Freak Enterprises

Don’t get me wrong, I love my Canon Powershot G2 but often it’s just too big and bulky to carry around. I’ve had my eye on the little IXUS range of Canon cameras for a while and during a recent trip abroad spotted this new IXUS 55. Being stuck in an airport waiting for a delayed plane is a great opportunity to check out a new gadget. One thing I really like about the G2 is that it’s digital camera shutter lag is much better than many other digital cameras, i.e. when you press the button it takes the picture very quickly and you don’t miss  too much of the action. However I was amazed that the lag on the 55 is almost non existent. In fact it was the speed of this little thing that made me decide to buy it there and then.

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I spend a fair amount of time travelling and staying in hotels so I really enjoy having my iPod with me. It’s not always convenient to wear the head phones - have you ever tried shaving with head phones on ? I looked around for a small pair of speakers for some time until I found this unit from Philips.
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My Dad just came back from a holiday in Canada visiting family and brought my Son, Reiss, back a robot. Not just any robot but a shiny silver Robosapien. These “toy” robots were all over the news before Christmas last year with predictions of it being that Christmas’ the best selling toy. Having lived with it for two days I can see why.
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Whilst surfing around Apple’s web site looking for iTunes hints ‘n’ tips, I stumbled upon the page for the Airtunes Airport Express. I was interested in the way that the AirPort Express would let me stream music and my existing playlists directly from iTunes on my PC to another set of speakers anywhere in the house. I have been wanting to set up something in the kitchen so this looked like a possible solution.
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I spotted this little box on eBay and couldn’t resist giving it a try. It allows you to answer and make Skype calls using a standard phone, whilst still allowing the phone to be used for normal land-line calls. I have a DECT cordless phone system and like the idea of being able to use Skype from anywhere in the house.
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Still on my quest to build an ultra quiet, lower power consuming server using a Pentium M chip, I have found this socket 478-to-479 converter from ASUS. It allows a standard ASUS motherboard to run a Pentium M chip.
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Nokia have launched yet another really interesting device, the Nokia 770. They describe this device as an “Internet Tablet” because it doesn’t actually include a phone! For connectivity it just supports WiFi and Bluetooth. For me, the most surprising fact about this device is that it runs Linux. Considering they describe it as a tablet I was surprised how small it is. I was expecting something around the size of a table PC but instead it looks just a bit bigger than a phone and more like a PDA. It is due to ship around autumn this year.
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For a few months now I have been looking into building a new server for home. It will have a couple of big disks configured for RAID and will host all our photos, MP3’s and videos. Its got to be quiet, its got to be power efficient so as not to drive up our electricity bills and I’d quite like it to be small. I have been looking at the VIA Mini-ITX motherboards and cases like this one from Serener. Only trouble is that I can’t find this case for sale anywhere in the UK.

It’s seems the whole PC industry is suddenly waking up to lower power consumption, low heat and low noise as being critical. Apple’s announced this week that they will switch from PowerPC to Intel Pentium M processors for just these reasons. So this got me thinking, if Apple can make machines based on Pentium M then why can’t I ? A quick bit of googling turned up a couple of suitable motherboards from Aopen. Now all I need to do is find somewhere to buy the board and a Pentium M processor and price up the whole thing.