Posts by TobyDog

Analogue radio given 10-year stay of execution as the UK U-turns on DAB digital future

Re: Thank fuck for that

If you have a 1990s Naim tuner then I may have tested and aligned it. I've still heard nothing better over the air.

Sadly I'm working in TV now, same shit, different medium.

Mobile networks are killing Wi-Fi for speed around the world

Re: Priorities

Hmmm, O2 asked me last week to comment on their signal. I rated them poorly on the basis that I commute on this line. They were a bit upset when I pointed out how bad their coverage was on one of Europe's busiest lines. It's not just the bit through the Chilterns either - have you ever tried to get a usable 4G signal on the train going through Camden of all places?

Uncool: Google won't be setting up shop in disused Berlin electrical substation

The street view is interesting. Google clearly don't want you to see the building.

How an over-zealous yank took down the trading floor of a US bank

Not a Kernel Panic, but no boot either

I used to support a lot of video editing and effects systems running on various Silicon Graphics workstations. The Tezro was particularly good in that it would display a GFX error on the front panel LCD if the mouse was unplugged. What it was trying to tell you was that it couldn't move a pointer in X11 without a mouse, but it halted the entire system and made it look like an expensive hardware fault.

Well done, UK.gov. You hit superfast broadband target (by handing almost the entire project to BT)

Re: Exchange-only lines?

Think of BT's most iconic building in the UK.

They only installed FTTC to the local residents at the tail end of last year - I walk past the cabinets every morning.

Bye bye MP3: You sucked the life out of music. But vinyl is just as warped

Even scratched vinyl with a half decent deck is listenable to, your brain is quite good at filtering through the noise. Try that with a scratched CD though (even if it may not skip there's error correction and concealment happening), or a marginal DAB signal, or low bit MP3 internet radio station. I used to work for one of the aforementioned hifi companies and used to set up their tuners - FM could sound absolutely fantastic. But it had a NICAM transmission path, low dynamic range, limited bandwidth and mediocre s/n ratio. Despite that it worked beautifully. I still have my tuner but listen online now. Or through a software defined radio to the FM broadcast.

Likewise with TV, in the 90's we had decent cameras, recording, good sound and nice tubes to watch it on. But here I am telling editors that blowing up a badly sourced 4x3 cutout of a standard definition 16x9 program into HD is never going to look good however much they moan about Adobe's products.