Category Archives: Technology

PHILIPS 32PFL7404. What. Up.

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Buying a new TV is such a minefield. You read all the reviews, you ask your mates, you compare the specs and then you make your choice.

I was looking for a new TV which had to meet the following criteria (any other features would be considered a bonus):

  • Freeview;
  • Full HD;
  • 32″;
  • 100Hz;
  • LCD;
  • > 2 HDMI connections;
  • < £600.

I narrowed the list down to three.

SHARP AQUOS LC32LU700: I liked the Sharp because it uses a grid of LEDs to backlight the image, meaning better contrast and greater energy efficiency. The new Samsung LED TVs (you know, the crazy thin ones) use a line of LEDs around the edge to achieve a similar effect, but this means that the light drops off towards the middle of the picture leaving it noticeably darker.

PHILIPS 32PFL7404: 5 stars from What Hi-Fi.

SONY BRAVIA KDL32W5810: Uses the Bravia 3 engine, which came highly recommended, and comes stacked with a bazillion extra features (including FreeSat HD, DLNA). Only really in my price bracket because it is about to be discontinued.

I eventually chose the Sharp and collected it yesterday morning from my local Richer Sounds. Bad decision. The TV itself felt very well built and the picture was stunning, but the remote felt cheap, the audio was poor and worst of all (and the reason it went back this morning) there were serious audio sync issues. If you’ve ever seen “Rumble in the Bronx” (a Jackie Chan film dubbed badly into English) then you’ll get the idea. If you turn off all of the image enhancing functions and watch the built in Freeview tuner then you might be able to live with it, but turn any of that stuff back on, or try and watch an external source and you just want to cry. The guys at Richer Sounds were brilliant (highly recommended) and allowed me to switch the Sharp for the Philips without any fuss. The Philips is awesome, so much more simple to set up (particularly liked the eye test style image setup, “Which do you prefer, number one… or number two?”), sounds amazing and has a much nicer remote. It’s going to take me a while to set up all of the features nicely, but I’m well chuffed with my purchase.

MW2 in 1080p with mad audio is a truly legendary experience. True story.

Jason Bradbury: Living the dream

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Do you know how awesome Jason Bradbury is? I bet you don’t. As well as being a presenter on the Gadget Show, a blogger, the master of the extreme caterpillar (see video below for details), a twitter Jedi (I am one of 46,570 apprentices) and just an all round top bloke, he is also an author of childrens’s books. His latest book, Atomic Swarm, was released this month and if you’re a really cool kid that’s into games/tech then you should definitely check this out. Of course if you’re like me: twenty five, not at all cool and into games/tech then you should still check it out. Shoo, go do it now!

Jason Bradbury: reppin’ for the geeks and living the dream!

PS3 DLNA

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Sup peeps, sorry for the stop-start nature to my blogging, please know that this is not due to a lack of inspiration but a complete lack of time… so without further a do.

A little while ago, a friend of mine was asking about the ReadyNAS experience, he was considering purchasing such a device himself and seemed particularly interested in DLNA support to the stage where he was considering purchasing a DLNA enabled TV. At that time I had not attempted to use the ReadyNAS in this way since I had no way to consume the data, but fast forward past the death of my Time Capsule and I had ripped all of the plaster board off of the wall in my room in my attempt to trace an old unused phone cable through to the main phone socket. I was going to steal the hole in the wall to cable up my bedroom, but the cable I was tracing disappeared down the side of the boiler and I still do not know where it goes, but luckily Yum Yum (one of my cats) found a worm separate old unused cable and so I used this hole instead. Now my PS3 is cabled to the network and so I have enabled the media server connection and it is legend… wait for it… dary. I get full and easy access to all of the music and video on my ReadyNAS and it is all delivered via my PS3 to my TV. Anything I torrent is automatically added to the correct folder ready for me to watch. Moral of the story: don’t buy a DLNA TV, get a PS3 instead… unless you already got one… oops.

My head is definitely *not* in the cloud

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I watch videos like this one about Chrome OS and all I can think about, and this goes for any cloud based web apps in general, is how I wouldn’t trust anyone with all of my data, especially if they were going to stick it on a server in the middle of <insert name of your favoured supreme cosmic being> knows where. Am I alone?

Rick, Apple and the worm.

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iRickI’ve seen this story covered in a variety of places and I couldn’t be feeling less sorry for the numpties that jailbroke their iPhones and didn’t change the root password. It’s Darwinian theory for the digital age.

On an almost related note, I recently sent Tim Weber, Business Editor for the BBC, an email about an article he wrote declaring that Snow Leopard had been botched by Apple, without providing the slightest suggestion of why. I got a response, but it was decidedly stock and decidedly aggro, I guessed that a lot of people had emailed in to make the same point that I made. Looks like I was right as in a recent article about Windows 7 he wrote “The upgrade process, while much improved, is clearly still fraught with dangers. And yes, one could call it botched”. Power to the people [and the beats].

Time Capsule R.I.P.

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deadtimecapsulegraveyard

When I first read on TUAW about the number of Time Capsules that were dropping dead around the eighteen month mark I was intrigued, but not concerned, as I had already transferred all of my data and Time Machine backups to a ReadyNAS Duo (having identified the Time Capsule as a single point of failure and having made the decision to use it just as a router). When I read a second article reporting that large numbers of  TCs were dropping dead at almost exactly the same point in their life cycles and that somebody had even gone to the trouble of setting up a website dedicated to memorializing the fallen, I was less dismissive. I’ve known for a while now that my TC was nearing the danger zone, so when it went nuts earlier today, and by nuts I mean refusing to boot, refusing to allow configuration changes and refusing to fall back to factory defaults, I wasn’t surprised to discover that it was 17 months and 16 days old!

Update: I have managed to resuscitate the TC, it doesn’t seem 100% happy, but it is working. I’m glad Apple decided to update the Airport range this week as I suspect that I will be in the market for an Airport Extreme in the not to distant future!

What is the licence fee for?

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What is the licence fee for?

When the BBC manages to get rights to a top show they are either unable to hold on to it (How I Met Your Mother, 24), mess about with the format (Mythbusters), put it on at a stupid time so that nobody watches (The Wire), or they don’t show it at the same time as the original broadcast (Heroes). When they manage to create something good themselves they replace it with something half as good (Last Man Standing, Tough Guy Or Chicken), mess about with the format (Autumnwatch), or put it on at random times (MoTD). The problem seems to be catching. What have Channel 4 done to Scrapheap Challenge? Why did Channel 5 abandon House and Prison Break? Why are Channel 5 *so* far behind with NCIS?

I don’t know why I bother trying to watch anything on these channels, but I don’t have to worry about it anymore as the most recent round of changes to Freeview have left me without the majority of the main channels and they are unlikely to return until sometime in 2012 (not getting a discount on the Licence Fee though).

It would seem that I’ll just have to watch what I can on Sky and torrent the rest*.

*To switch to Freesat I would need to purchase a new TV and a new PVR.

Talk to the palm (and other things)

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This isn’t a particularly well thought out post, more a general meandering through my thoughts, an aggregated thought feed if you will…

I absolutely cannot see what Palm hoped to achieve by reporting Apple to the USB-IF. Why not just integrate with iTunes in the same way as every other mobile phone/MP3 player/random application manufacturer, it almost seems like it’s more about the publicity and less about, well… there isn’t anything else to it is there.

Still no Snow Leopard friendly Growl. Grr.

What happened to webchunks? I was in the middle of preparing a software release, just calculating the checksums for the Win32 and Linux versions (ready to be documented in the release note) and then I discovered that the owner of webchunks had failed to put enough coins in the meter and so I had to transfer the checksums via a combination of text file and USB pen drive! Luckily the owner is a friend of mine and once I reported the service outage, he was on it in a flash (well once he returned from Chessington ;-) ).

I’m getting more and more addicted to twitter. I think it is so cool to be able to access the uncensored thoughts of so many people, an online Ben & Jerry’s in a world so full of vanilla. Having opinions isn’t a crime. At the moment, I am particularly enjoying following Jason Bradbury (him off the Gadget Show); Chris Jericho (current WWE superstar); Ken Anderson… Anderson (former WWE employee, still a superstar, creator of the CTM TLA) and Becky Kingston, who I only know of through one of Jason’s #followfriday tweets.

See I could have tweeted all of this in much less time than it took to write this post, but then I couldn’t have used the bitchin’ title that made me CTM. Anyway, I’m off to watch the footie…

Post tune: Velvet Revolver, Slither, Contraband

Where are all the plugins?

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Where are all the plugins for Safari 4? I’m pleased that the nastiness that was Input Managers is no longer with us, but where is the community support, where on the Apple website can I search for Safari 4 compatible plugins? I don’t care how fast or compliant to web standards Safari is, if it doesn’t offer me the ability to reproduce the functionality of the Firfox URL bar along with NoScript, AdBlock Plus and the other plugins that I take for granted in Firefox, then I ain’t switchin’ back.

You’ve got to feel it if the Doctor sealed it

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monster-beats-headsetMy Shure SE210s stopped working last week; the sound level in one of the ears suddenly faded by about 90%. I did some research googling and found lots of people reporting the same issue, then I recalled that the same friend that recommended the Shures to me originally, also mentioned some reports of cable issues, including cable breakdown from perspiration. The general consensus of opinion seems to be that the Shures are kick ass, but will need replacing every 4-6 months and I would have to concur with this point of view.  Some people are suggesting that users are to blame for abusing their ‘phones, but I assure you that mine were very looked after. To their credit, Amazon didn’t quibble about giving me a full refund or a direct replacement and since my research googling indicated that the replacements would fail in another six months, I opted for the former.

I decided that I was going to get a pair of Monster Beats by Dr. Dre (no he isn’t a real doctor) since I wanted over/on ear ‘phones, they are designed for use with iPods/iPhones and because well, you’ve got to feel it if the Doctor sealed it. No more pissing about with different boots, insertion and removal of in-ear ‘phones from my auditory canal followed by the very necessary house keeping, i.e. ear wax removal. First impressions: breath taking. The packaging for the Beats oozes class and that’s just the packaging, they literally tore through the playlist* that I concocted as a test with ease: distinct notes, powerful lows, no outside noise. I’m loving the mute button (you can temporarily mute the music by pressing the right ear), I can see myself making good use of that at work and I also like the inline mic for making calls without removing the cans. They are comfortable, light and well balanced (even with the two AAA batteries on one side) and they look good too (candy black and red). Stay tuned for more updates.

*Sound Test Playlist:

  1. Lil’ Wayne, A Milli, Tha Carter III.
  2. The Game, How we do, The Documentary.
  3. Bullet For My Valentine, Scream Aim Fire, Scream Aim Fire.
  4. Snoop Dogg, Drop It Like It’s Hot, R&G (Rhythm & Gangsta): The Masterpiece.
  5. Avenged Sevenfold, Almost Easy, Avenged Sevenfold.