As much as I love a good mechanical keyboard, my wife (or more specifically, her hearing) does not. There’s no denying that even though a good mechanical keyboard is the ultimate typing experience they can generate an ungodly amount of noise.
So, I was despatched to my local IT market with an instruction to buy a quieter keyboard. OK, love, don’t have to tell me twice.
Continue reading Review: Corsair K55 KeyboardI am a huge, huge lover of the Raspberry Pi platform and have used them all over the house for years now, but even I would have to admit that the built in audio capabilities are pretty dire.
That’s not really surprising, the Raspberry Pi was designed as an educational tool, it just happens to have been taken on by the hacking/modding community.
Continue reading Review: RaspyPlay4 BoardI’ve often wondered just how much your CPU can really affect the performance of a gaming PC. Surely most of the grunt comes from the GPU?
As it happens I had a couple of different systems to hand; my old i5-4690K rig and my AMD Ryzen 2600 machine, the results were quite interesting:
Short answer: yes, an older or slower CPU can absolutely slow down your gaming performance. So, before you go out and buy a Nvidia 2080Ti, spare a thought for whether your machine is actually up to the task.
I recently switched to a Macbook Pro as my daily driver laptop, with one of the compromises made being that it only has USB type C ports on the side. This is incredibly annoying given all I have to carry around; a mouse, USB storage, SD cards, the list goes on.
So, I was in the market for a cheap and easy USB C Hub, and Inateck kindly provided for the purpose of this review.
Continue reading Review: Inateck USB C Hub and OTG AdapterI’ve been an AMD fanboi for as long as I can remember. My first PC that I bought with my own hard earned money was an AMD K7 (Athlon) back in 2001.
So I was super excited with the announcement of AMD’s Zen2 and Navi platforms, both running on a 7nm process. So what was I to do? Here’s my 3800X / 5700XT build.
I recently upgraded my main PC and fell into the wonderful trap of adding just a few RGB elements. By the time I was finished it ended up looking like a unicorn orgy – hence the name of the build.
For quite a while now there have been a few different ways to program a Raspberry Pi as a a console emulator for some retro gaming action. The latest version of the Pi at this point (version 3) is a fantastic basis for emulation, with plenty of USB ports, HDMI out and enough processing power to emulate consoles all the way up to the original Playstation with ease.
The downside has always been that the port layout and overall look of the stock Raspberry Pi case don’t really lend themselves to the task, but thankfully the good folks at Retroflag have taken care of both of these issues with their NesPi Raspberry Pi case. Continue reading Review: RetroFlag NESPi Raspberry Pi Case
Back on the old Tech Made Easy site Synology were one of the first manufacturers to offer me any review opportunities, and for six years we continued to work together on reviews, news articles and competitions. I even got to travel to Old Trafford and sit in on a press conference for DSM 6 and check out some of their latest products, and my Synology branded foam stress cow (an homage to Synology’s UK home in Milton Keynes) still sits on my desk to this day. Continue reading 5 Years On: Synology DS412+
While I struggle to get some new content together over the next few days I’m looking back over my more popular YouTube videos and getting them presented here on the NEW, IMPROVED TechMadeEasy.
Check out this video where I compare two versions of XBMC (now KODI) for the Raspberry Pi mini-computer.
