you’re the only one with a ‘Prism’ wireless card. After getting all the drivers, and yes it was a mission, I decided to compile a pack with drivers for anyone with an Advent T9, you can download it here. Finally we got our software installed and sorted out the drives and yes, we’re finally done! Well actually, after finished we tried out our Creative Inspire 6700 speakers on the built in sound (which claims to be 7.1) and we weren’t completely impressed. Convinced that I required the best hardware we moved the great Creative Audigy2 ZS 7.1 card into the new PC (had to move around the exisiting PCI cards how annoying).

And finally Time to sit back and see what we’ve gained:

Yep, and of course there are a few more things like the nifty little case which is a lot more attractive then the big Dell (although admittedly less accessible). The extra ports on the front especially rock, with all of my card readers, audio ports, firewire and USB. Interestingly this PC also has a scart socket in the back. Yeah, I know I might never use it but that is really cool. Other things, the Dell 8200 ran a motherboard with RDRAM. Yeah – that now pretty much obeslete form of memory which is practically non-upgradable (unless you have a few hundred quid). Now with this new PC we have a much easier ability to upgrade the ram up to 4GB. Another problem with the Dell 8200 was that the AGP slot was 4x so it wasn’t making the best use of the graphics card. This one is 8x which is much better. Of course with PCI-Express now the standard that is really the only step left to get this PC into higher action.

And if your interested from the screenshot, we are running the Vista Transformation pack which is really cool (and with this ram it is not much of a memory hog). Time to update the ‘My Rig’ page!

Anyway Apple have now opened 6 stores in England which is pretty cool, I always used to wonder what you were meant to do when you Mac has a problem over here. Its not like you can just pop down to your Apple store (as I was once advised by some guy in America) and get it fixed. Funnily enough, I still doubt it would be as simple as that over here

Well finally I got to see the nearest Apple store to me which has recently opened in the Trafford Centre (when I say recently I mean since the last time I went because I haven’t been there for quite a while). Let me give you a little intro to the Trafford Centre, or ‘TC’ as the regulars might call it. It is basically a big shopping centre with lots of shops, I think that the correct word is a ‘Hypermarket’ but that just sounds sad, and they’d call it a ‘Mall’ in America. It’s one of the biggest in England, again thats just a guess, I know that people do come from different cities to see it so yeah it probably is. It is often being changed, mainly added to. There was a new John Lewis added at the end of last year and at the moment they’re extending the eating quarters even further. I’ve been going there pretty much since it opened in ’98.

Well this Apple store is quite nice, it has only one floor and it is relatively small, I’m guessing it was previously a small shoe shop of some kind. Anyway it has the very simplistic layout that most Apple stores have, and I think that is what makes them stand out. Before this shop opened I used to go to John Lewis to check out the Macs because they have been selling them probably since the first iPods. The thing I didn’t like about going there was that they were always a little behind on the latest. For example, last time I went, which was only about a month ago, there was no sign of any Intel Chip Macs and the ones that they had were at least a year old. One thing you can be quite sure of is that the official Apple stores will have the latest that they can achieve. Another thing that bugged me about non-Apple retailers is that usually the people working there haven’t got a clue about Macs. Sometimes its just amusing to watch them try and sell a Mac to a customer – and they always do try selling the Macs because frankly, they’re more expensive. Let me put it this way, I’ve had to interrupt just to make sure the customer gets the right information!

I think that the ‘Genius Bar’ is an interesting idea, but the name is really sad, no offence Apple! It sounds really geeky and again, I have some reservations as to how ‘genius’ these guys really are. I guess its safe to assume that they know more then your average guy about macs because really, people in there haven’t got a clue. What I like about that place is that they aren’t too cheapskate to only have a few products on display. They had some 20+ iPod’s and iPod nanos out there and there were loads of different Mac’s also available for use. Again I find it frustrating when other shops have the Macs behind glass, or on some annoying screensaver that ‘apparently’ (yes – Command+Q(+Esc) usually works) can’t be switched off. At these stores they have them all there ready to use, and they’re fully loaded with apps, music and pictures all at your disposal. I had a nice play around on a Dual G5 with a 30″ screen, yes that was nice. I opened up Photoshop and had a play around (yes I was the one who filled the screen with a nice ‘w0rd’). They also have a section at the back with ipod/mac accessories (overpriced of course) and some other additional items like printers, scanners etc.

The Apple website details some other things which sound pretty impressive. There is a whole timetable of events that the shop’s supposedly do, mainly workshops which are important to introduce people to the computer side of Apple.

In conclusion to my random article about an Apple store, I think that it is very positive step for Apple to open up stores in this country. They are certainly a success, people are attracted to new things and Mac’s are definitely new to quite a percentage of the population. I myself am not so amazed with them having used them since I was a child but I still see that the Apple market is opening up to a much wider target audience. I think it will still be some time before they are fully successful in competing with the PC market, but this has taken them at least a step ahead in that journey.

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I have been working pretty hard on the Islamic Praise plugin and I am already releasing a new version of the plugin.

There is now a much wider variety of images to choose from, 27 in total. I have commented the plugin file to make it easier for you to understand and customise and I have also updated the structure of the file itself a little. A demo page has now been set up to make it easier to see what outputs you will get when you enter the word.
Download the latest version of the plugin, check it out here.

edit apparently not, the /author/ bug still remains and my 200OK errors are still there. How annoying.

Edit 2

Both the 200OK messages and the /author/ bug were coming from the Permalink Redirect plugin which I was using. I updated it to the latest version but that only fixed the 200OK messages and not the /author/ problem. I have de-activated it now and everything is working fine.