BasicDog

It certainly has, and so much has changed!

Where do I start; I am getting married in April, own a house, have got a new job and a new hobby. See if you can guess what the hobby is... All of which have lead to my lack of posting articles/blog entries on BasicDog.co.uk and changes to the it from now on, I guess I should explain:

As my HTC mobile phone has become more of an integral and also somewhat forgotten part of my everyday life I haven't been able to control my urges to accumilate extra hardware that makes using my HTC Touch Dual easier.

This will be a guide of the different accessories available for the Touch Dual with an emphasis on which ones that I rely on daily. I have split the accessories up into several catagories based on what you are trying to do with the phone.

Have you ever wondered how much electricity the electrical appliances around your house use, we have a number on the back of each appliance but do we actually know how much they are using?

After building my new Home Theatre PC I found myself wondering how much electricity it is using compared to my gaming system, and this lead me to buying a Power meter from my local Maplin shop. The power meter is a very simple device, you plug it into a socket in your house and then put the plug of the hardware you are testing into it and watch the little LCD screen amaze you. The LCD screen can display many different units, including Amps, Volts, Watts and Kilowatt Hours, and since I am used to PC components and appliances such as microwaves being referred to using Watts, I used this as my benchmark unit.

This is the story of how I have managed to build a HD Home Theatre PC (HTPC) for only £135 and in the process managed to make a HTPC that uses an average of around 45w of electricity. Perfect for my living room, my electricity bill and in turn; the planet.

I embarked on my venture to build a media PC for two reasons, the first being to free my gaming system from the living room so I can get some much needed gaming action, and the second was an exercise to see how little money I could use to build a High Def capable PC with a HDMI connection. The components that I used are listed in a moment with their costs; these are mostly bought from ebuyer.com or a market stall in Derby.

Since my last article I have bought my first house, built a high def home theatre PC, got myself reconnected to Virgin Media after using my HSPDA Mobile phone for a few weeks and gotten green fingers in my living room with a power meter to see how much electricity all of my equipment uses.

I have owned the HANNspree Xv-S 32" TV for around 8 months now and I have been taking it for granted to the extent where I have neglected to mention it on here. This is of course a travesty as it was both very cheap and brilliant.

Employing my usual decision making technique for non PC component products, which involves finding a cheap product with 50+ customer reviews online and reading until I am convinced it is not low quality, I happened upon this TV on ebuyer.com. One of the great things about new companies to the market selling cheap goods is that the sites selling them soon build a substantial collection of customer reviews which in turn builds the company reputation.

A little about HANNspree
HANNspree are a branch-off company of HANNstar who produce the HANNs.G PC monitors; a respected brand and this therefore leads you to expect the same quality from HANNspree TVs.

So after much thought I have designed a new BasicDog logo, it is similar to the old one except pixelated, and if you are wondering why I chose the logo to be pixelated, then you should look no further than the name of the site.

In searching for an alternative to Abobe Photoshop I found a free application called Paint.NET which has the simplicity of Adobe Photoshop with the price of the more complicated GIMP software... Free! More on this fantastic Paint.NET software may follow.

What is Drupal?
Drupal is the system behind my website and thousands of others accross the internet, it is an open-source Content Management System (CMS), which is very easy to use for both website savvy individuals and beginners alike. A CMS can be used to set up all manner of different sites and most are easily customizable to your own preferences for both functionality and appearance.

For those who are not aware of what a CMS is, the Dictionary.com encyclopaedia describes it as:

“A content management system (CMS) is a program used to create a framework for the content of a Web site"

This loosely translates to me and you as software that you can use to make a professional looking website, without needing to know much (if any) web programming languages.

This week I have had to overhaul the entire of this site as my webspace had been attacked by a malicious piece of software, which I am thrilled to say the issue has now been resolved. So if anyone noticed the crazy changing colours and lack of site layout over the past few days, rest assured these have now stopped. I would like to extend my apologies for any inconvenience ths outage has caused.

This issue can also be blamed for the lack of new content on BasicDog and I will hopefully have some new and interesting articles up soon, one of which will be related to media PCs as I have spent a small amount of time in the last week setting up a HDMI Media Centre.

I have previously outlined the features of the HTC Touch Dual in my review of the phone, but there was one major oversight, which was that it only briefly mentioned the software that you can install on the phone. Without which the smart phone becomes... a phone.

After owning the Touch Dual with Windows Mobile 6 Professional for a few months I believe that I have finally collected and decided on the perfect software for my needs. This did however take many hours of installing and uninstalling applications and the frustration that goes along with it, and so in an effort to avoid this for others I am going to share my experiences with the main contenders for various software areas such as; Internet Browsers, Messengers and Media Players.

Searching the internet for but a few seconds in search of software on either your phone or your home PC you will be bombarded with plenty of sites, all with hundreds of applications for everything you can possibly think of. This new software can then be installed in one of three ways; if you downloaded them using your phone you can install them with the actual phone which includes a Java installer, or you can use MS Activsync to install them from your PC straight onto the phone or memory card.

Earlier this week I found myself sat on a wide range of seating, which was an unfortunate side effect of a trip to scotland. More than a day later I find that my bones are still aching, and I can only assume that I have either caught flu from an ill scotsman, or that the many chairs of that day in all of thier wonderful shapes and sizes have damaged me. Laying here in bed with my hips less than subtly reminding me of the trip, and my Touch Dual close at hand have led to this post being inevitable.

So I finished transfering all of my Online Portfolio into the shiney new Drupal driven version of BasicDog and I thought that I would officially anounce it...

Back to it's former glory heres your chance to take a look at my former exploits in the computing world, the Portfolio still holds the 3D work from university including the Web3D work for my dissertation, along with the 3D is the 2D work. I must warn you that even the newest work in this section is at least two years old as unfortunatly working life does tend to strip you of all creative motivation, on a less morbid note I have been in contact with people so you may find new work popping up over the next few months.

Not one of my most high-tech reviews here on BasicDog.co.uk, but I really feel that it is worth a serious mention...

The V-Fit Mini Bike is a very simple device which can be used in the same way as an excersise bike, only with the lack of seat and handle bars you can use it sitting on pretty much any seat in your house. If you are like me and you find yourself sat infront of a TV or computer on a regular basis for extended periods of time, and you realy wish that you could stay healthy while maintaining your time doing these very important activities, the V-Fit Mini Bike is a fantastic way to carry on without fear of losing that very handy muscle mass.

One of the major selling points of modern phones is that they feature cameras, and following my review of the HTC Touch Dual I hope to detail how it performs when taking pictures. Having a camera on your phone can be very handy and would be sorely missed if there wasn't one, though until recently they were seriously lacking in the features we have become accustomed to with digital cameras. Mobile phone manufacturers keep coming up with more and more innovative ways to make phone cameras a more viable alternative to carrying both a phone and camera, let's see what HTC have done with the Touch Dual...

It all began while I was on holiday for a week and the only way I could keep an eye on my site was to pay £1 an minute for a slot machine-esque internet access point. Anyway, this isn't about those awkward internet machines on holiday, but about how I find myself owning a HTC Touch Dual. The short of it is that I decided to get a PDA-phone, and now find myself wondering how I lived without one.

The PDA-phone I chose was the HTC Touch Dual (as I am sure most noticed from the title of the article) on T-mobile, and I must say that for the money (£25 per month) I don't regret the decision at all.