Then we moved in and slowly accumulated “stuff”.. “things”.. and “bits’n'bobs”. They piled up.. evolved.. and formed gangs, which attacked us on the way to the fridge. We fought back with charity shop donations and car boot sales, but the onslaught eventually overpowered us.

So, in capitulation to their demands, we thus embark on “Project Shed”. A shiny new home for our devious captors.

Day 1

The old shed. Dirty, leaky, unsafe for human habitation. Project shed stage #1: DESTROY!

My mate Jon the builder, who pretty much did this entire thing while I sat around eating biscuits and taking pictures

Day 2

To maximise the available space, we rebuilt the outer wall to be in line with the garage, giving us an extra foot of space inside. In the pic on the right, you can see all the plumbing coming out of the laundry room. That all had to go! We’re not having a sink in my sexy new room.

Door frame in place, while we wait for the wall to dry.

Day 3

Level up!

Day 4

Render on the outside wall, new roof and insulation inside! Behind the plaster board are wood batons with foil backed insulation material. This place is going to be nice and warm in winter! Outside you can see the edge of a huge pile of crap! That pile extends down the entire length of the garden and when we were finished, took two cars, 4 trips to the dump to get rid of! (Thanks little sis for helping out!)

Day 5

Most of the floor is interlocking wood flooring placed on wood batons for extra insulation, but this space in the top left was too shallow. The dark wet patch is levelling fluid, which you just poor on the floor and it drys completely flat. When the room is finished this totally flat area will be completely level and perfect for my pinball machine! On the right, you can see the laminate flooring being stuck down to give a nice finish.

When I started I said to Rachel that I wanted this to be 100% her space for her to work in. I was a little hesitant when she said she wanted one wall to be red and do a film montage on another, but check it out! Doesn’t it look awesome!

Day 6

Finally finished! Complete with sofa bed!

.. and of course, Pinball!!

I proposed in front of the Atomium in Brussels. I think I picked a pretty romantic spot It was snowing softly and the lighting was very pretty.

Check it out! Isn’t it awesome?! It makes such cute noises too!

For those of your who don’t know or haven’t guessed, the Roomba is a cleaning robot that automatically vacuums your house. It’s about a foot in diameter and as you can tell by the video, it’s pretty quiet compared to a full size vacuum.

Inside it, it’s got two counter rotating brushes which pick up large bits of dirt, then behind that, there is a vacuum which sucks up the remaining dust. It’s a pretty clever system because it means the vacuum doesn’t have to be as powerful. Oh yeah, and it’s got like robot AI n’shit.

I put the charging station under the cupboard at the back, so it’s got it’s own little home When it’s done cleaning, or when it needs recharging, it automatically finds it way back and docks

When it first arrived, I was so excited! Now, I’m not an extremely excitable person, but I have to admit, when I first saw Roomba go, I actually (yes, for really reals yo) jumped up and down with excitement! When it’s backing off it’s docking station it makes a beep beep reversing noise like a lorry does, it’s pretty cute.. then when it’s done cleaning and it’s docked successfully, it plays a little happy “Tar dar, I’m done!” tune.. It’s like the pet I never had! Plus, it’s cleaning the house! I heart Roomba.

In other related news, I also ordered myself a RooTooth. This is a Roomba bluetooth interface that plugs into Roomba’s little expansion port, so now I can hack it with my PC, mobile or other bluetooth devices Watch this space for a mobile phone controlled Roomba rolling around my house

After much investigation from us both, we discovered that is doesn’t read barcodes, but datamatrix and QR codes. In retaliation, I downloaded a reader for my E65 called i-nigma, which works a shit load faster and more reliably than the N95 one!

So obviously after all that, I had to go and make my own QR code

Nokia have a code creator on their site, but it makes the datamatrix type, which aren’t as pretty

After all this investigation, I’m left wondering if anyone will actually bother using these things! Pretty much every mobile phone now has a camera in it, so everyone could be using these things, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen one of these things on the street.

Gone are the days of beige! Shiny new Logitech Z-10 speakers arrived today to complete the panoramic beauty of my desktop

They’re gorgeous! and sound awesome too! They’ve even got a little LED panel in on them, so when I’m playing music it shows up the track info on the speaker!! and it’s got play/pause fast-forward/rewind and skip track touch sensitive buttons all on the speakers! Tres coolio! Definitely the pièce de résistance of my 20″ widescreen desktop.

Inside the case the shiny looking goodness continues

For the techies who care, it’s a 2.4Ghz Intel Core2Duo with 4Gig of PC2-8500 DDR2 1066Mhz RAM.

I built my new computer with two things in mind #1 was Photoshop. I wanted my new computer to eat 50meg tiff images for breakfast and #2 was silence. My old computer buzzed and rattled like crazy and it drove me mental. This new computer is totally silent! The motherboard has a heat pipe cooled chipset, the ram is heat piped and the case is a Arctic Cooling T1 Pro Silentium.. See their clever use of word play there It’s an awesome case. Shiny black and all the fans have little rubber shock absorbers, so it’s totally silent I love it!

In my quest for silence, I missed one thing.. the graphics card. The fan on the graphics card that I got was crazy noisy! So I ordered a ZeroTherm GX815 cooler for it. It arrived today. Now what I wasn’t expecting when I turned it on was the fact that it’d look like this:

How cool is that!?! It’s got blue LEDs inside it! Why, I have no idea! I’ve seen some case mods on the net where you can stick a transparent side panel on your computer.. but that seems a bit chavy to me. I must admit, the cooler is a tad on the enormous side! It’s supposed to cool super high end graphics cards, so it does dwarf my little graphics card a bit..But still.. it’s pretty, isn’t it!