Posts by JB

Google does fractals in HTML5

Great waste of time!

I loved this. On my 4-year old Mac Mini it took about 10 seconds to render, but I remember the days of Fractint and watching the image build up about 1 line every 5 seconds! Makes you wonder what else they can do with HTML 5.

Facebook riddled by 'my first ever status message' scam app

Hey!

Where's my $1000 Walmart Gift Card you bastards???

Supermarket techie in mega loyalty-point blag

Not sure...

Not sure which is the bigger scam, this guy, or loyalty card schemes in general. Surely all that marketing info is worth ore than 0.0000000000000001p every week??

Apple MacBook Air 11.6in sub-notebook

Netbooks vs Apple

The Ferrari did 0-60 in 3.5 seconds, but the push bike couldn't even get to 20, let alone 60!

Acer replaces laptop keyboard with multi-touch LCD

Title

It'll still go kaputt if you spill coffee on it!

Windows 7 fans hold hands out for Halloween service pack fun

Lucky dip

I hope the coming service pack will cure the lottery I go through every time I boot up my machine, you never know which error message, random restart or white screen will appear next! Also, how about a solution that automatically connects to the network, please, having to connect manually every time I turn my computer on takes me back to the dark days of dial-up!

Ten... bedside iPod docks

Non-ipod docks

Totally agree. Here in the States there's precious little alternative. I did find a Timex MP3 clock radio that has an articulated USB port so you plug your stick in and swing down into a little recess, as well as an SD card slot. Doesn't look very sexy, but then it is a clock radio. Manufacturers: more non-Ipod stuff please!

International Telecom Union drags self out of past

Interesting article

The only other time I've seen the ITU mentioned was on old postage stamps, that's how relevant it sees to me and, I'm sure, many other people.

Benoit Mandelbrot, father of fractals, dies at 85

Thanks!

You tend to take these mathematicians for granted, don't you. I remember wasting countless hours with FractInt in the early 90s, entering all sorts of command-line parameters and watching the image appear, line by line, down the screen! Makes you wonder where the next mathematical breakthrough will come from?

Behind the Kindle, under the iPad: an unholy alliance

Complimentary

I do agree with you to a point. In my opinion, ereaders should be regarded as a compliment to 'real' books.

I'm partially-sighted and like the way you can increase the text size on ereaders. I do use a little hand-magnifier to read normal books and magazines, which is fine at home, but on the bus/train/plane it looks silly and I feel uncomfortable hunching over my read, so I love the idea of being able to hold an ebook at the same distance from my face as people with normal eyesight hold them. I've always envied the way they can just pick up a paper or book and read it, while I have to hunch over mine or flatten it out on a table.

(As an aside, I was reading a book with my magnifier in the garden on a sunny day. I could smell a bonfire in one of the adjoining gardens...until I realised the sun was shining through the lens and burning a hole in the paper!)

I would get my ebook reader out on a plane or train, but I don't think I'd risk it in central London - I feel nervous enough getting my phone out on the tube!

Yes, books need no power, can stand a considerable amount of battering, and can be swapped/sold/given away, and I'm convinced that they will never go away. As long as the industry don't see ebooks as a replacement for paper and ink, I think it could be a rosier future for publishes and readers.

Ixos Divo 2.1 iPod dock and speakers

Right...

We don't have an ipod. My wife has about 10gigs of mp3 files, and I thought of buying her an mp3 clock radio for Christmas, something with an SD card or USB port to plug in a thumb drive.

On amazon, everything is geared up for ipods, especially ipod touch and the iphone. I did manage to find one clock radio, a Timex that took SD and USB sticks, but it was discontinued.

Surely it is cheap enough to incorporate an SD card slot and update the firmware to play mp3s on a cheap clock radio, or even a high-end audio dock.

Amazon shrinks books with Kindle Singles

Short Stories

Not sure if I like this idea or not. Could be useful to buy short stories individually, but I just have a nagging feeling that this is really just books for the ADHD crowd.

Print books have got bigger, but only because (in the case of the John Grisham/Dan Brown kind of books) the print has got bigger and the page margins smaller - format them like proper books and they're probably about 180 pages.

(Where's the 'not sure' icon?)

Microsoft says US staff must chip in for healthcare

Not the doctors

It's the insurance companies who are pushing up the premiums, not the doctors. For example, our tiny company has had a 25% hike in premiums, so much that we had to go on a lower-level, cheaper plan.

Being an ex-pat Brit, I sometimes wonder why the hell I moved to this country. People moan about the NHS, but at least you know you have health coverage all the time. I dread the thought of being laid off and having to pay 500 quid a month just in case.

A huge company like MS charging its employees for health coverage? Even bankrupt local government here don't charge the employee, just their dependents. MS must be in trouble!

Mozilla upsets net world order with Bing on Firefox

Bing - the world's also-ran advertising engine!

At least Google's ads are easier to ignore and the interface is clean. Bing just looks too flashy, and is an unashamed advertising engine! Good thing you can change it.

(should be a 'Bleaaggghhh' Register bird throwing up icon!)

Amazon Kindle 3 e-book reader

US/UK dictionaries

Good point, I've always had a mini-dictionary by the bed to look up words when I'm reading at bedtime. My wife wonders if I'm all there, flicking through a dictionary in bed, but there you go!

I was wondering, though...I'm a Brit living in the US and am very tempted to get one of these. I was wondering if the UK English dictionary is available on the US version. somehow i doubt it, but it would be nice if it was.

Hard slog

I don't know about the newer titles, but there is a considerable amount of work that goes into publishing an ebook.

I have a large collection of 1950s and 60s pulp fiction, a very niche market, and probably hardly worth converting to electronic format. But I am in the process of converting one to see what it's all about, and I can tell you it takes a long time:

scanning the pages

Using OCR to convert it to editable/searchable text

Going through page by page, correcting erors the OCR made (some very funny!)

Getting the formatting to match that of the original.

It isn't necessarily difficult, just very time-consuming, so I would imagine that would push the cost up, at least until the technology becomes reliable and fast enough.

Sir Norman Wisdom dies at 95

"Mr Grimsdaaaale!"

Very sad to hear this. He did do alot more than those films, like others have said. I well remember seeing all the films in the school holidays back in the 80s, some wer good, but others were a bit too mawkish for my taste, but still very well made. I also remember hearing him in a very nice light sitcom on Radio 2 about 20 years ago.

I remember hearing it reported that when he was suffering from dementia in his final years, and couldn't recognise himself in his own films. How sad is that?

He will be missed, but at least we have his films and other work.

Symantec pushes mobile security onto Android and iOS

Today mobile phones...

...tomorrow, the world! Honestly, this just smacks of an industry who are desperately expanding. Desktop market is saturated, where next? Ah, mobiles! All we need is yet another process slowing down my little 600MHz processor, it's bad enough on my desktop! We'll have it on our web-enabled TVs next, whenever they get popular.

Samsung E60 e-book reader

Agree most of the way...

I agree with you most of the way, but these things do have their uses.

As someone with a visual impairment, I have to use a hand magnifier to read paperbacks and newspapers. That's fine when I'm at home, but when I'm on the bus or train it's cumbersome and looks odd. I've always envied those who could read papers on the train or lounge around on the sofa with a paperback held at arm's length (or even use laptops, but that's another story!), for me reading can be something of a chore.

These devices are a great *compliment* to traditional books. In public I can use one to increase the print size so I don't have to have the thing up against my face and on that long journey I don't have to have loads of papers and books around. But at home I can goggle through my magnifier at my beloved 1950s paperback collection or chuckle at Private Eye.

One thing stopping me from going out and getting a Kindle or whatever tomorrow is the content. I haven't looked into it properly, but I'm guessing that alot of older, more obscure (or non-American!) material isn't available in ebook form.

Books will never die, but anything that lets me and millions of other blindies enjoy reading again can only be great news.

Olympus LS-5 linear PCM recorder

When I was 11...

I would have given my right arm for something like this. Back in the early 80s we used to have so much fun improvising into an old Ferguson flat tape recorder, then listening back to the result. And there was the thrill of taking the recorder outside on batteries!

I wonder if kids today get the same sort of enjoyment from the digital voice recorders in their MP3 players or phones as we did when we hit play and record way back when.

I've dabbled with audio productions using a WAV voice recorder, Ableton Live and a heap of sound effect files, but it isn't quite the same!

Sorry for the slightly off-topic comment, but seeing this just made me think of those old tape recorders.

Sony Ericsson screens wireless display for phones

Nice idea

It makes me wonder how safe it really is to whip out a fancy smartphone to use all these great apps, just takes one scally to accidentally-on-purpose bump into you to relieve you of your pride and joy. If they worked on the details, like the styling, a bit more, it could be very interesting.

PS: does it have a microphone? Can I talk into it like James Bond??

Keene USB FM Transmitter

Looks nice

Certainly cheaper and more discrete than the 'Whole-House Transmitter' I bought a couple of years ago. The thing costs about $120 and is the size of a pack of cards. You can power it with 3 AA batteries, which last about a month if you keep it switched on all the time, or via a mains adapter, though you get some rather annoying mains hum. I might invest in this little unit and keep the other for when we have a power cut and plug the MP3 player into it.

As for power, here in the States, I believe the maximum power is 250mW, which you'd need for the larger houses and more crowded FM band here, and they even allow low-power broadcasts on medium wave here, which is fine for speech.

About the neighbours. When I first got my FM transmitter, I lived in an apartment complex with 14 apartments. I never had any complaints, but one day one of my elderly neighbours asked me if I had heard this wonderful new station that had just opened up, they had English plays and comedy shows, just like the old days but in English! After that I was a bit choosier about what I put on the computer!

Blockbuster winds itself into Chapter 11

Dusty is right

Every Blockbuster (that's still open) that I've visited has been a dusty, musty hole, deathly quiet save for the broken air-conditioner. There's always a rack of VHS tapes in the corner, and even the DVDs look lie they've been there for 20 years. They've closed a few in my town, the only ones open seem to be in low-rent strip malls, the sort of place you wouldn't go near after 6pm. Face it, Blockbuster are going the same way that all the independent video shops went when they came to town...taste of their own medicine!

Amazon loves LoveFilm (true)

Hopes it makes a difference

I was a loyal Lovefilm customer when it first started and was just a great little service. I bailed out in 2007 when it started to grow too quickly, buying up other DVD-by-post outfits and struggling hugely to send stuff out on time or in the right order.

I now live in the States and use Netflix which, while being the biggest player in town, still seems to get discs to me the next working day and in the order in which they are in my queue.

Perhaps Lovefilm being bought outright by Amazon might just improve the abysmal service, but somehow I doubt it.

Cyberlink v. Nero media authoring suites

Bloaty

ACDSee used to be like this...great little prog for sorting and viewing your pics, now a bloaty mess that takes over your computer.

I used to love Nero when it was just a CD/DVD burning tool. then the DVD creator crept in, the music library, then the user interface went from clean and simple o loads of silly pictures that made it look like a very bad MySpace site. I now use Easy CDDA Extractor for my DVD burning, just does the job without all the bloat.

Beeb creates new global iPlayer post

I'd pay...

I'm an ex pat in the USA and I'd willingly pay for Iplayer - it beats the endless loop of Dr Who>Top Gear>Dr Who>Top Gear>Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares>ad nauseam on BBC America!

German gov pooh-poohs biometric ID card hack

Ahem

Kein Biggie, surely?

AOL goes soul-searching with Google in 5-year deal

History

I reember reading about some company called AOL, not sure, though, in a dusty computer history tome. Whatever happened to them?

LG to show 31in OLED 3D TV at IFA

Can't wait either

I always had to wonder about manufacturers' claims that LCD screens were better quality than CRT. Granted, some aspects of CRT look pretty archaic now (basically a huge valve that needs alot of power and a heater, huge amounts of nasty chemicals used in the manufacturing) but, as Adam 38 says, companies are still using CRTs for critical work. I was really sad when my venerable CRT packed up and all I could afford was a piss-poor TN panel LCD monitor. I can't wait for these OLEDs to become commonplace, to oust the shitty LCD displays that people put up with so readily.

119 iPad apps for admins, coders and geeks

C for miles!

Ah the memories. I remember learning C in the late 80s on a BTEC in Computer Studies. I did pretty well. Then it all went out the window and I've forgotten virtually all of it. Perhaps this little app you mention is in order! Now the kids are allowed to do HTML and can even use colour, whatever next!

FringOut phones home

Google Voice?

I was tempted by Fring when I first bought my Android handset, but was just confused by what it was and what it could, and could not, do. They need to sum up their service in one pithy sentence or they're going to lose alot of potential customers.

Shame Google Voice isn't available in the UK. I use it to call my family in the UK from the States using credit bought on the website. Yes, there's a bit of a delay on the line, but the voice quality is fine and I can use my mobile to call internationally from anywhere here for next to nothing..

Verizon demos 1Gbps over existing fiber network

Peak time

And during the peak it's about 5Mbps!

I live in a working class town in California, and would love to take out fiber-optic cable, but being where I am I doubt whether there's much of a market. Our local cable provider, Wave, is the usual rubbish, 18Mbps/1Mbps with a ridiculous 25Gb per month cap. Can't be bothered to do the mahs, but I'd imaging that would be eaten up in seconds at 1Gbps!

Would be interesting to see how this behaves in the real world with millions of users weighing it down.

Hotmail still not working? Use Chrome to fix it, says MS

Oh no!

Logged into my hotmail for the first time for about 5 years using Chrome, and everything worked fine, except all my emails had gone. I was quite relieved, actually, that I wouldn't have to wade though five years' worth of spam from African dictators and Eastern European lovelies. Now, how do ou close your hotmail account??

Hands on with Nintendo 3DS

Bugger all this 3D rubbish!

Yes, fine for most, but for losers like me with uncorrectable squint, 3D is a total waste of time. I worry a bit that all this 3D (or stereoscopic, I suppose) stuff is coming, and I and many like me will never see the benefit. Sorry to be a downer! Looks like a nice little hand-held, though.

Facebook beta joins web Q&A craze

Money

Just sounds like a half-arsed attempt to chuck advertising at people. "Who won the world cup in 1970?" wouldn't really generate much revenue, but something like "Where is there a nice restaurant in my area? means money fr someone.

Street View spooked by 10 Rillington Place?

1970s Health and Safety

Loved that film clip. Oh for the days when a flat cap afforded protection from flying masonry. I suppose builders in caps have gone the same way as those red and white-striped tents you used to see at road works, where you would probably find the workers drinking tea.

And how soul-destroying must it have been for that reporter that he was still working on the newsreels in 1970, when all his more savvy journo friends had gone over to the new-fangled tele-vision.

Czechs toast Bud-beating beer win

Reason Prevails!

Could you imagine a Czech company marching into an American company waving writs about saying "that name belongs to us"? It seems to be a one-way street. Glad sense prevailed, though, and the best beer won!

As for American beer, the big names have done a great job of giving it a bad name. Scratch the surface and there are some fantastic brews about Stateside. The Sierra Nevada beers are great, especially the aptly-named Torpedo (7.2%!). I once tried a Bud, just to give it a chance, but it really was just yellow water - even the dog wouldn't touch it and preferred to drink out of the swimming pool! Still miss my Wadworths 6X and Bishop's Finger, though. :(

Withings Wi-Fi bathroom scales

Reminds me...

Reminds me of the time my wife and I were house-sitting for my father-in-law. He had these rather posh-looking bathroom scales in the bedroom, and I decided I'd give them a go and see how much lard I'd put on over Christmas. I was just resting my feet on it when there was a beep and a crackle from a speaker, and a voice said "and how are we doing today, Mr Smith?". It was like something out of 2001. It frightened the life out of me. The voice said "Mr Smith?" a few times - it turned out that these scales were linked to some kind of call center, and whenever you got on them it rang up your 'personal assistant' who discussed your weight and diet, etc. Makes these rather pointless scales sound rather nice. I personally prefer to use my wetware to store the magic number long enough to get me to the pad on the fridge door!

NatWest sets lawyers on student site

Haha, agreed

Like the guy who changed his name to something like [name of bank] Are A Load Of Moneygrabbing, Evil Bastards, and so had to have that printed on all his cheques and correspondence. Nice one!

Location-based Web2.0rhea not an epidemic

Wha?

Never heard of these services myself, what are they? I suppose I am 3 years older than the top end of the demographic for these things, whatever they are, so I shouldn't be surprised!

Mine's the raincoat with the 10-shilling note in the pocket.

Google discovers Chrome can (really) block ads

Hooray!

Just installed it on Chrome for Mac and it works well. I might even try Chrome on my Windows machine at home now - I have been using Opera as Firefox has been rather clunky lately, but even Opera has a pretty poor excuse for content blocking.

Poor old Firefox needs to fight back now or else. Even then, though, I doubt it will ever be as unpopular as IE (at least for home users).

Firefox joins Microsoft in uncool kids class

I didn't want to admit it

I'd been using Firefox since about 2004 and was happy with it. But for some reason Firefox, especially since version 3.6x, seems to have lost its charm for me. The Windows version is fair enough, but the Mac version is horrible - slow, clunky, memory hog. I tried Safari and Opera on the Mac, but Chrome just worked and was nice and nippy, even if it was just as much of a resource hog as FF.

It seems that FF have become a bit complacent and Chrome are picking up punters fast.

If only Chrome had the FF plugins, especially Adblock+ and BabelFish!

Ten Essential... Budget Compact Cameras

Canon Ixus cameras

Just wanted to thumbs-up the Canon Ixus line of cameras. My first digital camera was the original Ixus in 2000 (2Mp and cost almost 400 quid!) and now we have the SD1100IS (not sure what it's called in Europe).

Alright, you're having to compromise on the picture quality, but that metal body, nice screen and, above all, pocketability make it ideal.

And I'd stay clear of Kodak cameras, they might make some interesting professional digital equipment, but their consumer stuff is very mediocre.

BBC iPlayer to run on iPads. Eventually

Academic

Would love to see this on the Ipad as an app.

All academic, as the BBC don't like us ex-pat Brits accessing the iplayer!

Toshiba Satellite U500-1EX touchscreen notebook

Fugly

...and expensive. and only 2 USB ports?? No thanks!

BBC nicely summarises Gordon Brown's legacy

Overseas user

So that's what the UK BBC news site looks like - since they decided to use IP geolocation we ex-pats haven's had a choice as to whether to see the familiar UK home page or the 'international' page with a couple of UK stories bolted on.

Ubuntu's Lucid Lynx stalks PC and Mac converts

I would like to use Ubuntu

I've been using Ubuntu on and off for 3 years, but apart from web browsing and email it's just totally frustrating.

I love the GUI, but my cheap and cheerful USB wireless dongle doesn't work; GIMP is great, but I can't print anything on my Canon printer; I try to install a small program and end up with tons and tons of other stuff called lib-something, loading down my system, and then totally lose track of what I have installed and what I don't. How come in Windows I never have to worry about .dll files?

I'd really love to go to Ubuntu, but it's still not there. I've given it a go, and I still have it as a virtual machine that I can have a play on now and again, but I wouldn't get rid of Windows just yet.

Steve Jobs snuffs App-Store-for-Mac rumor

Prices

I'm all for a Mac app store. Just think, Photoshop for $1.99, microsoft Office for Mac for an amazing 99c! That'll be the day!

Chocolate Factory eats crow on Googlephone

American carriers

If American carriers offered better phones, they wouldn't have to cap on like this. Even the cheap and cheerful phones in the UK are better. I'd have a Desire tomorrow if I could afford it, and it were actually available in the US.

Nokia: digital SLRs are doomed

Worse and worse

Cameraphones and other cheaper digital devices just make me wonder where recording technology - audio, photos and video - is going.

Remember when recording quality was getting better and better: like domestic reel-to-reels with muffly sound developing over the years into chrome dioxide cassetes with lovely sound quality, now we have 128k lossy digital mp3s, but nobody seems to care.

Same with video: used to have an 8mm cine cmera with blurry, wobbly pictures and no sound; then the video camera in a shoulder bag, then stuff like hi-8 and mini DV. What do we have now? Jerky, blocky video taken on a mobile phone, no better than the cine cameras of 40 years ago.

Whatever happened to 'progress'?