Posts by P Chase

Orbitsound T12 soundbar

One speaker?

Stereo from one speaker would indeed be impressive, but the review says this unit has three drivers: one in the middle and one at each end. If that counts as "one speaker", then so does a more conventional single cabinet containing two speakers: one left and one right. Boom-boxes and some instrument amplifiers have been doing that for decades; you get a degree of stereo image. Now perhaps this unit's unconventional layout does give a better stereo image, but I'm highly dubious about claiming it does so with "one speaker".

Cambridge congestion charge plans shelved

@Cambridge public transport sucks

While there are plenty of things that could be improved, there is also plenty to praise in our local buses.

Where I live in the city, the day-time Mon-Sat buses are so frequent, one rarely has to wait. I have two separate 10-minutely services, and some other less-frequent ones.

I go to work in a village by bus, most days, and this service is pretty reliable and reasonably frequent; I have a perfectly-good car, so I wouldn't use the bus if it was unreliable. At 10 pounds for a weekly ticket, bus is half the cost of driving to work, and one has the benefit of free travel Saturdays (Sunday service is indeed useless).

The bus experience does vary greatly depending on exactly where you live and work; some places do indeed currently have a poor service. But I think a lot of people who claim the buses are rubbish just like to parrot that mantra as an excuse for going everywhere by car.

Fixing the UK's DAB disaster

How to Lie with Statistics

El Reg has clearly been reading this very fine book, which I recommend to anyone. It has a section on how to mis-use graphs, to tell any story that suits your personal prejudices.

The graph in fact shows continuing sales growth, albeit at a reducing rate of growth. That may not be a runaway success, but it's certainly not a failure either.

Personally, I have one DAB radio, which I find OK. Reception is not a problem. Mostly, I listen to BBC R4 and various local radio, which I could equally find on FM, but I like to listen to BBC R6 and R7 every now and again, which I can only do on DAB.

Remembering the Commodore SX-64

I won one of these...

...as a geeky kid (before becoming a geeky adult), in a competition in The Times. The built-in monitor was rubbish, but they were nice enough to give me a proper one, too. And the Ghostbusters game, which I recall being quite fun.

Most home routers 'vulnerable to remote take-over'

Thumbs-up for Belkin

My (year-old?) Belkin not only defaults UPnP to Disable but includes a good explanation of the risks of enabling it.