* Posts by wondermouse

43 publicly visible posts • joined 6 Nov 2009

Google to pull plug on Play Music, its streaming service that couldn't beat Spotify, in favour of YouTube Music

wondermouse

The really crap thing about YTM as opposed to GPM is you lose the ability to stream music unless the app is front and centre. You can no longer use it to play tracks in the background unless you PAY!

This is really shite and cripples the functionality. As for the design... Bright and nasty springs to mind.

wondermouse

Re: I've just uploaded my music collection to...

128gb?

You're having a larf. My audiobooks drive is 700gb alone. As for my 2TB music drive...

The future of radio may well be digital, but it won't survive on DAB

wondermouse

Re: Pips all over the place!

(okay, you'll have to adjust the clocks in the studio but I imagine they already do).

That's proved to be one problem too far for the BBC radio boffins. After trying various schemes to get the pips to match exactly on Radio 4 on FM, DAB, Freeview and Sky/freesat, they gave up saying it was just too difficult. Therefore the pips are correct on FM, and slightly delayed on Freeview, a tad more on DAB and a fraction more again on satellite. Try running them all simultaneously and see!

It's particularly effective just before 6pm with the chimes of Big Ben! As far as I'm aware, no one has complained about the pips being wrong.

About to install the Windows 10 April 2018 Update? You might want to wait a little bit longer

wondermouse

Update is fine, until it isn’t

I have updated 14 machines to the latest version of Windows. 13 went fine, with no problems. The 14th - an Acer desktop, ended up in a nasty loop where it kept restarting, booted to a black screen, and then rebooted.

After forcing it to crash to get to system restore, was unable to roll back to previous version. The only option was to reset windows which took me back to 1709 losing all of my installed programs. A second attempt fared no better. Microsoft support for this issue has proved non existant. The workaround is a registry hack to prevent automatic updates, but certainly not ideal.

So where can i go for support when a Microsoft update borks a PC?

That dreaded syncing feeling: Will Microsoft EVER fix OneDrive?

wondermouse

I had a client using a paid subscription to Skydrive very successfully on his old Windows 7 laptop, His new laptop with Windows 8 would NOT sync successfully with it at all. In the end we gave up and installed Dropbox.

I have to say that Dropbox isn't really suited to an SME or enterprise environment, as it's impossible for admins to administrate on a granular level. All you can do is set up a folder that everyone has in their dropbox. You can't set up teams with their own folders, managed centrally with varying permissions. Dropbox really needs to up its game if it wants to be taken seriously as a tool for businesses.

Box can do all of this but the flexibility comes at a price, and it's too expensive for many small businesses to entertain.

Getting it right on the second attempt: Sony Xperia Z1

wondermouse
FAIL

A Sony handset? Never Again!

Sorry Sony. For me you blew it by dropping support for Xperia Arc and Arc S users and others and leaving us with slow, bloated OSes and promising, and then not delivering, upgrades.

That was the point I said "never again" to buying a Sony phone. You went from being the best (K800 and other great camera phones) to the worst and whether this phone is good or not it's too bloody late.

It's like a girlfriend who slept with all your mates, the postman, the milkman and the cat asking you to take her back.

There's a reason you're way out behind with your phones. Treating existing customers like dirt while bending backwards to attract new ones.

Same applies to your laptops. You stiffed me and you stiffed a friend once too often with your poor service and stupid overpriced spares. £46 for a plastic foot anyone?

Now I'm doing what I should have done years ago. Just say no.

Rant over.

Ten top stories from Classic Doctor Who

wondermouse

Re: Great list

Now that's a top girlfriend!

Congrats on MP3ing your music... but WHY bother? Time for my ripping yarn

wondermouse
Thumb Up

Re: The Manhattan blues...

>> The real problem with CDs is the space they require for storage...

>. Not really. Not unless you live in some place like Manhattan where real estate is priced by the square

> centimeter rather than by the acre.

When you have a LOT of CDs it becomes a serious problem, unless you live in a palace.

I found the CD sleeves offered by Discsox allowed me to keep all of the component parts of a CD package (booklet, discs, back cover) without folding, cutting or removing anything, in an archival quality lined plastic sleeve that takes up about a third of the space of a CD case.

This more than doubled the number of discs I could store on my shelves, and should I decide to sell any of them I can put them back into CD cases and they are good as new.

As far as ripping CDs go, I use dbPoweramp which not only rips accurately or tells you when it doesn't (unlike iTunes) but is multi- threaded so can rip up to 4 tracks at once on my i5 PC. It even lets you program custom ways of defining where/how it puts and titles the ripped files according to things such as is it a multi-disc set, is it a compilation album etc.

New blinged-up 'iPhone 5S' touted by Jobs FROM BEYOND THE GRAVE

wondermouse
FAIL

>>Pointless gimmicks have no place on an iPhone.

Apple Maps anyone? Tried it again last week and it's still totally shite. "Do you want London in America?" "NO!"

Fanbois taught to use Apple's new killer app: Microsoft Windows

wondermouse
FAIL

Re: Fanbois taught to use a GIMPED Windows...

>> 3. Lack of Kensington Lock on the new Macbook Pro. Tiny sodding detail, but highly annoying.

Not just annoying but totally bloody stupid. Same on the MacBook Air. Thanks to that 2 people had Macs nicked at a festival last week where every other machine was Kensingtoned up.

Looks like the "solution" is a large square metal plate that you are supposed to adhere to your mac with special sticky tape and industrial glue.

WTF were apple thinking NOT to provide a Kensington lock? Surely an extra, tiny oval hole in the case wouldn't be noticed? Or is the aluminium chassis not strong enough to support someone twisting it off?

Totally stupid. Sorry had to say it again!

Dr Dre's Beats plans to drop HTC, hook up with rich mate – report

wondermouse
WTF?

Re: Buyer Beware

I think you'll find these are knock-offs, fakes, faux versions.

They are also appearing en mass in UK car boots too.

And the sound quality is nothing like as good as the originals - even if you don't like them.

Fanbois smash iPhone 5s much sooner than iPhone 3s ... but WHY?

wondermouse

Re: Family Statistics

I wondered if I should click the "report abuse" button here, for wilful destruction of mobile telephony....

Suggest you swap daughter for an iPad!

wondermouse

Iphone 3 had a decent screen surround that meant it was almost impossible for it to land on the edge of the glass if you dropped it. The screen was far better protected than in later models.

iphone 4 had edge-to-edge glass on both front and back, and seemed to smash far more easily, hence the massive growth in pop-up "fix your screen here" type shops.

iphone 5 has similar front design and again seems to crack on even the slightest excuse. At least they've made the screen easier to replace.

Huawei unwraps Ascend P6: World's slimmest smartphone

wondermouse

OS?

What OS is it running? I thought it would be android but no mention of it in the article - unless I'm going blind...

Cold, dead hands of Steve Jobs slip from iPhones: The Cult of Ive is upon us

wondermouse
FAIL

iTunes Match - still not supporting large libraries?

I would happily subscribe to iTunes Match - but it doesn't support large libraries, and looks like it STILL won't.

My collection of tracks - mainly ripped from my own CDs - is around 100,000 tracks. iTunes Match just won't support this, which is a real disppointment!

Apple declares WAR on Spotify: iRadio bags streaming rights

wondermouse

Re: Radio Rates

"... those short 15 second Tesco adverts with a blast of a well known tune, do the artists get money for that or is it too short to require payment?"

They certainly should. For every piece of music played on a radio commerical, the advertiser has to supply appropriate PRS details. Part of former job was to ensure that this was indeed provided. Compilation albums such as Now... were a nightmare, and clever dance-orientated ones that mixed several tracks for one 20- or 30-second spot were horrible.

We once had 11 sets of PRS details for ONE 30 second commercial!

Who should play the next Doctor? Nominations needed!

wondermouse

Benedict Cumberbatch has just the right mix of brainy, quirky and otherworldliness.

Windows 7 'security' patch knocks out PCs, knackers antivirus tools

wondermouse
FAIL

Dell OEM and other hit last weekend - was it this?

At some point last weekend, my trusty Dell Laptop suddenly decided that my Dell OEM Windows 7 was not geniune. So did my mate's. All this week I've been hearing about machines that were legitimately running Windows 7 OEM suddenly being illegitemised.

Is it the same thing? Something MS has done seems to have screwed the status of these machines.

The Times offers subsidised Nexus 7s to get subscribers

wondermouse
FAIL

Minimum 18 month contract

I would have given it a go, but there's a minimum 18 month contract whether you pay all at once or in monthly instalments.

Last time I tried the Sunday Times Ipad app it was awful and clunky compared to the Grauniad one.

So for those reasons, Rupert.... I'm out.

Apple ships 'completely redesigned' iTunes 11

wondermouse
Pint

getting the status bar back

"WHERE is the "total number of tracks/total size" information that used to be handily on show at the bottom of the iTunes window?"

OK to answer one of my own fails at least. To get the status bar back you have to.....

1. CTRL+B to bring up the menu bar

2. then view>show status bar to bring it back

Good grief - talk about hidden settings! Without the menu bar you can't access it!

wondermouse
FAIL

Itunes 11 - Apple You B*****DS!

I installed iTunes 11 this afternoon.

I had a well managed iTunes 10 library with lots of playlists, almost all album art imbedded in ID3 tags, and about 120,000 tracks, all properly tagged.

Now I have NO playlists - they've ALL been removed. AARRGGGHHHHH!

Now about half of my library is missing. Now Christmas for example has only 11 tracks rather than 47

I can't find the column browser at all - the one view I used all the time.

It is currently busy "determining gapless playback" for 24,186 tracks and so is slower than a snail on strike

The search box - always one of iTunes' best functions - now keeps asking to search the iTunes store rather than my library.

WHY do they choose to hide the "track number" and "disc number" fields by default? It makes no sense and is totally beyond me.

WHERE is the "total number of tracks/total size" information that used to be handily on show at the bottom of the iTunes window?

All the TV shows that I carefully ripped and labelled in ipod format, with season info and the like - all gone.

And last of all, WHY, in the name of all things holy, does iTunes STILL not have a RESCAN LIBRARY BUTTON to add new media and remove deleted and renamed items? This should have been there on DAY ONE, not still missing 11 versions down the bloody line.

This is the biggest abortion of an update I think I have ever seen in iTunes.

Listen Apple - I WANT MY LIBRARY BACK. I WANT MY PLAYLISTS BACK. YOU ARE A BUNCH OF UTTER, UTTER, UTTER, UTTER.....

'Brit Bill Gates' defends his honour in open letter to HP board

wondermouse
WTF?

The stakes are high?

Are the stakes high in this case then?

Just wondered as you restated this twice....

Symantec source code leak becomes torrent

wondermouse
FAIL

Shome mishtake surely?

"... together with an invitation for hackers everywhere to pour over the code..."

then bake in an oven at gas mark 6 for half an hour, before topping... er... themselves.

Undervalued TiVo wins yet another legal battle

wondermouse

"The real genius of TiVo is convincing the unwashed masses to pay an additional and significant monthly fee for "PVR Service""

No, the real genius of Tivo is that it does PVR functionality far better than anyone else. Just compare TiVo with Sky Plus and see. A Sky Plus is simple but dim. A TiVo is just as simple but way more useful and clever.

Beeb rescues old Who episodes

wondermouse

I imagine the reasoning went something like:

We have loads of old black and white stuff on 2" video tape. In this age of colour TV no one would ever want to see those again. In addition they take up miles of expensive storage. If we record over them we save on our tape budget and free up space too....

If the situation with Doctor Who is appalling, then early Top Of The Pops is even worse. Almost nothing exists of early TOTP - no Beatles, 1 performance by The Stones, a rehearsal take of Sandie Shaw and so on, because no-one high up in the Beeb realised just how important pop music would prove to be.

Ironically I think every TV News bulletin has been kept, because news is "important".

Luckily the germans preserved Beat Club and Beat Beat Beat so we still have some pop.

iCloud Communications sues Apple for 'irreparable injury' to trademark

wondermouse

Interesting to note...

..that on geticloud.com the landing page is devoted to VOIP solutions not cloud computing, and even when you follow the datacenter link it's all about hosting, managed services and technical support rather than the sort of cloud computing that Apple is pursuing.

On the plus side, the site says they have been in business since 1985.

Samsung prices up Chrome OS netbook for Blighty

wondermouse
WTF?

But why would you?

If this was £150 quid then sure it would be a no-brainer.

But at £349 you've got enough for a decent netbook with all the functionality of this machine PLUS a generous hard drive too. Plus windows (and ubuntu free as well)

So who would buy this?

TiVo calls time on ageing set-tops

wondermouse
FAIL

Bad move by TiVo

I think this shows a basic misunderstanding by TiVo of the UK market.

TiVo US clearly doesn't understand that cable in the UK is not universally available, unlike in the US. Getting a new TiVo is not an option. I wish it were. I'd happily pay for a dual-tuner Freeview HD TiVo, and so, I suspect, would the majority of existing Series 1 owners.

For those of you that use a Sky+ or Sky HD box, the TiVo infterface is SO much better! A sky box is like a TiVo with a lobotomy.

That's why there are loads of people, like me, who still keep their series one machines running.

IF we could upgrade we would, but the only new model is a cable only device and I'm not in a cabled area. Nor, according to Virgin Media, am I ever likely to be. (Yes I live in the far-far-away, remote wilds of, erm, London. Zone 2.)

Without the subscription servce my tivo, and everyone else's in the UK, will become large silver doorstops.

We love our TiVos because they are BETTER. By taking the service away and not replacing it will sour the whole TiVo experience.

This stinks.

The year's best... TV media players

wondermouse

Cyclone Live?

What about the Cyclone Live box?

Only £60, tiny, well built, and handles almost everything you can throw at it! Full HD 1080p too.

Virgin unwraps three-tuner über set-top

wondermouse

who cares what they look like?

The functionality is the real TiVo plus point as any TiVo user can tell you. There is a reason that TiVo is the number one DVR in the US - it's simple but immensely powerful.

Sky + is like a TiVo that's had a lobotomy, with all the useful bits removed!

It's good to see them back in the UK, but bad (for me) in that we have a Virgin cable run literally 5 feet from our front door in South West London, but Virgin insist that we are not in a cable area, nor will we be for the foreseeable future.

Virgin Media readies 1TB TiVo set-top for Brits

wondermouse
Thumb Up

TiVo love.....

"As long as it run's a new UI rather than the bodged implementation that Virgin use,..."

That's the whole point! The TiVo interface is SO much better than, for example, a Sky + that the Sky box is like a TiVo with a lobotomy!

It's as close to a perfect interface on one of these devices that I've found.

Features on the (now ancient but endlessly moddable) Series 1 box include:

When you fast forward (to skip the ads) and press Play, it automatically starts playing from a couple of seconds before you hit play so you don't have to do the FF > Play > Rewind > Play shuffle!

An intelligent Season Pass manager that juggles multiple showings of the same episode so that if the 10 Oclock showing clashes with something else, it'll get the 2AM showing instead.

Wish lists that can schedule across any channel for example "all Dennis Potter plays".

Add ons include

Automatic padding: Add 3 mins to the start and 5 mins to the end of every recording UNLESS this would clash with another programme.

Full web access and remote programming. (with an optional network card)

A happy Mr TiVo animation when you first plug it in!

I love my TiVo and wish they did a Freeview or Freesat dual tuner box in the UK!

How average is your sex life?

wondermouse
Happy

am I the only one?

Am I the only one who did a double-take when I read

"...there is the Durex annual sex survey..."

Oh, it said "annual"!

Seagate-Steve trash for Apple-Steve flash pash

wondermouse
WTF?

More affordable?

"....Apple has announced its widened and more affordable MacBook Air range...."

hahahahaha.

11.6in sub-notebooks

wondermouse

Good as far as it goes but....

...it would be nice, as well as noting the single core models, to point out what dual core alternatives are available in the same line and their prices. I am looking for a decently specced sub notebook but I don't want a single core model.

I would have liked a comment, where relevent saying something like "while this is the single core model, there is a dual core version with an xxx processor available for £yyy"

Paris Hilton flashes her Brazilian...

wondermouse
Happy

Bending over backwards

In fact the hacks at El Reg will bend over backwards to ensure that there are no double entendres inserted in their stories or headlines.

If they should, erm, come across one I am assured that they would whip it out at the earliest opportunity.

Apple iPod Nano 6G

wondermouse
FAIL

Not for me....

The lack of video and, to some extent, the lack of cover flow makes this a non-starter for me.

They should have called this the Shuffle Plus and positioned it at the £79/£99 price point then they would have flown off the shelves.

I'd rather have a 4g or 5g 16gb nano myself.

And what about the Classic? Still the only ipod that stores 160gb. Mine is full to the brim and an ipod touch is simply not an option, especially considering the crappy new camera.

WM

Sony Walkman NWZ-A845 media player

wondermouse

Does it support disc x of y tags

I have a large library of high quality MP3 files and have found most media players seem to have difficulty dealing with the Disc X of Y tags that multiple disc sets in my collection are tagged with.

I really don't like seeing albums subdivided into Now 75 (Disc 1) and Now 75 (Disc 2) folders when the tracks should all be in the Now 75 folder. ITunes and other rippers use the Disc tag to seperate the 2 discs and it works perfectly on my iPods,

Most MP3 players I have tried seem to list multi-disc albums as 2 x track 1, then 2 x track 2, and so on, which is most irritating.

Can you tell me if the Sony can display the tracks from multi-disc albums in the correct order?

Thanks

Did ID card applications surge after scheme was scrapped?

wondermouse
WTF?

do wot?

> even after the newly installed government committed to scrapping the screen...

Cowon iAudio V5 HD media player

wondermouse
FAIL

Epic Fail

No ID3 tagging is a game changer for me.

All my MP3 files are correctly tagged and for some stupid machine not to recognise them is beyond belief!

Internet Explorer drops below 60% market share

wondermouse
FAIL

Epic Face Spite Fail....

> I deleted IE a few weeks ago.

> Some of my applications that were tied into IE fail to work properly now.

Dur! That's called cutting off your nose to spite your face!

Newtonian Rock shop leaks iPad prices

wondermouse
Coat

I read that as

"It better be really absorbent and not just exorbitant!"

I read as

It better be really absorbent and not just exfoliant!

Tories ask: Why BBC3, BBC4?

wondermouse

Leave 4 alone

BBC 4 has some of the most interesting shows around.

For example the French co-production Spiral, which was truly excellent and would be unlikely to get an airing on a commercial channel.

Plus the archive shows that they show on 4 are priceless!

EMI saves world from unauthorised Beatles downloads

wondermouse
FAIL

Capital Records?

Sheesh - no the Beatles are not, and have never been signed to Capital Records.

It's Capitol records.

Are you getting confused with Capital Radio?