Posts by Nigel Whitfield.

Re: Moka Pot

Yes, indeed, as made by Bialetti since 1933:

http://www.bialetti.com/www.bialetti.com/coffee/stovetop/moka-express-c-1_7_22.html

Re: Aeropress with milk

I use a Bodum Latteo manual milk frother when I have to do this myself, which produces fairly reasonable results.

Thankfully, my normal machine has been repaired now, and that has a built in frother, and there's a definite advantage to just staggering to the kitchen and pressing a button.

Re: No mention of roasting beans at home?

We wouldn't want to use up all the ideas for things to write about on the first weekend, now, would we?

Re: Filter Best For Me

I've certainly found a far wider range over there - and I noticed last time I looked in Carrefour at Cité Europe, they had a much bigger selection for pod systems like Senseo than was available back in the UK, too.

I have to pop to France next month, so I may do some research

Re: Twitter...

Arguably, the whole internet has a huge number of twats on it, and more or less always has. I remember back in the late 80s, people complaining on Usenet about the annual influx of new students, posting rubbish and breaching netiquette at the start of each academic year.

And then it was the complaints about people who got access through AOL...

Arguably, you could say that, given the high number of systems spewing out spam, internet email is pretty infested with bots these days too; despite filtering, I probably get a lot more spam that way than though any other service I use online.

It's fashionable in some quarters (see, for example, the comments on newspaper websites too) for people to protest loudly about how they don't see the point of one social service or another. I think the one great egalitarian thing the internet has ensured is that almost everyone can easily find another category of person on whom they can look down with a sneer.

Re: A plague of bots

Because some people don't like being subscribed to mailing lists, and having to give that information to an organisation, and then trusting that their details will be safe. Many people feel that following a Twitter account involves giving up less about them that handing over an email address.

We do in fact do email reminders, both for people who are members of the club, and for non-members who do choose to register with us for information; we list upcoming events on the main landing page of the site, we have a public events calendar, we have the automated twitter feed, and we post reminders on a Facebook page too. Some of the event posters are also distributed via Tumblr.

In short, there's more than one way of reaching people; some people choose to find out about our events just via email. Others just via Twitter or Facebook. Some might get the emails, but also appreciate the reminder that automatically goes out via Twitter on the day of an event.

All the methods have their own pros and cons; potential visitors use a range of different online platforms. Rather than saying "if you want to find out, you must sign up to our list" we instead choose to make the info available on the platforms they use. That seems eminently sensible to me.

Countries have the right to self determination. The same holds true for Northern Ireland, where it's long been established that any decision on whether to remain in the UK or to unify with Ireland will be the choice of the people there.

Otherwise, especially given the much larger population of England compared to all those areas that may wish to leave, what do you imagine should happen if Scotland or Northern Ireland were to vote to leave the UK, but the English voted to keep them within it?

Should we, effectively, hold them prisoner? While some might think that's exactly what should be done, I can't see it as anything other than a cause of much upset in the long run.

Re: Didnt I read

Oyster is, essentially, a system that was bought in (albeit customised), while the new system was developed in house, and TFL are, I believe, hoping that they'll be able to make money by licensing it to other transport operators.

More info (and discussion) here: http://londonist.com/2014/07/travel-using-contactless-cards-an-update-from-tfl.php

Re: NFC really hasn't caught on

My local pub has a couple of NFC capable card readers. Makes it much easier to get drunk without having to remember your PIN

Re: A little alarmist...

One would hope so; but then, we're dealing with a bunch of people who probably wouldn't be said at any decision that drove more punters into the arms of Sky.

And, of course, this is a decision taken at an international level; so I do think it's important that responses to the consultation keep Ofcom on their present path of objecting to the co-primary allocation (and so too do some of the more cynical of my contacts)

Re: HEVC for SD

It's a nice idea on the face of it, but how often does a new codec come along? You'd be adding a facility that most people would never use - and in many cases, there might be other parts of the set besides the decoder that would need upgrading too, to make any sense, which means likely making even more of it modular.

And modular things mean more connections - plugs, slots, and so forth. That in turn adds more points of failure, which will increase support costs - sending someone out to fix a set because the codec board has slipped a bit when they moved it round the living room - as well as an increased BOM.

We started with MPEG2 around the end of the last century. H.264 services launched on DTT in 2009 - roughly a decade later. I doubt we'll see affordable UHD kit for a while yet, so it's probably getting on for a total of a decade before H.264 ceases to be the newest codec in use.

So, if people keep their sets for the best part of a decade, there's not really a compelling need that I can see to provide the ability to swap out the decoder, given the cost and the potential effect on reliability.

Re: Concerning IPTV

Yes, multicasting would be great; it works in theory. In practise, are all the ISPs going to invest in the kit and the upgrades to their networks to make sure it all behaves well? And then decide that they'll provide a basic TV service out of the goodness of their little capitalist hearts?

I suspect that, instead - as history might tend to suggest - they'll do the bare minimum they can get away with, offer sod all support, charge extra and when when the service collapses for some reason during, say, a major news or sports event, make empty promises about it never happening again, while reminding people they never offered a guarantee of any sort of service level for domestic customers and if they can't watch Eastenders, well they should never have chosen to live at the end of a country lane.

Net result most likely to be lots of punters paying more than they do now, for a worse level of service.

Re: Cut or compress

Some of those perhaps could be accommodated via the IPTV functionality that's built into Freeview HD boxes, and I daresay more will be in future. But equally, others won't really want to have to switch to a distribution method that means they could lose a lot of their viewers (just as some have been resistant in the past to changing channel numbers so that things can look a lot tidier in the EPG).

Some of those shopping channels, for example, are oddly popular with older people, or the housebound, and those are also often the same groups who may not be able to afford the costs of a broadband connection with unlimited bandwidth, or live in an area where a decent connection is available.

Logistically - especially with the climate of puritanism wafting through the country - it might be much easier to force the porn channels off the airwaves and onto IP services. But I can't see the same happening with shopping.

Re: Gigabit fibre optic broadband

Well, that would be nice. But what about people stuck out in the countryside? Who's going to lay fibre to them?

And with the mobile networks pretty firmly against the idea of mast sharing to provide decent coverage in rural areas too, this is one of the big sticking points for IPTV in the UK, I think.

We have had for a long time a very well established terrestrial network, with loads of small relays all over the place (though some of them did vanish with DSO). We still have 98.5% of UK homes covered by it, and whether you use fibre or badger mobile firms into rural roll-out, it's going to be a very long time before there's enough network infrastructure to match that coverage

Re: HEVC for SD

HEVC would provide improvements (and, like most of these things, probably more in a few years when the encoders have moved on a generator or two).

But it would mean that nothing currently on the market or in peoples homes would be able to receive even SD broadcasts, other than a handful of very rich people with first generation HEVC silicon in their sets. So, as with the analogue switchover, it would be a massive leap that would require all new equipment - and that for a service that might, perhaps, only be around until 2030 anyway.

That's going to be a hard sell; won't a lot of people think "You know what, I got bitten once by going with Freeview, now I have to buy all new kit; who's to say it won't happen again?"

Using T2 and H.264 for SD means that there is an installed base of (according to Digital UK) some 11m receivers that will still be able to be used, and I think that would be pretty important to ensuring that it's a viable proposition.

Re: I'm curious...

As long as the set top box has Freeview HD, then fine. But, given that there will almost certainly have to be an as yet unannounced shift to using T2 and H.264, which are presently just used for Freeview HD services, then buying any kit without it means you risk it becoming obsolete, or being able to receive only a subset of channels, far sooner than would be the case for HD stuff.

Re: Booksellers do deserve protection

I go there to support a local business, because I think that's important. If they don't stock what I want, they will usually get it for me within 48 hours.

When buying books, for me the range available right now is not the most important thing. What's important that they can get the thing I want, in a reasonable amount of time.

I can't think of any occasions where my need for a specific book simply has to be sated within 24 hours or something calamitous will happen. And even if they don't have what I was after, I don't think I'd ever regard time spent in a bookshop as wasted.

Re: So what happens now to PC Pro magazine?

All the statements from people working at Dennis have been to the effect that he wanted them to carry on, and one of the things the company will be continuing to do is to fund the forest, according to the chief exec, James Tye (who started out on Windows Magazine, back in the 90s, before the launch of PC Pro):

http://www.campaignlive.co.uk/news/1300637/dennis-truly-force-nature/

Re: El Reg

I came along a little later, starting on Computer Buyer - the 'me too monthly' John refers to in this piece - at Dennis in 1991, back when it was launching and the company was still in all the little offices around Newman Street and Rathbone Place. I took over the helm of that after John left, at the tender age of 25.

I too have had my share of stand up arguments with Felix in the past - which I always got the impression he rather relished, as an alternative to the "cult of Felix" which reached its nadir for me in an internal memo that began "Felix thinks, and I agree with him"

While, like John, I eventually decided to leave Dennis, it was a fun place to be, and got my my first break into the world of IT publishing. I began by compiling the buyer's guide listings in the back of the magazine; two and a half years later I was editor, and I don't think there were many other companies where that sort of rapid progression would have been possible.

So, though at times I found him vulgar and brash, Felix deserves a warm and hearty thanks for the opportunities and the experience his company gave me.

Former Reg Staffer Tony Smith, of course, is also a Dennis alumni, from around the same time as me.

I would imagine that while that may indeed be very helpful, the problem is interfacing it with the many different boilers that are out there. Most will just have a simple 'demand' circuit which will work with one of these smarter stats, or an old mechanical one, or a simple timer.

To control the temperature of the boiler, you'd need a much wider range of options than, effectively, a simple switch; when it comes down to it, that's all that any of these generic solutions provide, albeit switches with fancy logic.

Without a standard to provide that sort of control, it's probably not going to be economical to retrofit.

Re: Baffled?

When I watch the TV, I do it through the AV amp, for which the Harmony is pretty well suited (except for the fact that the front speakers are driven by the non-remote controllable Naim gear, which is an extra step that foxes most people), but some guests/cat sitters just find the whole activity concept of that too alien to grasp. For those, it's often simplest to dig out the remote for the TV and let them blunder around with that and put up with the built in speakers.

Regular guests get the hang of the lighting controller, but others just decide it's a lot simpler to use the physical switch on the reading light by the sofa than press buttons at random until everything turns on or off.

Certainly, a lot will depend on your usage patterns and (shudder) lifestyle.

For someone who's home all the time, or who works in an office at set hours, then I agree - there may be little need for any of these things, and the ability to do a simple remote tweak if it happens to snow when you're at work, or something like that, will fall into the merely "nice to have" category.

That's why I didn't want to pick one and say "this is the winner," because it will vary.

For myself, having first used the original HeatMiser WiFi, I found that while in theory I could turn it off when I went out to a meeting, I hardly ever remembered, and about the only thing I did remember was the holiday mode when I was going away.

The Tado, which works out when to turn things on based on how far away I am from home, does it all in the background, and for me that works really well (and I'd certainly welcome their AC controller at the moment, too).

But, I'm freelance, I work from home, go out and about a fair bit, and so don't keep regular hours that could be scheduled with a normal timeswitch.

Re: Been there

The Tado does take into account things like the weather and the effect of the sun on the heating of your house, yes, but it doesn't have an external temp sensor, using data from the net instead.

nCube and the other z-wave systems can do that - the TRV in their kit has a thermostat built in, and as they point out, you can use that in conjunction with many of the other systems, so allowing certain rooms to be cooler than the setting on the main thermostat.