Kingdom Solutions

You need a Mortgage Broker

Dan — Sat, 01 Dec 2007 05:02:06 +0000

You need a Mortgage Broker, particularly if you need a home loan and you have been knocked back by the banks or you have special circumstances. Andrew Burgan from Lime Financial Services can help you. He has helped people with their dream home, refinancing and existing mortgage to help with the budget, and he knows his stuff.

Andrew has vast knowledge of the different home loans that are available. He can help doctors, first home buyers or just about anyone. Banks like things to be all in order but this is not reality for most people. Most people have special circumstances, but the banks don’t have the ability to see outside the box. Andrew however, can see outside the box, and he will go the extra mile to put you and your family into your home.

So, for any mortgages, home loans, first home buyers, refinancing and anything related, see Andrew Burgan at Lime Financial Services.

Leopard CRM Website Launched!

Dan — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 08:46:32 +0000

We’ve just launched the Leopard CRM website, CRM software for small business. If you need to manage customers or contacts in any way, Leopard CRM can be a great tool to help you keep track of things. The site shows all the benefits, features and plenty of screenshots.

Leopard CRM almost ready

Dan — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 02:11:44 +0000

A while back I mentioned that we had decided to rename a lot of our business under the banner, Leopard Software. Well, since that time, some other things have come together.

Leopard Software is about to launch it’s first product: Leopard CRM. We’ve been hard at work developing this Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software for around 18 months. Finally, it’s ready! We’ve just put our next customer onto our hosted CRM solution, which is going to be the future of Leopard CRM.

A hosted CRM solution means that we host all the infrastructure for your CRM system. This gives you the advantage of not having to maintain servers or other similar systems to support the software. This is great news for small and medium sized business as usually they don’t have the resources to commit to such a complex CRM implementation.

The full website will be launched soon, so stay tuned!

MythTV Update

Dan — Mon, 08 Oct 2007 02:06:14 +0000

I thought I’d give a bit of an update on my MythTV journey. To work around the buggy Nova-T 500 drivers, I had a cron job that would reload the dib-0700 drivers early each morning. This seemed to help the situation and I had less lost recordings than when I started.

After doing some debugging for the linux-dvb crew, I found out that a reboot (cold is better, but warm has some goodness in it) fixed some of the problems I was seeing. I thought, hey, why not reboot the server early each morning? Well, since doing this, I’m getting almost rock solid performance from my MythTV server.

So, if anyone is looking for a workaround to the current problems, reboot each day and you should notice a substantial improvement.

Hauppauge Nova T 500 PCI in Linux/MythTV

Dan — Mon, 24 Sep 2007 10:04:49 +0000

Recently I decided to embark on a new project, build a PVR with Linux and MythTV. A PVR introduced to my TV setup basically gives me the following abilities:

I can record TV shows
I can mark every episode of my favourite TV shows to be recorded automatically whenever they’re aired
TV shows are recorded to a hard drive in widescreen digital format
I can watch a TV show on any computer in my home
I can pause live TV
MythTV will automatically mark commercials allowing me to skip commercials when watching the show
I can record or watch a show without having to find a place on a tape (like you would with a VCR)
I can record multiple shows at once and record multiple shows whilst watching a previously recorded show

You can also achieve this by purchasing a brand name box from a retailer which does many of the same functions. The reasons I decided to go with MythTV are:

I am a glutton for punishment a retail PVR will generally plugin and just work, but MythTV requires some serious Linux knowledge to get working properly.
It is simple to add more storage to the system
It is simple to add more tuners to the system to record more channels at one
I already had a computer lying around that could be used for this task, so I didn’t have to pay around $800 AUD on a retail PVR box.

So this is MythTV in a nutshell. The main point of this article is to talk about the problems that I’ve had in setting it up. If you’re more of a technical type of person and are interested in setting up something like this, here are some of my experiences.

MythTV is great. It’s a very flexible system which can take a while to learn, but it has a huge amount of power in how it records and manages these recordings.

I chose to use the Hauppauge Nova-T 500 PCI card as my tuner card. This is a great card as it incorporates 2 tuners on one PCI card. This saves having to have a system with additional PCI slots available. The Nova T 500 can do fully digital, High Definition sources, so it really rocks!

While not going into great detail (there are other guides around for that type of thing), to set it up I had to obtain firmware, install a more recent kernel, compile updated v4l-dvb drivers from source control and build Mythtv from the latest SVN. However, I had problems. Mostly the system works quite well, but I experienced the dreaded USB disconnect problem. Unfortunately I got bitten by it after reading on the LinuxTV Wiki that the problems have been fixed, they haven’t.

Since I built the system, I’ve tried a new firmware attempt and a new v4l-dvb driver from source, but still no dice. I get problems every couple of days with recordings that disappear.

Having an automated PVR system like MythTV has been awesome. I can now set whatever shows I like to watch, plus each week mark any particular once off screenings, for example a couple of movies. Set and forget. My shows are available to watch whenever I want, NOT whenever the TV station decides for me. Freedom!

So, this is a note for anyone thinking of doing it, do it. It’s worth it. BUT, the Nova-T 500 is not reliable enough to recommend, you’ll have to do it with multiple individual tuner cards. Driver updates and work on the bugs is still progressing however, so I’m holding out for some stability soon.

Kingdom Solutions Launches “Leopard Software”

Dan — Sun, 15 Jul 2007 10:24:26 +0000

Kingdom Solutions officially announce the launch of Leopard Software. All future software products and projects will now be under the Leopard Software banner. Our primary focus will be customer relationship management software, more details about our CRM product will be announced shortly.

Getting Your Laptop to go Wireless

Dan — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 00:03:38 +0000

I was recently asked by a friend how to go about getting their laptop to go wireless. She had just bought a new laptop which had wireless capabilities, but wasn’t sure on how to connect it up. I thought that I would put the information here because others will probably find it useful.

Firstly, although you may have a laptop with wireless capabilities, you’ll need another “end” to communicate with. This usually means that you would have a wireless router somewhere in your house which your laptop would communicate with. There are other options popping up however, such as some cafes, restaurants or even airports are establishing wireless connectivity for their customers.

I’m assuming that you already have broadband connected at home, and would like to get a wireless connection to the Internet. You will already have a modem for your broadband and preferably you would have it connected to your desktop PC via Ethernet. The easiest way to check is to pull out the plug that goes into your PC and verify that the plug is clear plastic with a plastic tab on one side and eight pins on the opposite side of the plug. If you pull out the plug and it has a metal sleeve, this is a USB cable which will require more messing around unfortunately.

If everything is good, then the theory is that you would buy a wireless router, and you would disconnect the Ethernet to your PC and instead connect it to the router. Then you buy an additional Ethernet cable and connect it from the router to the PC. Your laptop will connect wirelessly to the router.

This information is only a very rough guide to give you an example of what would be required. To really do this properly, you would need some computer skills as you would need to configure the router in regards to your ISP (Internet Service Provider) configuration, and wireless security setup (so unauthorised people don’t get free access to your Internet connection).

elishacare Launches Their New Website

Dan — Tue, 08 May 2007 07:50:15 +0000

elishacare has just released their new website, designed by Kingdom Solutions. We love the great work they do in the local community. To find out more, head on over and take a look at the site.

Surf and Skate Clothing - Servant Clothing

Dan — Mon, 07 May 2007 04:40:57 +0000

If you want to look like you’ve got the moves while surfing, skating, or just hanging out, you need Servant Clothing. Servant Clothing has some great t-shirts and other gear to really help increase your street-cred. The designs are influenced by the skating and surfing cultures and are designed close by to Torquay and Bells Beach, the surfing capital of the world. Shane, the main man behind Servant is creative, hard working and continually pumping out new and unique designs. So get along and check out what’s available at the Servant Online Store.

Knowledge Base Software

Dan — Sat, 07 Apr 2007 03:09:00 +0000

This could apply to many software solutions, so , but at this time, I’ve chosen Knowledge Base Software as the example. I’ve been thinking about how simple solutions for small businesses can be implemented without specific IT knowledge. Most businesses could benefit from a knowledge base, it’s like a container that holds all the valuable information within an organisation. It can be a loose collection full of all different types of information. Having it searchable and easily retrievable means that you can share small insights with the rest of the company, quickly and easily.

I think that usually, a knowledge base would be like a brain dump of all the bits of information that staff know about. As staff work within a business, they collect all sorts of small pieces of information about the business. Like, that your major product doesn’t work well with your main competitors product, it introduces problems X, Y, and Z. Or even uses of your product by customers in which it was not originally designed for, like, when Jack called last week and told the customer service guy that your tissue product works well as a bass reducer in his home studio.

Now, this type of information could be seen as useless, but, your customers may find it valuable, and you may also find it valuable if you can identify patterns (like many people use your product in a home studio, but you didn’t realise it). In its most basic form, your customer service/support team can quickly search for known problems/solutions and deliver them to the customer quickly, minimising headaches for the customers.

When I mention these examples, I’m sure some business owners or managers become overwhelmed by what must be involved in setting something like this up. But, what if it were simple? What if there was a product created for businesses that was easy to implement? I’m specifically thinking of a solution that is designed for easy of deployment and use. I’m sure there are many products out there, and they have all sorts of features, but would they be willing to sacrifice features in order to simplify it to make it more accessible to more potential customers?

I think that many times, IT guys make things too complicated. IT guys think on a different level and it’s difficult for them to think like a regular, non-IT person. What if there were IT guys around that specialised in making things simple? I’m not coming up with any quick answers, but it’s something to think about.