Posts by TheFirstChoice 26 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Jun 2010
Onelan digital signage Net Top Boxes do this if they have a power interruption and they fail to boot from the on board SSD (or if the drive fails). Most of the time power cycling them with a suitable 20 seconds or so with them switched off will restore them to a working state... shame that a lot of them are installed in intentionally difficult to access positions behind a screen!
I imagine other signage boxes based on similar hardware will behave in the same way.
I've stopped my work PC from automatically updating at all by telling it my internet connection is metered. I can therefore choose when to let it download updates and subsequently reboot when it's convenient to me rather than Microsoft. The only application this seems to affect is Outlook and I can just click "Connect" on the warning banner about internet charges when I open it up (usually after an update reboot).
I think it was Special Reserve that I bought the Star Trek: The Next Generation - A Final Unity game from and then entered (and won) the competition to win the entirety of TNG on VHS!
They changed the rules slightly after that as I had put as many postcards in an envelope as would fit within the first class weight limit of the time to maximise my chances of winning :-)
It's not just the material cost here, it's the value Apple have attached to having more storage on the iPhone.
Current cost of an iPhone SE SIM-free on Carphone Warehouse:
16GB model - £359
64GB model - £439
iPhone 6S SIM-free:
16GB model - £529
64GB model - £599
Apple seem to attach a value of £70 to a 48GB memory upgrade - whereas a 64GB SanDisk MicroSD XC1 is £14.38* or a 128GB is £34.99** on Amazon.co.uk. So it's worth a lot more to them than simply losing 50p, they're actually losing £70.50 per phone that might have been upgraded, as 16GB is very restrictive in terms of what can be stored on the phone and is often regarded as just present in the price list so they can say the iPhone cost is "from" a particular price. This is the only thing that's good about the iPhone 7 as far as I can see - they've removed the 16GB option from the lineup.
* https://www.amazon.co.uk/SanDisk-Android-microSDXC-Frustration-Packaging/dp/B013UDL58E/
** https://www.amazon.co.uk/SanDisk-Android-MicroSDXC-Frustration-Packaging/dp/B013UDL5HU/
The major players in audio visual control systems are AMX, Crestron and Extron. Often the system integrator prefers one brand of control system over the others and with some systems the integrator is the only one with access to the source materials or ability to update the controls (usually through badly written contracts that don't mandate access to those materials).
Most of them have a way of controlling or monitoring the system remotely and it's all too easy to make the system publicly accessible and/or with default credentials available to connect to them.
Samsung as a hardware manufacturer no longer makes any money from me whatsoever as I won't consider buying any of their products again. I have also dissuaded family and friends from buying their phones - hardly anyone I know has a good word to say about them once they've tried to use a Samsung mobile device for more than 12 months.
I have no tears, I've just moved on to manufacturers that make less shitty products.
I've got an older Samsung (non-smart) TV, I've had a Samsung BluRay player, I had a Samsung Galaxy S3 phone. I'd never buy a Samsung device again - they just abandon any form of support for them, even when they're still current models and they could update the firmware, or refuse to admit problems that they've caused with firmware on a faulty component on the phone. Other manufacturers make better products that they continue to support.
Odeon cinemas allow you to bring in your own food and drink. I imagine no alcohol as they are licensed premises, and I don't know what their position is on bringing a meal from your local fast food outlet in... but it does mean you can avoid the huge price hike on fizzy drinks and sweets if you want to!
If Vodafone's management of their Irish network is anything like the glacial speed they operate at when attempting to repair faulty cells in the UK (and not actually visiting site to verify that it actually works, just relying on "it should work now, can you test it for us?"), then a wider presences of *anyone else* could only be a good thing.
Broadcast HD in the UK is 1080i50 - though the BBC use some 'smart' systems to automatically switch between 50i and 25p (e.g. when they play out movies).
I think 3D broadcasts (certainly the ones on the BBC HD channel as was or the BBC Red Button service more recently) are side by side 3D which meant chopping the horizontal resolution in half - two 960x1080 images next to each other.
One thing that struck me about Sony Ericsson phones when the companies originally got together was that they appeared to have their design by Ericsson and their software by Sony (i.e. fugly and crashing all the time).
By the time I bought one (the Xperia X1) things had improved somewhat, but then they made the amazing decision to not allow Windows Mobile 6.5 onto the X1 (not officially, anyway) - effectively telling existing customers they could either get stuffed, or buy the X2.
There was then a much more favourable option of waiting a few months for the Desire Z from HTC (if you hadn't guessed, I like phones with real QWERTY keyboards!), with me in the meantime telling my friends to not bother with a company that never released even a minor update for a (at the time I got it) £500 handset.
A company that treated its customers with that much disdain frankly doesn't deserve to exist in the market today.
As bad as BT is as a company, I'm pretty sure they will have replaced all the *trunk* connections with fibre by now. They did offer to lay fibre to the consumer throughout the country (well, except Kingston) back in the late 80s, but were refused permission by the government as that would give BT too much power (over telephony, and other services such as TV) that could be delivered over the fibre... since of course once they'd invested the multiple billions of pounds into replacing the copper cables, they wanted to be able to recoup that investment by selling services using them.
Remarkably good thinking by BT, in hindsight remarkably poor thinking by the government, but back then BT really did want to try to take over the world.
...if you've bought something online then you are entitled to inspect the goods before you decide whether you want them, and it is held that you can't inspect them unless you open the box.
If the retailers states "goods must be returned sealed in a saleable condition" they are infringing your consumer rights - though you must take "reasonable care" of the goods while they're in your possession.
So how does the meter know the reading has been received correctly? It'd be like the old pagers where if it was turned off or out of coverage when a message was sent to you, you'd never receive it. Far better to have to receive a verification (checksum?) of the data back from who you're sending it to or to retry if no response or the data didn't get through properly...
... it's time for a chargeback. If you paid with Visa (Debit or Credit) then the Visa Chargeback scheme protects you. Tell the issuing bank that your refund has been delayed unreasonably and they have to refund you and then it's up to Dabs to say why it shoudln't be refunded. If you paid with a Mastercard credit card then you're protected under UK legislation assuming you paid more than £100 (though many issuers protect you for any amount), if you paid by Maestro then you have no protection...
On the subject of a systems upgrade, I would never expect BT to get one right. If I said any more I'd have to be an AC :-P
...but they're installing Sony's 4K D-Cinema projectors. The ones that, unlike the rest of the Digital Cinema world who use DLP (which works and has a nice contrast ratio and decent colour reproduction), are using LCOS - effectively a giant LCD projector.
There have been many negative review of Sony's system, not least stemming from the imaging panels failing very quickly in day to day use. And if you want to show a 3D film on a Sony projector you can't show it in 4K... you have to run it with a weird double lens that produces 2 less-than-2K images stacked on top of each other, because it can't switch quickly enough between left- and right-eye images for the conventional polarisation or shuttering processes to work.
Until Sony decided the world needed 4K, hardly anyone knew they "needed" it!
Maybe they should take a leaf out of LG's book (though hopefully not their Standard Def scaling book) and have it that pressing "input" brings up the input menu, but pressing it repeatedly moves the highlight on the menu down by one selection each time, and then not pressing anything for a few seconds activates that selection. Or you can use the up/down arrows and enter button on the remote for faster selection.
And also LG seem to be the only manufacturer of consumer-level kit that still have an RS232 control port on the back, and still allow consumers to send commands to the set (the control codes are handily printed at the back of the manual) - which is amazing for automation systems that can use RS232 control.
...my current one has an annoying user interface where to go between sources I press "input" and it just cycles round, rather than bringing up a menu. The (slightly newer) one I recommended to my parents brings up a menu for this, and when I emailed Samsung to ask if they'd do a firmware update they emailed back and said they couldn't be arsed (in not quite the same words).
I have no time for companies who just abandon customers with kit that isn't the very newest model. Hence why I'll also never get another Sony Ericsson phone. There are plenty of other manufacturers for me to work my way through!
The mini USB connection is designed for 5000 plug/unplug cycles, whereas micro USB is designed for 10,000. The phone I have with mini USB has a slightly dodgy connection after under 2 years' use such that it doesn't work with all mini USB plugs any more.
Micro USB has also been designed such that the bits that will wear out quickest are on the plug connector rather than the socket - meaning you can replace a £3 charger rather than shelling out to get your phone's socket repaired.
I'm also not sure why Apple insists on sticking with their huge dock connection that at the end of the day also isn't very good - can you imagine a small device trying to shoehorn that monstrosity onto it? HTC have managed to get a perfectly good number of connections onto a Micro USB form factor socket that happens to also be compatible with a standard Micro USB cable/connection!
No point sticking with a standard that's just not very good.
Their online operation is pretty good at boxshifting, even if the stores are still painfully bad...
The fridge I got from Dixons online was as low-priced as anyone else, and they let me pick a delivery slot on a Saturday for free - and fulfilled their promise of texting me the night before to let me know the time of the delivery, and then the driver phoned when he was on his way.
And the LCD TVs we just bought were cheaper than anyone else for the spec we wanted, and again their delivery service was second to none (even with the driver having to find his way round a big university campus for the delivery this time).
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