Posts by Jock in a Frock
58 posts • joined Wednesday 5th August 2009 10:59 GMT
Re: Happy Harmony One owner here
The Sky+ box doesn't have a subscription, it's picking up FreeviewFromSky and piping it to the bedrooms.
RE: Windows for Tills
"An error has occurred and your till must close. Mind your fingers....."
Happy Harmony One owner here
I bought the Harmony one about 4 years ago and it languished in a drawer for a year because I couldn't get the software configured correctly. It's one of the worst apps I've ever seen (and I owned an HTC phone!)
After the warranty ran out I gave it another shot, and with the help of some guys on the Harmony forum, I finally got the hang of it. Now it's the only remote we use in the lounge for our modest setup (TV, XBox, Amp, Virgin V+, Sky+, media centre PC). I've had to simplify it as much as possible for my non-techie wife, but she sometimes struggles when the TV input mode gets out of sync. I blame Samsung for that as much as Logitech.
The new remote looks nice but it's vastly overpriced. These added functions should not cost much more than a Harmony One. How much does a Bluetooth chip add to the cost?
Logitech are feeling the pinch in the PC hardware downturn, but just overpricing their kit is a short-term measure and won't prevent them bleeding cash & customers in the next few years.
One word...
Dafuq ?????
@ FanniM
Sounds like a chat up line to me.
Oh! the! irony!
This on the same day that Yahoo! is outlawing telecommuting :
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-21588760
Paris - cos I'm going there on a work trip in 2 weeks.
We're a bunch of bandwidth-hungry buggers now!
I've recently installed some 10GbE LAN-PHY rings for a client so their designers can use realtime CAD modelling tools between three sites in the Midlands. They are using this 10GbE directly to their workstations.
Hopefully they are hosting torrent files too......
Ah, sunny Cosham.
I work for a telco who supplies services to IBM North Harbour. Luckily I only worked onyour WAN links, so never had to work with Thicknet or TR. I do remember the banks & banks of patch panels there though. I thought they were mains cables the fist time I saw them.
HUP is a good initiative
My employer rolled out 2010 last year, and opened up the HUP offer at the same time. I took them up on it and got 2 licences for home use.
It's nice having exactly the same user interface on both my work laptop and my home PC.
I can't speak for 2013, and don't think my company are planning an upgrade.
Not surprised
I had a tour of the prison in Belize City in 1990, when I visited the British Army garrison there (it's a tour they gave to all squaddies posted out there). Absolutely shocking conditions. There was one inmate there who had both legs amputated. He told us that he had one leg when he was sent down, but lost the second leg after a knife fight in the prison.
Terrifying to think about a long stretch in there, no wonder McAfee had a heart attack.
Nope!
Youtube still buffering here in Redditch.
I can see both sides of the coin
My company tie down the corporate image as much as possible, but have given the field engineers admin rights to install and maintain their own custom apps (to support our telecoms infrastructure).
They did install PGP Endpoint to prevent us writing to unencrypted USB sticks. This stopped us shifting code onto CF cards for our kit. Unfortunately they didn't prevent us un-installing PGP via the control panel, defeating the purpose....
They are considering a rollout of Win-7 on new laptops, and I hope they let us keep our existing XP ones for field use (off the corporate domain), and we'll maintaine them ourselves. Then they can tie down the Win-7 maches all they want.
Start saving, guys...
Cos I think 4K will be the price that early adpoters have to cough up.
Another oldie
Eye of the Beholder on the Amiga - pooped my pants more than once while blindly running through the catacombs.
Posted in Everything Everywhere prices up UK 4G
I have personally installed O2's 4G backhaul fibre transmission equipment (between their core switching sites) in Slough, Yate and Birmingham, and I will be involved in the same for Vodafone in the near future. I'm sure EE have installed similar, as the bandwidth demands for 4G are far too much for existing 3G backhaul networks to just swallow (although the core backhaul is the same technology - Layer 2 Ethernet switching over DWDM links).
Re: Not just in Chester
It was a bloke, he was in a car, and the barrier was not an automatic one - it was a large metal one which had not been secured open. A strong wind caught it and blew it into his car, killing him.
Asda were fined £225,000 plus costs for a H&S failure.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/south_east/7200678.stm
I'll stick with my Logitech Harmony One. After all, it's only taken me FOUR YEARS to learn how to program that properly! Curse you, Logitech, and your crappy software!
I use CDE on HP-UX for management of our company's transmission equipment. It's slow, buggy, unreliable, ugly and under-powered. However that's probably down to the poor implementation my company have deployed.
We have hundreds of staff using this platform, and I expect they're all logging into the same half dozen boxes.
My heart bleeds...
purple piss.
Sky Email For Life
@ dotdavid - Sky don't terminate your email account when you leave them :
http://www.sky.com/services/email/emailforlife/
I've been using it for about 4 years after leaving Sky.
It's not the darama that's the problem...
... it's all the other guff - Reality TV, Big Brother, Grand Restoration Location Makeover, The Boy With an Arse for a Face, Constipation Street, EastMoaners... I could go on.
There's a dearth of good drama, good writing, and BBC & ITV are scared of taking risks. The Shadow Line was good, more for the performances than the story. With Blackout, there was absolutely no coherent story for Eccleston & Bremner to work with. All style & no substance.
Give Shane Meadows & Paddy Considine more budget to work with - they will provide all the drama you want. And it doesn't all have to be gritty northern bleakness, these guys are magnets for brilliant actors, and they produce dialogue that Jimmy McGovern would be proud of. They would make a shopping list gripping drama.
Stephen Graham in This Is England was a stand-out performance, I'm not surprised that martin Scorsese cast him as Al Capone in Boardwalk Empire.
Dominic West (Jimmy McNulty in The Wire) was also gripping in Appropriate Adult, one of the scariest dramas I've seen in recent years.
American drama does tend toward being difficult to follow. As others have mentioned, characters talk over each other, and it requires real concentration to follow (e.g. The Wire, The West Wing, Southland), but that also merits repeat viewing (justifying the cost of a DVD box set). I'm currently on my 3rd run through The West Wing.
OTOH British drama seems more geared towards the dialogue being spoon-fed to us. This often strikes me as a little patronising, as real-life doesn't scan like that.
Just my £0.02
Posted in NJ lab claims plasma fusion breakthrough
Hang on!
"According to the lab’s chief scientist Eric Lerner" - wasn't he the main bad guy in the X-Men movies? ;-)
“The denser it is, the faster it will burn” - better keep Katie Price away from any naked flames, then....
Posted in Bankers
It's a very good film. Zachary Quinto plays his part brilliantly. I did think Jeremy Irons' character was a little clichéd, but his speech about how it was the same in '29, '34, '51 etc did resonate. I think the 2008 bubble bursting was necessary, but unfortunately it's the little guy left to pick up the bill.
Scary to see how cavalier these people can be with our money.
But at least...
... it's not an EFLA (Extended Four Letter Abbreviation).
Posted in Councils spunk £515m in 4 years on CCTV
Brum Council certainly 'spunked it'
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-birmingham-11524161
Spent a fortune installing CCTV in Sparkbrook, Sparkhill & Alum Rock, because they had very high Muslim populations - only to have to pay to remove it after an independent enquiry ruled it racist. The installation was approved under anti-terror legislation.
Posted in Cisco recalls suicidal UCS blade servers
A not to Gene Roddenberry if I'm not mistaken
Kudos, my man.
I had a cap blow in a 10kW HF Transmitter once, blew out the window in the Tx hall.
Posted in Ten... laptop accessories
The thing about the DC/AC converter is that it's really designed for use in the car (as if the cigarette lighter didn't give that away). Why would you need a carry case? Taking it into the hotel with you?
I have this exact model in my van, tucked under the passenger seat. I then have a 6 way mains block connected to it and mounted to the bulkhead between the front seats. Now I can charge my laptop, two mobile phones, a bluetooth earpiece, my sat-nav and a rechargeable lantern all while staying under the 150w rating.
So convenient, cheap, and it's saved my bacon a few times when out in the field.
I've mistakenly left it plugged into the lighter socket over the weekend (which remained powered for almost 60 hours!), and my van started first pop, so this thing doesn't draw any more power than it needs to.
Could I have done this with just a dedicated laptop jack? No.
Disk I/O ?
Never mind that, I need to hook it up to my 5-unit punch tape unit for permanent backup.
50bps FTW!
I work as an engineer for a major UK telco, commissioning DWDM systems, and even I find these number mind-boggling.
Oh bugger!
I have a real birthday on 29th Feb this year (the grand old age of ELEVEN!).
Don't bugger this up before I cut my cake......
HDMI1.3a incuded as standard on both Model-A & -B
Standard HDMI connector, onboard video decodes at 1080p 60Hz no problem. Will play back video at that rate while consuming less than 1 watt and generating next to no heat.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=TgR74Kp6Ws4
There's also a video showing it playing Quake 3 Arena at about 20fps too. Apparently it can perform faster but there was a problem with a specific library holding it back.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=e_mDuJuvZjI
I expect MAME would be a walk in the park for the Pi, looking forward to that too.
Remember -
The Raspberry Foundation is a not-for-profit charity, so don't bleat on about price gouging. Shipping prices will be kept down, tax is unavoidable, and the Foundation discovered that importing the components and assembling in the UK would attract a lot of import tax. That's why the manufacture has been moved overseas, to keep costs down.
Would you rather they said £99 up front and stuck to it? At £99 it would still be a remarkable achievement.
It took me a while,
but I finally got it!
@ Jean Le Pharmicien
A cluster of RasPi's is known as a Bramble
These look like such fun, I plan to get one just for giggles, I will mainly use it as a media hub behind my TV in the lounge, but hope to just tinker with it for shits and giggles.
If I get it working well as a media hub, I can dispense with the ATX tower I shoehorned behind the TV cabinet.
Power consumption is < 1W at 5V on a micro-USB connector. I plan to use a redundant HTC phone charger.
My home router is behind my TV anyway, so networking is sorted. I have a wireless keyboard with a built in trackpad, connecting via a USB dongle, so that's easy. The RasPi has HDMI1.3, so the telly is plug'n'play.
I think the only thing I might need is a USB hub to connect an external USB HDD at the same time as the keyboard. However if I can get TightVNC running on the RasPi, then I can forgo the keyboard and the hub, and drive it from my laptop.
As for enclosures, the idea is that you build your own (no cooling required!), but the Foundation do plan to sell enclosures in the near future.
If this project takes off, I think there will be a nice market in accessories & expansions etc.
This really is a genius project, and I can't wait to get my hands on one. Takes me back to hacking around with my ZX-81 in the early '80s. This will open up Linux, Python and several other languages to me, as I've become detached from programming over the years. Damn you, Windows 3.1/95/98/2000/XP/Vista/7 !!!!
Posted in Parasites spark swarm of ZOMBIE BEES
@Silverburn
Sounds a lot like pregnancy & childbirth to me. The only difference between that and these parasites is that these parasites don't expect you to feed them for eighteen years then put them through university!
Flash! Flash! I love you, but we only have eighteen hours to TRIM the drives!
@ Ralph B
Hmm, strange... I can't seem to route to your networks.
Posted in Compact Disc death foretold for 2012
Divorcee Barbie
Mattel are also releasing Divorcee Barbie.
She doesn't come with any of her own accessories, but she does have Ken's house, Ken's car, half of Ken's pension etc etc....
Just as I started watching it...
I never caught The IT Crowd while it was running, but just this weekend sat down and watched the first two episodes of Series 1 on 4oD. Really enjoyed it and look forward to seeing the rest.
Ironic that just as I start watching it, Mr Linehan pulls the plug.
Oh well, back to the basement for me.....
Is this guy Cave Johnson in disguise?
Howes said. "Plus we'll be doing great science anyway."
Paris, cos she can suck a lemon.....
@ P Saunders
You, sir, owe me a new keyboard.
Lethal Frisbee - I think that's my new forum name from here on......
Posted in Peugeot 508 Active e-HDI micro-hybrid
407 2.0 HDi 136 owner here
I bought my 407 2.0 HDi 3 years ago when it was 1 year old, so far I have 47K on the clock and it's been enjoyable. Servicing costs are reasonable, performance is good, and I still enjoy the styling of it.
The 508 is a nice looking alternative to a Passat or a BM, and I know owners of those marques who have reported dodgy electrics, poor economy amongst other problems.
I expect I will be in the market for a second-hand 508 next year once the depreciation brings them into my budget.
Has anyone asked Assange....
... if the password is in the Wikileaks dump? Apparently everything else was.
We do n't need no steenkeeng title!!!
"Unfortunately, a change made within the latest update has led to some customers seeing speeds affected whilst using certain applications."
The Internet, for example...
Posted in London's Olympic clock claps out
LOL
Ah ha ha! Ah ha ha ha ha! Ah hahahahahahaha haha ah haha
Ah haaaaaahaaaaa Aha ahem aha hmmmm
That is all.
Re: Punched Tape
Used to repair Trend PTA punch tape units for the RAF, I remember being able to read the codes directly (how sad).
We used to test them with a stream of RYRYRYRY characters, as it produced a good pattern for testing the punch units.
