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Virgin Media offers speeds 'up to' 50Mb. Hmmm...
If you read me regularly you’ll know that I’ve been procrastinating like a nervous bungy jumper about signing up to a Virgin Media cable account for about a million years.
My biggest problem is the fact that this is actually the old NTL which whom I had numerous incredible and frustrating issues with when I first had a cable modem installed back in the day. I’ve been online and read reports that Virgin Media are no better than NTL (in fact it’s even suggested that it’s entirely the same staff etc.). I think if I ever faced the kind of incompetence that I encountered at the hands of NTL I would probably go postal.
But I really want a faster connection than my ADSL line can provide me with. Apparently I’m just the wrong distance away from the exchange so the measly 1Mb that currently squeezes its way down my copper wire is as good as it’s gonna get.
This sort of speed is fine for work (indeed, it’s a work-provided line) and I can hook into my company’s VPN and use RDP no problemo, BUT a) it’s not good enough for personal stuff. For example, I’d like to watch BBC iPlayer in higher resolution but since the BBC decided not to buffer their stream, it’s a total no-no.
So I’ve bitten the bullet and opted for Virgin Media’s ‘up to’ 20Mb line. A friend of mine has it and says he gets around 8Mb which I’m hoping I can beat but even that will be a considerable improvement. It’s gonna cost me £30 a month which is reasonable and I’ve always got the option to whack it up to the full 50Mb service if I think I’ll get near to that much. That particular speed sets you back £50 a month which seems excessive but I remember paying that to NTL for a 1Mb line when they first bought them out! Imagine that.
Booking the service and installation online was an absolute doddle so credit for an easy experience there. Where I feel somewhat frustrated already (and I’ve only been a customer for a couple of hours) is that the booking process allows you to request a particular installation date and time. Great! Please come out on Saturday morning. That would be most handy.
Shortly after finishing the purchase I received an email. Lo and behold they were apologising but couldn’t make the date I had requested so suggested another some days later.
I’m happy enough to wait but what gets me is that they could easily have worked that out when offering me times which they clearly only did to make me feel happy. Once the order was set, then they can tell me they can’t do that time. Typical.
A bit of honesty wouldn’t go a miss, Virgin Media! Hook you online booking diary up to a real-time diary of your engineers’ availability. Grrrr….
Anyway, I shall make sure I’m on-hand next Tuesday when they run the cable up to the house. I want to be absolutely sure they don’t do what the Sky engineer decided to do and find the shortest route possible from source to destination even if it meant hanging a cable over my drainpipe, running it straight down the side of the house and drilling a dirty great hole halfway up the all.
I’ll let you know how well the service works come next Tuesday. Can’t wait – <MARVIN-VOICE>Though something’s bound to go wrong. It always does.</MARVIN-VOICE>
That bastion of collected knowledge, the Encyclopedia Britannica, has been well and truly trumped online by Wikipedia, partly due to the breadth of subject covered by the latter but mostly, I suspect, because you get maybe 10 seconds to read most Britannica entries before a huge black box covers the text and tells you that you need a premium (read ‘paid for’) subscription in order to view it.
In a bid to revive its popularity, editors of the Encyclopedia Britannica have decided to take a virtual leaf from Wikipedia’s book and start to accept user submitted content as both new entries and additions to existing ones – but with a slight difference.
Whereas Wikipedia entries are immediately on the site and then peer reviewed some time later, Britannica, presumably wary of its reputation, has stated that user content will be checked by editors before going onto the site, claiming they can turn around submissions in 20 minutes.
If the idea becomes popular Britannica will need a staff army to keep up.
When that American Airlines Airbus made its miraculous landing on the Hudson River last week, it delivered more than one amazing conclusion.
Primarily, of course, was the simple fact that a plane can come falling from the sky with no active engines, land on a freezing cold river and all but one passengers on board – who had the misfortune to break both legs – can literally walk away from it.
But secondly – and most importantly for a column dealing in technology – was the way that news and pictures of this incredible event were circulated around the world.
I have the feeling that my colleagues, the professional journalists of this fine publication, may not like what I’m about to suggest but, if it’s the job of journalism to get to the news first, on this particular occasion it was beaten by a bunch of regular Jo(e)s with mobile phones and Twitter accounts.
Twitter (twitter.com), in case you spent 2008 with your head in a bag, is the hugely successful ‘microblogging’ website that allows you to quickly publish mini articles including links to photographs.
Anybody who is following your account on Twitter will instantly receive your article. It’s a bit like text messaging to more than one person who has decided they want to get your texts.
The main and probably most dramatic picture taken of the plane event which showed the two wings of the floating aircraft jammed with people who had clambered out, was taken on a iPhone.
The person responsible had snapped the picture from onboard a ferry that was heading to the rescue and had immediately posted it to his Twitter account.
What is clearly happening is that we are becoming accustomed to two types of reporting and journalism.
The first, that of the citizen with a mobile phone or other means of instant communication who happens to be close (physically or emotionally) to the event or issue is usually written or photographed in a style that can best be described as ‘acceptable’ but is very quick to get out.
The second style of journalism is the more traditional type, written or photographed with skill and experience but which is only available some time later.
Both have the potential to be Earth shattering; both are incredibly important in this day and age and neither are going away any time soon.
So the festivities are now over and all that’s left are the memories – and, if you’re anything like me, approximately half a million photographs, especially if Santa delivered a new camera this year.
I hear a lot of moaning from people (my parents in particular) that the problem with digital photography is that nobody ever gets to see the photographs because they can’t be handed around the room as they were back in the old analogue days.
This complaint, of course, completely fails to recognise that your snaps can be processed just the same as they ever were, either via a photo booth found in many high street shops or by uploading them to a website that offer the service.
The added benefit of digital photography is that we can all now be more like professional photographers who have always taken dozens of shots of a scene, safe in the knowledge that at least one of them should turn out half decent.
And that, I think, is actually part of the problem.
When a camera can store hundreds of photographs rather than the old 24 exposure reels, we tend to fill them up before dumping the lot onto a computer where they might get flicked through once and then effectively abandoned.
All modern computers come with terrific software for organising a photo collection and adding captions to make it searchable but it’s such an overwhelming task that we nearly always leave it until ‘later’.
I’ve found a good solution for those of us without the time required for organisation and it produces something that is actually worth looking at.
Stitching still photographs together into a movie isn’t a new idea. Both Windows Movie Maker and iMovie on a Mac contain picture montage tools but I’ve found the end results too much like something you’d see in a soppy segment on Oprah. All they need is some cheesy piano music in the background.
Then I discovered animoto.com and my faith in stills montages was rekindled.
Animoto is simple to use. Chuck it some photos and your choice of music and it creates a really interesting movie that’s low on cheese and high in quality.
It’s surely better to make a one minute clip of your favourite snaps that you’ll actually want to look at rather than confine the lot to a darkened corner of your computer.
I have a memory that is something akin to a hideous genetic crossbreed of a goldfish and a sieve.
I don’t know if I was born without the ability to remember important things or whether I simply became reliant on keeping notes and ‘to do’ lists from an early age.
Even at school I would always carry a small, spiral bound notepad in my back pocket where I would jot anything I needed to remember and then check it routinely throughout the day.
As the years have passed I have found my love of paper difficult to shake off and still keep copious scribbles and personal memos in my treasured Moleskine (www.moleskine.co.uk) notebooks but being a digital devotee has meant shifting my reminders to online offerings.
For some time I’ve been using Google Calendar to log meetings and tasks that need completing on a certain date. The function to have Google email and/or SMS text message me at fixed times before an event’s due date is particularly useful but if not used carefully it can result in what I refer to as ‘alert hell’.
Many is the occasion I am working at my desk when almost simultaneously I get a new email message tone, a text message, an alert from my iCal on my Macintosh which has been set to synchronise with Google Calendar and finally a pop-up from my work computer’s system tray – all telling me the same thing.
Having applications that communicate with each other and several computers and an iPhone all setting their clocks with split second accuracy can be overkill. I feel like the owner of a cuckoo clock shop at midday!
I’ve recently gone back to using an old favourite that I have mentioned before in this column.
Remember The Milk (rememberthemilk.com) has added even more useful features in the year since I last used it. It’s now even easier to add tasks, set reminders and check what you should be doing each day.
I chose to pay the entirely reasonable $25 (about a pound a month) a year for a pro account and now I can synchronise and manage all my tasks via a wonderful little application on my iPhone.
I’m no longer in ‘alert hell’. I get meaningful and relevant reminders that help to keep my day perfectly organised.
Who needs an old fashioned biological memory?
The sun is a mass of incandescent gas
A gigantic nuclear furnace
Where hydrogen is built into helium
At a temperature of millions of degrees
The sun is hot, the sun is not
A place where we could live
But here on earth there’d be no life
Without the light it gives
We need its light
We need its heat
We need its energy
Without the sun, without a doubt
There’d be no you and me
The sun is a mass of incandescent gas
A gigantic nuclear furnace
Where hydrogen is built into helium
At a temperature of millions of degrees
The sun is hot
It is so hot that everything on it is a gas: iron, copper, aluminum, and many others.
The sun is large
If the sun were hollow, a million earths could fit inside. and yet, the sun is only a middle-sized star.
The sun is far away
About 93 million miles away, and thats why it looks so small.
And even when its out of sight
The sun shines night and day
The sun gives heat
The sun gives light
The sunlight that we see
The sunlight comes from our own suns
Atomic energy
Scientists have found that the sun is a huge atom-smashing machine. the heat and light of the sun come from the nuclear reactions of hydrogen, carbon, nitrogen, and helium.*
The sun is a mass of incandescent gas
A gigantic nuclear furnace
Where hydrogen is built into helium
At a temperature of millions of degrees
Google’s recent acquisition of the mega-popular YouTube raises some interesting hypothesis for the future of online video sharing.
If you’re one of the four people left in the country who has never heard of YouTube, it’s a site that allows its users to upload their video clips for all the world to see.
Usually described – incorrectly in my view – as a sort of global ‘You’ve Been Framed’, the site plays host to millions of clips ranging from a few seconds up to feature length videos.
And it’s certainly addictive. Browsing YouTube reminds me very much of the early days of the web, when I would go online to seek out one thing and then find myself hours later off on the widest of tangents, having completely forgotten my original intention.
YouTube cleverly displays what it considers to be clips of similar content to the one you are currently viewing, ensuring an endless trail of breadcrumbs to follow.
Far more than simply short videos of teenage Americans miming to their favourite pop song, as it is most commonly described, YouTube is a rich library of many notable things shot to film over the past few decades and it provides an easy and free platform for would-be documentary makers to have their work seen.
I believe it is for this reason that Google considered the $1.65bn takeover to be good value for money.
Broadband internet connections make it feasible to deliver TV quality video and movies online, instantly making the medium available to the woman on the street and not just wealthy corporations like the BBC or Sky.
Today, with some cheap, consumer-level video equipment and a popular idea, anybody could make a ‘TV’ programme and distribute it globally for effectively no cost.
It’s a massive revolution and it’s happening right now.
Other companies are also seeing the potential in IPTV (Internet Protocol Television).
One of the best examples of this new broadcasting medium is Revision3, a company that produces an ever increasing portfolio of interesting and professional quality free programming with subjects ranging from cookery to technology news. All shows can be subscribed to via the iTunes Store ensuring automated delivery as soon as they’re available.
Forget a few extra channels being available on Freeview. The internet has the potential to offer unlimited content.
The past fortnight has seen two major releases in the web browser market.
Microsoft was first off the block when it unleashed Internet Explorer 7 on the world and it was closely followed just a few days later by a new milestone release of Mozilla Firefox.
As regular readers will know, I’m no fan on Internet Explorer. Lacklustre security, no real innovations and an almost total disregard for important web standards, coupled with Microsoft’s monopoly that sees the browser on just about all new PCs purchased, has undoubtedly hurt the web and its reputation over recent years.
Firefox, on the other hand, has considerably tighter security, made innovations like tabbed browsing and extensions and complies more closely with standards.
Microsoft had previously stated that it would no longer be releasing updates to Internet Explorer but as awareness of its security flaws grew, take up of alternative browsers, most noticeably Firefox, grew rapidly and the company was forced to do something about it.
So how do these new browser versions fare?
There’s no denying that IE7 is a radical step forward. A very new interface, in keeping with the design of the forthcoming Vista, is sure to confuse many average computer users but features like tabbed browsing, a rather nifty built-in RSS newsfeed reader and a final acknowledgement by Microsoft that security is important, definitely makes IE7 a compelling product.
So does it offer Windows users currently turned on to Firefox a reason to switch back?
Sorry, Microsoft, but it doesn’t even come close.
Firefox 2 takes the success of its predecessor and builds on it. An enhanced interface, a built-in spell checker and a phishing filter that alerts of potential attempts at tricking you to fraudulently provide passwords mean the best just got better. On the downside, the long standing problem of a memory leak that can see the browser take up vast amounts of your computers RAM if left open for a long time is still present, although it’s probably something only noticed by techies with hefty browsing habits.
A fly in the ointment of Firefox’s continuing success could be that Microsoft will eventually push out IE7 as an automatic update meaning that Windows users will probably end up with it by default.
My job requires that I make the occasion trip to the company’s head office which is right in the heart of London.
It’s nice to get out the office and see some different faces once in a while but the time spent travelling to and fro really takes a chunk of productivity out of my day.
Some time ago I made the clearly sensible decision that getting to our nation’s capital during the week is easier conducted by coach.
Yes, the journey will take longer but at least I’m assured a seat and it’s far easier for me to leave my car at the Park and Ride before picking up the coach.
I also choose to take Oxford Bus Company’s espress service (that’s the green bus) rather than the red Oxford Tube because it stops at Baker Street thus saving me a slow crawl through the city traffic.
However, I always looked on enviously as Oxford Tube passengers sat inside a bus that boasted wifi connectivity – something lacking on the espress.
Until now.
It may have taken them a little while to catch up on their rivals but Oxford Bus Company says the interim period has allowed it to test various available networks and find the best one suitable for the job.
Providing mobile wifi is tricky because, by definition, you’re always on the move. The new espress service does its best to combat any signal dropouts by using two satellite dishes instead of the usual one. The claim is that this results in just one brief spell of a potential loss of signal around junction 6 due the lie of the land.
Given that a return trip to London can mean around four hours on the bus, the ability to work and stay connected for that time is of immeasurable benefit. I’ve tried the odd bit of offline work before but its invariably only minutes before I need access to the internet to continue.
The inclusion of on-board power sockets will also ensure that I don’t turn up at the London office frantically seeking the nearest plug.
By the time you read this I will have made my first trip on the espress since the service was in put in place so expect a brief review of it in next week’s column.
Moderation? We’ve heard it all before
January 2, 2009 in Comment, The web | Leave a comment
The internet has undoubtedly seen a relaxing of censorship in this country and others.
Things that were once banned can no longer be controlled by individual states because of the open architecture of the world wide web.
Of course, this hasn’t stopped some governments from trying.
China infamously blocks access to huge swathes of the web, something it is almost uniquely able to do because of its complete control of the country’s telecommunication system. In order to avoid being blocked itself, Google controversially agreed to censoring demands from the Chinese government.
No doubt there are numerous technically savvy citizens who can and do risk getting around the blocks in place behind this new, virtual iron curtain.
Australia has recently revealed ambitious – and surely ultimately futile – plans to make demands on Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to censor access to certain content.
Under the proposal, all ISPs would have to block their users’ access to certain websites and content – something that is not only extremely difficult to implement, but also extremely easy to circumvent.
Not only are the Australian government’s plans expensive and technically of dubious feasibility, they also call into question the whole issue of censorship and who would decide what its citizens can and can’t see and under what circumstances would those decisions be made.
Go back a decade or so in this country and there were regular censorship calls from MPs who didn’t understand the impossibility of what they were demanding.
These days, our politicians attempt to win credibility points by making more attainable but equally futile arguments.
The latest comes from culture secretary, Andy Burnham who has said the government is looking at the possibility of introducing movie-style age ratings to websites in an attempt to guide us on their content.
Such a plan is doomed from the start for so many reasons.
Because it is unenforceable, the government have said it will be ‘optional’ which probably means a handful of UK sites for children would use it for a short while before abandoning it when it fails to take off.
It’s also reminiscent of Channel 4’s red triangle which was supposed to indicate adult content in a program and instantly became the first thing kids would look for when channel hopping on their bedroom tellies.
Common sense, supervision where necessary and an acceptance of reality are all we really need.