* Posts by Andrew Maddison

12 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Jan 2008

IWF denies wielding Pirate Bay banhammer

Andrew Maddison

@Rtrdo

"So I phoned them and ask the content filter be removed. Ready for an argument and everything, and the girl got it removed no problems.

Pity they've probably put the label PERVERT on my account now :-( "

I just popped into a Vodafone store and they did it over the counter. My friends dared me to ask them if I could have porn access enabled, but I chickened out and asked for the content filter to be disabled.

Motorola Aura

Andrew Maddison

Memory size

2GB of eAAC+ at 56kbps should cover a fair few music tracks (they sound pretty much as good as a 192kbps MP3 at that bitrate), and given the camera is so poor you won't want to be using the storage capacity for pictures (or watching videos in red!).

BT Wholesale cuts off Prodigy Internet

Andrew Maddison

@ kain preacher

Theoretically the MAC means that you don't need to be without DSL service for days waiting for things like the original service to disappear from the line, or for the new service provider to gear up to offering you the service once your old provider has been removed. It also means the new provider knows that you're not tied into a minimum term contract which would stop you from being able to move service provider.

In theory on the day of switchover using a MAC, you will only be without service provision for a couple of hours or so.

BT silences customers over Phorm

Andrew Maddison
Thumb Up

@ Law and @ Simon C (about avoiding BT)

"I'm about to move into a new house... I'm with Sky Broadband at the minute and want to continue with them, but I will need to pay BT to install a new line as the new place is brand new... do I have a choice of paying somebody else??"

You can phone The Post Office. They offer the possibility of installation of a new phone line to use their service, however their phone service doesn't have a 12 month minimum contract period. They also charge £110 for a new line, as opposed to BT's £126.99 (IIRC), and if you get a line with BT then you're tied to BT for 12 months. Have a look on the Post Office website for home phone (though you need to phone them as they can't take a new line order over the 'net).

Ofcom to create 116 bureaucracies

Andrew Maddison

Major fiddling?

How does making 116 calls 'truly' free involve any major work from the mobile phone companies? Some numbers such as Childling on 0800 1111 are free already (at least T-Mobile committed to keeping them free when they started charging for 0800 calls - just before I left them)

Ofcom: 'Well done Ofcom!'

Andrew Maddison

@ AC (@ John Loader)

When you roam, the person who calls you pays the normal rate for that call - it's the person receiving the call who pays the premium for the privilege of being abroad.

If you're on the south coast there's nothing stopping you from changing your phone's operator setting from "automatic" to "manual" and locking it to your home network so you don't end up accidentally roaming to France before you leave the UK. And if you manually select the "preferred" operator that your mobile phone operator partners with in the country you're roaming in (eg if you're an Orange UK customer then the partner in France will be Orange France) then you'll usually pay less for your calls than if you use a non-partnered network.

Seagate first with 1.5TB hard drives

Andrew Maddison

@ Chris iverson

Except that a Terabyte (TB) is now 1,000,000,000,000 bytes and a Tebibyte (TiB) is 1,099,511,627,776 bytes, so its formatted capacity will be 1.2 TiB.

HD TV in the UK

Andrew Maddison

Freesat from Sky

If Freesat from Sky was a "spoiler" for the BBC/ITV Freesat service, why has it been available for the last 3 or 4 years? It was also a piece of cake to order a card (which was £30 when we got it) and whack it in to an old Sky box that was already in the house I lived in at the time. Voila - every terrestrial channel available (including all regional variations!) including the ones like Five that aren't on the new Freesat service yet.

Yes, they send you mailshots trying to entice you into getting a full Sky package but sometimes the deals are too good to miss. In February 2007 they enabled all Sky channels for a month as a "trial" (just long enough to get bored of Sky One's endless Simpsons repeats). And then they offered 3 months of the full Sky World package for free, *and* gave me £50 in M&S vouchers. And there was no problem downgrading back to the Freesat channels once that offer had expired!

I even bought an old Sky box from eBay for my sister and a Freesat card and now she can watch TV - the analogue reception in her house is too bad to bear. She's had Freesat for 2 years now and it only cost about £60 in total (as the house already had a minidish on the side from the last owner).

MySpace hides in bathroom ahead of make-over

Andrew Maddison

@ The Evangelist

In the bottom right of the window on Facebook there's a little head/shoulders icon - click that and then select "go offline" to appear offline in Facebook chat. I assume it works, I've never used that feature myself!

OnlineTV recorder TVCatchup.com shut down

Andrew Maddison

@davenewman Re: Some organisations are licensed to record everything

Offering an online backup service would have been illegal as the law currently stands. Educational establishments generally hold an Educational Recording Agency (ERA) license, allowing recording of most Free To Air channels. Specific exclusions are the provision of an online on-demand or backup service (which isn't a "broadcast" as defined by the law, as it's triggered by the end user), plus the recording of any material from the Open University (who operate their own system - and you'd be surprised how many prime-time programmes are co-productions that are copyright to the OU!).

As ever, the law (and commercially available services) lag up to a decade behind what is happening right now, or should be happening.

O2 sweetens its iPhone deals

Andrew Maddison
Coat

@Chad H

"O2 value the cloud access at £15, so before any of you go comparing the new tarrifs, remember to value them against tarrifs £15 lower"

How do they value unlimited WiFi access that costs £6.99 / month when bought direct from The Cloud as £15 in value?

Oh wait, they're selling a device from Apple.

Apple tells iPhone vendors not to reveal sales figures

Andrew Maddison

@Chad H

Almost every phone may *do* email, but how many people can be bothered to set it up? Or register yet another unmemorable email address so their network will "support" their email usage? Compare that with *every* phone that does SMS and virtually every phone that can do MMS (the iPhone being a notable exception, of course).

SMS and MMS for me cost nothing - they're included on my tariff. No limits, other than a "fair usage" limit of around 2000 messages per month per number.

Plus when I'm away from a wireless access point (which would be most of the time I'm not on a computer - it's supposedly a 'mobile' phone after all), web browsing isn't the crap 2.5G experience that iPhone users are lumbered with. You might have an unlimited data tariff, but how much data can you actually shift without falling asleep on EDGE (assuming you're in an area covered by it, which is still way less than 3G coverage)?

I got my N95 several months ago, for free, and my total monthly contract bill is £32.50 - including a 120MB data allowance (not a huge amount but it's enough for web browsing, live GPS map data, Remote Desktop through a laptop, and the occassional song download). The deals are there if you push hard enough, but they aren't there for the iPhone because CPW and O2 can't budge on what they're allowed to offer.

Maybe iPhone version 2 will sort out most of the problems, but it seems more likely from past Apple efforts that version 2 will sort out some, and then they can skin all the fanboys again with version 3.