Monthly Archive

Sometimes this column gives tips; sometimes this column gives advice; and rarely this column gives a resounding warning that readers will fail to heed at their peril.

Ladies and gentlemen, today we find ourselves at the latter stage. This is Def Con Three. I implore you to avoid all distractions and to fully digest the following statement.

Do not sign up to Virgin Media’s broadband service.

What follows is more than a personal whinge about a one-off experience. I have it from the horse’s mouth that the company is continuing to sign people up for a service it knows it cannot hope to provide. It will take your money and leave you wanting.

In my book that’s called a scam.

Here’s what is happening. Virgin Media is currently engaged in an aggressive advertising campaign in Oxford and elsewhere where it is praising fibre optic cabling and its newly available 50Mbps broadband service. As you might expect from such a campaign, it is receiving a significant number of new customers.

The cable modem that Virgin installs in your house works by making a physical connection between itself and Virgin’s nearest data exchange. These exchanges contain things called Universal Broadband Routers (UBR) which are, in turn, connected directly to the internet.

Each UBR has a maximum capacity which you can think of just like the router in your house. The more computers that connect to it, the slower the connection becomes for each of those computers.

Virgin Media is taking on more customers than it has UBRs to support them, making internet access very much slower than promised or, at certain times, non-existent.

My ‘up to’ 20Mbps line was installed last Wednesday and over four days my connection fluctuated around the 2Mbps level. Engineers came and went before finally admitting the problem with the oversubscribed UBRs. Virgin itself will give no date for when more UBRs will be introduced, thus increasing the capacity.

When accounts are placed the company does not check the current capacity on the line, preferring to just keep adding more and more people to it and taking £30 or £50 a month for a service it likely cannot provide.

My account is now cancelled and Virgin Media won’t get a penny of my money. I will also be contacted Trading Standards.

Anyone who knows my computing habits will tell you that I’m a mouse fiend. It’s like I’m on some endless quest to find the perfect desktop companion – and it’s a quest that is proving very difficult to achieve.

As a Mac user, my primary choice of mouse was, of course, the Apple Mighty Mouse. This sleek, white, flat device was ergonomically dreadful (though not quite in the same league as the notorious ‘puck’ round mouse that Apple introduced with the very first Mac) and introduced the little nipple trackball on the top.

We’ve long had mice with an up and down scroll wheel and more recently we’ve seen left to right clicking of that wheel and so it surely wasn’t long before we got a multi-directional trackball perched atop our desktop rodent.

Great. Except they don’t work.

If a speck of dust, finger grease (look, we all have it, OK?) or the minutest amount of dirty gets within the ball enclosure, it stops the thing from working – it just free-wheels uselessly around without having any effect on the screen cursor. I’ve lost count of the number of alcohol wipes I’ve used on the thing. They clean it for about eight seconds before a micro-organism works its way back in and then its slippy slidey time once again.

Useless.

I stuck with the Mighty Mouse for far longer than I should’ve before throwing it into a box where it will live out the rest of its days.

I then embarked on testing a string of alternative wireless mice, plumping ultimately for Microsoft’s terrific Arc Mouse.

I love this thing. It’s light, compact and folds away if I want to pop it in my laptop bag for the day. In fact I liked it so much that I started using it with the other computer on my desk and eventually didn’t want to give it back to the Mac. It became clear I needed another new mouse.

Foolish simpleton that I appear to be, I popped into PC World as I was passing one day and had a look at their selection of mice. I’d normally stay clear from actually purchasing from that particular fine shop given their dramatically inflated prices and some staggeringly bad customer service I once experienced, but I needed a new mouse and my eye fell on the Kensington Blade (pictured) because it looked stylish.

It also had the trackball nipple which I unforgivably overlooked, assuming it would be OK.

I must learn to keep my assumptions in careful check because this thing is as bad as the Mighty Mouse that came and went before it. It simply doesn’t work and I’m back to free-wheeling hell once more.

So I need yet another new mouse. I’d love to get another Microsoft Arc but I’m worried that two of them will interfere with each other. Maybe I’ll have a quick trawl of the web and see if that would, indeed, be the case.

I really should flog off some of this old abandoned hardware but I don’t really have the heart to submit some other poor unsuspecting soul to the frustration and torment that I have suffered.

Look, you can have both for a tenner. How’s that?

I’m following with interest BBC technology reporter, Darren Waters, and his experiments and experiences with Virgin Media’s 50Mbps cable service.

Results so far have been mixed, which you might expect, with some sample tests getting an almost maximum speed right down to relatively poor connections coming, bizarrely, from Virgin Media’s own FTP server.

I’d love to conduct similar experiments on Virgin’s 20Mbps service after finally biting the bullet and signing up to it on February 4th.

The online sign-up form is well structured, being simple and relatively quick to complete. Part of the process is stating when you would like the Virgin Media engineer to come and install the line. This appeared most useful and I chose a convenient time on the following weekend.

Having submitted the form I was immediately sent an automated email thanking me for my custom, welcoming me to Virgin Media and, predictably, telling me that they couldn’t manage the installation date I had requested.

This is a scam. They could easily tie in their engineers’ diary with the online booking form but they want your custom and to appear as efficient as possible from the outset.
Immediately put out, I changed my installation date to the next available date of February 17th, already a full two weeks after my initial booking.

I was given an afternoon timeslot but having sat patiently waiting, at 5.45pm I rang the information line only to be told the installation had been cancelled. Apparently they had tried to call me but there was no reply and no answerphone.

The only number of mine they have is my mobile (I don’t have a landline) so this sounds unlikely.

Forced to reschedule, I was given the earliest date of February 25th, now a full three weeks after signing up.

I asked if I could get a guarantee on this date only to be told that wasn’t possible. I have to call them the day before and check that the installation is still going ahead.

Throughout this I’ve felt like I’m doing them a favour when all I want to do is give them my hard-earned money!

This is being written before the 25th so I don’t yet know if they’ll bother turning up but you can follow my progress on my blog where you can also ask me questions.

Follow me on Twitter at twitter.com/dmcmanus

On the way back from dropping my daughter at her friend’s house yesterday I decided to quickly pop into Tesco as I was going past it and there were a couple of things I needed.

By the time I got to the checkout those couple of things had manifested themselves into a full basket of stuff so I needed a couple of carrier bags.

Now before this rant goes any further, let me sing up in praise of the humble and much maligned supermarket carrier.

These days, you’re more likely to get disapproving stares by daring to request one of these than you would if you pulled out a gun at the checkout and said ‘Stick ‘em up’. A campaign to stamp out this evil incarnate has proven to be very successful.

But not for me.

I make a habit of grabbing more of the little blighters than I actually need to carry my shopping home – and for one very good reason. I use them as liners for my small kitchen bin.

Tell me something that could be more environmentally friendly than a biodegradable vessel for carting home shopping that is then reused as a bin liner thus saving the amount of plastic that would otherwise be used in, erm, a bin liner.

To my way of sane thinking, this means that I am using the same amount of plastic in a bag for two separate tasks, as opposed to the one task I would eke out of an off-the-shelf bin liner.

I just need to pause at this point for an extended bout of self-congratulatory back patting. Excuse me a mo…

So, where were we? Oh yes! Standing at the checkout in Tesco in need of a carrier bag or two for my basket of shopping. Or, as it turned out to be, in need of about 48 carrier bags for my basket of shopping.

You see, Tesco, in their (in)finite wisdom have taken another step forward in trying to discourage us from taking any of their bags. They’ve made them so incredibly tiny you’d likely need individual bags for each grape in a bunch.

Seriously. They are ridiculously small and therefore 100% utterly, totally and completely useless.

Of course, that’s the bleedin’ point. Their absolute pointlessness is supposed to help you to remember to bring you’re own hessian holdalls the next time you dare enter the premises. That means carrying them on your person all the time just in case you make a last minute decision to pop in for a spot of groceries.

Come on Tesco. This is ridiculous and a blatant attempt to save yourself money. If you were really so concerned about packaging and the amount of plastic you were adding to the world’s increasing stockpile, you might find it in yourself to stop using so much of the damn stuff on your produce. Don’t place two otherwise average avocados on a moulded tray and then wrap them in plastic just so that you can stick a fancy silver label on them, call them ‘Finest’ and charge three times the price of the lose variety.

But then, of course, you wouldn’t make as much money from people stupid enough to spend the extra money because it makes them feel special or ‘posh’.

I’m hoping that this latest microbag nonsense will be short-lived. In the two minutes it took me to pack, pay and leave I heard the women at the next and previous checkouts both complaining about them. When I mentioned them to the cashier she gave me a look that clearly said ‘Yes, they are small and you are the 700th person to point that out to me today’.

As an almost maniacal note taker, I love it whenever anyone mentions Moleskine notebooks (a particular indulgent passion of mine) and really good quality fountain pens.

One of the first few lines of the book 1984 by George Orwell describes the main character, Winston Smith, fetching out his forbidden diary and running his hand over the smooth, white paper. That’s the excitement that paper has always given me, despite being a staunch technologist and gadget guru.

There’s nothing quite as beautiful as elegant script scratched onto sepia paper. One of the most beautiful things I think I’ve ever seen are Leonardo Di Vinci’s notes. Even after 500 years you can feel the soul and deep passion of the man just by looking at what he almost literally scribbled down (backwards, usually).

So I was very taken with a recent tweet by fave author Neil Gaiman who talks about writing in a notebook in brown ink. How is it I’ve never heard of such an invention before? Brown ink would instantly age my notes and doodles giving them a Di Vinci-esque look and feel instantly (sadly, can’t do the same for the actual content, but I think I’m finally able to cope with that realisation).

So where do I find such a thing and can I get cartridges for my existing Parker pen (yes, I have a cartridge pen – sacrilege it may be, but self-contained plastic tube replacements are considerably safer to carry in a laptop bag than a glass bottle of liquid wanton destruction).

My new mission in life is to seek out brown ink. It’s a daredevil venture that is likely to take me to the very heart of the Prime section of Amazon UK.

Wish me well. I may be gone for minutes.

Somewhere lurking in a dark corner of this net we call ‘Inter’ is my venom-enraged report on the experiences I one encountered with NTL and their cable modem service. They managed to provide me with a level of service that was so breathtakingly inept it will stay with me until my dying day.

But those days have followed NTL into oblivion – or so I believed. NTL were purchased lock, stock and smirking barrel by VirginMedia. When you Google VirginMedia you find all sorts of horror stories about their crapness but that’s probably the same about most companies on internet forums, right?

Add to that the fact that VirginMedia has a 100% monopoly of cable in this country and the fact that I need cable if I’m to attain better internet connection speeds than the paltry offering from my ADSL line, it’s embrace VM or move to Sweden.

Despite being rather partial to the odd spot of gravalax, I’m not quite ready to turn Scandanavian so last week I went against all my better instincts and signed up to Virgin.

They immediately told me that they couldn’t install my line on the date I’d asked for and instead promised February 17th which, by a swift glance at the calendar, turns out to be today.

So, at almost 7pm am I now sitting enjoying 20Mb connection speeds on my new line?

Am I buggery.

The gits didn’t show up. At 5.30 I called and asked ‘que passa?’ I was told that the engineers had rescheduled the installation to NEXT WEDNESDAY. Not only that but they weren’t even prepared to guarantee that date, suggesting that I phone them a day before and make sure we were still on. What about them phoning me!

I lost the plot with the woman on the phone and told her to cancel the whole thing before putting the phone down.

Half an hour later I called back, spoke to the same woman and reinstated the installation. I’ve now got to wait another bloody week. Argh!

Social networking mega-site, Facebook, has reached an astonishing 175 million active users.

It’s an enormous number by anyone’s standards but will it see a decline after the publicity surrounding its new Terms of Service (ToS).

Usually such things are barely noticed as we tick the acceptance box but Facebook are now laying claim to any and all the content you put onto the site, to use as they see wish – even if you ‘remove’ your account.

Founder Mark Zuckerberg says there is nothing sinister in the ToS but many users are expressing privacy concerns.

A question I seem to get asked more than others is the one about downloading videos from YouTube. Can it be done? If so, how?

I rarely find the need to download YouTube content as I simply mark something interesting or entertaining as a favourite on my account and play it back from the site.

However, there have been occasions when an earmarked video has suddenly been ‘removed by user’ or disappeared for other reasons (yes, OK, copyright violation) so I can understand when it might be prudent to grab a local copy.

Search Google for ‘download youtube video’ and you’ll be hit with hundreds of results for software and Firefox extensions written to do just that. Some undoubtedly work better than others but it turns out that all of them are under threat since Google announced this week that it is to crack down on such applications.

Why is Google, the owner of YouTube, suddenly so keen to stop us downloading its content?

It’s no coincidence that this comes at the same time as the company offering paid-for downloads of some videos.
YouTube is attempting to make money by allowing partners to charge for downloads. In this test initiative, selected partners can offer their videos for a fee which is paid through Google Checkout.

Clearly not many people would pay for something that was simple enough to get for nothing.

For now, most traditional methods of downloading videos still appear to be working. My personal favourite (still operational at the time of writing) is pwnyoutube.com. When you find a video on YouTube that you would like to keep, simply add the ‘pwn’ to the front of the address and you will be offered the clip in various formats.

My daughter went into town with her friends today. Nothing unusual about that, you are bound to say.

Might not be to you, squire, but to me it was a monumental moment. You see, this was the first time she’d done such a thing. She’s only 11 years old and, to be honest, I’d understand if you think that’s too young but she was with a group of five girls, all of whom are extremely sensible (as only girls can be) and in this age of mobile phones I figured there was no reason not to see how it went.

Of course, it went just fine. She’d gone equipped with a decent amount of cash as the original plan was to hit Pizza Express for lunch, which I thought was a great idea.

Upon picking her up later in the afternoon I enquired, “So you’ve had lunch, then. What did you have? Pizza?”.

Her: “No, we decided against Pizza Express in the end.”

Me: “Oh. OK. What did you have then?”

Her: “Hot chocolate, chips and a doughnut.”

We drove home and had a huge bowls of strawberries and bananas washed down with orange juice.

You see, it’s all about balance!

Right! now! yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

I am an antichrist – woo-hoo!
I am an anarchist – alright!
Dont know what I want but
I know how to get it – shooby-doo-doo-wah
I wanna destroy the passer by cos
I wanna be anarchy !
No dogs body – yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah!

Anarchy for the u.k (alright) its coming sometime and maybe (woo-hoo)
I give a wrong time stop a traffic line (O!K!)
Your future dream is a shopping scheme cos i
(yeah, yeah)
I wanna be anarchy !
In the city
(Doo – wap, wap – ooh ah! Wap wap, ooh ah! Yeah!)

How many ways to get what you want
I use the best I use the rest (baby!)
I use the enemy I use anarchy cos i

I wanna be anarchy !
The only way to be !

(shoop shoop shoo wah, wah, wah, wah, way)
(shoop shoop shoo wah, wah, wah, wah, way)

Is this the m.p.l.a (nooo!)
Or is this the u.d.a (nooo!)
Or is this the i.r.a (no way!)
I thought it was the u.k or just
Another country
Another council tenancy (yeah, yeah, yeah)

I wanna be an anarchist (wah, wah)
Oh what a name
Get pissed destroy !

(Whoa… that was sooo much fun. Let’s all dig anarchy!)
(Yeah! …. repeat to fade)