Save Tango

Is Tango truly in trouble, or are they just fun, creative marketing people? You decide. And then shut up about it - it's obvious.

Looking for a cheap DVD player with USB and DivX playback?

If you want a DVD player, chances are most now support DIVX playback, but if they don't have a USB socket then you'll have to waste your time writing your files to DVD or CD for playback, alternatively you can get a DVD player with a USB socket and plug in a USB pen drive or USB hard drive*. If you want one of these magic machines from the future, have a look at these:

Cheapest: BIOSTEK - XC-150 USB/MPEG4 DVD Player £20 Pixmania via Amazon UK

Sigmatek - XS-700 Pro DVD Player - £29 Pixmania via Amazon

Cheapest with 1080p: Sumvision PHOENIX HDMI 1080p DVD Player with SD/MMC/MS Slot - £35 at Datakits (excluding postage) or £29 at Amazon (exc postage) - also features SD card slot for photos.

Cheapest branded: Philips DVP3260/05 - DVD Player with USB £39 at Amazon UK

Pioneer DV-310-K - DVD Player With USB Input (Black) - £53 at Amazon

Cheapest branded with 1080p: Philips DVP5990/05 - HDMI 1080p DivX Ultra DVD Player - £55 at Amazon UK

ONKYO DVSP406 DVD PLAYER (MULTI-REGION) 1080p - £67 at superfi

Pioneer DV-410V-K - DVD Player with HDMI Output, USB Input and High Definition JPEG Playback (Black) - £68 at Amazon

* Some struggle to power USB hard drives - I use an LG DVD player, and a Freecom XXS 250gb USB hard drive and that works fine.

Best and Worst of 2008 List

Best things of 2008 :- Lots of great cameras, all cheaper than ever, loads with image stabilisation, and wide angle lenses: Best budget: Canon A590, Sony W130, Best compacts: Olympus 1030SW, Panasonic FX150, Best zoom Pansonic TZ5, Canon SX110 IS, Best DSLRs: Olympus E510 (or E520), Canon 450D, see more here. Expect even cooler stuff next year including Olympus' Micro Four Thirds camera.

Second hand cars are now seriously cheap eg Ford Focus 2005 model (new shape) around £3500 on Autotrader.

Interest rate extremely low - so if you've got the right bank and mortgage type your mortgage could be much much cheaper.

Best technology of 2008: In my opinion is the Intel Core 2 Quad Core - 2.4ghz quad core chip was around £100 at it's lowest price this year - excellent performance and amazing price.

Biggest dissapointment of 2008: Spore - nasty DRM, didn't live up to the hype at all, not worth buying. Oh, and the awful financial market throughout the world.

Reasonable Screen Recording Software For Nowt

Not sure if it'll be useful to anyone here, but thought I'd jot a note. Yesterday I stumbled across a bit of software to record video files of you doing stuff on your PC. The most obvious use is probably to record tutorials with voice overs and stuff. So the above link is to a reasonable bit of free software to do the job. I've not been able to find any help files or anything, so it's a bit of a "follow your intuition" approach, but using their "lossless" video codec, the results can be quite good. Camtasia Studio, I gather is a more polished, sexy non-free product, that seems to get a lot of use by the pros, but for the rest of us, this free product might just suffice.