Posts by Peter Hewitt

FSF slams Mozilla for 'shocking' Firefox DRM ankle-grab

Stallman

Not sure why he's so bothered. IIRC doesn't he read websites by using SSH?

Virgin Media gives TiVo users access to Netflix

I'm sorry are you from the past? Did Digital Switchover not happen?

Admittedly there are plenty areas (hello my flat in the centre of a city) where only Freeview Lite is available. Hence I throw my money down the Virgin black hole. Netflix would be an incredible boon as I'd not have to clart around plugging HDMI leads into my laptop anymore.

Apple to accept iPhone trade-ins at US Retail Stores

UK Trade In

So having changed the URL from US to UK I noticed there is a trade in scheme over here too. My iPhone 4S 16GB in perfection condition is apparently only worth £70, which is interesting because ASDA are paying me £180 and even envirofone are offering about £150 for it.

Rubbish.

Facebook finds new way to wring hundreds from users

Sub-headline

Surely you mean:

A gift card? For me? You shouldn't have... BITCH!

Naughty-step Apple buries court-ordered apology with JavaScript

JS is on all international homepages

Actually, loath as I am to defend Apple, it does appear this code is used on all the international homepages

For example South Africa

http://www.apple.com/za

Pano does browser-thin virty desktops

Pedant Alert

"grabs the open source Chrome browser created by Google (itself a modified Mozilla browser that has its roots deep in the Netscape browser)"

er no. Chrome is based on webkit, which has its roots in KHTML. Nowt to do with Mozilla.

Wave, Buzz... Android? What Apple teaches Google

Ping?

I find it poor to slag google's admittedly rubbish attempts at social networking without at least having the grace to mention Apple's own utter disaster of a social network: ping.

Oh and of course Mobile Me, which was a disaster, although was rescued, but hey ho.

Stallman: Did I say Jobs was evil? I meant really evil

Stallman's Rider

I am appalled that there is no dedicated article to the amazingly preposterous rider so cruelly relegated to a mere footnote.

Sort it out or my bookmarks shall be getting an edit.

Belkin Conserve

Actually rather good

I've had one of these for a while, got it for about £21 at PC World, and I love it.

The alternative, the type that is attached to my friend's TV where the TV remote supposedly knocks the other things off is a pain in the arse to operate nicely. My main concern it has to be said is not the electricity but the hum of my speakers even when they're off on the switch.

Another excellent product are the £5 pack of three remote sockets you get in Asda. Use two sets of these for mood lighting / xmas lighting and they're worth every penny (although need resetting after any power cut > 10 mins)

In the interests of full disclosure the receiver on my first one of these broke after 14 months, however it has a lifetime guarantee and Belkin posted a brand new one out within a week so no complaints there (also means I now have two remotes for even lazier operation).

Facebook's complexity will be its doom

You'll note the BBC button is actually implemented quite differently than the others and thus doesn't track in the same way. Only once you actually click the bugger to share something does it contact FB.

Much as I want to stick up for them though they probably did it for performance reasons rather than privacy concerns.

Dixons' best chance? Quit the UK and move to Sweden

name change

I think that DSGi renamed itself to Dixons Retail a few years back.

Least that was the impression I got when the woman I was arguing with re: a faulty Currys dishwasher gave me the wrong email and then wondered why she'd not got the photos she was wanting.

Replacement came from John Lewis who were delightful.

Mozilla to ship Firefox 4 on 22 March

re: themes

wasn't the "personas" thing invented mainly because FF3 ended up with a mass of ugly purple UI due to the way it utilised the Windows 7 colour palette?

Course its redundant now they have glass working properly

Park the Mario Kart, and throw your keys in the bowl

Ban this sick filth

I note that the inevitable has occured:

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1360784/Wii-game-We-Dare-given-12-rating-despite-sexual-nature-play.html

"A new ‘sexy party’ computer game has outraged parents with lurid adult content which they claim will encourage orgies and under-age sex."

Fantastic.

Btw, if you view the video on youtube itself rather than embedded there are a selection of increasingly desperate aternative endings. Woo.

Mine's the one with the wiimote in the pocket that's pleased to see you.

How to... print wirelessly from your iDevice

Printer settings

On my Windows computer I have two "printers" set up in Control Panel for the same colour laser.

The default has its settings set to mono, thus saving time printing as it doesn't have a fit whenever it encounters a blue link on a webpage and starts to fanny on with all the other toners.

If I want to print in colour I simply send the document to "HP Colour" and it prints in CMYK goodness.

I presume a similar system could be set up here where you have a few defaults on the mac with different names if you want to use settings frequently.

Mozilla delays Firefox 4 until 'early 2011'

Newer builds than beta 6

Beta 6 is rather "meh" however out of curiosity I've been using the nightlies and just a week after that beta there was a significant improvement in speed and the interface looks MUCH better and works in a much slicker manner.

It doesn't have the same incredible speed as IE9 yet however its far faster than B6.

Hopefully these next few months will be spent on performance issues as that seems the most major issue on the nightlies.

Paris, because performance is key to her success too.

Ryanair wins ihateryanair.co.uk because of £322 ad revenue

Break even

One thing i'm not clear on, is the £322 the total ad money or is it "profit" ?

If I was to put the usual set of contextual google text ads at the bottom of the page and earn say the £80 or so it costs to host a website, would that disqualify me for letting my hobby site offset its own costs?

Or does it only kick in if I'm getting direct kickbacks from airlines for profit over and above running costs?

Both this article and the one on the Graun are distinctly low on info regarding the exact nature of the ads involved.

Biometric passport 2.0 scrapped alongside ID cards, NIR

re: condem

*yawn* I'm bored of this already, it's the new ZanuLiebour

Jesus descends to Google Earth

Goldenpalace

I presume our friends from the online casino are already snapping up the farmer's field?

Ten free apps to install on every new PC

Microsoft Security Essentials

An excellent program, I agree. however since when have its updates needed to be manually applied? Mine come down automatically and through windows update.

Are West Bromwich Borg pliers actually side cutters?

Phone box

Looking at Hayden Clark's link that hardware shop does seem to be their base as they vanish once you move one square back.

http://tinyurl.com/alienbase

Having said that, why in the yard behind the hardware shop is there a phone box on the roof of a garage? More alien meddling?

BBC: Grasp the high-speed runaway cloud nettle

re:

a cloud on the ground is fog no?

The BBC's most useless tech journo

Please remember this is the author of

"Mr Clark told me PNG it stands for portable network graphics which is an image file much like a JPEG."

http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/thereporters/maggieshiels/2010/02/last_rites_for_microsofts_most.html

It?, because I wonder that whenever I read her blogs.

Office 2010 beta lands in laps of MSDN, TechNet coders

A suggestion

Could articles on office be accompianied by a poll like tool that allows the inevitable 5000 posters who'll now post "I HATE TEH RIBBON BRING BACK DA MENUZ!!!111!" to make their feeling known without actually interrupting the rest of the chat?

Digital River makes total hash of Windows 7 upgrade offer

A morning wasted

I spent an entire morning battling with this god awful software, not least because it wqasn't even clear what file had downloaded. Three other people did the same as I did and went looking for the .iso and accidently deleted the completed download by relaunching the downloader expecting there to be a button on it.

Eventually it was sorted by putting it on a flash drive, burning it to a DVD might have worked if it then didn't ask for a driver for the DVD drive it was running from :S

Street View prowls Outer Hebrides

Recovering its tracks

I was also excited to see the google car going through Dundee, filling in the gaps from its last trip.

Naturally having spied it coming down my street I instantly slammed myself against my window to try and get my mug on the site :)

Paris, because everyone has seen her Outer Hebredies... Maybe coat then...

Beeb pushes major new iPlayer release

Bandwidth caps

The service itself is stunning, I was amazed at the quality and am impressed at the new resize button - the way they've implemented it is far better than the way it was in Labs.

It'll be intersting to see how this will play out with the ISPs. Playing with the service last night I noticed that Robin Hood had a download size of 900Mb. Therefore once you watch three HD shows in a month you'll be well over the cap level of the smaller broadband services. Even on Virgin you'd likely hit the limit with two shows in an afternoon.

Waits for Daily Mail: "BBC WANTS PEOPLE TO PAY TWICE TO WATCH SHOWS??!!!!" in a week.

Fujitsu moves colour e-reader to pre-order stage

What type of screen?

So is this digital paper still or is it more of a standard LCD affair?

Virgin Media boosts bottom tier broadband

What about those of us already on L

Unlike some I'm very happy with my virgin connection after years of suffering poor ADSL out of in the sticks but I would be intersted to know exactly what happens to us existing L customers. Do we get upgraded to 20mb? Do we get a price cut?

Paris, because her throughput is above average.

Brit porn filter censors 13 years of net history

Virgin seems ok

Don't seem to be having any trouble accessing it on Virgin.

I noticed Heat magazine's website was blocked by Google (and therefore also firefox) yesterday. v

Perhaps the IWF should implement a "think this is wrong?" system like google's malware system has.

iPlayer finally makes friendly with Mac and Linux

P2P

Actually, according to the BBC Internet Blog this new version won't use p2p at all and instead is now being based on a simple download from their servers.

Web who's who botches secure sockets layer

ssl2?

i thought firefox, opera and ie7 all disabled ssl2?

Open source fanciers finger Beeb's Win 7 'sales presentation'

what?? no drms?

So now iPlayer works on Linux and their demands of all BBC content to be flung at them drm free (because of course that'll not go wrong) they now want to stop all talk of windows whatsoever?

Yawn, at least mactards are amusing.

Mine's the one with the knitting pattern included

Group Test: Universal Remote Controls

Can they control Virgin Media boxes?

This is one snag I've found with all in ones, they seem unable to control virgin's range of boxes. Can these logitech ones control them with the web update facility?

Bespoke top level domains 'to cost $200,000'

.reg

and will your distinguished organ be purchasing any?

.paris, because she'll wonder why all her sites are in french

Run Mac OS X on a PC

VMware

Is it possible to run this in VMware or on Virtual PC?

Tempting as it is, going back to XP from Vista Betas caused enough BIOS related headaches for me.

MS takes Windows 3.11 out of embed to put to bed

WHSmith Book Ordering

When I worked at WHS our book ordering terminal was a dos contraption running on 3.11 coupled to a fabulous dot matrix printer that used to jam every time you turned it on. All of this helped us on the weekend team discover the wonders of playing 16bit solataire without a mouse.

Then they replaced it with a dodgy website thing that ran on the XP (with no service packs) tills inside a full screen IE6. This was vastly less reliable.

Firefox record breaker sets the date

@neoc

can't you open firefox using the -p switch and find your profile directory in a shared location?

steve, cause i fear the fanboys are turning into the new itards

Woolworths flogs Disney Princess chair for £100m

re: spunked

perhaps they are using the dasani definition of the word as opposed to Claire Swire one....

Microsoft fires cannon at counterfeiters

New website

Hasn't that website been around for ages - linked from the help menu in XP's Explorer, it just appears to have had a small revamp.

I fail to see the Paris Hilton angle in this story.

Net radio saved from certain death

Streamripping

I presume real radio stations have to pay a fortune to try and prevent people home taping.

Stupid insane record company types