BasicDog

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.

Living without a hard wired connection to the internet has been a very mixed experience for me, to access the internet I have been using my HTC Touch Dual and HSPDA to keep up with bills etc. While this is very convenient as it has allowed me to continue to download with a bandwidth of ~130kbps, it is not without faults. These range from a dodgy USB connection making the connection unstable when accidently knocking the phone, to DNS errors on 1 in 20 web page views.

My experiences of building a HD HTPC for under £150 might be worth reading, I will outline the components and software that I have used and the reasons for using them with the set-up.

I have been very suprised by the findings of my power meter and hope to share this with you all in an article soon, you may find that you are buying recommended hardware that realy isn't needed and to application of solar power is looking more and more possible for me in my new house.

So while I apologise for the lack of new content on BasicDog over the past few weeks I am happy to say that I have loads more to write about over the next few weeks.

--Watch this space--