Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

Someone gave us some John Lewis vouchers as a wedding present. Unfortunately they did this anonymously, through the wedding list we used...

The vouchers have been sat around for a while, stuck onto the cork board on my office shelves. Meanwhile the Sky+ box under the telly has been filling with films we haven't watched - and we've recently retired the video recorder. After all, who uses VHS these days? With the disk filling up, and Sky's 6 month viewing limit rapidly approaching we decided it was time to give the vouchers some exercise, and looked into getting ourselves a DVD recorder.

We did some online research and found that John Lewis was stocking the LG DR4912, which seemed to have all the features we wanted, and then some (including support for DVD+/-RW disc formats and built in firewire!) - and at a very good price indeed. So we headed off to Peter Jones, took a quick look at their display model, made our decision and picked one up, and then staggered with the bulky package down the Kings Road.

After a bit of crawling around on the lounge floor and swearing at bulky SCART cables, it's now connected up to the TV, replacing our old DVD player. It's already allowed us to back up one film without too much fiddling around. And it's nice and shiny with not too many blue LEDs...



Many thanks to the anonymous gift giver!

Today I have mostly been rebuilding my PC and rescuing my files from a slowly dying hard disc that had corrupted the OS in most peculiar ways.

My first attempt at a rebuild was, err, abortive. In fact, I got so stuck, I ended up talking to a chap at Microsoft PSS. After all, what else do you do when both Google and your wife who writes help magazine columns for a living and has more PC internals books than anyone else around can't help? There I was with a machine that kept asking for authorisation and then failing to load me into a user shell. No way of getting past the problem, and no way of safely replacing the corrupt code.

The PSS engineer found this quite unusual... To the extent of telling me "I didn't know that could happen." Unfortunately it didn't seen to fixable, as something had corrupted some really secure code.

When I break things, I really break them.

We suspected the failing hard disk, but it was a rather unusual failure mode. I suspect what was failing was not the usual mechanical systems, no catastrophic head crash or motor seizure. Instead, something was happening to specific sections of the drive platters - something that was slowly spreading. However that did mean that if I could install the OS on a new drive, there was a chance I could extract the files off the slowly dying platters.

Luckily it worked.

Still, after shuffling new and old hard disks around the machine I seem to have a PC that's working again, along with a copy of all my files (including my recently updated accounts).

Let's just hope it lasts a while...