Alastair D'Silva

I managed to get some spare time today (well, tonight), so I got down and dirty to replace the motherboard in my Friendly Robotics RL-1000 automated lawnmower.

 Normally, this is a job for the service agents, but after speaking to them, and cringing at the thought of getting this behemoth back to them, I asked them to just send me the board, and I'll service it myself.

Having just upgraded to a new TV, we are now connecting most of our equipment via HDMI/component where available. We have a Joytech 540C Xbox Control Centre which ties all our non-HDMI sources together, and it generally works well, switching composite, s-video, component, stereo RCA and optical SPDIF. It also has a builtin 5 port 10/100 ethernet switch (I wish it was gigabit though). Unfortunately, when feeding a component signal from the Wii, the colours appear washed out, and the screen

A couple of weeks ago, Aldi had a 42" LCD for AUD$1500. Its quite a good deal, image quality is quite good, compared to other sets in that price range. Sure, it only has an analogue tuner, with lots of ghosting (on a signal that our older LG CRT displayed perfectly), but who cares, for $1.5k, you get a screen thats perfect for hooking up to a media centre machine, tuner be damned.

A few weeks back I picked up a couple of Engin 221 VOIP DECT phones (a rebadged DLink DPH-C160S) from Ebay, with the hopes of being able to use them with my Asterisk server. As it turns out, the Engin ship these units with crippled firmware, so you can only reconfigure the IP settings, but not the SIP settings, rendering it useless for anything except talking to Engin. It won't even work with their VOIPer accounts, nor are they willing to unlock the device.