Posts by Phrimmy

End all the 'up to' broadband speed bull. Release proper data – LGA

Home wiring issues

What the LGA or the media don't really mention quite often is that a lot of the speed / performance issues are due to the poor state on phone wiring beyond the master socket in the home. The BT Wholesale speed checker site is generally a pretty accurate estimate as long as there aren't wiring issues in the home and anyone can use this site or use their ISP provided version of this info when signing up.

People will often complain about poor speeds without doing even the most basic of diagnostics on their own home setup and blame the ISP or Openreach when the responsibility for any wiring issues after the master socket is the householders problem.

As an example, I recently went to resolve an issue for someone where they had upgraded to FTTC (via BT as ISP) and the estimate for their line was 40mbps download but they were getting about 15mbps. I found this was entirely due to their extension wiring being spliced in before the master socket. As soon as the extension wiring was correctly wired into the removable panel on the front of the socket and a central VDSL filter fitted then the speed went to the full 40mbps.

BT hauled into Old Bailey after engineer's 7-metre fall broke both his ankles

Take a leaf out of Sky

I recently had my LNB replaced on my satelite dish wish is wall mounted at a height of a couple of metres and the Sky engineer drilled into the wall to tie his ladder off with all his safety gear including hard hat, harness etc.

For dishes mounted on roofs Sky will never send a single engineer, they always insist on 2 engineers from their "special heights" team.

In the aerial industry though some aerial installers will do roof installs on their own so there is obviously some interpretation going on of what is safe / unsafe practice.

Is iOS 9.3 Apple's worst ever update? First it bricks iThings, now Safari is busted

Optional

It looks like the issue is due bug in iOS that completely breaks the Universal Links if it gets served an app association file that's too large according to the following site : https://bencollier.net/2016/03/unable-to-open-links-in-safari-mail-or-messages-on-ios-9-3/

The common thread appears to be people who have the app "Booking.com" installed. Unfortunately just uninstalling Booking.com doesn't fix it but you can fix it by following these instructions :

https://infinitediaries.net/how-to-fix-ios-9-x-safarimail-link-bug/

'Fix these Windows 10 Horrors': Readers turn their guns on Redmond

Windows 10 woes

I must admit it didn't surprise me but trying to get the automatic update to Windows 10 from Windows 8.1 didn't want to work despite sever tries including clearing the Windows update software distribution folder and re-downloading the "automatic update" several times (in case it had got corrupted) - each time I just got a lovely "failed" message against the Windows 10 update.

In the end to upgrade I just used the manual Microsoft Windows 10 ISO / USB download image tool and this seemed to work fine for the update process but it did mean I effectively had to download it 3 times (once automatically, once after clearing the Windows update software distribution folder and running Windows update manually then finally by using the Microsoft Windows 10 download image tool!

Initial comments are it is basically Windows 8.1 with a slightly less annoying start menu, Cortina search and the new Edge Browser.

Unfortunately though some quick tests with Edge vs IE11 I notice that Edge will often freeze for a second or 2 when clicking on some website links whereas IE11 seems to perform fine. I wasn't really taxing it either - just using the BBC news site or el Reg.

Chromecast video on UK, Euro TVs hertz so badly it makes us judder – but Google 'won't fix'

Not just Chrome cast, smart TVs & iPlayer are broke too!

Its not just the Chrome cast that exhibits this issue!!!!!

If you watch Amazon instant video or BBC iPlayer on a smart TV from one of many major TV manufacturers (e.g. Sony, LG, Samsung etc) the apps play out video at 59.976hz which works fine for US TV shows, and 23.976 movies which pull down to 59.976hz quite well (this technique only gives a small amount of judder but has worked well on USA TV for years)

....but if you watch a UK / European TV show via the iPlayer app or Amazon instant video the tell tale sign that things are broken are the end scrolling credits which look hideous due to the fact that the source frame rate is 25hz progressive (for 50hz interlaced they would have de-interlaced prior to encoding). If you then add the built in TV motion compensation algorithm e.g. motion flow etc. then this can actually make things even worse!

This problem also exhibits itself watching through a web browser using flash as PC & laptop LCD monitors refresh at 60hz unless in full screen mode with the refresh rate deliberately changed to be a multiple of 25hz in the video card settings (and even then this doesn't always work because a lot of video cards can't maintain this exact frequency so end up dropping frame to ensure the audio stays in sync).

The interesting thing is that nobody in the wider media seems concerned that all of European TV is inherently broken for streaming media on all manor of PCs, laptops, phones, tablets etc.

Scottish independence debate: STV player flops under weight of viewers

Add it manually to Sky!

Seems a bit silly really crowded round a computer, when I just added the STV HD frequency manually to my English Sky+HD box (would also have worked on Freesat as well I would guess) and was able to watch it live on the big screen (or relatively big compared to a laptop!)

It took around 30 secs to add the channel after a quick Google. The BBC did mention this on Radio4 but obviously it was far too techy for them to just give out the frequency!