Why is it that every single major purchase I make leaves me feel dis-satisfied and pissed off because the product is broken in some obvious way. Or at least in some way that seems obvious to my overactive critical mind?

Our aging Sony VHS VCR finally broke. And our equally aging non-widescreen Sony TV is embarrassing. So it was time to upgrade the major bit of evening entertainment hardware in the household. So I ventured forth into the minefield that is Black and Silver consumer electronics. As usual I didn't do enough research before picking what looked like a bargain. A nice new 32" Evesham Alqemi SX LCD TV and an Evesham PVR160 hard disk recorder. At UKP600 and UKP150 these look like pretty good value. There's just one catch, we have NTL cable, principally so I can watch motorcycle racing on Eurosport and Motors TV. So a key requirement is that it plays well with NTL cable and I can record a cable channel. So I make a point of asking the salesman, he (and I) look at the box and see that as well as Freeview, the PVR has two Scart inputs and should be able to record from one of them. What I should do is wait for NTL to finally release their HDD competitor for Sky+. But I've been waiting 24 months since the announcement and there's still no sign of it. And lots of complaints about their subsidiary, Telewest's, version. But with Christmas coming up, I can't be without any method of TV time shifting.

The boxes get home, it all goes together, it fires up first time, the manuals aren't too bad. Having a hard disk for recording from a 14 day program guide is super cool. And then the irritations start.

- The TV has a very slight but annoying lip sync problem. I do the research and discover that this is actually normal and caused by the differing digital processing paths between the audio signal and the video signal. You can get super high end home entertainment hardware with adjustable audio delay lines to tweak it out. The IBC held a seminar on "Lip Sync: A lost cause". So everybody, but everybody, is spending large amounts of money on Digital, High Definition, super shiny, giant, flat, wide, video hardware that upsets the part of the brain that focuses on the lips and mouth of people speaking to us, leading to a low grade anxiety while watching. After a while you can't quite work out what's wrong but you know something is.

- Some manufacturer in the far east has come up with an amazingly cheap electronics board that combines two Freeview tuners with a 3.5" hard disk. This gets packaged into lots of slightly different boxes with slightly different logos and sold at an amazingly cheap price. BUT, the designers left out one blatantly obvious feature that every recorder has had since the invention of the Scart plug and that's the ability to record from Line in as well as the internal tuner(s). Yup. The PVR doesn't work with an NTL Cable box. The second SCART socket is Video OUT ONLY for connection to a DVD/VHS recorder for archiving recordings. It should be so trivial to provide this that I can almost imagine that it would be a software upgrade only. And because the boards come from one manufacturer, every single low end HDD recorder is the same. So these things don't work for anyone with cable or satellite. Doh!

- The PVR box has room for a FreeView pay-TV card. But the slot is blanked off. So even if I paid (again) for topup TV to get Eurosport, I still couldn't record it.

- So the PVR goes back for a refund and I walk down to Richer Sounds, hoping for a sensible sales person and a bargain. Hooray, they have an LG DVD recorder and 160Gb HD for only UKP250. It appears to do everything I need. Fingers crossed. Back home it all goes together. Somewhere in the manual it says HDMI out, the TV has HDMI in. I nip down the shops and buy an HDMI cable. Then I look at the back of the box. Arrrggg! The RH188H has the socket. I've got the RH188 which doesn't. Oh, well, everything else seems to work. I don't get the nice 14 day EGP but Videoplus and manual timing works and I've been doing that for years with only a few fuckups.

- I'm still trying to find the optimum way of hooking all the SCARTs and antenna cables together. This should be simple but it's confused because we have an aerial on the roof, a tuner out from the NTL box and three bits of kit each with two SCARTs. The antenna feed for everything needs to come from the aerial to get Freeview on the TV. The SCART interconnect is about trying to avoid picking from 7 Digital inputs every time you switch from TV to Cable to Recorder. And making sure I don't screw up when setting the timer.

- The old Sony TV had speaker output sockets. We had an ancient pair of Celestion Ditton 15 speakers, inherited from my Dad, hooked up. They have a lovely warm sound with great bass. Of course the new TV has numerous audio out sockets but it's all low level. And while the built in speakers are ok, they're a bit weak. There's a bunch of frankly useless effects like an equaliser, bass boost, two speaker Dolby enhancement, mono to fake stereo. So they all get set to flat. The headphone output is independent of the speaker output. And the remote doesn't control it. Plugging in headphones doesn't mute the main speakers. In fact there is no way to mute the main speakers except the big mute switch which is overridden by the volume control. So do I a) take the back off and solder in a speaker out socket. or b) buy the cheapest stereo amp I can find or c) buy a cheap Dolby surround decoder. But wait a minute, the external amp connections will mean yet another remote to control the sound which is different from the two remotes for channel. And why am I even contemplating ripping a brand new box apart and wielding a soldering iron? Am I nuts?

- Somewhere in here I go looking for reviews or anyone who knows what they're talking about. And that's when I'm reminded that Google sucks when looking for anything to do with consumer products. All you get is 30 price comparison engines. And when you do actually find a forum, there's a spectrum of competence from extreme hardware and software hackers reverse engineering the electronics (1%) to vast hordes of amateurs who haven't a clue (99%). And all mingled in with extremely upset customers who've been sold a pup and have had to fight their way through customer support hell (15%).

I guess I must be getting old and turning into the classic grumpy old man. This stuff used to be really easy when there were 4 terrestrial channels, TVs were all the same and so were VHS recorders. Now it's a constant and expensive treadmill of amazing technology that grows in features and drops in price on a 6 month cycle. Except that it's always 10% broken and not exactly what you wanted.

This modern life, eh?

Boing Boing: AT&T's You Will ads - campaign for Internet normalcy :

the Internet was(is) way better at letting us be weird than it was(is) at helping us be normal.

Telekinesis

Why: I cannot imagine how a bio-chemical-electrical mechanism like the brain and nervous system can cheat Newton's laws and push dumb matter around at a distance. And I don't really believe that any amount of quasi-quantum theory can help make it happen.

Caution: If the brain has quantum effects built in, and if the many worlds interpretation of Quantum Physics is right, then it's just about possible that the brain might be able to choose to live in the universe where everyone's underwear spontaneously jumps 2 feet to the right. But that's a big if.

Corollary: There's a whole range of New Age claptrap that boils down to a belief in Telekinesis. Some parts of "The Law Of Attraction" amount to this.

Prove it: Follow this experiment for a week or two. Look for money on the ground as you walk the streets. Spend a week with the point of view that the money appears because looking for it is making it appear in front of you. Try to come up with several possible mechanisms for this. In the second week use the point of view that you're seeing money on the ground because you're paying more attention to what's around you. Develop several alternate hypotheses for why you're finding more money on the ground and try to test them out.

Seen on Slashdot | How To Tell If Your Cell Phone Is Bugged

I read through a full list of the ways in which the British State monitors me. When you read them all at once, it has quite an impact. The simple question I have is this: I am completely innocent. I have committed no crimes and am not suspected of committing any crimes.

SO WHY AM I BEING WATCHED?

Nobody is truly innocent. Anyone who rides a motorcycle understands this.

The key is "Getting away with it".

I'm getting there with my home build recumbent. When I first rode it, it was really twitchy and decidedly scary going down hill. I tried various attempts at changing trail, but today gave up on that and fitted a 24" front wheel instead of the 20". Much better. It feels more like a bike now and is just about ride-able hands off.

I've also moved the pedals further away which has helped drive especially up hills. I'm still occasionally bumping a knee on the handlebars. Not sure how to fix that.

The chain was 2 links too short. In top gear on the front chainring and bottom gear on the mech it was all too tight and prompting the chain to jump off the bottom guide.

I've now sourced an old Estate Agent sign (Coralite) that happened to be lying on the pavement across from our house. Next step is to fashion this into a tail fairing.

My No Weld Recumbent made the Makezine Blog.

Void.Bot was ProgrammableWeb's mashup of the day.

Ross Mayfield asks: Is she creating experiences, or just playing a spot market amidst DRM countermeasures?

We're all just playing the spot market between rival versions of the future.

[09:42:55] Julian Bond says: Just been pondering group forming. For a network of size N
- Metcalfe: Value grows by N^2
- Reed: Value grows by 2^N - N - 1
Some implications for Skype:-
- Group chats radically increase the value of the network because they move Skype from Metcalfe to Reed.
- What's the minimum average size for a group chat to be self-sustaining?
- What's the maximum average size for a group chat before it splits? There's some law that says groups become unwieldy at about 150 participants. So Skype public chats should be set to max 150 ?
[09:42:55] Julian Bond says: - Skype needs to actively encourage group forming. Which means things like public chat directories.
[09:43:49] Julian Bond says: Few-To-Few comms are more interesting than one-to-many or many-to-many
[09:44:37] Julian Bond says: "The long tail" is spiky. It's actually made up from large numbers of small communities.
[09:44:49] Julian Bond says: In any community, 90% lurk.
[09:45:37] Julian Bond says: The Fat Middle is more interesting than the Short Head or the Long Tail.
[09:45:38] Julian Bond says: Oooh. I can feel a book coming on.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/jbond/tags/noweldrecumbent/

One Ladies MTB.
One kids 20" MTB. Fork and front wheel
One older kids 24" MTB cut out the bottom bracket and upright.
Skateboard wheels.
Assorted odds and ends and time.

TechCrunch UK » Blog Archive » Boo.com to relaunch

Oh Nooooooo. The horror, the horror!

Is the moment when Boom 2.0 jumps the shark?

I have a project taking shape in my head.

1) Take one late model iPod with a broken hard disk
2) Build a 1.8" socket to 2.5" hard disk connector cable
3) Build a 3.3V to 5V convertor to drive the 2.5" hard disk from the iPod's drive power supply.
4) Build it into a case just big enough to carry the larger disk
5) Double up on the battery. Perhaps convert to a couple of cellphone batteries.
6) Load Rockbox on it.

What I'm after is a usable iPod thing with a 120Gb disk that still fits in a pocket. Just. What I'm missing is the electronics knowledge to design 3) I can wield a soldering iron but I'm not sure where to start on the voltage convertor. I'm fairly sure that there are one chip designs for this that can handle the 0.5 to 4W current, but don't know where to start.

Because of the way that iPod cases fit together I figure I can keep the iPod face plate and mount it flush on one side of a plastic box big enough for the drive and extra batteries.

This is the next level of sites like Make and Instructables. Here's an idea, now how do I make it? Open Source Hardware Hacking?

Today on Flickr

You've run into one of the limits of a free account. Your free account will only display the most recent 200 photos you've uploaded. All of your photos beyond 200 will remain hidden from view until you either delete newer photos, or upgrade to a Pro account.

None of your photos have been deleted, and if you upgrade, they'll all come back unharmed.

Sigh. Is this what is going to happen to each property as Yahoo! hoovers up the more interesting Web 2.0 startups?

I find it sad and irritating that the vast majority of Web 2.0 Mapping Mashups are USA only.

Not surprising, but sad and irritating.

Unofficial Skype Chat Directory is an attempt at documenting where the Skype 3 public chats can be found. Maybe Skype will do something similar.

Meanwhile void.bot keeps growing.
#motd // Returns message of the day
Add members // And it will welcome them.

MAKE: Blog: DIY Thanksgiving - HOW TO - Fry a turkey, turkey fryer kits, safety and more...

Jeez'! No sooner do we get over endless Halloween costumes, than we're into another American festival and another round of DIY madness.

There's a bit here I don't understand. Why would anyone want to fry a turkey? Did the Pilgrim Fathers fry their turkeys and it's been handed down as the correct way to cook them? Is it all a conspiracy from KFC?

And is Goose an optional alternative for Thanksgiving?

1. DRM doesn't prevent illegal use of files, it just makes it a bit more difficult to access them.
2. All it takes is one person to crack the file and it can be made available to everyone.
3. Anyone selling content on CD is already selling unprotected files anyway.
4. DRM adds a lot of costs for content producers - Implementing DRM isn't free of course.
5. There's a huge hidden cost in trying to sell DRM'ed content
6. Often the costs of the DRM are passed along to the consumer as well.
7. DRM-free content will play on your device of today and your device of tomorrow
8. Your media devices of the future will be significantly different than your media devices of the present.
9. DRM fundamentally changes who is control of your media.
10. Whenever you buy DRM'ed content you support the system of DRM

Explanations here.



Just Say Not To DRM - Support DefectiveByDesign.

How ironic that Gregor Mendel, the founding father of modern genetics and hence one of the underpinnings of evolution should have been a Christian monk.

WMP wasn't streaming properly. So I re-installed WMP 10. That took ages and required a restart. Then my Creative Zen Xtra with PFS stopped being available. It only half worked and sat there without fully connecting.

So I installed WMP11, which again took ages, required a restart, grabbed a load of file associations and left icons everywhere without asking. At least the Zen now connects ok. Although Sync is slightly better in WMP11, I still won't use it, because I have neat file structures both in the music library and on the Zen which I don't want screwed up. Amazingly, you still can't play music off the Zen in WMP11 although this works in Winamp 5.3 mostly OK. For some unknown reason, the Winamp playlist editor lost the connection and the streaming stopped working, although starting again from an existing playlist was ok. This morning I discover that the Zen connection didn't survive putting the laptop into standby. I had to pull the USB plug and put it back in again.

So tired of all this. Yet again, MS seems to have a huge pile of bloated crap which I'm forced to use because they're business people did a deal with the 2nd market share PMP maker. And they've then reneged on that deal by going into competition with them.

I'm stuck in this loop because nobody makes the PMP I want to own. It's a redesigned and updated Zen Xtra with a 2.5" disk, plain old USB Mass storage for sync, no DRM support and a half way decent firmware system or RockBox. The 2.5" disk is the killer. 1.8" disks are neat, small, energy efficient. But they're also expensive and don't have enough capacity. The new top of the range 80Gb iPod is *just* big enough capacity for my needs. But god it's expensive for what it is; an essentially disposable piece of electronics. And taking an old iPod with a broken disk drive and fitting an 80Gb 1.8" disk isn't really an option for price reasons even if Apple's usual hardware lock ins actually allow it.

Go back to that mythical perfect PMP. Now that MS is dumping on their PFS partners, maybe it's time for Creative, Samsung, Toshiba, Cowon, Achos, iRiver, et al to just turn their backs on this whole sorry mess and produce the PMP we want to buy. Forget about all that DRM, downloadable music store nonsense. You can't compete in that area with Apple anyway. Just build a better PMP. And one that doesn't depend on WMP to get the music on and off it.

Grrr.

I actually bought a second hand ancient Archos Studio 20. to see if I could create my own version of this, given that PC World are now selling 120Gb 2.5" disks for under a 100 quid. I've installed the latest RockBox on it. and it does kind of work. But the tiny screen, military industrial design and the crappy buttons mean it's not really usable and a bit embarrassing. And only having USB 1.1 is a show stopper. I've thought about whether it's hackable into something usable, but I probably can't do anything about the screen or USB so I don't think so.

http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=joinpublicchat Looks like it will work for finding pages with a link to a Skype public chat. As long as the author used the redirect via Skype. Still haven't found a way of searching for the short link skype:?chat&blob=yadayada

I have a requirement for an unusual Google search. Does anyone know how to search for a link like this:-

skype:?chat&blob= *

I want to find all web pages that contain a link to a Skype Public chat.

Answers to julian_bond at voidstar.com