Posts by Dr Wadd

If it is the same screen corruption problem as with some of the earlier Pebbles you can fix that by popping off the back and jamming in a ball of tissue paper to apply extra pressure to the screen's zebra connector.

Re: Woeful customer service

I'm really gutted that Novatech have closed their stores other than the Portsmouth branch. It was very handy to have a bricks-and-mortar computer shop close by that isn't PC World.

Re: A PITA to deal with

I went to a local Currys a couple of evenings ago to replace a television which had died. I was left standing around for about 10 minutes with no members of staff asking me if I needed assistance, when I finally asked for some help it finally arrived after another 10 minute wait. When I did finally get to speak to someone they were coming out with such rubbish I gave up and left without buying anything. I'm sure it helps to sell the overpriced HDMI cables by saying the poor image quality on the display sets is down to cheap HDMI, but that line isn't going to work with everyone.

I only went there because I needed a television quickly and Richer Sounds were shut. Instead I decided it was easier to be without a television for a few days.

I'd be interested to see what the XBMC/Kodi performance while running under Android is like on this device. According to the Kodi Wiki the Android version does support MIPS, so if that works nicely that would seem the simplest way to go at the moment.

Re: 20m max altitude?

It can fly higher than 20m. However, once a connection with the controller is lost and it enters "return to home" mode it automatically maintains an altitude of 20m until it is directly over the take-off location. In most environments that would mean it would safely clear any buildings in the way, it would certainly be perfectly fine if I were using it where I live. Of course, this does present an issue if the return journey includes a particularly large building.

Re: Typical

The best set-up I've found for my own needs is to use a TVHeadEnd server with Freeview (it also works with FreeSAT, and I believe that if you use a tuner card that accepts a CAM it can also work with Sky).

TVHeadEnd is running on an old Atom netbook I had spare with a couple of USB tuners connected. Playback on my TV is handled by a Raspberry Pi running RaspBMC. It gives me all the functionality that I would need from a commerical vendor with the flexibility of being able to customise the system as I see fit. If I want to record more channels simultaneously I can just add more tuners. Any recordings I make can be copied from TVHeadEnd and saved to my main file server. I can access the recordings from multiple devices, and I can stream the live TV it pumps out to multiple devices.

Yes, it did require a bit of effort in my part to get everything up and running, but other than not having all the channels I could get on a pay service the end result is far superior than any paid offerings out there.

Re: Not that easy

It would be perfectly simple to save these files in an non-Amiga specific format using an Amiga. I don't recally my Amiga having problems working with JPGs or PNGs. It's also fairly trivial to get the Amiga to use MS-DOS formatted floppies, so no need to worry about how you'd get the files off of the Amiga either.

It's true that it wouldn't be possible to read these discs using a standard PC floppy drive, but there are ways to connect an old Amiga floppy drive to a PC and get that to read the discs instead.

Re: I had full id but I was still denied...

Another supposedly "useful" data footprint is now apparently your credit record. A while back the local council were questioning whether I was eligible for the single occupancy discount on my council tax (I am). They were arguing that they weren't sure if I was actually living at the address in question, or if anyone else was living there. There explanation for raising these questions was because they were unable to locate any recent credit activity at that address. This was for a very good reason, I'd engaged in no activity in recent years that would result in a credit check. It took a reasonably lengthy fight with the council and getting my local councillor involved to get them to back down and stop demanding "evidence" I refused to provide, primarily because, as I explained to them, it would be trivially simple to produce "evidence" that calmed their fears but did not objectively prove that I was entitled to the discount.

Re: I expect to be greeting them soon - DITTO!

It certainly made me wince when the BBC were interviewing someone in the last couple of days about the plans to sort out failing hospitals and the talking head was stating how important it was to get top level managers in place. No doubt these are going to be managers plucked from the business world with no clue about medical matters so I see them as more of a burden than a help.

Re: Normalization with the real world......

If that were the case we'd only be able to access pornography via WIFI at train stations as I believe those are the only branches of WH Smith that still stock pornography, they pulled it from their high-street stores many years ago (excepting magazines like FHM and Nuts, which I've always assumed were for men too cowardly to buy real porn). Of course, Smith's "think of the children move" was somewhat hypocritical as at the time at least they were one of the largest, if not the largest, distributor of pornographic material to independent newsagents.

Re: Deinterlacing

Why not leave the ripped video as interlaced and allow the playback device to deal with any deinterlacing issues? I've been ripping all my DVDs with Handbrake, for interlaced material I tell Handbrake to set the interlaced flag in the output file, RaspBMC picks that up and handles the deinterlacing for me.

Re: VGA

At least until you dig your old Amiga out of storage to grab some 3D models out of it, only to run in to the problem that the output is configured for 75Hz and the LCD panels I have with VGA ports only support up to 60Hz, but I concede, that is a bit of an edge case.

Re: Is that core IPv6 ready?

Plusnet allow you to switch over to a fixed IP for a one-off £5 charge which I found more than reasonable.

Re: Not going to happen

I've just changed ISP to Plusnet, with them there is a single one-off charge of a fiver to get a fixed IP, I was actually surprised at just how reasonable that was.

Re: Music via radio.

The flip side of that was being shown once how touching a screwdriver to the right point on a BBC B's motherboard caused it to play a particular radio station from the speaker. I wish I could remember how to pull of that particular trick.

Re: Ethics Morality and Law

Somewhat ironically, when attempting to click through for the PDF detailing Starbucks' ethical stance the file can't be found.

Re: the repurposing of an airliner...

I was rather amused by an interview I saw with Tom Clancy not long after 9/11 where he described an attack with a passenger jet as "unimaginable". I thought somewhat odd given that he had been able to imagine it perfectly well just a few years earlier.

Re: A few things on this

Where have you got this notion that they block devices that aren't running Windows or OSX. My Ubuntu box has no trouble connecting to the net via their services, neither does my Android phone. Is this a misunderstanding on your part, or something they are rolling out incrementally that has yet to effect me?