Posts by Will 19

The hoarder's dilemma, or 'Why can't I throw anything away?'

Loft

I spent last weekend re-arranging the 50 BBC Micros and masters I have in the loft. I just can't help it, if I see one at the tip I've got to liberate it, my head thinks "hey that's £300-400 worth there".... d'oh!

STONEHENGE: Attack of the RAYGUN HISTORIANS

Interesting

Considering some of the stones have been moved slightly to securely concrete them in and large amounts of the thing was rebuilt in 1901 and then again in 1958... I'm surprised they found any alignment.

WD updates video streamer for Netflix, iPlayer

Firmware update

A firmware update came in last night about 6pm. iPlayer has appeared and seems to work well.

I was just thinking...

... this the other day, that the only thing missing from the box was an iPlayer option. Fantastic little device and so configurable, very impressed. Also got mine for under £80 so they're definitely out there for that price.

Elite coder readies £15 programming gadget for schools

CPU speed

I would say highly efficient programming is needed now more than ever. Just imagine how fast processors would be if the code written to run on them was as streamlined as a 1K chess program!

However I'm guilty of being an 8-bit child, even wrote a commercial game called Bladedancer for the BBC micro. However the skills learnt back then are not wasted and translate directly to PIC/Atmel programming... hell Ieven refered back to Acorn user yellow pages to create SIN and COS on the little 8bit buggers.

Boffin breakthrough doubles Wi-Fi speed

Seems overly complex

Why not have a dedicated send and a dedicated receive antenna. You know what's being transmitted already without having to rely on it being re-received and nulled. Why not just subtract that from the incoming signal from the receive antenna, therefore cancelling the transmitted signal onboard at it's highest quality? Using 3 antenna and a null point restricts antenna orientation, the use of high gain antennas and I would imagine wouldn't work in a repeater situation.

Amazon boasts first $10 billion quarter

Kindle books

Well maybe it's time to do some bloody quality control checking on the Kindle books then! I have 10 Kindle books and every single one of the paid for books has problems in formating and OCR glitches. Why are they even using OCR when the book would have been created digitally anyway?

Considering the digital copy is quite often as expensive or more so with VAT on top than the physical books, I'd expect them to have this sorted, especially as we're on the third generation of Kindle now.

UK tech retailers are rubbish

Curry's and cables

Few years ago I went to Curry's to buy an optical lead for my 5.1 setup. I'd found what I'd wanted for about £7 and a sales guy nabbed me and tried to sell me one that had gold plate at each end of the connector. Apparently this would offer me far superior sound quality! I pointed out that the lead was basically 1m of fibre optic, no electrical connection at all so any gold plating was totally redundant. He really couldn't see it!

FAA to pilots: Expect 'unreliable or unavailable' GPS signals

Haven't we been here before?

It happened in Cornwall a few years back:

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/06/06/mod_gps_jamming_trial_cornwall/

There were lots of complaints that it was tourist season and everyone would get lost. The event passed pretty much unnoticed.

Diary of a Not-spot: One man's heroic struggle for broadband

I know the feeling

Here in sunny (snowy) Cornwall I've had a similar experience. I don't live that far away from a magical green box but the cabling is Aluminium and BT are not interested in replacing it no matter how many people want broadband in the area. Periodically the broadband checker changes it's mind and says we can get broadband and the same tired engineer comes out to explains we can't even though the web site says we can. I'm an electronics engineer and I've come up with many creative ways to try and get the bloody service here but BT aren't interested! I've been through satellite systems, rallied around residents in line of sight areas which can get broadband so as to establish a link and even been approached by companies wanting to setup a satellite hub here to serve the community local demand has been so high. In the end I settled for 3G. Even that wasn't easy, I've had to resort to a high gain antenna on the roof to get a decent signal. Been using it for 3 years now and other than the odd tower outage and the hideously small transfer allowances it's been so much better than dial up.