Following on from something my buddy Flavio said at work yesterday, I ended up on a bit of a bargain gadgetfest today. Take a £35 media HDD enclosure from Maplin; add a £35 250Gb HDD from Novatech; copy all your MP3s, various movies, and all your pictures across onto it; and you’ve both a handy USB-2 backup drive, but also a very easy way of listening to all your MP3s through your proper amp in the living room, and watching *cough* movies in AVI/MPG more easily than burning them to DVD on your big TV.
Admittedly the manual for the media player is up to the typical standards of a bargain bit of Chinese electronics, and the user interface is crap in the extreme but it’s still a bargain! I found the mention of the EFFEET (sic) button in the manual to select the style of slideshow transition effect mildly humourous, until I then realized that the remote control really did have an EFFEET button to change effects :-).
Whilst in Maplin I also picked up a cheapo 4-way Kameleon remote control which appeals to my love of things that light up. Apparently the 2nd generation models eat batteries … probably because simple minded people like me keep picking them up just to witness the neat trick which is a remote control that lights up electro-luminescently when it detects motion! My task tomorrow is to try and program the freaking thing to work with our living room setup, though I’m actually leaning towards using it in our bedroom since our digibox remote control has been stuffed since new.