New Gadgets

15 October 2003

I have recently acquired 2 new gadgets.

The first is a Philips Pronto. It's a cool touchscreen programmable remote control. It has a good editing suite that lets you design the layout and design macros for controlling ir devices (for instance - turn on the vcr - select channel 3 - start recording). I our front room we currently have 5 remote controls - TV,Digital Box,DVD,2 VCRS - and with kids this is a BAD idea as each evening we play hunt the remote. Now we have just 1 remote control - and no chance of the grandparents understanding it!

My other gadget was kindly contributed to me by a mate at work. It's called a Multitainer and was sold by Fujitsu a few years back as a multimedia centre. It's basically a PC in a DVD style case - has a 10gb disk, graphics, network card, sound card and a dvd player. It only runs '98 and the graphics cards aren't supported by anything later. It did come with a IR keyboard and remote - but these are missing. I plan to try to get a keyboard for it from ebay (make do with a USB one for now) and use my Pronto to replace the remote. I'm hoping to install a mini-linux distro on it and use it in the front room to do the following:
Be a front end to MythTv (A cool open source PVR) that I already have running on my server.
Be an mp3 player to my mp3's (on my server)
Run Mame to allow me to play all those long forgotten arcade games
Do anything else I can think of.

So much to do and so little time...

Hello. My name is Roy. I live in rural Oxfordshire.

This is my blog. I write about things that interest me, make me laugh or that I want to remember.