Posts by My Opinion 82 publicly visible posts • joined 18 Sep 2007
Two things I say to friends looking to buy anything "tech":
1) NOW - Buy the best you can for the most you are willing to pay - being wary of the sharp price increment for the very latest / highest spec.
2) FUTURE - Once you have done 1) STOP LOOKING - otherwise you will see what you've just bought get cheaper and something better will come along for the same price.
I have seen no comments here about the Nascom. Surely that was represented there?
The Nascom was a British self-build 2MHz Z80 based kit on a 12" x 8" board with 1K ROM and 1K RAM as standard and a "full" keyboard. Output was normally via a domestic TV (it had a modulator on-board) and loading/saving via a domestic cassette recorder.
It was launched in 1977 at £199 (plus VAT). A lot of kit for the price at the time! (Mind you, that didn't include a power supply which you had to buy (and build) separately.
"And if you don't have an HD tuner then watching SD on a big LCD TV is awful, the picture quality is rubbish, blurred and washed out (I have spent a lot of time at friends houses who have new LCD's and the picture on our CRT is much clearer)."
All I can say is that your friends must have made very poor choices of TV sets or not set them up right.
We have a 42" Pioneer - OK, I admit it's plasma, not LCD. But then many people either lump ALL flat-screens under just the "LCD" label or the "plasma" label. Many simply don't know they are the different types!
Anyway, 95% of our source material is through a Humax 9200 - the very piece of equipment you say you have - so all SD source.
The picture is stunning! Even my wife, who is as great a technophobe as you can find, has said that she finds natural world type programs on this combination truly amazing. Her words "this is when your new TV really comes into its own".
Our pictures are not blurred; they are not washed out - they are awesome!
I suggest you tell your friends to buy decent sets - or perhaps they just need to spend some time setting up the ones they have!
And yes, I agree the Humax 9200 is a superb piece of kit - I trust you have made sure it has been updated with the various software updates that have come along from time to time. The updates have made this the only piece of consumer equipment I have ever owned that gets BETTER over time with great new features being added as time goes by.
Get the right set, make sure it's set up right, and you can really enjoy SD material.
"In the end, it went quietly. As of yesterday, Tiscali is no more in the UK.
"Carphone Warehouse and TalkTalk boss Charles Dunstone wielded the axe on his corporate blog.
"He said: "From today the Tiscali brand is no more and we're committed to giving all of our customers absolute clarity about who we are, the services we provide and the prices we charge."
And yet 2 minutes ago on the Nildram website:
Nildram is a trading name of Pipex Internet Limited, a Tiscali UK Company
20 Broadwick Street, London W1F 8HT
Registered in England, registered number 5306519
So, if "Tiscali ... is no more" perhaps Nildram need telling?
My 12 year old son has a PS2 and a PS3 (80GB) and uses both.
He has even bought some more (admittedly used) PS2 games recently.
Why? Well, he claims he totally finishes many PS3 games within a couple of days, even 1 day for one!
And as well as offering longer play time the PS2 games are a lot cheaper - particularly used!
So, had we been able to buy a new PS3 with backwards compatibility for PS2 games we would willingly have done so.
£141,028.52 in ill-gotten gains, yet they can only find 34 victims to return £927.52 to?
If they have the eBay records they should be able to track down ALL of the defrauded eBayers.
Something somehwhere just doesn't add up ..... or maybe it does:
"Under the rules half of the rest of the money is split between the Crown Prosecution Service, the Magistrates' Court Service and the police"
So the less we return the more we get to keep!
Oh yeah of little faith.... "You'll be waiting a while" .... Not true at all. It happened 10 years ago!
The original Nokia 1610/1611/1630 range (circa 1998/1999?) had an optional battery which had solar panels on it.
Admittedly this was an early GSM phone and thus quite large by today's standards, but a benefit of that was the rear surface area of the battery (which just slid straight on/off the back of the phone and therefore was itself the rear panel of the phone) was a fair size.
"if you dont like the company or their service dont buy FROM THEM!"
"I even got some fancy christmas lights in the post from FROM THEM today!"
Err - but you didn't buy FROM EBAY. You bought from a seller who paid eBay to run their auction (or to list their item Buy It Now item).
And if it all went wrong then eBay would show diddly-squat interest in your problems. They'd just happily keep the seller's fees.
This is in answer to those above who say an eBay buyer shouldn't part with anything more than a small amount of money without seeing what they are buying.
I did consultancy for a couple of years for an eBay seller who specialised in used car sales.
We built the business very quickly and in the second year sold over £3,000,000 of cars! As our reputation (ie: feedback) grew more and more people were happy to bid on the auction and win, then use BACS/CHAPS to transfer the money and a delivery fee to us, whereupon we had a natioanl delivery company transport the car from us to the buyer.
The first the buyer would see of the car was after they had paid for it and it was sitting in their drive!
We received excellent feedback - the secret was always to describe the car very accurately, have lots of very good photos, etc.
Unfortunately there are scams, but more often than not it is buyers who are too greedy in their expectations and who do not take reasonable precaution when making the purchase. Has the seller sold this sort of item lots of times in the past? Is their feedback good for items of this sort? Am I sending money to an account and location that has a name related to the information I can see in the auction/feedback/from eBay?
If the buyer acts sensibly there is no reason why they can not make a successful unseen purchase for a sizeable sum of money.
The largest transaction we made where money was received before shipment of the car was £26,000.
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