When I first got my Sony PSP I noticed in the menus a link to “LocationFree”. I didn’t have a clue what this was so I searched on the internet and found that you could watch TV wireless on your Sony PSP if you had a LocationFree base station. How cool is that? Unfortunately these were only available in the US at the time.

Sony have now released these in the UK a short while ago and although they were out of  stock on their online store I found one on Ebay which was also a bargain and I couldn’t resist the temptation to buy it.

Setting up my PSP to receive TV was a piece of cake and took less than 5 minutes. All I had to do once I had connected the base station to my Sky+ box was to put it into setup mode then get the PSP to find it and register itself and I was set. I have to say I was a bit dubious how well it would work but to my amazement the picture quality received on the PSP was excellent.

Next thing to do was setup the remote control by downloading the codes to my PSP. This again was a simple exercise and now I can happily control my Sky+ satellite receiver anywhere in the house or garden.

Now I had got the PSP working the next task on my list was to get it working with my Sony UX180P. This wasn’t quite as straightforward as the PSP and took a little longer. Mainly because I don’t think the instructions were all that clear or I wasn’t reading them properly.

The confusing thing to start with was that I couldn’t connect to the base station. It turns out that unless you have the base station connected into your router by cable it won’t work. It wasn’t a problem for the PSP but the pc was a different story altogether.

This is one thing that I had overlooked when reading the specs before I bought it. Being a wireless device I had thought it would connect to my router wirelessly but this isn’t the case. It needs to hard wired in with a cable. Now this was going to be a problem for me as the location of the base station was going to be in a different room to where my router is. Luckily this didn’t turn out to be such a big problem after all. I bought a Netgear wireless game adapter and plugged it into that and it worked straight away.

Picture quality on the PC was equally as good as the PSP and again was excellent. My only disappointed is that on the PSP there is a button to control the picture format so if you are feeding it with a widescreen signal you can stretch it out to fill the whole screen as it should be but this feature isn’t available yet for the PC. I only hope they support this in the future with an upgrade to the software.

Now for the tricky part. I wanted to set it up to watch TV over the internet. This involved setting up port forwarding in the router to the base station which wasn’t such an issue as I had done this before with my wireless camera. The only real problem I had was finding out how to setup the dynamic dns service in the base station. This part got me scratching my head a lot as it wasn’t that clear in the instructions. The problem I had was I was looking in the wrong place. Instead of the advanced settings it was actually in the easy setup menu. Once I had found the correct menu it was as simple as can be. You don’t need to sign up to anything and the dynamic dns service assigns you a web address to connect to the base station with.

In the specs it says that the minimum requirements are a broadband connection with upload and download speeds no less than 300kbs. As my current provider only gives me a maximum of 256kbs and probably doesn’t achieve that I was a bit dubious to whether it would actually work or not. I was pleasantly surprised to find that it did and although the picture quality wasn’t anywhere near as good as connecting directly to the base station it was perfectly viewable. I would say it was as good as watching a program recorded on an old VHS video tape.

Things can only improve when TalkTalk finally let me go and I get a different provider with 3 x the upload speed I’m currently getting.

So now I can happily watch anything on TV from home including all recorded programmes on my Sky+ box anywhere in the world where I can connect wirelessly to a hotspot or a 3G connection with my Sony UX180P.

I have to say it is pretty amazing and if anyone had told you ten years ago that you would be able to do this you would have laughed in their face. Imagine what we will be doing in another 10 years?

I mentioned before an offer that Orange was doing where you could get unlimited internet browsing for ?1 a day and now it seems hot on their tails T-Mobile has launched a similar offer giving you unlimited internet browsing for £1 a day.

This offer from T-Mobile only applies if you are using a Pay As You Go phone and doesn’t extend to their contract phones where they encourage you to take out their Web ‘n’ Walk plan as an add on to your existing contract.

I guess this is one instance where it pays to be on PAYG which is strange considering how all the mobile companies try really hard to sign us up on contracts.

I am going to try it out with my Sony UX180P although strictly speaking you aren’t supposed to do it.

Not so much a gadget but more a work of art and a great piece of engineering.

The Geochron Kilburg clock allows you to see what time it is anywhere in the world at a glance.

The clock features a moving map which shows areas of day and night making a complete cycle every 24 hours and gradually changes shape with the seasons.

I managed to pick this one up on Ebay at a considerable saving on the retail price (for a clock they are expensive) and it has been worth every penny. It now hangs on the wall above my desk so if ever I need to know if someone is likely to be awake across the world I can just glance up and see instantly what time it is.

It’s great for planning holidays as well locating where a country is without having to get the atlas out.

The Sony UX180P comes with 2 Built-in Cameras (front: 0.3M pixels and back: 1.3M pixels) which although handy is not much better than a modern mobile phone.

I personally wouldn’t use it in preference to a digital camera but it can be quite useful in situations where you’ve left behind the camera and you need to take a quick picture or video.

Below is a small video taken with the UX180P of our pet rabbit Bugs.

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This is a slightly blown up version of the original but does give an idea of what to expect. What surprised me was the amount of background noise picked up by the built in microphone. What you can hear on the film is the fan or maybe hard disk or a combination of the two. In the reality of using the UX180P you wouldn’t actually notice these sounds.

If a had to pick my favourite gadget of all time it would have to be the Apple Newton Messagepad.  For those of you that don’t know what a Newton Messagepad is it was at the time a state of the art PDA far ahead of anything else on the market.

My first Messagepad was the MP100 which I bought way back in 1994. I used this continuously until my next purchase which was a vastly improved MP130 which came with an all important backlight so I could now use it happily in the dark.

In 1996 they then brought out the MP2000 which I immediately purchased. This again was a vast improvement over the previous the model with a speed increase from 20MHz to a whopping 162MHz. Everything on it just worked so much better and it was fast. To this day I have never come across a PDA with handwriting technology that worked as well as this did. Bearing in mind it was launched 10 years ago you can see how way ahead of its time it really was.

Sadly Apple canned Newton in 1998.

I used my MP2000 which I later sent off to Apple to be upgraded to a MP2100 right up until the day it finally died only a couple of years ago. I’ve since bought a second-hand MP2100 off Ebay for nostalgias sake but confess since I lost all the info on the one that died I have never got round to using it.

So now at home I have my collection sitting in a drawer consisting of:

1 x MP100
1 x Dead MP2000
1 x MP2100
1 x Sharp branded MP
1 x eMate 300

I wonder if they will be worth anything in time to come?

For anyone who wants to know more of the ins and outs of the Messagepad there is a good page of information here.