Yearly Archive: 2016

CallamMcMillan.com > 2016

The Cheapest PC: July 2016

21/08/2016 0 Comments

To date, the trend has been for the cost of the cheapest PC to fall. However, following the vote to leave the European Union, what has the adjustment in the value of the dollar done to the price of your computer in July? Using scan.co.uk, who are my goto place for computer supplies, I decided to find out.  As we did back in May, we’ll look at what the cheapest PC you can build is, then look at what you can get from eBay on the used market. Case and Power Supply The CiT1021 is no longer on sale, so instead…
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The Cheapest PC: May 2016

14/06/2016 0 Comments

In March I wrote about the cheapest PC I could build, it came to just under £195. Now it’s the end of May, another two months have passed, new products come onto the market, and older ones are discontinued and retired. Surely though, not much can have changed since March? Using scan.co.uk, who are my goto place for computer supplies, I decided to find out. Last time I specified two machines – the first being the very cheapest thing you could build, the next being something that you could possibly live with. What we’ll do this time is attempt to duplicate these setups,…
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WordPress Security: Some useful tools

31/05/2016 0 Comments

Look to the right of the page and you’ll see the effect various personal issues have had on my free time. Couple that with needing to do a load of work on the house, and my capacity for looking after this website has become near zero. The problem is that administrative overhead didn’t go away – comments still needed to be moderated, and the number of failed login attempts was starting to become a worry. So one lunchtime at work I decided to look at some WordPress security tools. Ultimately I came up with two plugins and a useful website…
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The PC Builder Series

24/04/2016 1 Comment

  What is the absolute minimum you can build a new PC for, and should you? This is a regular series that looks at the market for new PC parts. From May 2016, we’ll also look at what’s on the used market for the same price.July 2016May 2016March 2016January 2016 These are a series of one-off articles that look at different things to consider about the PCs and the PC market.Another way to do it: Buying 2nd hand PCs

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The cheapest PC – Another way

22/04/2016 0 Comments

In the previous articles on building the cheapest PC, the premise has always been that it’d be nice to have an Intel machine, but they’re too expensive, so lets go for AMD instead. While it’s not a bad argument, the result is always going to be disappointing or underwhelming. Fortunately there is another way, and I actually put my money where my mouth is on this one. That is to buy a used PC from a site like eBay. Here we’ll talk about what to look for, how that fits into the wider scheme of building a new computer, and…
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Speaker Cable Sizing – By the numbers

18/04/2016 0 Comments

During a recent reshuffle of all the rooms of the house, I found myself going through the laborious process of moving my office, and all the equipment therein. Part of this meant rewiring my monitor speakers. While I was doing this, I didn’t have enough speaker cable, it was too late to go out and get some, and I was too impatient to order some on the internet and wait for it to arrive. What to do? I went into my store cupboard and grabbed myself a length of 1.5mm2 flexible cable, and hooked the speaker up using it. Having plugged in…
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WordPress: Looking at the Activity Log

04/04/2016 0 Comments

When I last wrote about the site at the end of January, I mentioned that I’d installed an activity monitor. Logging is not a standard feature of WordPress, so you’ll need a plugin. The one I chose is the Aryo Activity Log. It’s now been running for two months, and I have drawn a number of conclusions. The information below uses data gathered since January 31st 2016. The conclusions are: Updates are frequent, so don’t ignore them In two months there have been two core updates, and 16 plugin updates. If we extrapolate that out to cover a three year period,…
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The cheapest PC revisited – March 2016

25/03/2016 0 Comments

Early in January, I wrote about the cheapest PC I could build. It came to just under £200. Since then, time moves on, new products come onto the market, and older ones are discontinued and retired. Surely though, not much can have changed in 10 weeks? Using scan.co.uk, who are my goto place for computer supplies, I decided to find out. Last time I specified two machines – the first being the very cheapest thing you could build, the next being something that you could possibly live with. What we’ll do this time is attempt to duplicate these setups, making substitutions where…
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Why you can’t rely on redundant

04/02/2016 0 Comments

Some months back I spoke about setting my friend and partner in crime up on a pfSense router. Part of the reason for doing this was that he had dual WAN links and we could put them into a redundant configuration. I stress now, this wasn’t the primary reason, more of an added bonus. It was therefore with some surprise that I got the following text message on Tuesday: And my internet is down My first thoughts were that there had either been a power cut or some muppet had put a digger through the BT wiring. So, away from…
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Three months of WordPress: A review

31/01/2016 0 Comments

In October I’d had enough of this website. I had topics I wanted to talk about, but getting them onto the screen was so difficult thanks to a half finished editor and a lack of motivation on my part to finish getting the site working. For the first eight years of owning this website, I’d steadfastly refused to use WordPress or any other CMS system. Then I decided to give it another go. It’s amazing what a few years of development on a product can do. The experience went from being impossibly annoying, to being relatively straightforward. Three months on,…
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