I’m No Electrician | Tech Gadgets & Gizmos

OK the door hasn’t flown off the NY store or anything, the store I’m referring to is iTunes, the music store run by Apple has surpassed Walmart and become the largest music store worldwide.

The largest digital download store wouldn’t have any doors.  It’s operated via desktop software that connects via the Internet therefore isn’t really considered a brick and mortar business.  At this point, US consumers actually still purchase more CDs than downloads, but Apple has become number one over top CD selling stores like Walmart and Best Buy.

What does this mean for you?

Well, the advantages or the digital download store are quite obvious. You can buy a track, rather than a full album, you can even buy 4 tracks off an album without buying the full thing. You don’t have to leave the house and you can play it as soon as the track has finished downloading. The variety of choice you have is also 2nd to none (with the odd exception, cough Beetles cough) and probably better than any single store. The introduction of mp3’s have revolutionised the way in which people listened to their music.

The advances in technology are gaining so fast that it is hard to keep up with, the transition from digital music on ipods to digital movies on ipod was almost instant.  CD’s and especially records still have a market but that market is becoming more common with collectors and the everyday shopper will sooner or later make the jump to digital downloads.  

What is your preference? Do you purchase via digital download?

Have you ever been sitting at your desk and get the feeling that you are being watched? You really can’t tell if someone is standing there watching you play mindsweeper or surf the net while your in tray just keeps piling up!

Now you can keep an eye on who is making faces behind your back while at work with the C.H.I.M.P spotter. This little piece of kit is actually a rearview mirror for your monitor. Now you can see when someone is sneaking up on you or you will know exactly when to alt-tab back to your spreadsheet before the boss catches you.

What you get:
Convex mirror (3 inches diameter) fits easily on either corner of your monitor with accompanying Velcro. Choose between black and the new iCHIMP in stylish white.

The next time you are cruising online or playing your favorite MMORPG at work, make sure you can see clearly with this bad ass mirror setup from Thinkgeek.com, you won’t be disappointed.

I recently took part in the 2008 download day and I’m now running FireFox 3:

So far the new browser looks very good. I love the look of it and have not had any problems with moving across. All add ons have been added or updated, all passwords and data including bookmarks have been saved.

So far the number of downloads have reached over 13 million, 8 of which were completed within the 24 hours of download day.

Here’s my certificate from Mozilla for participation.

The reason behind download day was to try and set a new world record for downloads in a single day. The record attempt could not have been helped when the mass influx of pledgers on 17 June crashed the FireFox servers for a couple of hours. Still 8 million downloads in a day has to be a new record right?

Did you take part in download day 2008? What do you think of FireFox 3?

I’d just dug through the askimet spam box and have found 6 comments that were definately not spam. Apologies if you comment was one of those that the filter picked up automatically and i’ll make sure I check in there more often.

Thanks to everyone who reads and comments on the blog.

A few weeks a go I told of how I went for to play a game of poker and ended up doing a PC Upgrade. Now I warned you all that I was definitely no electrician and this is exactly why the blog is titled what it is.

I got to the game OK and started work on the machine, the lid came off and the power went off (at least I remembered that part) and in went the memory. The machine was booted back up and like a dream recognised the RAM. Next came the problem part, I had to back up the files from the current hard drive, install the new one and then put the files back on the new drive. Luckily I had 4 system restore Cd’s waiting for me……. I’m jumping a head of myself because I didn’t even get that far. The drive I had ordered was totally the wrong sort, I needed an IDE drive, but what I had was a SATA drive. There was no way this was going to work. So I sent the drive back and went to look for an alternative.

Now when I looked all I could see was SATA or PATA drives. No IDE drives.

This is where I learned something, a SATA drive is a serial connected drive and a PATA drive is a parallel connected drive. The PATA drive connects through the IDE cable so I now have one of these on order.

I always thought that drives were advertised as IDE so I wonder if some sort of globalisation naming has taken place and IDE drives are now referred to as SATA. Anyway crisis over and I will put the hard drive in at the next poker game.

As for the poker that evening? I put the least cash in the pot, which ended up being pretty massive and I clawed my way back from only having 2 chips to stay in the game til the last hour. So a mini victory for me.