Posts by xpz393 145 publicly visible posts • joined 25 Apr 2013
Read a BBC article earlier which repeatedly desribed a saloon car as a "Sedan".
I suspect it's due to the majority of media editors now being of an age where most of their early years passive learning came from online content which is mostly American English rather than British English, so the USA spellings and pronounciations are what they're now used to.
As much as it will grate on us old(er) farts who grew up on a media diet of carefully curated BBC and ITV kids TV content, I suspect in another generation or so, British English will be preserve of elderly folks and then-outdated books.
Did they *really* mean literal Sky+ here, or is the issue actually affecting SkyQ?
IIRC Sky ceased offering Sky+ several years ago, and as a canny negotiator could easily bagsie a free upgrade from Sky+ to SkyQ around contract renewal time (granted, by playing the “ok, cancel my service then” game), surely there can’t be many Sky+ boxes around these days?
Telefonica have wanted rid of O2 for some time now.
Remember they nearly flogged it to Three a couple of years ago, but apparently that was anti-competitive, and was stopped by one of the competition overlords. Shame really, as O2's healthy allocation of low-frequency spectrum combined with Three's mainly higher-frequency spectrum could've made for a bl**dy decent network.
Anwyays, suspect that "Merger" actually means "Virgin Media will take the lead on it all for now whilst Telefonica becomes a quiet partner for a couple of years or so, then VM will buy-out Telefonica's shares if all is going to plan."
Watch this space...
That’s a frighteningly good euphemism for electric cars:
“fuel tanks that shrink with time” : Battery capacity degrades over time, i.e. you can travel fewer miles on a single charge as the battery gets older/goes through more charge cycles.
“non replaceable tires without disassembling the whole car“ Change “Tyres” for “Batteries” and you’re kinda there… Owners of 7yr old Nissan Leaf and BMW i3 electric cars are facing a postcode lottery of whether or not their dealership will even offer a battery change, and those that do charge an eye-watering amount due to the labour involved to pulling the car apart to get to the batteries, and the cost of the batteries themselves.
The situation saddens me, as I am a proponent of electric cars (I'm about to take delivery of one), but this issue around refreshing the batteries really needs to be sorted in a way that’s feasible for the dealers/garages to do, the owners to afford, and the old battery to be fully recycled so that we don’t create a huge amount of landfill waste.
I hear you.
Apple Pay is a particular faff now, as it seems to try FaceID a few times before giving up and prompting for my code instead. Strange how I now envy those with an SE 2020 or one of the older models with touch-ID which just continues to work as it always has done :)
I use a dual SIM iPhone. EE and Vodafone, so have played around with the two networks in a real-world scenario.
Both SIMs are always "active" and show a signal. If someone calls me on either number, the phone rings. When I make an outgoing call, I can toggle which number to call out from.
Data, however, has to be set to one SIM or the other as the phone can't handle two seperate data connections simultaneously. I've found that EE has a slight advantage over Voda, so usually leave it set to use this.
However, a neat trick of the phone is that if the EE signal drops altogether, it'll automatically activate the data on the the Voda SIM (if it has signal), and even better, the EE goes into a VoWi-Fi type mode, using Voda's 4G signal to make/receive calls and texts.
Now I'll get to the point...
Generally, I concurr that EE have the better performance, but I still regularly find myself in situations, usually indoors, where EE's service drops completely, yet I still get a couple of bars' 4G with Vodafone, which is perfectly usable.
On balance, if I didn't have the luxury of a dual SIM phone and had to pick one network out of the two, I'd rather sacrifice a wee bit of the top-end speed performance I get with EE, and switch to Vodafone for the better indoor performance.
Orange merged with T-Mobile about 10 years ago under the holding name "Everything, Everywhere".
Everything Everywhere duly began amalgamating their networks, by first allowing automatic roaming between the two networks for their customers as a quick-and-dirty win, then moving on to more graceful/transparent measures.
After a few years of background tinkering, Everything Everywhere launched their third brand, EE, which was the only one of the three to offer 4G.
After the launch of EE, Orange and T-Mobile continued to trade as individual brands, and existing customers were coaxed into "upgrading" to the EE brand. Orange and T-Mobile eventually stopped selling to new customers, and AFAIK, any remaining customers were eventually automatically shipped over to the EE brand.
For an extra upvote or two... T-Mobile UK was previously One2One from when it launched in 1993 through to the early 00s.
Considering the unimaginable overnight shift in how we use "The Internet", a dip in average speeds of just 1.7% is a pleasant surprise in my opinion.
Aye, I know it's sacrilege to publicly praise a UK telco, and I know we should expect a healthy level of resiliency baked-in for “unforeseen events” in our critical infrastructure. Arguably, this situation has tested and proven the infrastructure to be not nearly as bad as we all suspected it to be.
I can’t help but feel we should be praising their engineers/teccies who kept this all going (despite years of poor manglement), with only a slight dip in performance which the vast majority won’t have even noticed in practice.
Argh! You've conflicted my vote-button-pressing :-O
I agree about your first point that this was spun as "doing good" but clearly an opportunity for them to save costs = upvote.
But I disagree with you that the effect on Netflix has been unnoticeable = downvote.
I thought something was wrong with our TV or broadband connection until I did some digging and found the article confirming they had reduced the streaming rates.
Right up until the iPhone 8, I could stick £20-£25 per month into a savings-pot, and know I'd have enough in that pot to buy a new iPhone every couple of years. This worked fine for the 3GS, 4S, 5S, 6S, 8, paired with a well-negotiated SIM only deal @ £10-£15 per month.
Then the iPhone X came along @ almost 2x the cost of all the flagship models which came before it. That was way too much of a price jump for most folks to simply absorb, so the result is that most folks now just upgrade less often. I'm now aiming at once every 4 years instead of once every 2 years.
The good news is that iPhones do now seem to comfortably perform well for 4+ years if kept up to date and not abused too harshly, and Apple do seem to commit to 5+ years of iOS updates from when it was first released.
Probably not a bad thing from an environmental perspective either.
Not so good for Apple's figures though, if others are now halving the number of iPhones they purchase over a 4 year period!
I didn't know that, Pete 39 - backwards compatibility, where possible, does generally give the best of both worlds or at least eases transition for the majority of end-users/customers.
I guess it could be argued that the <10yr old DAB radios which already support DAB+, even if the customer isn't currently using it, is a form of backwards compatibility. The morning after RadioX was moved from DAB to DAB+, I was quite pleasantly surprised that it "just worked" on my in-car radio. I was expecting to have to re-scan or re-select the station at the very least.
I can sympathise as I also had a 1st-Gen Pure which can no longer receive the stations which recently migrated from DAB to DAB+
A cracking little set which has served me well, and it annoys me that Pure didn't include end-user-upgradable firmware in our particular radios; an oversight which for most “digital” equipment would ensure future obsolescence.
The good news though, is that some DAB radio manufacturers do seem to have learned from their previous mistakes and have evolved. Whilst our 15yr+ old 1st-gen Pure sets are sadly destined for the electronic waste pile, I was able to firmware-upgrade an approx. 10yr old PURE radio to enable DAB+, and do the same for a similar-age Roberts radio used by my parents.
In more recent years (about 7 years ago I think?) the leading DAB manufacturers committed to supplying all new DAB radios with DAB+ compatibility built in, ready to go. Google “DAB Digital Tick” if you’re interested in reading more.
I think (hope) that you, me and the other early adopters of DAB will be in the minority of folks who end up with an obsolete radio once stations fully migrate to DAB+. On the flip-side of the coin, the majority of DAB listeners, whose existing equipment can already support DAB+, will at last benefit from the much improved service.
It's not surprising there has been a "meh" attitude from the general public towards DAB, considering that the vast majority of the UK's Radio stations still broadcast on legacy DAB's lossy and cumbersome MPEG-1 format from the 1980s. On a decent receiver, music often sounds hollow/tinny compared to FM. When driving, the complete loss of audio vs. FM just getting a bit crackly from time-to-time is particularly frustrating.
There was a reasonable fix announced in the mid-00s, but progress has been painfully slow in the UK.
What's commonly referred to as DAB+ in the UK uses a much more efficient codec (a variant of AAC IIRC?). At the right bitrate, music will sound much closer to the depth of FM quality, and the much improved error correction should reduce the frequency of signal-drops whilst driving or in a low-reception area. Another bonus is it's much more spectrum-efficient. A 48kbps stereo stream on DAB+ should sound better than a 128kbps stream on legacy DAB.
As a working (but still rare) example, Global Radio recently switched some of their DAB 80kbps MONO stations to DAB+ 40kbps STEREO stations. The station I regularly listen to now sounds *much* better, and several of the spots I drive through which consistently used to drop the signal no longer do. This is on the same car stereo as I was using before they switched.
So, for a better end-user experience, and a more efficient use of spectrum available for digital radio, I believe a full DAB to DAB+ migration must be achieved before FM is switched off (if ever).
I've always felt uncomfortable seeing folks' home addresses splashed all over the media in relation to a trial. It's irrelevant to the general public at best, and at worst it facilitates acts of vigilantism.
I wonder how long it will be before a defendant challenges the practice as a GDPR breach?
Think of the Sonos speaker as being a dumb terminal which uses WiFi for connectivity, rather than Bluetooth/Airplay as other "wireless" speakers tend to use.
When you use the smartphone app to start a radio stream from Radioplayer/TuneIN or a track from Apple Music/Spotify, Sonos' cloud service establishes a direct connection between the stream source and your Sonos speaker.
Your smartphone app is merely a glorified remote control. Your smartphone is *not* used as a gateway device in the same way as it would be if you're using Airplay or Bluetooth etc.
I find this approach gives several advantages:
1. Syncronised grouping - you can play the same radio station/music track through several speakers, and they're all sync'd perfectly. So, no more going from room-to-room with the same radio station being played several seconds ahead/behind the neighbouring room's speaker.
I believe the Sonos achieves this by presenting the same source stream to all grouped speakers rather than needing to open a seperate stream for each speaker.
2. No drop-outs caused by your smartphone and speaker becoming out of range of each other.
3. Alexa/Google Home integration - probably doesn't need explanation.
Hope that helps?
Anyone else remember early-00s ISP Breathe's offer for "free freephone-dialup Internet forever* for a one-off £120 (ish)"?
*Forever = Until we realise we launched a wholly unstainable product and get slurped by Tiscali.
Another legacy e-mail gone. No flowers please.
No, you're not...
I'm into my 11th year with Virgin Media as my cable broadband provider (well, technically NTL in the first year or two) at three different addresses as I've moved around the county.
Speedtest.net has always reported at or above my advertised speeds, and the small number of outages have been fixed quickly and without fuss.
I've certainly never experienced the horror stories that BT/Openreach friends and associates have experienced, such as long lead times for connection, randomly disconnected services which aren't fixed for days/weeks, or fluctuating speeds.
I still believe that if "Nokia" re-lauched the ORIGINAL 3310 and the ORIGINAL 6310i and charged no more than £100, there'd be decent buy-in as the re-imagined versions are cheap and nasty both physically, and in terms of the OS.
Only things they may need to consider are a shift to the li-ion battery for the 3310 (6310i was already li-ion IIRC?), and support for 4G + VoLTE, considering 2G will eventually disappear.
Each time the celebratory trumpets sound the “success” of EE coming out top (again), I shake my head in disappointment that “the best” means:
1. No indoor 4G coverage in many buildings I frequent within 3 miles of a large city centre
2. No data or calls during power cuts
Will be interesting to hear our Police Chief’s response when EE instruct him to inform his officers it’s unlikely to be a network issue, and they just need to reset their device’s network settings. Again. To no avail. Again.
"A spokesperson for the Home Office told The Register: "We have been clear that the operation of commercial multi-user gateways can have the impact of masking the identities of suspected terrorists and criminals which threatens our national security."
Yet deliberate CLI spoofing via other methods is still OK.
Not sure whether to call bullsh*t or stupidity?
I still have an early device from Honeywell's Total Comfort Connect range, which in addition to the thermostat on the wall, also has a "gateway" box which is connected to my LAN, communicates with the wall thermostat via a proprietary wireless link, and holds a local cache of the app-programmed schedule.
This level of built-in resilience to keep the system working as normally as possible in the event of a connectivity or cloud-based failure is the very reason I opted for this system over others available at the time.
So, whenever the inevitable <1% (annually) downtime for the “connected” features of the system occurs, it’s nothing more than a minor irritation. I still wake up to a suitably heated house, and I still have a system in place which will at least work as well as my old non-connected 7-day programmable thermostat did.
Bootnote: Obviously, the gateway box sits on a dedicated IoT VLAN with some firewally-goodness going on for good measure :-)
"I think you will find the default configuration used by Virgin Media is to link the TV box to the Internet via the WiFi." - Roland6
Considering that a substantial part of Virgin Media's offering is traditional fixed broadband, the conspiracy theorist may argue that they do have a vested interest in making their TV offering rely upon it in some way by default.
However, I think the conspiracy theorist would be giving VM too much credit for lateral thinking on that one :-D
It'll take time, but I can see it coming. Perhaps I was slightly off the mark, and what we'll see in the standard home market is a 5G version of the current xDSL home WiFi routers, eg same WiFi to the devices around the home, mains powered, with the WAN link being 5G instead of xDSL. This could also feature an external aerial socket to overcome indoor 5G coverage issues.
D'ya know what, I think I've just landed on Version 2 of my vision already!
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