Andrew Beacock's Blog

My wife was looking around for an external speaker for her MP3 player and in our searching we came across the XMI X-Mini speaker on Amazon . This little mono speaker has 105 five star reviews (out of 115) on Amazon and at the time was £20 (it's now £16.96 - was £15 for a short time). It's an absolutely cracking speaker - the internal (rechargeable) battery lasts for hours and this thing can really pump it out - with the bass expansion chamber opened up it sounds amazing. We have used it as a speaker for an MP3 player as well as an output speaker for a guitar headphone amp - true rock guitar sound on the move! If you are on the look out for a mini speaker for your MP3 player you will not be disappointed with an X-Mini! Technorati Tags: , XMI , X-Mini , MP3 , speaker , Andrew Beacock

My first foray into purchasing MP3 was from Amazon.co.uk some months back. It was a smooth experience much like buying anything else from Amazon and it's quirky MP3 downloader popped the nicely named MP3 files into my music folder in the normal directory structure of Artist name/Album name/track number & name . This week I purchased an album from Play.com 's MP3 catalogue due to it being a little cheap than Amazon. It's download format was a large zip file that had to be saved to the desktop, it's content was just the tracks - no artist/album directory structure, no track numbers. Because I don't have an iPod I had to look up the track listing on the net and rename the files just to put them in the right album order! Next time I want to buy some music online I think I will be skipping Play.com 's offering completely and paying the little more that Amazon.co.uk was charging - it will be worth it to just have my music just download straight into the right ...

Late on Thursday night I broke one of my electric guitar strings and being a beginner I didn't have a pile of replacements to drop in straight away. I'd placed a couple of small orders with StringsDirect over the past few months and had such fast delivery that they were my first port of call. I placed an order for a couple of packs of handmade DR Strings (one Tite Fit and the other Hi-Beam ) around midnight on Thursday night and what with the Christmas post service issues (along with various PO strikes) I had little hope that they would be with me before Christmas. They arrived on Saturday morning, nicely packaged, all the correct bits I ordered - absolutely perfect! So if you need any guitar accessories, take an online trip to StringsDirect , they have loads of items and the delivery service is second to none! As an aside, I picked DR Strings after Justin Sandercoe of www.justinguitar.com recommended them - his online guitar tuition site is second to none and I trust...

I recently upgraded my television from a Philips 28" widescreen tube to a 1080p Panasonic 42" plasma . My old Sony PlayStation 2 was now looking a little weak when upscaled to 42" so I decided to invest in some component cables to take advantage of the best output that the PS2 had to offer as well as enabling "Progressive Scan Mode" in some supporting games (Guitar Hero 2 for example). Here are my step by step instructions on how to HD-enable your PlayStation2. Buy a quality component cable My PS2 came with some SVIDEO-style connectors and a SCART block to plug them in to. The image quality on my old TV was fine but needless to say on a 42" HD plasma things looked a little different! I spent a lot of time reading all sorts of reviews of PS2 component cables and it seemed that people were having mixed results with the cables in the £5-£15 bracket. After some searching about I found a PS3 to 5 RCA (component) cable from IXOS which also works with the PS2...

Note: This is a non-technical post that I'm making to see if anyone else is searching for information regarding any outstanding bathroom orders - if so, please leave a comment so we can pool our collective wisdom! We placed an order through Bathrooms Italia for a new bath back in January and after repeated phone calls inquiring about the whereabouts of the bath we have found this morning that the site appears to not be avilable anymore and they are not answering their phone - 01845 577 432. After a little digging about it appears that Period Bathrooms are also not answering their phone - 01274 660 770. Both of these companies seem to be public consumer websites for Althea UK Ltd. , their number is the same as Bathrooms Italia - 01845 577 432 which is never answered. A quick search on Credit Gate shows the following suspect activity : REGISTERED OFFICE CHANGED ON 22/01/08 FROM:KC HOUSE, BRETTON STREET DEWSBURY WEST YORKSHIRE WF12 9BJ SECRETARY'S PARTICULARS CHANGED ON 21/...

When I was researching PC components back in September I spent a lot of time on Scan's excellent website looking up prices, specs, etc. A few weeks ago I stumbled upon a page describing how to create OpenSearch plugins for Firefox (which can also work in IE7). It didn't look that hard so I picked Scan's website as my target. Here is the result: Install Scan UK Search Plugin This has been tested on Firefox2 and IE7 on WinXP and Firefox2 on Ubuntu. I would be very interested to know if it works on any other browsers or platforms... More search engines can also be found at on the Firefox Search Engines page and at searchplugins.net . Technorati Tags: OpenSearch , Firefox , IE7 , Scan , Search , Plugins , Andrew Beacock

My 3Com wireless broadband router decided to stop working last week leaving us without any internet at home. It was a 3Com OfficeConnect ADSL Wireless 11g Firewall Router , a rather excellent piece of kit that I purchased from Amazon.co.uk when my Linksys WAG54G started playing games with the wired lan ports. I bought it in January and it's been rock-solid ever since, very easy to setup, and the only downside was that it shipped with extremely old firmware but that was easily solved with a visit to the 3Com support website . It stopped working in the afternoon last Wednesday (5th July) whilst I was at work. The ADSL and wireless didn't work any more, and I couldn't get into the administration interface. I fished out my old Linksys router as that had working wireless and internet and got onto the 3Com support site late that evening. It comes with a 3 year warranty (I've had it 6 months) so I managed to submit an RMA (returns) request . The next morning was an email...

I recently bought a new car which didn't have a tape deck so I couldn't plug my MP3 player into the car so that I could listen to my latest podcasts . I couldn't live with it like this so I started to research into FM transmitters for my player. I had heard mixed reviews regarding these FM transmitters, quite a lot of people were reporting that although they were ok, but a large amount of interference was received when travelling in built up towns and cities. Most of these transmitters can only be configured for one, four, or maybe eight different frequencies, meaning that the choice you have is severely limited. After quite a bit of surfing I managed to stumble upon the Digiana Audiax II . It supports tuning to around 200 different frequencies which covers the full UK radio range, it's really small and comes with a car charger and a battery. It's incredibly easy to setup and tune, I have mine tuned to 106FM as there is very little around in that frequency range ...