* Posts by Gildas

46 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Oct 2007

Start-up Bee pledges 'affordable' British e-car

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@ Gerard Kupra

That Torygraph article is based on "data" from Transport Watch which is nothing more than the rantings of one Paul F Withrington who thinks the country's transport problems can be solved by tarmacing over its rail lines and using them for trucks and buses. Why the Telegraph ran a major article based solely on that loon's ramblings is beyond me - he is one step up from standing outside a tube station with a sandwich board proclaiming "Trains Are Evil!"

Dell Inspiron Mini 12 notebook-not-netbook

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@ Jason

Page 6, para 1 mate, wake up!

Tata to release UK's first 'serious' electric car

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Bits and Bobs

Fair enough Rover made many mistakes in its last five years inc. not taking the Viking badge of the entire range apart from the lwb 75 and focusing on the MG brand, wasting money on stuffing an aged Ford V8 in the swb 75, wasting even more money on the whole MG-X project inc. parting with £10m for Qvale but trying to sell the Indica in the UK was just taking the Michael and destroyed any goodwill that MG-Rover may still have had in its home market. It also suggested that the management at MG-R weren't just cash strapped, but incompetent.

As for the Vista EV's performance, getting to 40 odd mph in 10 seconds isn't much worse than the performance of a 1.6Lxi Skoda Octavia I once owned. It took 14.9 seconds to hit 60 and was perfectly usable day-to-day.

Re. the 12v battery, I suspect - though I may be wrong - that the usual vehicle ancillaries present such as the lights, ciggie lighter, stereo etc run off the 12v battery as they do on the petrol version - to save cost - and that the 12v unit is charged from the motive system. The sound insulation probably comes as part of the Vista bonnet sub-assembly no matter what the engine type.

Acer to phase out 8.9in Aspire One netbook?

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silly buggers..

a good SCC should have a SDD so when you drop it while running it won't brick itself (I've let my AA1 slip of the coach and bed a number of times with no ill effect) and Linux...cos XP is shite!

10" would be nice, but I can live with 8.9, f''nar f'nar

Cowon iAudio S9 PMP

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@ Stuart etc

In defence of the Cowon A3 I have had one for over a year and it has been faultless apart from the the occasional crash when ff/rwd-ing through a large video files (700mb +) - a simple turn off/on fixes that. As for taking 3 days to charge via USB, that is just cock, it takes about 6 hours - and anyway, Cowon supply a mains charger! Cowon also issue regular firmware updates for their players which is not quite the same as offering "no support". The A3 also has a screen that is in a different league from either the S9 or the iPod Touch.

Of course it ain't perfect - the lack of playlists is a pain (btw, you can set up separate lists on the S9, but by Christ it ain't easy!) but I use mine mainly as a video player.

If you want easy multiple play-lists (and gap-less playback) - buy a bloody iPod, that's what I did because Apple products have those two functions nailed down in a way MTP devices can only dream of. Of course no Apple product will play Flac or decent rez AVI files so you pays your money. The sound my A3 produces makes my 2G Nano sound like utter shite btw.

Of course multiple play-lists and gap-less are not the be all and end all to every consumer - some folk like to listen to their albums in the order the artist intended and gaps only really make a mess of operas, so I can see why Cowon didn't bother addressing either.

What I would say about the S9 is wait until El Reg reviews the Cowon O2 before buying, the screen is bigger and it has memory expansion.

2008's top three touchscreen phones

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@ Gary F

Queues are not a sign of anything other than consumer gullibility. Seriously, no grown man has any justification for standing outside a shop in the pissing rain in order to be one of the first to own anything other than the secret to everlasting life or to an everlasting erection.

Granted the iPhone started the touch screen revolution and has a superb UI and browser but the absence of stereo Bluetooth and an even half decent camera are major drawbacks as is the tie to o2 - who I will return to as my cellular supplier when Hell freezes over. They are not failings that can be overlooked merely because it is an Apple product, which seems to be the subtext.

Just because something is the first does not mean it is the best no matter what the debt later generations of products may owe to it.

Would I personally have put the iPhone higher up? Yes. At the top? Probably not - I reckon the Google Phone should be No.1 with the iPhone at 2 and the HD at 3, but I can see where the Reg is coming from.

Reserve your ire for things that matter in the grander scale of things dear boy, its only a phone!

2008's top three netbooks

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SCC

OK, the new Sammy looks great, but it ain't all that small or cheap. If you ask me a SCC has to be A) under £200 and B) have a SDD to make it truly chuckable. I'd say that makes the AA1 and Dell the obvious contenders for the top 2 spots. Start spending £300 and wanting a 160GB HDD and you may as well spend a few quid more and by a "proper" laptop.

Raids net police £1m in pirate game and movie discs

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Can't you lot read?

At no point does the article actually say that plod found discs worth £1m. It says they found 30,000 discs and that they were found at a place "where pirate films, games and music – with an estimated street value of £1m – were produced." sic.

That £1m is more than likely an estimate of the street value of the forged goods that plod think were made at the facility since it was set up, or in recent weeks, or according to any indications of production qty they found at the place (blank disc containers etc) - i.e. they found 30,000 discs but reckon another 170,000 may have already gone out of the door: 200,000 x £5 = £1m.

Portsmouth gets crime-predicting CCTV

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Unhappy

Presumably

if you are a Brazilian electrician and are caught on camera going about you business then Plod are automatically alerted, roll up armed to the teeth and pump half dozen rounds into your head.

You have to give it to Orwell, he was only out by 24 years and that's not bad in the old Guessing What The Future Will Be Like business.

Heavyweight games pirate jailed for three years

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Sex life boosted...

I see the Sun article says "Delight ... changes boosted the couple's sex life"...suspect three years being taken roughly from behind in the showers while at Her Majesty's Pleasure wasn't what they had in mind when they wrote that.

Piaggio MP3 to beat Chevy Volt to plug-on mass production

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Not sure about the looks..

the front end looks like a pissed-off Selenite...bird in the blue dress in lubly though.

Muslim leader rejects Sony's LittleBigPlanet edit

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Free PR??

If Sony had not withdrawn the game it is more than likely nobody would have noticed the offending lyrics - as has been pointed out you can buy the source song from iTunes. By doing what they have done Sony have generated a massive amount of free PR for the game. I suspect the Manchester Cathedral farrago has a pretty positive effect on sales of Fall of Man so it's quite possible Sony are just repeating a winning formula. Hell, its not beyond belief that they included the song deliberately so they could withdraw it and create a story - one of the terrestrial news channels carried the story last night and showed clips from LittleBigPlanet and Fall of Man. Job done from a PR point of view.

Govt ponders proof-of-ID law for future phone purchases

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Airstrip One...

Seems perfectly in line with the fundamentals of Ingsoc. My only question is do you have to register your phones to the Ministry of Love or the Ministry of Truth?

Apple recalls iPhone 3G power adaptors

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@Sergei

The pins of a power adapter snapping off in a mains socket (even if the user is ham fisted!) is hardly a non-story. Reporting on Vaio power packs going up in flames is not anti-Sony, reporting on Dell fitting the wrong keyboards is not anti-Dell. Reporting on 3G iPhone power adapters breaking while in use is not anti-Apple, it's news...

from Webster's Dictionary you twit...

news singular noun 1 information about recent events, now especially as reported in newspapers, on radio or TV, or via the Internet. 2 (the news) a radio or TV broadcast report of news. 3 any fresh interesting information. 4 a currently celebrated person, thing or event • He's big news in America. that's news to me colloq I have not heard that before.

ETYMOLOGY: 15c, meaning 'new things'.

Ten of the Best... iPod rivals

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@Oliver

...cos I don't want to flatten my phone's battery while listening to my tunes on the train from Manchester to London and back when I have a full day of work in between. That is why I want a pmp and a phone in two seperate but handy packages - until someone comes up with a battery that will support 10 hours of music/video playback and at least half that length of talk time that is.

Ten tweaks for a new Acer Aspire One

Gildas

No.11

Install Thunderbird from the programmes repository. The standard e-mail client is OK but not a patch on T/bird.

Dell launches Inspiron 9 mini laptop

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Excellent...

no need to regret running out and buying an AA1 when I did. Good-oh.

MSI repells reporter with armed response team

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Just as well...

..you didn't mention the war!

How can I run Windows apps on a Linux Acer Aspire One?

Gildas
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.exe

Not sure you will have much joy getting .exe files to run on Linux, but as for setting up T/bird, you can find that info and much else here:

http://www.aspireoneuser.com/forum/

http://www.aspireoneuser.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=782&p=12262&hilit=thunderbird#p12262

Journey's latest hit: an MP3 player

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Ideal gift for...

a small town girl living in a lonely world!

Acer Aspire One: the new sub-laptop to beat?

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Release date

amazon.co.uk have it down for Aug 11, play.com for Aug 7th. Both want £219.99 for the base version.

Vista woes fuel Mac sales surge - analyst

Gildas

@Ted

Now be fair. If you take a base MacBook and up the memory from 1GB to even 2GB and up the HD from the standard 120GB to 250GB the price comes out at £849!

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Price is right?

"but Apple has the balance between price, performance and features about right"

Oh yeah?

Dell Inspiron 1525, 15.4" screen 2.1GHz chip, 3GB memory, 250GB HD: £520.

MacBook, 13" screen, 2.4GHz chip, 2GB memory, 160GB HD, err..£830!

I think a lot more folk would buy Macs if their (UK) price stucture didn't take the preverbial! As it is I'm happy with my Dell and I have enough left over for a Acer Aspire One.

HTC Touch Diamond

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Battery

Noticed on the HTC site than an "extended life battery" is on offer for £40 - comes with an enlarged back panel too - so I guess HTC have decided it needs more juice. Wonder if it will ship with the long life battery when it arrives as the 02 Xda whatever-the-hell, T-Mobile Vario thing-a-me-jig etc

Sony Ericsson Cyber-shot C902 cameraphone

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K850i

fair play to the 850i, I have had one since October 07 and it has been faultless despite being dropped down a flight of tiled stairs in January! It's a little big I grant you, but the camera and flash combo make it hard to beat.

Help! Windows XP to Vista migration mishap

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do it manually

had a similar problem moving from a 2004 Advent to a new Insiron 1525 a few weeks back. After an hour of dicking about I just copied all my data onto a 120GB Freecom Toughdrive and moved it to the Dell manually. Took a few hours, but at the end of the process I knew all the data had been moved and had an up to date back up copy of everything on the Toughdrive.

Best compact camera with a viewfinder?

Gildas

Fujifilm S5700

not exactly compact, more SLR-lite, but a superb camera that can be found for around the £100 mark if you hunt about a bit.

XM-I X-Mini capsule travel speakers

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Re You Was Robbed

The X-Mini Capsule in the Orange store is a single speaker of a slightly different design.

The best price I have found for the Mini-Max stereo speakers was here...

http://www.flashdirect.co.uk/acatalog/X_-_Mini_Max_Speaker.html

presumably the same place El Reg found it.

Samsung SGH-F490 cameraphone

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imperial / metric

mixing metric and imperial is what makes you Brits so lovably eccentric, probably all a part of you not knowing if you want to be part of Europe or the USA!

"How big's you TV?"

"about 80cm wide by 60 tall, 32inch screen"

"how much is gas in the UK?

"About £1.25 a litre"

"and your speed limit?"

"70mph"

wasn't this what put a recent Mars probe into the ground at several hundred mph (kph)?

Brennan JB7 Micro Jukebox

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Re. want one...

me too!

O2 XDA Orbit 2 smartphone

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Video / Tim Cook

I am not so sure that the majority of Touch/TytnII users are really going to give too much of a toss about the whole lack of video acceleration. OK, some users may find it helpful if all HTC's MSM7200 and MSM7500 Qualcomm based handsets actually had the ATi Imageon hardware and drivers but at the end of the day HTC have never said their handsets do come thus equipped and I for one can't wait for the folks (folk?) at htcclassaction.org to try to sue HTC for not including something they have never claimed to include in the first place.

As for going before the beak to define the phrase "a rich multi-media experience" as used in an advert, good bloody luck.

Let's face it is, if hi-def video is your bag why the hell are you buying a handset with such a frankly very, very average screen as the Touch family?

Reading htcclassaction you would thing the lack of video acceleration and drivers makes the handsets unusable - does it cock, nothing wrong with my TyTn II. Hard not to come to the conclusion that the lads at htcclassaction need to get our more or maybe find a girlfriend, or maybe both!

If you buy an HTC handset and think the video playback is shit just take it back, get a refund and buy something else. Simple.

Fair play to the Reg if HTC actually claimed their handsets had wonders and shit miracles video drivers I guess they would have mentioned their absence -I'd love my TyTn to add 6 inches to the length of my knob, but it doesn't - not HTC's fault though.

Rumour-mill rumbles on Apple, Immersion vibro iPhone pact claim

Gildas

Haptics...

unnecessary and pointless if you can switch them off, unnecessary and very annoying if you can't. My Touch Dual works just fine without throbbing or beeping.

This DVD will self-destruct in 48 hours

Gildas
Paris Hilton

Look out...

here come the tree huggers.

Paris because you need to be as daft as her to actually think that consumer packaging waste is the real problem facing the planet.

Intempo Rebel DJ and ad-zapping FM radio

Gildas

Surely...#2

Not sure I see the point...the news, weather, traffic, DJ flagging requests, competitions etc are sort of why you listen to the radio in the first place! If you don't want to hear all that stuff, listen to your mp3 player or shove a CD in your car's stereo.

Route 66 Mini Regional

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Route 66

I believe it is where one gets one's kicks!

Cowon iAudio A3 personal media player

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Firmware

I've got one of these and it is a truly great bit of kit, but a word of warning, the new A3 firmware available from the Cowon site, v.1.18 I think, can sometimes bugger up the audio/video synch on AVI files. I swapped back to the original firmware and everything is now fine. They do actually say that 1.18 is a beta so I suggest you leave it alone until it gets to v2.0.

Line up for full-windscreen satnav

Gildas

Paper maps

have one edge, they don't crash. A mate recently got lost driving from Watford to Chichester because his Tom-Tom went arse up in a car park in Watford. Did he have a road map? No. Did he end up going the wrong way around the M25? Yes. A 30 sec glance at an even half decent map would have shown him the twit proof way between those two locations and indicated that he needed to follow the Heathrow signs from the M1/M25 jct.

Sat Nav is great in unfamiliar urban areas but on the open road you really should know where you are going and how you get there rather than depending on a sat nav box to point out the bleedin' obvious.

Samsung SGH-F700 smartphone

Gildas

Re. If you want a cool gadget for surfing the web

fair enough, but surely the N800 & 810 are internet tablets (well, that is what Nokia call them) rather than smart phones so it is hardly a realistic comparison. Bit like saying the iPhone is not as good a web browsing device as a laptop!

Which is the best 5Mp cameraphone?

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K850i

I've been using a SE K850i for about three months now and even though it doesn't compare to a decent digital camera the results are not half bad, especially in good natural light, while the xenon flash does at least mean you can take reasonable pictures at night.

Star Trek XI teaser trailer beams onto web

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JJ Abrams...

has a host of 2nd rate US TV shows and MI 3 to his credit. Oh dear...

Blackberry Pearl 8120 smartphone

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Re. Not that bad....

The problem with the video reviews is not that they are video per se, nor that they are delivered seemingly sans script by someone who spells Will with one 'l'. The problem is that they lack the wit, style, humour, consideration and perspicacity that makes the usual El Reg reviews stand out from the "dry...picky...geek-speak" reviews on many other sites.

My new PC can't see my old iTunes downloads

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iTunes

Try going into "File" and "Adding folder to library" then select the folder with all your music in. Failing that try "File" then "Import" on the same folder.

Queues start a day ahead of UK iPhone arrival

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Are these people sane?

Adults, sitting on a pavement, in central London, in the cold and rain, to buy a phone? Give me strength.

Sony Ericsson Walkman W660i music phone

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Why 3G?

So you can use the phone as a laptop modem?

Church slams cathedral gun battle game's Bafta nomination

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The relevance of the church today...

With all the problems Manchester has with youth and gun related crime it's good to see the church going that extra mile to make itself look truly out of touch and ridiculous in the eyes of the city's youth.

LG KG271 and KG275 budget phones

Gildas

Title

"In advocating more features and bemoaning the lack of them the author misses the point entirely."

I rather think the author is making exactly the opposite point; that the lack of features is to be welcomed.