Hi-fi stupidity or is it?

Visited Sound and Vision (which I still refer to as "The Hi-Fi Show") on Friday.

Along with the usual array of lovely stuff, I was most impressed by something I didn't believe in: Mains cables. True Colours Industries demoed the difference between standard mains cable and their own "Constrictor" mains cable. The audible difference was astounding: tighter bass, wider soundstage, clearer, "more beatiful" treble. I had to buy one (even though I couldn't really afford it)! So I bought the 6-way block, and the results at home were even better.

The Velvet Underground were clearer and easier to follow. Norah Jones was more musical and, again, clearer. Richard H Kirk and the Aphex Twin were more taught and, yet again, clearer.

It's like a veil has been lifted or I'd cleaned my ears out. It's like a complete hardware upgrade. And yet, I'm scientifically skeptical that these things work!

Orginally published on 11:37 Monday 23 February 2004

Overclocked at last

Finally got around to overclocking my venerable XP2100+ which natively runs at 1733MHz. At a whopping (OK, not that whopping) 1884MHz that's a massive (OK not that massive) 9% increase. The same as a theoretical XP2289+ (or nearly an XP2300+).

Not the greatest increase in the world, but noticable. The memory bus still runs at 4:5 so that's 181.25MHz = 362.5MHz DDR (vs. 333MHz standard).

Nice.

Thanks to Coolermaster, there's no noticable increase in temperature or noise. Wow.

But then 9% isn't much, is it?

Originally published on 22:57 Wednesday 18 February 2004

Moderation PB!

modded to 5. Oh yeah: /. god, baby. ;-)

Originally published on 17:46 Tuesday 17 February 2004

Hauppauge Win Nova T

Now I don't know whose fault this is, Hauppauge's, MSFT's or what, but I am sick the back teeth of my Win Nova T card. It just doesn't fucking work in any way shape or form.

I can scan for channels and it shows that I am receiving all the channels (at 100% level - I'm almost within line-of-sight and 10km to the transmitter).I receive the EPG fine. I even get the Digital Teletext for BBC Parliament.

However, I receive/display no picture and no sound. Which makes it fucking useless.

If you are intending on buying one of these cards for use under Win XP, I can only recommend that you do not as the drivers are clearly shite.

Of course I really want to use it under Linux, but the instructions and (command-line) interface are fucking awful. I guess I'll have to try though as trying to get hardware working under windows is like hitting your head against a wall that you can't see.

Prism54.org

Tried the latest CVS snapshot from Prism54.org last night with my Netgear WG511 card.

Perfect. No moans, no quibbles, just brilliant. I can now surf, scp ISO images, you name it, wirelessly around the home.