Paying A Premium For The Familiar?

Landlines. I often wonder how long many will put up with them in the face of ubiquitous mobile phones and voip services but seemingly many can’t give up the habit of the familiar. British Telecom in the UK are to increase the cost of daytime calls to 7.95 pence per minute excluding the connection charge and accompany that with an increased line rental.

My pay-as-you-go mobile phone service charges only slightly above that to call landlines and mobiles at 8 pence per minute and free between people on the same network. My home phone voip service charges 0.06 pence per minute to UK landlines. That BT price is hardly competitive is it? And yet the use of landlines still continues.

What is the price rise about? Less people using landlines? Increased costs? Because they can?

Image by HowardLake under this creative commons licence

That Certain Obsolete Niche

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There’s been a much reported view of late via Dr. Mark Dean, who had a hand in the design of the original IBM PC, that we’re moving into a post PC world where the desktop computer will join typewriters, incandescent lightbulbs and a handful of other consumer items that have passed the peak of their usefulness.

Some say that the desktop computer is suitable for creators of content but today many are either just consumers of content and mobile ones at that or are inputters of data. There are many who still use typewriters and listen to vinyl (which has even enjoyed a resurgence of late) and just this week a music group released their material on VHS tape (OK that’s just nostalgia for a past they never experienced similar to the rise in small music labels that release music on compact cassette only).

These items have moved from the mainstream to the niche.Few are ever truly dead. Maybe the desktop computer will move to a similar position. The home server for those that prefer not to trust the cloud? The dusty home of digital memories?

Surely it’s just evolving. Formats and form factors change and old habits die hard.

Vacuum tube image by jeua under this creative commons licence

Vinyl record image by SPazzø under this creative commons licence

Compact cassette image by Herr Popp under this creative commons licence

Typewriters image by donovanbeeson under this creative commons licence

Lightbulb image by Anton Fomkin under this creative commons licence

VHS tape image by Paul Mayne under this creative commons licence

‘Obsolete’ computer image by aliwest44 under this creative commons licence

Frozen Batteries Live Again (Sometimes)

All things must die. Eventually. Other things die too early. Other things are just playing dead temporarily. Some things can be revived.

And so it seemingly was with a mobile phone battery which just wasn’t accepting a charge anymore. For a long time I’d assumed the phone’s charging system had packed up and very nearly bought an external dedicated battery charger to allow charging of the battery outside of the camera. Then I went a little funny in the head. Yes a little more funny in the head than I perhaps usually am.

I put the battery in the freezer. For five days.

I’d heard of this act of desperate revival for years but kind of dismissed it as an urban myth or at best a slightly dangerous move which indeed it can be.Batteries can explode if care is not taken.

I wrapped mine in newspaper and then wrapped plastic around that and placed it in the bottom of the freezer compartment.After five days I removed it and placed it in a box outside to thaw out. Once thawed I then tested it in the camera and lo and behold the battery had started to accept a charge so I hooked it up to the timer for a scheduled overnight charge (cheaper night electric rates and all that).

This morning the battery was showing 100% charged and it’s not discharging rapidly on use of the camera.

Miracles do happen.Well planned ones do anyway.

Image by trekkyandy under this creative commons licence

This Cable Is Not Their Friend

Our neighbours recently turned 75 and has decided to have a TV for the first time in their lives now they don’t need to pay the TV licence (as those over 75 are exempt in the UK).

Their son bought him a nice Sony TV with freeview built in but they don’t have an outdoor aerial and freeview reception is a bit flakey.

Anyway the son has paid for a full Sky installation (I’d have gone with Freesat but hey it’s their choice). This was all fitted yesterday so he’s got a nice  Sky HD box plugged into the telly.

I got a knock on the door today asking for help. It all worked yesterday but today they can’t get the picture up.

The trouble is, as it turned out,  that the Sky HD box is  connected to their telly with a single HDMI cable which is great for all that high definition picture stuff but not terrifically user friendly for non techie telly users as, unlike scart, HDMI is seldom auto detected. That means that turning the sky box on will not automatically switch the TV to the correct input on their TV. Add an additional connection via a scart cable  and it will switch to the correct input automatically but you lose the full HD picture quality.

In this case I offered to  add a scart cable and explained the somewhat complicated input selection process for HD via HDMI  but they really he didn’t see anything wrong with the scart derived picture or really quite took in what the benefits of HD were.

You’d think a nice shiny new cable technology would have included all that auto sensing / handshaking stuff in its initial specifications to make sure it worked equally across all equipment  but for many people it just doesn’t work unless they’re au fait with toggling on screen menus to arrive at the correct input. It’s all just a bit less user friendly.

Hell, I was never a fan of scart which had it’s problems with how many of the 21 pins were wired up and in what configuration but it was and is clearly more user friendly in operation than HDMI.

Original image by solenoide under this creative commons licence

65 Potential Local TV Service Areas Announced

 Ofcom have identified 65 potential pioneer locations for the proposed local TV and broadcast services and these have been announced by The Department For Culture, Media And Sport.

Click on the image to enlarge

More information here.

 

 

Image is Crown copyright

 

 

 

London Riots: “An Aggressive Form Of Late Night Shopping”

Those understated words were spoken by Peter Power, a crisis management specialist  today with regards to the third night of riots in London together with outbreaks in Birmingham.

There’s been a worrying number of proto fascist ‘get the army out’ type outbursts by many. Sorry we did that in Northern Ireland and did that really quell lawless activity quickly or did it inflame the situation further?

There are ways to deal with this but sliding down an authoritarian militaristic simplistic solution route isn’t necessarily the smartest move we could make right now. Simplistic solutions rarely work. We need to be smarter and more grown up about how we tackle societal breakdown.

That in no way excuses the riots (the original grievances of Tottenham aside) which seem to have been opportunistic in nature and exploited by criminality. There are no excuses for the criminal behaviour but don’t let the shrill knee jerk reaction style voices of some exploit our disgust to drive even bigger wedges between our communities and further erode our freedoms. The rise of gang culture, criminal activity, warped moral compasses. a fractured society ,the excesses of our consumer culture and simple selfish greed all played a part in this.

I hope that out of the ashes real community manages to make their collective voice heard  (and that the media allows them to be heard) and that they are able to rebuild their communities and help tackle the imbalance of power that has distorted and exploited the good that exists in many of those affected areas. I also hope the rest of us don’t just turn our backs on the good people in these areas and write them off as all one and the same. That would be an even bigger tragedy.

 

#riotcleanup -www.riotcleanup.co.uk

 

 

Image by Dr John 2005 under this creative commons licence

TOTP 76 -The Hits And The Misses And The Lack Of Memory

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I’ve been tuning in to the run of Top Of The Pops repeats from 1976 that BBC Four have dusted down. It’s been interesting for me as I was a young one at the time and had assumed my interest in popular music would have had me glued to the weekly chart run down but I’ve been taken aback at how genuinely new many of the acts were to me.

Who?

Endless ‘who?’ moments each week reveal I must have had much better things to do as the hot summer of ’76 turned the grass yellow. I’m not alone in my exclamations of ‘why don’t I remember this?’ as the simultaneous Twitter stream tells much the same story. Was it all just so bad to commit to memory?

Pre Punk Pap

It’s been a gentle reminder of how dire popular music had become by 1976 and why punk probably had to happen later that year (though there would be a considerable delay before it was reflected in such a mainstream programme as Top Of The Pops).

Edited

The curious aspect of the repeats is that the Beeb are showing an edited half hour version in the evening and the full version complete with the two cut acts from the earlier edited version after at 1AM. Can we not spare the extra ten minutes in the schedule during the evening?

Other edits have taken place that don’t even make it to the full version repeat such as the billed appearance of Jonathan King which was clearly seen as too controversial to include in the light of his subsequent misdemeanours. Pop History with modern day revisions.

#TOTP