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I’d been thinking about buying a small low-powered PC I could use as a server for a while, but I couldn’t find one I liked, one that was fanless and not ridiculously expensive (or at least too expensive for what I considered its worth).
I like my Acer Aspire Revo R3610, but it’s way too noisy to be left on permanently. I had initially passed on the XS35, I think because of a prejudice against Shuttle liking to use custom parts rather than standard ones, but I came back to it and eventually took the plunge.
Part of the reason for picking the XS35 was it’s fanless. Quite a few systems stated they were silent, but when you got into the specs they still had fans, not a recipe for silence in my experience. The XS35 has no fans. I was going to put an SSD in it and run it with no moving parts at all, but the price/performance of a 2.5″ drive was too good and my experience with the Scorpio Blues is they are silent for all intents and purposes. So the machine runs totally silent, only the (overly) bright LED on the front indicates it’s on.
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18th June
So you’ve got a nice new Kindle, all fresh and filled with possibilities. Obviously you can buy books for it, but what else can you do with it? Read on to find out.
Getting Free Books
Once you’ve setup your Kindle you’ll want to get some books to read on it. You can buy books from Amazon (or other ebook stores, assuming they support it) but there are also plenty of free ebooks available and not just those which are out of copyright.
Supported Formats
It’s probably worth saying at this point that ebooks come in a variety of formats. The Kindle will support its own AZW format as well as Topaz (TPZ), plain text (TXT), Mobipocket (MOBI, PRC) and PDF documents. It can also handle HTML files and Word documents if sent via your Kindle email address as it will convert them (more details below) and you can convert from various formats (notably EPUB, the other big ebook format) using additional software (more details below).
The one thing to watch for is buying books in EPUB format (or other formats) as they’re likely to be protected by Digital Rights Management (DRM) code which will stop you being able to convert it.
Where to Find Free Ebooks
OK, so that said, starting with the big names, Project Gutenberg has long been a provider of free ebooks, largely those out of copyright, and they usually provide them in a range of formats so you should find one you can either download and load directly onto your Kindle (just connect it to your computer via the USB cable and copy the files into the documents folder, or use the software mentioned below).
Google Books is another big player in this market. They list books which you can’t download (but can preview) as well as books that are fully available (switch to advanced search and select ‘Full view only’ to focus on complete books). If the book is listed in their ebookstore then they usually offer then in EPUB and PDF (select the ‘Read on your device’ link) and if not then typically they’re in PDF.
Aside from selling ebooks, Amazon also list free ones as well. If you find the Kindle eBooks section of the site and scroll down to the bottom of the navigation on the left you should find a link to Free eBook Collections, which has details of external sites as well as the Kindle Popular Classics selection.
One of the sites linked to by Amazon is ManyBooks.net which, again, offers a variety of free books, largely out of copyright, in a wide range of formats to download.
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4th June
Leading up to last weekend something reminded me I had a batch of book reviews that had previously been housed on my personal blog, but got lost in the move to hosting on WordPress.com (which I did to try and get back into the Google index as they dropped me for some reason, the reviews were lost, incidentally, because I created a custom post type and then exported from a theme which didn’t have it, just FYI). I also had a hankering to have a play with WordPress’ custom post types and taxonomies. I’d already had a stab at it for book reviews, so most of the work seemed done and I figured it would be easy to throw something up. Which it would, only as it progressed I got a little more ambitious.
Anyway, it’s done now and you can find the site at consumeandreview.co.uk
I started by grabbing the latest version of WordPress and setting it up on my local development server. Once that was done I re-used much of my code from the book review custom post type I had created, but decided to convert it to a plugin instead (for future portability). I also added taxonomies for author and genre using the register taxonomy function. Previously I had stored author as custom meta data, but as it was something that could be shared by multiple books I figured it was better as a taxonomy and would save me re-typing (plus it allowed some functionality, such as author pages, much more easily). I also decided to change from the simple recommended yes/no system and go with a rating out of five, so that required a small change as well.
Once that was done I exported all my reviews from my old site and imported them using the WordPress Importer plugin.
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20th May
I use Media Browser to make perusing my ripped films and TV shows more visually appealing but, as good as the in-built functionality to retrieve cover images and backdrops is, there are times when it can’t find one, or not the appropriate one (lots of movies with the same title).
I used to prefer Salami’s Movie Organiser for filling in the blanks. It was easy to use and lightweight. The problem is it’s no longer in development and, while I’ve tried some of the other meta data tools they’re all a bit over- the-top or come with a cost. All I wanted was covers and backdrops, I’m not bothered about meta data (funnily enough I know about the movies I put on my HTPC, I bought them).
So, with a couple of days off I knocked up my own little app to retrieve a list of movie or TV folders and then do a look-up on themoviedb.org or thetvdb.com so I could grab the relevant images.
As I found it useful I thought I would release it could benefit anyone else.
Screenshots
Looking up a movie:
Looking up a TV show:
Installation
So far only tested on Windows 7 32- and 64-bit, so no guarantees on anything else. It requires .Net Framework 3.5 or higher.
Just download the file (link below), unzip and run setup.exe.
Download
You can download it here, just save it, unzip the contents to a folder and run the setup.exe file.
Instructions
These instructions can also be found in the Readme.txt file in the download.
Once you have installed the application:
- Once the application has loaded, simply click the browse button to select a folder which has folders for each of your movies or TV shows under it.
- Once you have located it, make sure the correct type is selected (Movies or TV) and then click Process.
- The box on the left should now display a list of movies/TV shows, simply click on an title and it will automatically search themoviedb.org (if Movies was selected) or thetvdb.com (if TV was selected) websites and return the results. It will also load the current cover and backdrop images from the folder if any are found. Titles with no cover image will have an asterisk appended to the name.
- Navigate to the main movies/show page if necessary (where multiple results are returned) and locate the image you wish to use as either the cover or backdrop image (note: right-click and select Back if you need to return to a previous page).
- Once you have found the image, right-click and select the appropriate option and the image will be saved automatically and named appropriately and the previews at the bottom of the app will be updated accordingly. Note that on thetvdb.com the full size images are not linked to/visible from the preview images, you have to click the image to reveal some options and then right-click on the ‘View Full Size’ link that appears and select the appropriate option to download the larger size as the cover/backdrop (not really needed for covers).
- Simply close the app when done.
1st May
Lifehacker has a couple of good articles on improving and cleaning your PC. The first deals with speeding up an old laptop. I would say (as they do in the article) that most people won’t need 4GB of RAM and the improvement from 2GB to 4GB will be minimal, so I’m not sure I’d bother. A Solid State Drive is not a bad idea, depending on how old your computer is, laptop or desktop, and they’re not difficult to install. They are price though.
Cleaning up your machine is a great, usually free, way to get some extra performance though. Which leads into their second article. Admittedly this covers more than just your computer and is basically just a link to some older articles, but it’s still valid.
Reinstalling your operating system, while a laborious process, does return the machine to original state and you’d be surprised how much faster it runs. Removing any old applications, performing disk de-fragmentation and clean-up also offers some boosts. If your hard drive is running out of space, move files onto an external (or separate disk) and you should get some improvements too.
9th January
Part of the reason for picking the XS35 was it’s fanless. Quite a few systems stated they were silent, but when you got into the specs they still had fans, not a recipe for silence in my experience. The XS35 has no fans. I was going to put an SSD in it and run it with no moving parts at all, but the price/performance of a 2.5″ drive was too good and my experience with the Scorpio Blues is they are silent for all intents and purposes. So the machine runs totally silent, only the (overly) bright LED on the front indicates it’s on.
