Let’s start off with the hardware. The machine is mostly plastic, but it appears durable. I’m a great abuser of products and I haven’t managed to break anything on it yet. The bottles are of above-average plastic thickness, so they’ll probably last as long as the company claims they will. The CO2 canisters are well …
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Review: iRobot Roomba 550 / 551
This is a review of the iRobot Roomba cleaning robot. The iRobot roomba is a robot that claims to be able to vacuum for you. As vacuuming the floor is one of those tasks that I put off and rarely get around to, it seemed like a good product to evaluate. I evaluated it for …
Read MoreNixie Tube Clock
This is a product review of the TubeHobby NCV2.1-14 Nixie Tube Clock Kit. For those unfamiliar with nixie tubes, they are a technology that dates from the 1960s. Nixies are glass gas-filled tubes operating on approximately 170 volts DC. Each tube has 10 cathodes, one for each of the numerals 0-9 and one anode. Whereas …
Read MoreMore wordpress benchmarks on godaddy hosting
Ran a few more tests and have some conclusive results… This time we’re going to see the difference between my original database (that had external access enabled) and migration to a new database (that has external access disabled). Experiment conditions – A random URL fetched every 5 minutes from a pool of 27 URLs. Only …
Read MoreViper 350 alarm install in TJ Jeep
This write-up is on a Viper 350 Plus that I install last week. The goal of this system was to have power door locks and keyless entry, but I found that buying a complete alarm system cost little more than buying just a keyless entry system. Personally I don’t give a hoot about the alarm …
Read MoreWindows Live Writer
The next phase in the experiment is to play around with some editors. At the moment, I’m testing ‘Windows Live Writer’. Installation was fairly easy from Microsoft’s site with a few caveats. The installer automatically tries to install a bunch of Microsoft bloatware that I didn’t want (Mail, etc). It also wants to set my …
Read MoreCinemaTube
The CinemaTube BV-5005HD is a standalone media player with HDMI 1080p output. First, some background on my particular application. I always wanted a DVD jukebox so that I could store all of my DVDs in one location and watch them at will without having to chase down a DVD and insert it into the player. …
Read MoreOptiming wordpress with WP-Cache
In the last entry, I was fretting over lousy database performance adversely affecting wordpress. Since then I had a chance to install WP-Super-Cache and evaluate the effects. I’m operating it in “half cache” mode at the moment, and may try operating it in full cache mode later. This benchmark ran for approximately 8 hours and …
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