There was a time when I was either looking on-line or in a large Tech store (such as PC World) and I would be looking at items I had no idea I needed but somehow bought anyhow to add to my collection. Eventually though, you can et to a point when the more sensible side of you asks that question in your head “Do I need yet another external hard drive?”. I think it depends on what items you buy in the first place that can cut down in the number of “other” items you need to buy and eventually as I stated, you walk around and see nothing on offer that you seriously need and thus save your hard earned money.
Posts tagged faster
Firefox 4 Beta 12 with Adblock and Ghostery
I need to state here that websites need adverts, they use this as a mean to get money which in turn helps pay for the time and effort they put into producing the goods. Static adverts I can live with and even sometimes they show me something I might want to buy and all is good but when a site (mostly the video streaming sites) start to push adverts down your throat and they are loud and annoying and repeat over and over on each new page you go to – this is when you as a person need to take a stand.
While I Love the way Google Chrome works, there is just too many things that make me want to jump ship back to Firefox such as Adverts, flash slowing down the browser, my NAS box not working properly via Chrome and so forth. I have given the latest Firefox 4 Beta 12 a run and added a couple of extension and I will document how it is working out for me so far.
Sony Playstation 3 rolls out new firmware
Sony keeps updating it firmware with what they call ‘Security Fixes’ but add nothing that I can see to the mix. I was hoping for example to see ability to play music while playing games and other goodies but the fact remains is that Sony just keep updating the firmware to try and stop people running firmware that allows you to install homebrew utilities and games. The problem is that a person by the name of GeoHot found the encryption key and the only way really for Sony is to replace the hardware – this is not going to happen.
Virgin Media increase upload speed plus more throttling
UK Broadband supplier Virgin Media are set to increase the upload speed of all its tiers starting now and rolling out area by area. There is no extra cost for this service and on there fastest service (XXL) they are going form 1.5Mbps to 5Mbps, the lower speed tariff 20Mbps (XL) will have their upload changed from 768K to 2Mbps. With the good also comes the bad – not only are they restricting your traffic as before but also slowing down Newsgroup and Torrent Traffic.
VLC 1.1.0 adds hardware-accelerated playback

Ready for HD
- GPU decoding on Windows Vista and 7, using DxVA2 for H.264, VC-1 and MPEG-2
- GPU decoding on GNU/Linux, using VAAPI for H.264, VC-1 and MPEG-2
- DSP decoding using OpenMax IL, for compatible embedded devices
- Improved support for MKV HD, including seeking fixes, and 7.1 channels codecs
- Support for new codecs, like Blu-Ray subtitles, MPEG-4 lossless and VP8




