The seven month hitch

Monday, July 28th, 2008

Back in January I decided to chase up a rumour that the Government was planning to radio-tag serious offenders so it could track their movements. So, I did my research, wrote some words and rang the prison’s service to see if anybody fancied having a chat about it – confirm, deny, ignore. Whatever. Seven months later, I got my response.

Seven months… that’s 213 days, 639 meals, five and half million breathes, 1,704 hours of sleep. Empires have fallen quicker than that.

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WiMAX less popular than powered exoskeletons

Monday, July 28th, 2008

WiMAX wireless, as we were discussing in the office just the other day, has so far proved as popular in the UK as a Gary Glitter comeback tour.

And now, courtesy of a particularly peculiar piece of research from BT, we have the stats to prove it. When BT asked more than 2,000 adults which technology they would like to have access to by 2012, WiMAX came below H20-powered cars, powered exoskeletons, On-demand access to media on any device, and a robot cleaner, registering interest with only 13% of respondents.

Personally, I’m hoping for a broadband connection that gets even close to the up to 8Mb/sec promised on the tin. The powered exoskeleton is probably a more realistic proposition.

Ebooks: A bad idea getting worse

Friday, July 25th, 2008

Don’t get me wrong, I quite like technology. I’m the kind of person who’d be admiring the massive metal foot of the Terminator even as it stomped my skull into the dirt. But when it comes to eBooks, not only am I not sold, I’m sat on the shelf hiding my price tag behind my back and shooing people on towards the muffins opposite.

And it’s not just that the entire eBook market is beset with ridiculous proprietary formats, clunky readers and expensive texts being pushed by companies whose only knowledge of books is a hazy memory of drawing moustaches on sperms in science class. Even Amazon, which built an empire on the blighters, seems to have forgotten why we love them – digital texts cost more than paperbacks, you can’t share them and its reader looks as if it were built in 1893 and runs on steam. Amazon, quite contrary to its claims, doesn’t have an eBook strategy so much as a series of really bad ideas all lined up in a row.

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Nine things I hate about iTunes

Thursday, July 24th, 2008

1. The fact I have to use it at all
In the normal, grown-up world, there are standards for things like MP3 players. That’s why every MP3 player I’ve owned in the past five years has worked, right out of the box, with both the manufacturer’s own library software and Windows Media Player. Every MP3 player, that is, apart from the one built into my iPhone.

2. Its high-handed approach to my system resources
iTunes is a program for managing your music files. All right, it does other things too (though I’d prefer it not to), but there’s absolutely no need for it to be running all the time. So why does it need to secretly install services and startup items? (more…)

Why I hate Facebook (but keep coming back)

Thursday, July 24th, 2008

Before I get too much grief, I’m fully aware that I’m about six months too late to start jumping on the slam-Facebook-bandwagon, but it’s starting to annoy me so much I can’t hold in my stored-up anger any longer.

It’s not even that I want to use Facebook or even have an opinion about Facebook. The fact is, I have to use the darn thing if I want to keep on communicating with my brother. (more…)

Testing camcorders. In a fish tank.

Wednesday, July 23rd, 2008

A lovely blue Sanyo Xacti VPC-CA8EX just landed on my desk to be reviewed, which is great, because it has one particularly exciting feature – it’s completely waterproof. Eager to test this out I ran down to reception where we have a huge fish tank, and I dropped it in.

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Global warming, the Ofcom way

Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008

We’ve seen recently just how muddled a regulatory body Ofcom seems to be. There was the nonsensical claim that rural households in Britain are as well connected as their urban neighbours, swiftly refuted by a ThinkBroadband.com survey – and anyone who’s ever been outside a major city.

There was the bottling of speed sanctions on ISPs in favour of a laughable broadband code, essentially giving ISPs carte blanche to continue attracting punters’ cash with fantasy headline speeds.

Then there’s the eight weeks Ofcom still expects disputing customers to wait until their case will even be looked at. Not to mention the no-win situation Ofcom’s been manoeuvred into by BT.

But for final damning evidence of Ofcom’s ineffectiveness, I point you away from the world of IT and towards this excellent, and deeply unsettling, New Scientist article. It explains (far more eloquently than I could here) how Ofcom has essentially given permission for documentary makers to pretty much make things up, on the basis that it’s only news programmes which need be presented with “due accuracy”.

If they won’t crack down on something as huge as that, what hope for an end to “up to” speeds?

What planet is Microsoft on?

Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008

I’ve just tried downloading Microsoft’s WorldWide Telescope (a contradiction in terms, given that the idea of a telescope is to look beyond our world, surely?).

Given that the software is partly aimed at kids, it’s good to see Microsoft has made the installation process nice and simple.

Space cadets.

Oi. Microsoft. Where’s my XP SP3?

Tuesday, July 22nd, 2008

It’s been a good couple of weeks since Microsoft started pushing out XP Service Pack 3 through Automatic Update, yet I’m still to see hide nor hair of the blighter.

I’ve got Automatic Update turned on and other patches are coming down the pipe with depressing regularity, but not the big boy.

I’ve headed off to Windows Update to see if I can manually tempt the swine on to my system, but the site seems oblivious to XP SP3’s very existence. I’m being offered Office Comaptbility Pack Service Pack 1 (packs for packs? Give me strength), an update for Outlook 2007 and the first Service Pack for Office 2008 Accounting, but not a sniff of the final Service Pack for the most popular operating system in the company’s history.

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When sat-navs meet racing games

Monday, July 21st, 2008

There have been several blogs from various members of the PC Pro team about the joys of sat-nav recently. First I gushed about the ease with which I drove 1,400 miles in a couple of days, and barely got the map out once. Then Darien got all excited about the beat-the-ETA game everyone inevitably ends up playing to liven up long journeys.

But this… well. This is just brilliant.

According to CNN, General Motors is developing a windshield that “combines lasers, infrared sensors and a camera to take what’s happening on the road and enhance it” for ageing drivers. (more…)