Less successful technological purchases
Mostly, I don't do impulse purchases. I research, research, and research again until I've bored myself to death and am sure I want the item.

Still, I am not immune, especially to the delights of cut price computer hardware. I've made several purchases, but some less successful ones including :

Winterm 3630LE. Gorgeous piece of kit - thin client in a 15" TFT. Only problem : never use it, and Windows CE 2.11 doesn't connect to Vista without crashing.

WinTV Celebrity. Now *this* is a serious piece of engineering. Full length ISA card, takes in the output from VGA, overlays TV/video, and outputs its own image. Does video capture, supports really high resolution. Originally 600 quid or so, got it for 30. Unfortunately, drivers were a bit variable and never really used it much.

Sigma Designs Reelmagic. Now this really was a bum purchase - ISA card - does MPEG 1/Video CD decoding without needing any CPU. Only problem : about three games supported it - all of which were crap, MPEG was dying at the time in favour of MPEGII/DVD, and practically every Video CD is shit. Still not got around to chucking it out.

dalsemi Tini. It's a neat low power board with networking, 1 wire connectivity for things like temperature sensors, onboard java stack etc. Only problem : 1MB RAM and quite slow. Suddenly realised that I wasn't actually certain what useful purpose I could do with it.

Skype/SIP gateway. Links your phone to Skype, so that everyone calls you on one phone. Only problem : isn't it a good idea to figure out if people want to call you on Skype, first? Never even opened the packet..
(syllopsium, Thu 21 May 2009, 14:16, 2 replies)

Reelmagic
My dad had one of those back in the day, Had a quite good live Eric Clapton VCD but that was about it!
(bill, Thu 21 May 2009, 14:36, closed)

Buy yourself a SkypeIn phone number
That way people can dial your Skype phone from a normal phone. I got an Edinburgh number that my family call me on in Australia.
( SteamedCleaner, Thu 21 May 2009, 15:08, closed)