Ouch
Expected a lot more from this.
Suppose it's difficult to beat Citizen four, but wow that was awful!
168 publicly visible posts • joined 15 Jun 2009
Tee Hee - dont buy into these shitty startup ideas.
The fact they designed it in the first place to not work without their servers online should have been all you needed to know.
Use HomeSeer and then bolt on anything you need.
Even if they go bust - it'll keep on trucking within my lan
A fool and his/her money are easily parted.
This!
There is a music producer called plastician, his early music went under plastikman which suffered the expected trademark infringment letter hence the name change. he still has material uploaded to youtube by someone else who has claimed ownership and no matter what he tries - will never see those royalties.
Google / YouTube arent interested.
Similar to the nonsense going on over on soundcloud where signed artists have been banned for uploading their own music. insane.
Had to agree with your round up of the year in phones, there are no winners - except the manufacturers. Find it harder and harder to justify a new phone as i get older and with them all at circa £5-600 its a no from me.
Started looking away from the flagship models at the end of last year and was quite taken with the honor 7 but storage and battery stopped me
this is a contender....
Dont like the increases? They are letting you leave... more than TalkTalk offer - just sayin.
Also - when you've left, what do you replace it with? BT or BT via reseller? No way in hell are they coming back into my house.
For the service i get from virgin they are in my good books.
although i never have to call them (i know that is painful - but then so is calling talktalk for clients)
I also dont use their super hub, so im probably not a typical user.
Call them what you want - home automation has prevented at least one break in (attempted) that i know of at my place.
Just added sensors to my external doors so the system knows when someone is coming or going and can then turn stuff on or off. Very useful when coming in legless at 4am.
But during the day when no one is in, it knows someone is standing at my front door for more than a minute not ringing the door bell (hidden cctv camera), so it can turn a tv or radio on, and the hall light.
Turns out the guy was picking my front door lock - as soon as the light came on he scarpered.
HD Photo sent onto the police - he didnt return.
Thanks Homeseer :)
fairly interested as to how the 02/3 deal will work out, as far as i can tell the networks are non-compatible currently?
Three has great internet but expensive calls
o2 has cheaper calls but the infra is awful and barely works most of the time.
Combine the two, shit internet and expensive calls i imagine will be favored over cheap calls and fast working internet.
have to agree with the man here, i refuse to pay for any streaming service.
they screw artists and fans at the same time.
listening on your phone earphones sure you can deal with low quality to a certain extent, but play anything on decent speakers at any reasonable volume and you need as high a quality as you can get, ideally studio master quality, data is cheap, why the hell cant i have it?
Completely sensible suggestion for 48k 16bit flac as standard from an above comment.
As a DJ i refuse to deal with anything less than a WAV file, but it seems the shops are using this as a way to extract even more money out of me now, looking at you beatport. £1.20 for a track, but want it as flac or wav, oh add another £1.85 on top. Bastards.
Try playing a 128k mp3 on a 80kw funktion one sound system and see how that goes down...
Fair play to you "20 Something". Any anti-bbc comment gets such a strong reaction here.
I've just hit my 30's and have never found use for the BBC beyond:
Top Gear
BBC News for Election Coverage
Olympics & Wimbledon
I pay the license fee, begrudgingly, but it needs to go.
I'd pay per service or per show happily, but not given that option.
And knowing people who work at the beeb, it is infuriating to watch my money pay for their jollies!
Radio could be stripped back to half of what it currently is with no noticeable reduction in service, same with half their TV offerings. The shows just dont stand up to the US Cable equivalents.
Over the last 12months i've started watching around 10 new TV Shows, the only UK one was dropped after one episode, they are light years ahead in terms of original programming.
Bring on the down votes!
This stuff is still so ten years ago, and the reason for this is because no one seems to be learning from the people that have come and gone over the last 25+ years of automation tech.
X10 was ok, Z Wave blew it out the water
now we seem to be going back to lots of propriety systems in places i would never trust them!
Monitor by front door by all means as an input device, but a z wave lock etc? Get out of town!
Cant imagine my home insurer would be particularly happy about me ripping out all the 5 lever locks
I say this all as someone who has had home automation in the house for years, most of the CES stuff is just plain backward, and won't exist come this time next year.
Still using my Motorola Xoom 1, battery life goes in 6 month cycles of being piss poor, then okay again.
I only use it at the end of the day when on the sofa or in bed to control the tele and stumble about the web.
Im reminded how useless it is, when i take it on the road though.
Constant charging required to watch anything on it.
I wanted to upgrade it for christmas, but just didnt happen. I'll use it till it dies....
Had a few clients infected with this due to bad on the ground security practices, deleted the lot and restored from online backup. Business as usual after a slightly extended lunch break...
Do feel sorry for home users who got hit though, i heard of someone who lost their dissertation, no one but his own fault for no backup but still. Ouch...
had to take 3 cab journeys this week and thanks to a stuck up colleague it had to be a black cab.
Cue 20 minutes of being told how awful Hailo, Uber etc are and how brilliant black cabbies are, how helpful and pleasant they are (as we were thrown all around the back of the cab thanks to his ducking and diving) in each journey.
the last cabbie just ranted constantly from start to finish in a massively racist fashion about all the pakistani's driving addy lee's, how they have to use sat nav (when he had one as well) - i will never give money to these morons ever again, needless to say my colleague returned in her own cab, whilst i got an Uber, guess who arrived back first and paid less..... yup... me
also reported the cabbie for his racist views, i doubt i will hear anything back about it though as it sounded like his brother on the other end of the phone.