Posts by Fuzz
706 posts • joined Wednesday 25th July 2007 17:00 GMT
Re: Well ... wifi scanner
Similar, but a lot more detailed, a wifi scanner shows you all the nearby wifi networks. It shows you ones that are broadcasting their SSID and ones that aren't. It tells you their relative strengths and the channels they are transmitting on. If multiple instances of the same network are available with the same SSID but different MAC addresses then they are shown separately. They can be useful for planning wifi network deployments, positioning antennas etc.
It's a very useful tool but if it's something that you can't live without then an Android phone is probably a better way of getting there than a jailbreak.
Why bother?
What's the point in getting post office broadband if it's the same (same gear, same connection, same customer support, same tech) as Talk Talk, you might as well just buy Talk Talk.
Posted in Aga cooks up phone-controlled 'iOven'
Wow
this looks pointless,
My oven takes around 5 minutes to heat up, I can't see any reason for wanting to do that remotely.
We just want the spam to stop
I don't think they do want the spam to stop, they'd much rather that the spam continued flowing in a way that was easy enough for them to identify with 100% accuracy so they can keep selling their product.
I didn't realise people still used pipex, I used freedom2surf years ago and the service was great. It continued OK when they were taken over by Pipex. Then the whole lot went to Tiscalli, it was fine for a while then one day, my Internet speed nose dived. I checked my router and sure enough I had been moved onto Tiscalli's LLU service without any consultation. I started my migration the same day.
Smart meter
My meter already tells me how much energy I'm using, the clue is in the word meter.
Re: Yes Metro Off Switch by.......
There hasn't been a release candidate, we've had an early developer build which had the reg hack you mentioned and then a beta (consumer preview) release which doesn't. Of course there is still a chance MS will put the switch back for the upcoming release candidate.
Re: Where's the fuse?
rather than turning it off you could just not run people over, that would work.
Re: All three KBs work here, what's the big deal?
Same here,
Haven't noticed anything unusual on my WSUS machine
Re: Forced format shifting apathy....
format obsolescence is not generally caused by manufacturers.
Tapes became popular alongside vinyl because they were portable. The quality wasn't as good and all that rewinding was a pain so they never took over from vinyl.
CDs are considered better than vinyl by most people because they are easier to use and allow you to jump forwards and backwards across the disc accurately and instantly. They didn't completely replace tape because they weren't as good on the move.
mp3s have replaced tapes because they're better in every way. For some people they've replaced CDs, for others CDs are still useful as a way to buy uncompressed DRM free music.
DVDs combined with PVRs have replaced VCRs because again in almost all use cases the new product is better.
examples of products that are their purely to line pockets are minidisc, DCC and bluray, these are products that have benefits over their predecessors but not enough to warrant going out and repurchasing music or video collections to take advantage of.
Posted in UK mobile broadband carriers compared
t-mobile pay upfront
t-mobile do a pay upfront option where you get 90 days + a dongle for £30, if you're using it all the time then that's very cheap.
Posted in UK mobile broadband carriers compared
Re: All you can eat on 3?
This is a phone plan, you can't use 3 phone sims in dongles you just get a message to say it doesn't work like that and you need to put it in a phone. However there is no problem with tethering so for mobile broadband that seems like a decent option.
Posted in Sony outs 1080p skinny laptops
Re: Typical Reg
If you go to the Sony website you can order one. No idea how many ports it's got although I know it definitely has at least hdmi and 1 each usb 2 and 3. There is an add on dock with an optical drive and some sort of AMD graphics. I'm guessing this connects over thunderbolt so there must be one of those onboard too.
Standard display is 1600x900 the 1080p screen is an extra £40.
Standard disk is a 128GB SSD (listed as 3rd generation I'm guessing one of the newer sandforce based drives) 256GB is £410 512GB is £1100!!!!!
Standard RAM is 4GB you can opt for 8GB for an extra £110 but only if you also get a 256GB SSD
The 3G option is 14Mbps for £110
backlit keyboard is an extra £25
Posted in Sony outs 1080p skinny laptops
Re: Screen resolution
If you go and look at the Sony store, you can configure one of these latops. The standard screen is 1600x900, the 1080p is an optional extra.
However the cost of the 1080p screen is only £40 and this is on a price list where doubling the size of your SSD from 128 to 256 (would be about £100-150 in the shops) will cost you £410. So this just shows how stupid the whole 1366x768 screen issue is.
I am very tempted to order one of these, it's exactly what I want, shame about the cost.
one problem
same stupid issue, after all these years the ctrl + fn keys are still the wrong way round. Lenovo have fixed this on their other laptops but the thinkpads are remaining the same.
If it wasn't for this stupid mistake the X1 looks great, would have prefered 1680x1050, those extra 150 pixels make a lot of difference.
Posted in Freecom Hard Drive Sq 2TB
Re: The drive needs to be re-formatted?
The review doesn't make this at all clear but this is a format that Sony TVs use for recording. Other TVs will use different formats, possibly standard, possibly not.
Posted in Apple drops '4G' label from new iPad
The problem here is that 4G isn't a properly understood standard. When 2G phones came out, no one called them 2G, they just said they supported GPRS.
When 3G phones came out, they were clearly different from everything else, they were big and had lousy battery life. The LTE phones that have come out so far are nothing like this, they look and perform similarly to 3G phones.
For Apple this is just about advertising, it's not possible to look at the 4G label and decide what that means. I don't understand why Apple don't simply advertise the product as "80Mbps mobile data" or what ever speed the ipad can reach when it's sat next to an unused mobile cell.
The whole labelling things as 2G, 3G 20G etc. is stupid. It started off seeming like a good idea, but it very quickly gets out of hand. Much the same as the naming for USB, does anybody buy USB devices looking for ones that are super speed, hi-speed or full speed?
Posted in Colour Kindle incoming says mole
already in colour
kindle books are already in colour, if you read them on a tablet or PC you get colour images
Re: Film grain vs compression
Maybe it's different for video but that kind of colour banding is referred to as posterization on digital images.
Posted in Ten... Ultrabooks
The thing Intel got wrong
They should have specified a minimum screen resolution for each screen size. I just don't get how you can copy the air in the basic style but not take a look at the specs to see what kind of screens these devices should have.
Re: Insulation
On modern builds the insulation comes attached to the breeze blocks and has the foil layer included.
Re: Windows?
All new windows are K glass or an equivalent I doubt very much it is causing your mobile reception problem.
Posted in Samsung outs Ivy Bridge notebooks
Re: Theory
but that's fine, I think most people would be happy with a 1080p 15" screen.
Thing is I don't think TVs are to blame, I can't remember the last time I saw a TV smaller than 19", all laptop screens are smaller than this so they are produced for laptops. The real problem is that there is simply no choice.
5 years ago if you bought a laptop from Dell, you could choose to have a high resolution screen for extra cost, this was available on most of their laptops I had a look last week and couldn't find a single laptop where the screen was available in different resolutions.
Hopefully Apple will put out new macbooks with high res screens and the other manufacturers will copy their lead.
£5 million
is £5 million enough to build a fibre broadband network for a city?
If so then surely it's economically viable for commercial business to build their own with no need for government funds. If not then this is a superficial waste of time.
Posted in iOS Rock Band gets back together
why not admit to it?
Surely people would respect the company far more if they said, "we listened to our customers and we've changed our mind"
Saying it was an error is just treating your customers like idiots, the message is carefully worded to give the required information whilst at the same time advertising the EA brand and products, that doesn't happen by mistake.
hang on there
Do my eyes deceive me? 1080 vertical pixels on a 15" screen?
What's the issue
If you feel you've been cheated then take your device back to the store and they will give you a refund.
Years ago I bought an Ericsson T39, it was one of the first phones to support GPRS and was advertised as such. At the time there wasn't a single network in the UK supporting GPRS.
the terms 1G, 2G, 3G, 4G are meaningless to most people aside from, is it faster than the old one?
Sure technically it's not 4G but if they want to call it that, why stop them?
Posted in Twelve... classic 1980s 8-bit micros
Re: Left out again.
I played a football game on the Electron based around the 1990 world cup. There was no real gameplay you just picked a team and the game played out without interaction. The first level was qualifying, if you got past that you had then had to save your game to tape so the electron could load level 2 which was the actual competition. Then you would load your saved game from your tape. I never saw level 2.
Posted in Microsoft unveils paid SkyDrive options
Re: Existing subscribers all get 25GB
Not me,
Just logged in now, I've had a skydrive account for ages and I've been bumped down to 7GB, maybe you only get to keep the 25GB if you're already using more than 7?
Posted in Hands on with the Nikon D3200 DSLR
Re: And still no built in GPS
There are several reasons for this
1. Most people don't give a shit about having GPS on their camera
2. In a smartphone the GPS is provided by the SOC in a camera it has to be separate so the cost is higher
3. If it's built in Nikon can't sell people their overpriced accessory.
by the way I have both a decent GPS from China (which broke after a couple of months due to a poor socket design) and Nikon's mediocre GP-1 (which is still rock solid and reliable after 3 years heavy use)
Re: Meh
Plusnet also use thomson routers and the weird caps point towards plusnet
Re: Interesting ...
Disappointing only 512Kb RAM though.
Same as my Amstrad 8512? Probably should be MB
Posted in Hands on with the Nikon D3200 DSLR
Re: So it's jsut more Mp then..
The sensor is the same one in recent Sony cameras. Low light performance at print sizes will be better than the D3100.
The most improvement for this model though is the new LCD screen which is finally the same as the D300 released in 2007.
I've been after a small Nikon for a while, coupled with the 35/1.8 it makes for a very high quality device in a small package.
Re: Better reception?
All the BBC channels are on the same multiplex, if you can get one of them you can get them all.
Posted in Ten... smartphone survival accessories
Re: Femto cells??
The suresignal cells from vodafone are tied to a postcode and will only work in that postcode.
Even if you could just plug it in anywhere and have it work, if there's a 1Mb broadband connection that you can use and no mobile reception then I'm guessing there's also going to be a phone line.
This has got to be the worst survival accessory going.
Posted in WD lets loose ferocious 1TB VelociRaptor
Re: Momentus
you do realise that most servers these days are using 2.5" drives? The smaller drives generally have faster access times because the heads move less distance. The only reason for using larger drives is capacity, if the 2.5" drive provides the capacity you need then there's no reason to use it in your workstation.
Posted in Cellco execs lay into Nokia's Lumia
Re: It's not about the price.
"Not being able to block web sites with a hosts file positively sucks. "
This is an awesome comment, only on the register will you find someone moaning that they can't edit the hosts file on their phone.
Re: This is news?
who downvoted you?
Skydrive is 25GB of free online storage, 5GB of which can be used for live mesh which works in a similar way to dropbox.
far more complicated than they are making out
First we have sync speed, this is affected by two things, line quality and line length. Now line quality is down to openreach so it seem fair enough that if your quality isn't right you shouldn't have to pay. Line length is down to the physical locations of the property and the exchange whose fault is that? If the line is correctly sold, i.e. you are told at the time what speed to expect then I don't see a problem.
Next you have contention, oversubscribed exchanges, backhaul peering, how do you test for that on an individual basis.
Then you have slow websites, my Internet in my house runs happily at around 12Mbps but I don't see that all the time and it's not down to my ISP.
However there is something else that is far less complicated to solve and that's use of the word unlimited. The best way to solve that is the same way that the mobile providers have with broadband dongles by selling a fixed amount of data.
Posted in Ten... Kitchen Gadget Treats
knife
Why is this knife on the list? It's basically just a steel bladed knife. If you're going to have a knife on the list, and I'm not sure you should have anything that doesn't require power, it should be a Kyocera ceramic one.
Re: Owneer of Lumia 800... Avoid like plague
Don't know what's wrong with your phone but
1. Tethering, works fine on my HTC Mozart and the Radars we have at work
2. Auto time, Again on my mozart, settings->date+time change set automatically to on.
3. email search, I can directly search the server on my gmail account and my exchange account, but for some reason not my hotmail account so I'm guessing it's a problem with the provider rather than the phone.
Posted in Eight... Rugged Cameras
Re: Nikon Coolpix AW100
This camera comes in 3 colours, one of them is bright orange for people like you who are in the habit of leaving their camera lying around in fields.
Re: Class 4 good enough for me
The point of faster cards is to speed up data transfer to/from the card.
e.g. when you put a faster card into a digital camera it generally won't make the camera faster, however it will make it faster to get the pictures off of your card onto your computer.
The same is true here, a faster card should make it quicker to copy your DVDs onto the phone, very useful when you're trying to grab a few movies to watch on a trip when you should be walking out the door.
Posted in Sky joins BBC for Olympics coverage
Freesat?
I take it these channels are encrypted. Why aren't they transmitted in the clear so that freesat viewers can watch them as well?
Posted in BBC iPlayer added to Xbox
great, can we have one for media centre now please?
Tunerfree MCE is pretty good but it's a bit buggy, especially with the flash streams for HD. Also the way it caches the info from the net was probably necessary when it was first written but now I'm sure there are better ways to get live data rather than finding the program you want to watch is never there.
Of course technically Microsoft could just use the same interface as you get on Freeview HD.
Posted in Belkin Dual-Band Travel Router
why?
what exactly makes this better than any other router for this purpose?
As Powelly has said, they should have put a 3G card in it that way it's more use than a normal router. As it is you're just paying a lot of money for router in a bag.
Posted in Apple iPad 3 Sim-only contracts compared
t-mobile
Why would you sign your life away for 18 months? Just buy yourself a prepay dongle, £29.99 gets you 90 days of "unllmited" access and a dongle. At the end of the 90 days just buy yourself a new dongle or have a look around for a better deal. Sell the dongles on ebay to recoup some of the money.
To anybody suggesting giffgaff, give me a break. I have a giffgaff sim in my phone and the data service is appalling.
Now this is a good idea providing the HD copies
1. are in 1080p
2. contain proper 5.1 surround
I'd gladly pay $5 per disc to upgrade my DVDs to HD.
tried poweline
I had some powerline adaptors I was using to stream video, wifi reception was too poor so this was a good alternative. It worked great for about 12 months then one day the adaptors started showing average or poor signal suddenly it wasn't possible to stream even low quality iplayer, let alone full bluray rips. In the end I just put in a run of outdoor coax, gigabit speeds, perfect reliability.
Re: Anyone who uses a QR code
The same could be said for any url shortening service.
Forgot the customary moan
1366x768? On a 14" screen? This laptop is not for watching films. The screen on this should be 1280x1024 or 1440x900
