Category Archives: Home Network

Scottish Power Economy 7 Rates and The Owl SQLite Queries

Posted by dave on June 14, 2012 No comments

In a previous post I talked about querying data from The Owl SQLite database, and here I will advance on that a little. I’ve also recently made some changes to my home network after upgrading to Virgin’s Superhub and 60Mb …

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The Owl USB Energy Meter and using the SQLite Database with PHP

Posted by dave on June 14, 2012 2 comments

I’ve had The Owl running for a little while now and the software that comes with it is a little bit rubbish to be honest. I kinda works OK I guess but is very limited, so it was time to have a little …

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Wiping a Hard Disk from within Windows

Posted by dave on June 1, 2012 No comments

For a while now, prior to selling any computer bit on eBay, I always wiped the disks using DBAN from a CD. This worked well, If the machine would boot from CD anyway. I have a USB to SATA kit …

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DVB-T Signal Strength and MCE TV Tuners

Posted by dave on May 31, 2012 No comments

In my recent post, I talked about added multiple tuners to my Windows 7 Media Centre. I’ve since removed both the Cinergy 2400i DT cards and added in 2 x Hauppauge HVR-2200 dual tuner cards. The Cinergy ones worked ok, …

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Windows 7 Media Center & Multiple TV Tuners

Posted by dave on May 23, 2012 1 comment

I hadn’t planned on writing a post about this but after all the trouble I ran into, I figured it might help others. Ok, the story: I had Windows Vista running on a P4 3.0GHz 3.5GB RAM Dell PC, with …

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Axis 2100 Network Camera Repair

Posted by dave on April 18, 2012 2 comments

I bought an Axis 2100 camera off the bay the other day, it didn’t have a power supply but was very cheap so I took a gamble with it. I bought an AD-121AD generic power adaptor from the bay too, …

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Creating virtual directories in Windows using MKLINK

Posted by dave on November 16, 2011 No comments

I won’t go into too much detail as to why I needed to do this, but basically I needed a network share to look kinda like a local folder. After experimenting with NET USE, SUBST and various other solutions, I …

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Managing Hyper-V Server 2008 R2 in a Workgroup

Posted by dave on June 2, 2010 No comments

I setup a new Hyper-V server at home last night. The install itself was straight forward, I’m basically trying to run even less servers to keep the old energy bills down. It’s a shame there is no USB support in …

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Fitting the Armoured Electric Cable Outside

Posted by dave on May 30, 2010 2 comments

Now that we have a Hedgehog, it was time to get more permanent power to the garden. I picked up some 1.5mm SWA 3 Core Armoured Cable from B&Q along with some conduit, a metal back box, an RCD plate …

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