Welcome to Brian's Jottings.
I spend a lot of time writing software on the PC and I've always been interested in making it work as hard as possible for me. This is not always easy. Both software and hardware conspire to place road humps in the path of an otherwise smooth ride. However, with some patience you can achieve quite a lot. This site is a random collection of personal PC-related achievements and links to others with similar interests.
I have my
own electronics company manufacturing PC-based automatic test equipment but my
own speciality has evolved into writing the software that controls the systems
that we make. In addition to this use of the PC, I am particularly interested
in home automation - a natural progression from a teenage attempt to automate
my bedroom curtains with some string and an old car wiper motor. Today, much of
the house lighting and garden watering is X10
controlled and managed by a house server PC fitted with a webcam. More recently Windows Media Center edition
(MCE) has grabbed me. This is Microsoft's digital home offering for recording
TV, playing music and viewing photos in the home. I've spent time
building MCE PC's, interfacing them to various displays and linking them on a
network to distribute video and audio around the home. There are so many issues
associated with this that I've started to maintain my
own page of MCE links and details.
ArtSplit - a file-splitting program which works with huge files.
New! Click here to see how to upgrade media center from a single tuner to a dual tuner.
Building a really quiet Media Center PC for the bedroom.
Convert DVR-MS files to MP3 automatically.
Brian Frost, Ferndown Dorset.