about:toys

audio/video

Inger & I enjoy spending time watching DVDs, listening to music and watching the occasional video on our entertainment system, which comprises of the following components:

Custom designed and built Class A-A-AB power amplifier.
Custom designed and built left & right front speakers. They are a transmission tower design, as opposed to the traditional bass-reflex design.
Marantz SR-870 Dolby Prologic decoder / Tuner / Surround PreAmp
Krix Centrix center speaker.
Tannoy M2 rear speakers.
Pioneer DV-600AV DVD player.
Nintendo Wii game console.
Philips TiVo (series 1, 320 GiB) PVR, running the OzTiVo image.
Pioneer PD-S703 CD player.
Loewe Aventos 3781 television (Q2500M chassis) with inbuilt DTV tuner.
Foxtel STU-200 Cable TV decoder.
One for All Kameleon 6 (URC-8060) remote control. Highly recommended.

books

We have a large collection of books (catalog hosted at LibraryThing).

Most of my stuff is Science Fiction, with a bit of fantasy from my younger days, as well as a smattering of other genres. Some of my favourite authors include: Isaac Asimov, Iain Banks, Steven Baxter, Greg Bear, Greg Benford, K.J Bishop, David Brin, Kim Newman, Alistair Reynolds, Dan Simmons, and Vernor Vinge.

transport

bikes

I ride a Trek Soho 4.0, with a Shimano Alfine 8-speed internal hub gearbox, and disc brakes.

Inger rides a Giant Cypress City.

Brendan rides an Apollo Mayhem 20" BMX.

public transport

We're regular users of Melbourne's Metlink public transport system. We are well serviced by trams at our apartment (seven routes past the front door; 3, 5, 6, 16, 64, 67, 72), and it's a fifteen minute journey to Flinders Street railway station.

I have a Yearly Zone 1/2 Metcard. Inger has a Yearly Zone 1 Metcard.

car

We've been Car Free since September 2005.

We're members of Flexicar Car Sharing.

we've previously had a MY03 Subaru Liberty Heritage wagon, and a more stylish yet less reliable MY99 Audi S3.

computers

Being a computer geek, I've obviously got a fair collection of hardware lying around. Here's an (incomplete) list of stuff that is in use:

athene - Dell Inspiron 8600 (Pentium-M 2000, 1024 MiB RAM, 60 GiB HD, 1920x1200 display) running Windows XP. Inger's main workstation.
argo - Dell PowerEdge SC430 (P-D 2.8 GHz, 3072 MiB RAM, 2 x 500 GiB HD) running NetBSD/i386. The home file server.
antiope - PC (Core2Duo 1.8 GHz, 4096 MiB, 120 GiB HD) running Windows XP. Luke's main workstation.
charon - Billion BiPAC 7404VGO-M ADSL2+M router / 802.11g access point / VoIP ATA. The external router/firewall.
odysseus - Apple MacBook Pro (2.4 GiHz CPU, 4096 MiB RAM, 160 GiB HD) running OS X.5. Luke's work laptop.
tivo - Philips TiVo PVR (220 GiB HD)
wii - Nintendo Wii.

music

We have a reasonable large and diverse music collection, including: ambient, blues, pop, rock, soundtracks, trance, and techno. One day I may put my CD database on the web, which makes it easier to work out who borrowed my CD's.

DVDs & videos

We've got a reasonable collection of DVDs, both movies and TV series that we enjoy.

photography

I currently use a Canon Digital IXUS SD750 camera to take my photos. We previously owned a Digital IXUS S100, which served us well for nearly 5 years and over 5500 photos before the screen developed a crack and ceased to function.

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