Category: Articles

I am a Three prepay customer and my phone is the OnePlus One.  At a first glance, the two seem like great combination where the OnePlus is great for multimedia video and the Three network provides “All you can eat” data on the 4G network using band 3 (1800MHz) that the OnePlus supports.

In reality, my phone does not work in most rural 4G coverage areas and Three’s “All you can eat” data can slow down to a trickle very quickly, regardless of the time of day. Continue reading Three using LTE Band 20 (800MHz) and throttling downloads

As Ireland does not seem to have a feed-in tariff for solar power at this time of writing, I have been curious as to what it would cost to store excess energy in batteries if I ever decided to get solar panels installed.

If the building is completely running off-grid, then using batteries to store power makes complete sense as the solar panels alone will not run high power appliances, not to mention provide no power at all after sunset.  However, when the grid is available, but does not offer a feed-in tariff, is it really cost effective to store the excess solar power in batteries? Continue reading Storing solar power in batteries costs more than the grid

About a year ago, my De’Longhi DES16E stopped working.  When it failed, it would run for 2 to 3 minutes, then cut out with the display completely blank for about 15 minutes and then cycle on like this.  It was just two years old, but out of warranty.  At this point, I debated on whether to go with a desiccant model or another compressor, but in the end decided to go with a larger compressor model after weighting the pros and cons:

Continue reading Trotec 75S vs 100S dehumidifier at 20C 60% RH and desiccant comparison

This article is based on our experience of replacing an open fireplace with a Stanley Erin stove in a 4-bedroom single-level detached house, how the various coal products compare (plus a few to avoid) and how I light a smokeless fire. Continue reading Stanley Erin stove review and which coal works best for us

When I first got my Nokia 5800, one feature I looked forward to was its sat-nav feature (originally called Ovi Maps) which was advertised as a free service for certain Nokia phones, including my model. It offered the ability to download maps to the phone so there would be no need to access the network for map data like map services on other phone brands. This all sounded great, that was until I started noticing unexpected data charges on my phone account even though I know I have not been using the web browser or using apps that access the network. Continue reading Nokia Maps hidden charges (Symbian OS)

With flies being a real nuisance here at the time of writing this article, I figured I’d share my experience of dealing with these annoying flies. Continue reading How to kill pesky flies – Fly Swatter, Zapper, Spray,..?

After a few years of cooking on both lava rock and flame tamer barbecues, this guide is based on my experience with cooking with both types of gas barbecues. Continue reading Barbecue cooking: Flame Tamer vs. Lava Rock

While consumer digital thermometers tend to give reasonably accurate temperature readings to within 1C of the actual temperature, hygrometers can vary a lot and I don’t mean by just a percentage or two.  I placed 5 digital hygrometers in the same room and left them to adapt over a few hours.  To my surprise, the relative humidity percentage readings varied from 48% to 70%!  The temperature readings on the other hand varied no more than 1C of each other.  With three hydrometers giving similar readings (two with readings in the high 60’s and one showing 70%), I figured that the two giving the low readings were probably way off, considering it did feel quite stuffy in the room. Continue reading Measure relative humidity using an infrared thermometer

While there are a wide range of disk and partition cloning utilities available, many users may not realise that Windows 7 has its own disk imaging utility that is just as effective, but with the advantage of not costing anything to use. The user just needs either an external HDD or a second internal hard disk, the SSD to clone to and either a blank CD-R or the Windows 7 OS installation disc. Continue reading How to clone HDD to SSD with Windows 7′s own software

Most SSDs have two speed ratings for reading as well as for writing.  The first rating is the sustained MB/s performance, which is the main marketing most manufacturers use.  The second rating is the 4K Random IOPS performance, which gives a much better idea of how the drive will perform in the real world.  The sustained MB/s rating is the sequential transfer rate the SSD will maintain continuously, such as over a period of 30 seconds.  The 4K Random IOPS on the other hand is how many 4K (4096 byte) operations the drive will handle per second with each block being read or written to a random position.
Continue reading How to convert MBps to IOPS or calculate IOPS from MB/s