deeeep baaaasss!

I am so excited. After running my home cinema/music setup for so long without a sub, and then with a pretty pathetic passive sub, I’ve now gone and plumped down some cash for a Rel-205. I’ve got Monitor Audio Radius speakers for everything else, and I was going to go with the Monitor Audio little baby sub. However, once in the shop the larger Monitor Audio Radius subwoofer was a hundred quid cheaper, and so I persuaded myself that this would be better. However, this took me into a larger price bracket, and so inevitably I started looking at others.

Rel are a company that just do Subwoofers. They used to be a small company that manufactured in the UK. However, they did get bought out by their US distributor a couple of years ago, and now they manufacture in China. This unit has both connectors for both LFE channel (the .1 of the 5.1), and also connectors for filtering the lower end of the front speakers for music. I’m not quite sure I understand how these differ from the standard subwoofer connectors where you plugin the feeds from the fronts, you set the crossover to filter all sound below a certain frequency to the sub, and then send teh rest back to the fronts, which need to be wired in series. This has a single lead, and so you do not need more speaker cable.  But from what I do understand there’s going to be nice tight bass for music. Not the annoying boom, boom, of cheaper subs, but proper backup for the main speakers. Wahey!

It arrives on Friday, and I already feel sorry for the neighbours.

Software Updates…….

Apple have released both Security Update 2008-001 for Tiger (OS X 10.4) and OS X 10.5.2. Cool, let’s hope these fix those annoying iChat AV problems with some routers and uPnP.

JoikuSpot- S60 to wireless Router

Now this is very, very cool, and about time.
JoikuSpot

Normally to connect your laptop via your 3G phone, you need to use it as a Bluetooth modem. Whilst this gives good speeds (well as fast as Bluetooth will allow) it does require setting up, and the use of 3rd party scripts in the case of my MacBook Pro.

Since most decent smartphones also have wifi now, it’s been discussed as to when you’re going to be able to use a 3G/S60/UIQ (perhaps even Windows) as a wireless Router. Connect your laptop to the ad hoc wireless network on your phone, and all external net access get placed over the 3G connection. Bloody great, and kudos to this company. Just think, you and some friends are all in a restaurant that does not offer free wireless. With your unlimited data plan, you get out your smartphone, pop it on the table and you and your (sad) friends connect their laptops instead of having a Conversation. Cool!

EDIT I’d forgotten I broke the wlan on my E90. Might take me a while to test this out.

SuperDuper for Leopard has arrived

Wahey! Finally the best way to backup/duplicate your Mac has come to Leopard.

SuperDuper!

Since I’ve upgraded to Leopard I’ve felt pretty insecure without having at least two bootable backups of my MacBookPro (to a firewire and also a DMG on my ReadyNAS+). Well it’s just been released, and I can backup to my hearts content. Seriously this is the easiest way to both backup AND to migrate to new hard drives. It’s an excellent piece of software!