Review Back in October 2010, Reg Hardware looked at TVonics’ first Freeview HD recorder, the curiously styled DTR-HD500. The DTR-Z500HD is a more conventional ‘shoe box’ shape, though much smaller than many of the others I’ve looked at, but it once again packs in a good spec.
DTR-Z500HD: a more sober design than the last TVOnics DVR
There’s a 500GB disk drive, Ethernet network connectivity – BBC iPlayer isn’t supported yet, but is in the works, apparently – and twin tuners, so you can watch one channels while recording another, or record two at a time. Read the rest of this entry »
Review The Fuji FinePix X100 is, of course, a Camera for those with more money than sense. Just look at it. Finished in wildly ostentatious silver magnesium alloy with splashes of leather on the grip, the retro viewfinder styling and chunky shutter speed dial evoke the rangefinders of the 1960s and 1970s.
Grand design: Fujifilm’s Finepix X100
Even the shutter release button has a screw-thread drilled into it to allow you to attach an old-style cable release. In these days of interchangeable lens, electronic viewfinder cameras, what possible appeal can a fixed-lens Camera like this hold? Read the rest of this entry »
Review Like Frankenstein’s Monster, Mortal Kombat has ever been the lumbering chimera, an amalgamation of individual parts thrown together, somehow brought to life much to the despondency of nature’s will.
Two girls, one mug
Take the series’ visuals, for example: ever shifting from one trend to another, as the graphical trend of the time was embraced. Whether these were early forays into motion captured fighters, or later ventures into 3D, it would take a brave gamer to claim these experiments were ever totally successful. Read the rest of this entry »
My challenge from Reg Hardware: build a PC, install Mac OS X on it, and explain how you can do it too.
Today’s Macs use standard Intel-type components. A key difference from Windows is that Mac OS X loads though a boot mechanism known as EFI (Extensible Firmware Interface). Some obscure Apple-proprietary concoction, no doubt? Far from it. EFI, now officially called UEFI – the ‘U’ stands for ‘universal’ – is an open standard, originally devised by Intel as a replacement for the ageing Bios boot system.
Unlike the 16-bit Bios, EFI can be 32- or 64-bit, and is much more flexible. In particular, with suitable hardware, you can tweak EFI to persuade a Mac OS X installer that it’s installing onto a Mac. A generic Intel machine on which you’re running the Mac operating system has become known as a “Hackintosh”.
A Hackintosh, yesterday
So What Needs Hacking?
Pioneer Hackintoshers had to hack the official Mac operating system. These days it’s easier: you just buy the standard Snow Leopard installation disk from the Apple Store, and rely on EFI to set up the hardware environment and install the necessary kexts. Read the rest of this entry »
iOS App of the Week Android devices have a memory manager utility that can show you which apps and services are running in the background, and allow you to shut them down in order to free up some extra memory.
XSysInfo provides more data than iOS 4′s multitasking menu, including apps’ impact on battery life (right)
Apple, being Apple, likes to keep that sort of information hidden away from its users. You can double-click the Home button on an iOS device to see which apps are running – and, to be fair, that’s probably all the detail that most people need to know. Read the rest of this entry »
