When Mark Shuttleworth, the man behind Canonical/Ubuntu, made the comment that Ubuntu should be prettier than Apple OSX in near term I got excited - the man was absolutely right. It doesn’t matter how customizable and operating is, or how good can you make it look with some effort if it does look bad out [...]

Pioneer BDC-202 is an interesting combo drive that brings you the features of a Blu-ray BD-ROM drive and a DVD recorder. As such it is an interesting choice for any home computer, but especially for HTPCs due to the Blu-ray playback features. We have just started testing the drive, and as usual our primary interest [...]

After quite a bit of consideration, I finally decided to order myself a PlayStation 3, the 40GB model. Unfortunately I had to send it back for replacement or repairs, as the unit I received was obviously faulty. Interestingly, I am not the only European customer that has bought a faulty PS3 40GB unit. Read on [...]

Maxell is a well known media manufacturer that has been in the business for decades. They used to ship media of their own using Maxell’s media indetifiers (MID), but recently the manufacturer of their media has varied a lot. We tested their current 16x DVD recordable offering for both, DVD-R and DVD+R. The DVD-R discs [...]

DVD recording technology has not taken any quantum leaps recently. The recording speeds are pretty close to the velocities physically possible, and overall the technology is quite mature. Nevertheless it is nice to see the vendors still releasing new and improved models. Pioneer DVR-115D continues the famous product line of Pioneer Electronics and while it [...]