Posts Tagged ‘gear’
Thursday, December 28th, 2006
Today I took a trip to Pixmania’s pickup store in London and managed to buy this
It was suppose to be for my mum (she gave me the mulla to buy it and all) but somehow I just got a bit excited and installed it on my room, was hoping to squat on the LCD for a bit but my mum gave in so now this TV is MINE mwahahah. I can do picture in picture (hence the muse board at the corner) as well as using it for hdtv, wii (with composite ports) and other stuff. Its an awesome LCD TV despite being a random and unknown brand. I only bought it since Jason recommended me it and said alot of people have reviewed it and said it was good (and it damn well is).
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Category anything, geek | Tags: Tags: gear, jason,
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Thursday, December 21st, 2006
Today I managed to purchase myself an awesome Canon EOS 400d DSLR camera. It was a rather rushed and impulse decision but definitely a wise one. I don’t think they will lower the prices of dSLR cameras after xmas so why wait all the way till then when you can simply buy one now and spend more time with it. As well as deciding on the time I was going to purchase it (ie today) I also decided on what Camera I should buy. My main contenders were the Canon EOS 400d and the Nikon D80. Most reviews would steer towards the D80, one of the main reasons being that it feels nicer and has slightly more features. Some personal preferences include the fact that it accepts SD cards as well as having an LCD protector.
Went to Pixmania to buy the camera since it was £480 there (cheapest you can get). Unfortunately they didnt have it in stock, neither did they have any 1gb extreme III memory cards. Guess I had to try another store. So I went to Jessops at Hammersmith and asked the man if i could compare the cameras (D80 and 400d). I thought it would be easy for me to compare here and make sure I’ve made the right choice. I tried the 400d and it was perfect, it felt perfect in my hands and is nice and light. I then got to hold the D80, boy it was big and heavy. I decided on the 400d pretty much when I held the camera.
Managed to purchase a few extra things, including a canon gadget bag and 3 years warranty. I managed to haggle the warranty down to £45 instead of £55. Was pretty proud of it, the manager tried ensuring that the deal was settled by saying happy stuff to me, it did work haha, he also wished me a merry xmas and all awwh. So yeah £575 for a 400d, £50 canon bag and a £55 3 year warranty. Slightly awesome 
.
The rest of the day was spent taking photos of random stuff, twas pretty awesome. Most of the photos can be found on my flickr page
Friday, December 1st, 2006
After uni on Friday, I thought I’d cheer myself up by purchasing some daddio music gear. This time I’m talking about proper gear, professional stuff. After heading to Putney High Street from Kingston, I went to WHSmiths to read some pro audio magazines. They were very useful, so I took a few free catalogues and leaflets from certain magazines and went to good old turnkey to buy the stuff I wanted.
And this is what I got:
- Digidesign Mbox 2 audio interface (has a few inputs for mics and guitars for recording) This comes with pro tools, the industry standard tool for audio recording. I felt it was important for me to learn the professional stuff as soon as possible so this was definitely useful. RRP is £290
- Shure sm58 LC dynamic vocal microphone; there was the sm57 to consider but i opted for the sm58 since I wont be actually recording any guitar cabs or instruments, I was considering recording the violin with it too, but see what happens haha. Definitely needed a vocal microphone for recording vocals. I’m not too keen on singing but I can occasionally give it a shot privately haha. That or take my mbox with me on the go and record people from my laptop. RRP is £70
- Sennheiser HD200 closed headphones; I previously purchased the HD202 headphones and was very impressed with it (well, when I say impressed, I mean they whoop most regular headphones, still no match for my Shure e3c earphones), so yeah, I thought I’d buy myself a pair since B had my HD202 now. One of the cool things about these headphones were the fact that you can easily replace the headphone cable as the headphones has its own headphone socket (if that makes sense?) which means you simply need a 3.5mm audio cable for it to work (which it comes with). These headphones will be used mainly for home recordings and all, they look a bit silly outside and are no match with my other pair of earphones. Having a nice pair of monitor headphones means you can comfortable monitor the recordings without disturbing anyone, as well as getting all the sounds etc. RRP is £35
- A nice 6meter long XLR cable for my mic. I bought some professional Planet Waves cables to ensure that none of the signal is lost and all. The cable was nice and bulky. £25
So I bet you’re wondering how much I managed to haggle from the above haha, well… consider the total of the above to be £420. Thats quite alot of money and all, I told them since I spent quite alot of stuff, I should get some discounts on the XLR cable. The lady managed to slash a tenner out of that, as well as providing me with a B Stock mbox 2. They said that it was an ex demo so it wasn’t used at all, which meant I can really save some money. All in all I spent £382 on the stuff above. Was mucho pleased.
However, upon arriving home, I managed to find out that the mbox 2 wasn’t simply an ex demo product. The hardware has been registered and used which meant that I wasnt able to register the mbox 2 and receive software updates on pro tools. Was REALLY bummed out by that, but no worries, Turn Key are amazing in terms of after sales support so I’m hoping to pop over at Turnkey and get this all returned so I can simply buy a brand new mbox2.
The whole night was spent playing around with the gear. I must say, I do not regret buying anything today, everything was amazing. The mic was alot cooler then the mics I had (which arent professional at all) and the mbox allowed me to do some recordings on pro tools and use all the plugins provided, I didnt install all the other stuff provided since it’s better to wait until I get my own brand new mbox and then install and register the stuff from that. The headphones were amazingly comfortable, the sound was superb and everything is just fine and dandy.
So yeah, heres some photos of the gear I bought, enjoy:
Tuesday, November 7th, 2006
Got bored so i decided to take photos of my desk, will look awesome when I get an Imac though, will be like one of those designer desks you see in films like DEVIL WEARS FUCKING PRADA haha
Tuesday, October 24th, 2006
For those who wish to make their PC’s look more like a Mac, there are several cases which can fulfil that wish, the most popular yet tedious approach is to buy a G4 mac pro and totally deface the case till no tomorrow. That would be the BEST way in achieving a mac like case.
For those who arent too keen on customising their own cases (like me), there are alternatives, such as the Lian Li case and the case I’ll be reviewing now, the Akasa Zen (White) case.
Today as well as my casio watch, I also received my Akasa Zen Pc Case. I’ve been meaning to get my pc case changed due to the noise it generated. I had about 6 case fans (yup case fans, not including other fans) installed on my previous case which meant the noise was simply unbearable. Though that’s what you get when you want a cool motherboard and cpu.
A very detailed review on the case can be found through XtremeComputing though the photos are a bit grainy. I’ll try and review the case here to provide a further understanding of the case
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Tuesday, October 24th, 2006
Yummy hehe, my new watch arrived, was kind of hoping that it was going to be a white watch but it turns out amazon screwed up on that part. I think if i didnt cancel my order and reordered the other watch, I would have probably got the white watch, though the names were totally mixed up and all. Ah well
The thing has a vibrating alarm which I like, best feature I’d say. I set mine so it vibrates every hour of the day (that’s quite alot of vibrations I dare say). You can random say “its 3 o’clock” to everyone and they’d think you’re weird, but the vibrating alarm is definitely useful for timekeeping at times, just alerts you when an hour has finished.
Apart from the vibrating features, the look of the watch is amazing, very sleek and geeky haha. Though I think the white one would have been better, you never know, I might invest in one as well (wearing them on separate occasions OR even worse, wearing both haha).
I’ve gone a bit dumbfounded in terms of reading the time, I forget to check my wrist still, due to the fact that i previously relied on my n70 to do the time keeping.
Wednesday, October 18th, 2006
Last night kev tried to persuade me into buying a mac mini, since the flagship model has 1.8ghz Duo core processor and a slightly alright harddrive, I was very tempted to get that NOW instead of waiting for some miracle to happen in order to buy a 20 inch imac. BUt unfortunately I managed to come to my senses in terms of performance you can get with an imac compared to a mac mini. With a mac mini you’d need to have it bloated up good and proper with ram upgrades etc in order to get it to function properly.
Having additional reads I’ve also found out that macs have an emulator type thing called Rosetta which allows the macs to run applications which are native to PowerPC architectures. Now if you’re wondering why I mentioned this, after reading several reviews, it seems like Rossetta is very processor consuming, it takes more energy for it to run applications that are not Universal (runs both PowerPC and Intel) so applications such as Photoshop (which still isnt converted into a Universal Binary) will be running as slow as a green snake on a sugar cane field.
So yeah, though I wont be using photoshop (already researched on using Gimp on a mac), its not a good idea to wait a bit more until most of the applications are ported AND (more importantly) I can afford it haha.
Another good thing about stalling the time you purchase something is the fact that they upgrade every so often, If i was silly enough to have purchased a mac a few months ago, I would have got an Intel Duo Core 1 processor instead of Intel Duo Core 2 (though the performance is only improved by a tiny bit). Gargh, i just wish I had some money haha. Would like to ironically work at apple store haha (though I’d be rather arsey there, plus I’d have to travel alot to get there *sigh*)
Tuesday, October 17th, 2006
My razer mouse has arrived woo! Came through the post quite early then I had expected. Was very excited and pleased about the product, you can DEFINITELY see and feel the difference between a 1600dpi mouse and a lousy 400dpi one. First things you’ll have to tweak about is the sensitivity, as the slightest move can get your mouse half way off the screen haha. Managed to install the drivers and configure the buttons and all.
One of the bad things about the Razer mouse however is the fact that buttons 4 and 5 of the mouse are fixed to the mouse (ie you can only assign them as on the left and right hand side of the mouse, not on both on one side like my previous mouse). This meant that forwarding pages will need to take a wee bit more effort.
I’ve tried using the mouse for gaming, image making and general browsing, it definitely proves the most useful out of them all for image making, picture the amount of times you’ve spent dragging a box and trying to make sure you get the dimensions right in terms of pixels, this mouse makes it a breeze, especially if you turn the sensitivity down so that your mouse moves incredibly slow so you know whats going on.
The mouse looks pretty sweet next to my keyboard, I think I’ll take a photo of it when I get my z120 camera back haha
