Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Nintendo DS Homebrew!

What this is about, creating your own projects, applications or games and there's a lot of great homebrew stuff around. Getting set up for this does allow you to play pirated games though which isn't so great for the industry and a reason for bad press on the home brew scene.

Cyclo DS is my choice for cartridge which I got from Abotcity. The reason, this is updated on a regular basis and it auto patches, which means you don't have to mess around with application roms, stick them on a micro SD card and away they go, it is also nicely made and can handle larger than 2GB cards. I use a 8GB card that I got from Newegg.

Apart from being updated regulary, what makes this the best card to use, you don't have to stick your roms in the root of the card, you can stick them in folders so you can organise your apps how you like and stick photos and media files on there and play them with a media player.

Okay, your set up, now what, a couple sites to start you off are NDS Homebrew and NDS Hive. You'll find applications ranging from audio tools and painting tools to maps, weather tools and other apps that use your wifi connection as well as home made games.

Sunday, March 1, 2009

Child Safety Gate

Well it's gotten to that point where we really needed one for our crawling tot.

Our criteria was based on:-
-Recommendations from friends/family
-Cost
-Ease of use and installation; not requiring it to be hardware fixed because we rent

With that in mind, we went with Safety 1st Perfect Fit Gate - $35 so the price was good considering how expensive some are, also it is a sturdy gate, not the best looking but it can be pressure fixed against the door frame.

Over all it works as a safety barrier, but as a opening gate, not so good because you do need to use the hardware for that to work, screwing it into the wall and using the mounts, which does take the point of the pressure fit away some what.

The auto fit system which seems good on paper, and when watching it work, does seem to work well, but it is only on one side of the gate so I can see how this might not work so well for people who have base board heat on both sides of a corridor or other things that could be in the way against the wall.

It is also quite heavy too, so definitely make sure you have it installed securely.

Over all, I think it works quite well and worth the money, though if we had our own house and could install a proper gate I would perhaps look at another option.