Gizmo of the Month - 3G PAYG Dongle with no expiry!

Vodafone are offering 3G dongles with no pay monthly fee and no expiry on download credits purchased. See here for details.

As far as I know they are the only company currently offering this, although if anyone knows otherwise I would be very interested.

Basically you buy the dongle for £39 with a gigabyte of credit for free, then when it runs out you buy another gig for £15. There no requirement to do this and there's no expiry on the 1GB you have purchased (unlike all other offerings I have seen). £15 per gig isn't very cheap admittedly but at least you don't have to pay it every month!

Posted by Daniel: 13:38, Thu 3rd Sep 2009

Gizmo of the Month - Techno-Balls

Out of all the Xmas presents I got this year, I had to tell you about this one. What looks like a simple marble run kit is actually hours of constant tweaking and adjustment to get that perfect swish mesmerising marble motion. If you are even slightly obsessive-compulsive like me you will love it!

I personally got the Techno-Balls "Hi-Lift Drive Helter Skelter" (269 piece set) and although once you've built and perfected it there's not a whole lot of room for customisation, it does take a considerable amount of time to do and makes an impressive gizmo ornament at the end of it. However fingers crossed I will get another kit next year and be able to combine the two to unleash some of that supressed creativity potential ;)

Posted by Daniel: 11:21, Sun 16th Mar 2008

OBDII, Check Engine lights and fun with car diagnostics

Ever felt that you were once a pretty good home car mechanic until all this computery stuff came out? Ever got a check engine light come on and felt you had no choice but to take your car down the local dealership and prepare to be fleeced? Ever wanted one of those gadgets you see the mechanics using which tell you instantly what the fault on your car is? ...or maybe you just fancy a cool gizmo that draws graphs of your 0-60 times, horsepower, fuel consumption, speed, rpm, etc.? Personally they all sound useful to me...

(Updated: 10:53, Sun 13th Jul 2008)
Posted by Daniel: 22:32, Sat 29th Dec 2007

Removing Windows Mobile 6 Branding

Just recently I obtained on contract a Samsung SGH-I640V (sometimes referred to as a version of the Blackjack Slider). Its a great little Windows Mobile 6 based smartphone which had unfortunately like many phones fallen victim to Vodafones branding butchery. One of the things I personally found particularly painful was the horrific background images and red colouring which appeared all over the place. In my quest to remove this obnoxiousness I discovered a few little tips and tricks which may be useful to anyone else in a similar dilemma.

Posted by Daniel: 21:56, Thu 13th Dec 2007

Syncronising the Parrot CK3100 and Windows Mobile 6

I've owned a Parrot CK3100 for many years now and I can honestly say its a great Bluetooth car kit, one of the best in fact. No matter what weird and wonderful phones I have thrown at it in the past (and trust me I've had some wierd phones over the years) with a bit of persuasion its always worked.

This time around I had to do a bit more persuasion than normal so I thought I'd let you guys know how to get it working and hopefully save someone a lot of effort.

Posted by Daniel: 16:07, Fri 7th Dec 2007

Matching Multiple Monitors - The GretagMacBeth way

When running a multi-headed setup on a budget its not always possible to have identical monitors; this introduces the really irritating problem that across your screens the colours dont match. If like me you spent hours and hours playing with colour controls and pieces of software which supposedly help you set your gamma, etc and still never quite managed to get it right - then you probably need to invest in a colour profiling tool.

Posted by Daniel: 12:34, Wed 5th Dec 2007