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Matthew Hill

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A Personal Domain Name is a pretty unique present to purchase someone, I certainly wouldn’t say it’s your average Birthday / Christmas present anyway. That’s exactly what I did last Christmas, I purchased my parents and brother their own Personal Domain Name. I managed to get them all firstnamelastname.eu domain names which I was quite pleased about. With “Hill” been a word in the dictionary and none of us having particular uncommon names the .com .net and co.uk domains had been taken way back in the mid 90’s. However the eu. domains were all available, what I like about the .eu domain extension is that .eu is shorter than .co.uk, which is great as I prefer my domains to be as short as possible. I was quite surprised by my family’s reaction to their Personal Domain Name, they seemed really pleased and are all now using their Personal Domain Name for various things. My parents have switched from their ancient pop email account from our ISP to using their own Personal Domain Name powered by Windows Live Domains. This means my parents now have web based access to their email, push email on their mobiles and can use it from both their PC, Laptop and any other internet connected device with a web browser. Personal Domain…

Dolphin Android is a port of the popular Dolphin GameCube / Wii Emulator to Android devices. Essentially Dolphin is an open source emulator that allows GameCube and Wii games to be played on devices other than the respective consoles. At the moment Dolphin is capable of full speed emulation of almost all Wii / GameCube games on Windows, Mac and Linux. Dolphin for Android however is still an early alpha and will not emulate any commercial games at present, it is however capable of emulating a few GameCube and Wii tech demos on your Android device. So although you will probably not be playing Mario Kart Double Dash, Super Smash Brothers or your other favourite GameCube / Wii games with Dolphin Android any time soon its quite possible you will be able to one day. The developer states the Dolphin Android port is in pre-alpha status, so to expect slow speeds, graphical glitches and a myriad of problems with it. To use Dolphin Android your Android device must: Support OpenGL ES 2 (99.8% of the Android Market) Have at least 1gb of ram With lower end Android devices approaching 1gb of ram as standard and dual core processors been pretty much standard in Android devices…

The RPC:S-5:AEC-0 Google Play Store Error The Google Play / Android Market error retrieving information from server RPC:S-5:AEC-0 error message can be a bit of a pain, the RPC:S-5:AEC-0 error just randomly appeared on my tablet after it upgraded to a newer version of Android. However this is how i managed to fix the RPC:S-5:AEC-0 error with ease. Load the Settings app, click apps, then select “All” Next in the all apps view find the “Google Play Store” and click on it Now click “Clear Cache” (Not Data), then Force Stop. Next in the same app list find “Google Service Framework” Click clear data (Not Cache), then Force Stop Switch off the phone or tablet and turn it back on You should be able to download and update apps from the Google Play store once more. Enjoy no more RPC:S-5:AEC-0 errors when downloading or updating apps.

DRM (Digital Rights Management) has always been hated by a lot of people, it restricts what you can do with content you have paid your hard earned money for, and usually end’s up causing people who purchase the content problems. Where as people who simply pirate the content will never have any issues with it. It’s hardly an incentive to purchase something when you can download it and get a better experience. Now i understand why content producers like DRM, it is supposed to protect content they produce from been freely shared.It also allows restrictions to be placed on the content you have purchased, for example you can only play this music on 2x devices. To complicate things more a device has to be able to handle the DRM embedded in a file, so if you purchase a TV Show on iTunes, that TV show is not going to play on your Android Tablet, Windows Phone, Linux powered media centre and so on… whats more that content has to be authorized for use by a remote server. So here is where the big problem starts, what happens if that authorisation / activation server is down, taken offline, or if the company you purchased the content ceases to exist in a few years time, what…

A VMware ESXI Low Power server for learning at home is something I have been interested in for a quite a while. Both VMware Esxi and Microsoft’s Hyper V Server is something i’ve kept randomly hearing about over the years, I recently did some reading up and decided a little VMware ESXI Low Power server dedicated to running virtual machines on my home network would be perfect. I’m always experimenting and trying new things in my free time. Usually when its been something totally new, for example a beta of Windows i’ve simply installed it on another hard drive and dual booted it. I personally don’t think that’s the most piratical thing in the world to do, I find that I end up booting back in to my main operating system, then staying in it. So this is where VMware Esxi or Microsoft’s Hyper V Server would be perfect, the idea is a little low powered pc can sit in a cupboard and run virtual machines, then be remotely accessed from any PC on my network. So with the idea in my head this is a project i wanted to do, i set about looking firstly at low power usage computers. Most of the thing i looked at were not really suitable, either been vastly underpowered in the case of Nettop…