Well finally the office transformation is complete! Me and t’other half have matching desks now, we put down a wooden floor, got some filing cabinets, repainted the walls and i had two photographs of Eiko and Pip blown up to poster size. Oh and had a wooden blind. It’s a much nicer room now and we love being in there. Just need a couple of new office chairs and a nice new rug and we’re all set.

Whilst we were at it i’ve got us a NAS drive (networked storage) meaning we can have one big itunes library on the NAS drive which can be accessed from any pc in the house wirelessly. Can also stream videos from it, stream music to my Pure Evoke internet radio and there’s also a printer connected to it so we can wirelessly print from any pc in the house too. Fabulous. I do worry of course that one wrong move or setting will have the whole lot come tumbling down! I’m not convinced networks are the most stable of things so i’ll make sure i have a complete itunes backup on a separate drive just in case.

What i wouldn’t mind finding out is, can you run World of Warcraft on a NAS drive because it would be very handy to be able to play from any PC in the house. At the moment it’s installed on my main big laptop in the office but sometimes i’m on my smaller laptop in the bedroom and wouldn’t mind a quick game of WoW. I shall find out!

Anyway, here’s how the room is looking now (click to enlarge).

Well, i know i only just had that Sony Cybershot but the opportunity arose for a killer camera at a killer price so i went for it. First thing that attracted me to it is it’s zoom range – it goes from 25mm wide to 300mm – it will actually go beyond 300mm to over 500mm by lowering the pixels and on top of that you have digital zoom (not recommended but ok for quick grabs).

The screen resolution is far better than the Cybershot too, images and videos look brilliant on the display and like the Sony it can also shoot HD video in either AHVCD or Mpeg.  I went for the brown version but it also comes in silver, black, blue and red.

Anyhoo, here are my first pics and video taken with it. You know what surprised me?  Usually i open my pictures in photoshop to make aut0 adjustments to levels and curves and i found that the pictures didn’t need adjusting. So apart from the odd crop these pics are how they came out of the camera.

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Much as i love my Canon digital SLR camera and Canon HF100 HD camcorder, sometimes you just want something a bit more compact for casual snaps & clips. But at the same time you don’t want your causal snaps & clips to look like shit either. My previous compact camera was a Sony Cybershot T200 and it’s a brilliant snapper but the video wasn’t great. So i’ve upgraded to a Sony Cybershot T500 which is pretty much the same camera (though it goes from 8 to 10 megapixels) but it gains a 720 High Definition video recorder. Here’s my first test video with the camera:

I think it’s pretty good considering it came from such a tiny compact camera! Obviously it’s no replacement for a dedicated HD camcorder but it’s brilliant for something you can carry everywhere. Oh, and the photo’s ain’t bad either!

Click read more for my review
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Its snow time!