Technology

Our Vista Media Center machine was continually waking up a few minutes after it was put to sleep. This lead to higher power bills, and higher greenhouse gas emissions. To find out the cause of the last wakeup request, you can execute the following command from a Command Prompt:

powercfg /lastwake

Unfortunately, this didn't give any useful information for me, so I took the following approach:

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.

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.