Back in May of 1994 I opened my company Farrow Computing Limited when I was a mere boy. I never thought I would be as successful as I was with it. But finally because of my emigration to the USA, it was closed at the end of March 2010, sixteen years of running my own business.
Looking back there were plenty of times of “what if I cant get work..” “What if I mess something up”, but looking back it really did go well. Enjoyed most of it.
Truly the end of an era.
After putting a power meter on my home entertainment system realised that my equipment was using a lot of power 350 watts at peak. So thought I would do some investigation into a recent low power mini-itx board from Zotac. I chose this one because it was dual core and it has a pci-express card on it which is good for a cable tuner I am looking at to use in it for when I am in the USA.
Ordered the board from mini-itx.com as they are the only people I could find doing this board. It came and everything looked fine except that the fan isnt fitted and there are no holes for it on the cpu heat sink. After talking with mini-itx they told me to screw it to the heatsink even though it doesnt have any predetermined holes. I also noticed that the manuals that came with it – the quick installation and the main manual werent for this board. Which was a great start.
I had already converted my old system from Vista to Windows 7. I then put the new Atom board into my case and started it up. Immediately I was getting checksum errors and just stalled. I was like oh dear must be memory related so twiddled about a bit with the memory until I found the culprit. From going from 1 board to the other, one stick of my 2Gb DDR2 had decided to die.
Not a real problem as really 2Gb of memory should be ok for what that board needs to do. So once over that everything came up fine. I use this as my media center so mainly playing music and watching tv (SD & HD blu-ray).
Initial reaction was that its great. So lets put it through its paces, watching blu-ray with fast moving action – didnt phase it at all everything was running fine at 17% cpu and wattage was about 270 watts so it was already saving me about 70 watts of power. I then decided to get it to record two tv stations and watch a recorded program at the same time.
It did this as well although cpu was about going from about 50 to 75%. And when navigating through the menu it was a bit sluggish although livable. All in all it is great because it will save me money and the Windows 7 media center is a little better than the old Vista one.
FURTHER UPDATE: having recently bought UP on blu-ray I have noticed something that is important for this board. Some of the later blu-ray’s are recorded in MPEG4 – I have tested UP and The Taking Of Pelham 123, they are both recorded in MPEG4 unlike I Am Legend which is VC1.
MPEG4 is currently running at around 47% cpu usage which is fine on its own but if (like I was at the time of trying to play UP) you are recording tv at the same time its just a bit too much for the little NVIDIA ION board which then runs at 100% and frames and audio drop on the play back of the blu-ray movie. Its a shame because its a great board and just what I want when the machine is on all the time but its a trade off between performance and cost of running the equipment.
Overall I am still impressed even though there are these obvious trade offs.
I noticed in my stats that everyone is coming to my blog from search engines looking for white Mini Cooper S’s and I realised that I dont actually have a picture of mine from the front. So here it is on the day I bought it waiting to be driven by myself. Shame I sold it back last year. Any way here it is in all its glory …..
Drove it many times to France and once to Madrid. It was great fun, nearly as great as my GSX-R 750. Wonder where it is now??? Registration was HV57UOA – post here if you have seen it.
If your looking for more photos or stories about it try clicking the mini tag in my tag cloud.
Ok so I have decided to start listing all my stuff that I have lying about the house that isnt being used. There is quite an extensive range. So keep coming back to look at my sidebar to see what im selling.
Going to start with a pair of digital freeview tv tuners which I bought back in 2005 and have never used them. So get bidding if you want them…
[Ebay 260547177386] [Ebay 260547177560]
Yesterday I got invited around a very good friend of mines – Rick Marden. It was excellent we had fajitas and they were good. Also had to have a photo with the hat !!.
It was such a great send off for my emigration to the USA. It ended up with him giving me a bottle of Pol Roger which was Winston Churchill’s favourite champagne and a special edition scalextric mini cooper from the Italian Job. So kind, thank you.
It was just great and I will miss him and his wife Judy a lot.
ok I updated my wordpress blog to use a plugin from watchcount.com, so that I can list my ebay items on my blog. I will be selling a lot of stuff soon due to my impending emigration to the USA yahooooooo !!!!
There was a small FEATURE in the plugin that didnt allow it to work when php is hosted on IIS but have worked with the author and have now solved that which is great. Actually great support from them and it works a treat.
So I now have ebay items on the sidebar and you can post directly into the text like this… Check out the tattoo flash from my impending brother in law !!! yahoooo. OK OK I am getting a bit wild for a Monday morning I know any way check this out.
[EBAY 110487838245]
Not sure on the ebay header bit but I guess thats ebay doing that so probably nothing we can do about it.
As I have some time on my hands these days I finally decided to open a Twitter account. Some of my friends do it although not a lot as most of their activity seems to be on Facebook.
Opening the account was fairly easy. And twitter is self explanatory really. I guess the real reason for getting on Twitter is another way of publishing my useless information that I release from time to time via my WordPress blog. So I downloaded the plugin twittertools and set up the Twitter login details which worked a treat – when I now published a post on my blog it pushed it to my Twitter account paulfarr0w. The problem was that it had the big long url in it so hunted about and realised that actually within twittertools it had 3 other plugins, one being the interface to bit.ly which gives you tiny url’s.
Signed up for an account with bit.ly and posted again and bobs your uncle now I have posts going through twitter as well all from one source my blog.
Oh one last thing the hash’s in the titles tell Twitter to group the posts by those keywords which is pretty nifty.
Well first blog of the new year and its snowing once again.
My road outside the window has been white for nearly the whole time over Christmas. It just hadn’t cleared. This morning I woke up to find heaps and heaps of snow. The news is saying its the longest cold spell for 30 years. One thing is the UK grounds to a halt when its snowing.
Looks rather beautiful though – don’t you think?
First snow of the Winter hits us here in Guildford, Surrey. Its not as bad as last year but looks like a substantial amount of snow none the less.
Well things finally came to an end for myself on the BPOSS (BP Open Shipping System) team. So the team decided that we would combine the Christmas team lunch with my leaving dooooo.
John Sparke thought we should go to a Spanish restaurant that he knew…
El Faro
3 Turberry Quay
Pepper Street
London E14 9RD
It is right next to Crossharbour station on the Isle of Dogs.
The staff were welcoming and Spanish which is great as most of the waiting staff these days in Spanish restaurants are english.
I would say the menu was small but precise with some really good stuff on it.
I had the Spanish omelette to start with, followed by a perfectly cooked blue rump steak. The wine menu was excellent and I and a colleague had a red rioja which was just fantastic.
For dessert I had the caramelized bananas served with Madagascar vanilla ice cream.
My colleagues meals were also excellent.
The bill was 433 pounds which worked out at 86 pounds a head so it wasn’t the cheapest lunch although I think the three bottles of champagne and the brandy’s after the meal somewhat pushed the price up.
Would I go back – YES I would.
