Posts by Dave 126

Re: Apple DON'T repair your iThing

>My son's 160GB ipod classic had a flaky headphone socket.

I don't know if the iPod Classics have the same internals as the, ahem, classic iPods, but the older ones were repairable (though I only ever took one apart to get its HDD to repair an iRiver H320). The hard part is getting inside - though iFixit or a wealth of YouTube videos will help you out. A guitar plectrum was the tool of choice. On the older models the headphone socket was on a ribbon cable, so the first thing to check would be whether it has become dislodged...

I remember an old Creative Nomad jukebox in which the headphone port was soldered directly to the main PCB... not a good design decision. With no flexibility, it didn't respond well to the large 3.5mm plugs found on oolder headphones or on 3.5mm > phono 'Y' cables. I've also had a Sharp MiniDisc player with the same flaw, and a myriad of screws that looked like they came from a Swiss wristwatch, never two the same length.

I've just remembered - my latest Sansa Clip is due to drop through my letterbox today (I tend to lose them before I break them... I might have to paint it hi-vis orange!) : D

Re: Apple DON'T repair your iThing

>Apple's policy of replace rather than repair usually means you lose your data permanently.

'Data that you only have in one place is data you don't care about', Shirley?

If you lose your phone, or have it stolen, you will also have lost your data permanently... unless, of course, you have synced your phone to your computer or a cloud service. Indeed, it is possible to clone an iPhone in its entirety, so that the replacement unit is indistinguishable from the original.

Android is a bit more piecemeal in this respect, though the important stuff such as phone numbers and photos can be uploaded as they are created. It also gives Google the WiFi passwords that are stored on your device. Backing up apps requires 3rd party software, and possibly rooting.

Mike Bell's positive experience is reflected by surveys conducted by the British Consumer Association, and published in their journal 'Which?'. The other highly rated retailer for customer service and support was John Lewis.

Re: Required reading

A classic example is the development of the video game 'Halo: Combat Evolved' which was done by a relatively small team at Bungie. Whether you like the game or not, the team made an effort to re-examine the actual game-play of first-person shooters to remove the tedious parts of the genre, then set it against a fairly straightforward plot in a world inspired by Niven and Iain M. Banks.

The sequel, Halo 2, was a mess by comparison. Bungie have said since that because they felt expected to make a much larger game, they recruited a far larger team - which of course meant the overall vision became fuzzy. The sprawling plot was hard to follow, and new features that sounded good on paper ('Wield two guns at once! Wow!) detracted from the simplicity of the original game.

Re: @David W.

>I'm afraid you're reading the wrong website then. There's plenty of other websites if you don't like this one.

That is true, but some intelligent people read the Reg and comment on its articles, so it is a shame when an opportunity to discuss different approaches to technology is wasted on tedious slanging matches. Fortunately, this thread has been left relatively unscathed.

Re: And this is whats missing today

No, having lots of cash isn't the only required ingredient, but it helps! Apple have a track record of not being Microsoft.

Re: And this is whats missing today

>with Steve Jobs gone, Ive, sorry Sir Ive will be pushed and in return the corporate decision makers again

Nah. Steve Jobs was ill for a long time, and knew to have plans for an Apple without him - indeed Tim Cook was acting CEO for months on end during Jobs' illness. Tim Cook, by recently telling some investors on where to get off, has shown that he knows better than to think short-term.

Sir Jony might look like a big softy, but he isn't the sort to be pushed around easily. If he was, he'd still be in the UK designing bathrooms.

Of course, there is no guarantee that it will be Apple who dominate profits in a new product sector (as they did with phones and tablets) but they are in a better position than most (enough cash to buy any company or talent they need).

Re: Follow the money

>This is what the PC market is turning into - super-expensive high-margin performance hardware for content creators, leaving toy-comp tablets to the proles.

>Not an entirely good thing, IMO.

What do us proles need a PC for, beyond some spreadsheets, email, web-browsing, and the odd bit of video encoding? The last I checked, all that can be achieved on a cheap n cheerful laptop, Small Form Factor PC, or even an ARM based device. As a benefit, these things can be done on passively-cooled hardware - blissful silence!

The causal use of productivity applications (video editing, CAD) that require a little more grunt can be powered by some gaming-grade hardware. If one really needs the stability and accuracy of the professional kit - certified workstations, pro drivers, ECC RAM - then there will be a business case for stumping up the money for it, and probably tax-deductions, too.

Don't get me wrong, TheOtherHobbes, I'm not dismissing your concern, but I feel I don't exactly understand what it is without you expanding upon it.

My personal concern - perhaps parallel to yours - is that 16:10 laptops like hens teeth these days (other than Macbooks, that is)... 'widescreen' displays require the user to do more scrolling up and down. Also, I would like higher-res PC screens, but by all accounts 3rd party applications for the desktop side of Windows don't behave as sensibly as they could - Photoshop, for example, has ridiculously small toolbar icons on high res screens.

It amazes that some niche software, such as Solidworks, has a more civilised UI than many 'mainstream' productivity applications - for example, it offers the option of large toolbar icons, so it can be used comfortably on very high res monitors.

Re: Yes please.

Cameras are a bit harder- the electronics will work fine, but the lenses are harder to seal against water ingress, and pond water on the inside of the lenses won't help image quality and also upset the delicate moving parts (focus, zoom, image stabilisation mechanisms).

But yeah, essentially solid-state devices are easy.

Re: The ultimate test

My Sansa Clip MP3 player has survived a cycle through the washing machine... I couldn't remove its battery, but just left in on a radiator for a couple of days before attempting to charge it up. It worked fine.

Two months later, the washing machine wouldn't drain, so I investigated the filter... amongst the horror of hair and gunk, I found the microSD card that the washing machine had knocked out of the MP3 player - it worked fine, too.

I've heard of other Clips surviving the same - one user dropped it amongst sachets of silica gel. A nice little machine, even if the clip on the back always snaps off (they are easy to lose, so I've had a couple of them!)

A cheap source of silica gel is cat litter (unused, please!). A caravan owner swears by leaving trays of cat litter around his caravan whilst it is unused in winter, to absorb any dampness. The cat litter can be gently heated in an oven to restore its effectiveness.

*heat?

Re: Wheres the proper keyboard?

Ah c'mon ted frater, is it possible that you're being slightly arbitrary?

You bash phones for trying to be cameras, yet you then bash them for not trying to be Psion organisers.

For sure, a Psion-style keyboard would be nice, but you could carry a discrete bluetooth/OTG keyboard with you. You could carry a discrete camera with a big lens, and a dedicated sat-nav, a separate calculator, and a stand-alone personal media player, too. Why these gadgets have converged into one unit is because they require many of the same hardware elements - battery, screen, speakers, DAC etc.

You could buy an old-school dumbphone and a 7" tablet.

My own preference is for a 4" Android phone, a wristwatch, a Lumix LX camera and a Sandisk Clip media player. Each of the discrete devices is slightly better than the phone for its specialist function- plus the phone's battery lasts longer! If I needed to conduct time and motion studies, or regularly tot up figures, I would probably invest in a stopwatch or calculator, too.

Re: 60 W led?

60 W equivalent.

Apparently, the 'equivalent to' figures stated on CFL bulbs were being compared to frosted-glass bulbs, as opposed to the brighter clear-glassed incandescent bulbs that most people used.

Re: iRevisionism?

>The reason it was so sought after was because it was "Apple"

Or maybe because it resembled the phones most people use today? The first iPhone had the basics (multi-touch screen, proximity sensor so you don't end a call with your cheek, useful information such as travel times accessed with a single tap of an app instead of faffing with a browser) that we see in the vast majority of phones today. Other companies had the elements, but didn't play their hand as quickly (Nokia, especially).

True, it didn't have 3G like some other handsets did, but mobile data was very expensive at the time anyway- and it wasn't required to check emails or get travel information. In the UK Apple negotiated with Orange, and used their leverage to get an 'unlimited data*' tariff.

It wasn't perfect, but at least it could be used with standard 3.5mm headphones, unlike a lot of phones at the time (looking at you, Samsung, Nokia, Sony-Ericsson).

Re: Lost era

Again, yossarianuk, what the hell are you on about? How did you get from Amiga games to Linux?

Amiga and ST games were classics. PC games were different. The classic PC games ( X-Wing, for example) were for DOS, not for Windows.

Tosser.

I expect that you'll next claim that Nintendo or Sega have never made a good game, because they were on propriety platforms.

Re: Bitmap Bros...

This is probably the first time that I've seen Linux cited in a celebration of Gold Age British game development. What the living feck? Bitmap Bros, Team 17, Sensible Software, Psygnosis, Bullfrog, Codemasters... classic outfits. The PC did feel like the poor man at the gaming party back then, but like the ugly duckling it would mature into a swan that hatched a load of first-person shooters... cheers iD.

Just the other day, a website with .EXE Amiga games was drawn to my attention... downloaded Dune 2 'cos I read about it in PC Zone back in the day, then I realised that there was an Android port. I've wasted too much of my weekend on it!

Re: @Anonymous Coward

>Yeah, honestly, never mind that. The Micro-USB is good enough.

Good enough? It could do with being less fiddly to insert, and less scratchy. For someone who has arthritis, an old 'Nokia' power connector is easier to insert, and thus fitter for purpose.

Lots of 'good enough' compromises eventually add up to a poorer experience.

Re: But do all Macs run OSX?

>Let's say I have xcode on screen one, photoshop on screen 2. Working in xcode. Now I need to do something in photoshop from a menu. So I have to mouse over to photoshop on screen 2, activate it, mouse back to screen one, select from the menu, mosue back to xcode.

Use the keyboard to switch tasks. Alt-Tab, usually.

Re: Talking Scroticus eulampios IMHO, It would be fair

>Seriously, give me one technical feature [in OSX] not already offered by Linux and Windows and then admit your fanboism is just the result of fashion-driven masochism.

That's the point. OSX isn't sold on *technical features*, it is sold on 'features for the user'. Apple might take a bunch of technical features and give them a polished GUI, like TimeMachine, or no GIU at all like FusionDisk. The user doesn't have to understand how they work, so a simple name will do. Easy to market.

Re: Ratios

I hate the stretching of older content. I might be a couple of minutes into an episode of Father Ted when I notice Dougal's head is strangely wide, placing him in the 'uncanny valley'.

Is it actually broadcast like that, or is the TV set trying to be helpful? If the former, could a TV be told to 'unstretch' the content? Or is it easier to just download the content off the internet that someone has ripped from a DVD?

When the BBC show older content on iPlayer, they don't stretch it. However, since I have a 16:10 monitor, I have black bars at the sides and at the top and bottom of the image, since it isn't very smart about filling the screen.

Re: All I want

I enjoyed the Alec Guinesss version of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy on YouTube... More recently, True Detective was excellent. There is a world of good stuff out there, but discovering it can be tricky. Who knows, you might develop a taste for Soviet-made 'Easterns' films...

However, good content benefits from a coherent way of finding and viewing it. Using an IR remote control to navigate on-screen menus isn't a great experience. One of the better methods I've seen is using an app on an iPad that allows you to search YouTube and then instruct a PS3 to play it on the big screen. There's no technical reason that a generic tablet couldn't be used with a generic set-top-box to navigate both broadcast and streamed video services in a similar fashion.

It'll get there.

Paper clip Vs Pliers

Another situation in which I have used pliers instead of a paper clip:

Needing to restore a router to factory settings, I used a pair of pliers to 'nibble' a larger hole in the plastic casing so that the reset microswitch could be accessed with a screwdriver.

Re: Journalistic Integrity

>Maybe an article on other uses for paper clips?

Resetting / restoring routers?

It's worth noting that some of the advanced uses for a paper clip require the intervention of a pair of pliers.

If you need to hold some papers together and can't find a paper clip, you can use a pair of pliers and an elastic band to achieve the same. The pliers will double as a paper weight. An additional bonus is that they won't jam the sheet feeder in a multi-page photocopier.

Good idea!

It would only take a mirror to deflect the energy to a cooking pot, thus making the most of the investment in the reflector assembly.

Re: @ AC

Poor farmers could afford more things (seed, schoolbooks, medicine) if they got a fair market price for their produce. With a mobile phone (or just their own SIM that they can use in a shared phone) they don't have to take a middleman's word for the current prices.

We lucky blighters might use most of our bandwidth for cat videos, but that doesn't mean that a little data can't go a long way. Just think of of the utility that we used to get from Teletext (weather, stock prices, news etc)

There have been sunny Glastonbury festivals, but not enough for these to be the bog standard bog! I dare say that a demonstration unit might be displayed in the 'Green Fields' area.

To be fair, festival toilets are better than they used to be. The cleanest are those by the mixing desk islands in the middle of the crowds in front of the big stages. You'll need to ask the security guards permission to hop over the scaffold partition, but they can be understanding. Always carry your own absorbent material. Beer and cider will make your trips to the dunny far more frequent, so remember that other mood-altering substances are available.

I wish I had appropriated the door of a Portaloo (TM, the 'Hoover' of the toilet world) at Glasto about a dozen years ago... some Bristoliann bloke had stencilled a picture of a monkey on the door, and apparently such things are worth a lot of money now that some shark/cow-worrier collects his efforts.

Re: Smartphones

> Every so often I have to reboot this damn thing because it claims to have signal but acts like it doesnt.

You can also try turning 'Airplane Mode' on and then off again... its quicker than rebooting the whole phone. A work-around, not a solution, for an annoying situation.

Re: TBL is MS!

>Once you unleash DRM you'll regret it. It won't be applied sensibly.

Er, last I looked DRM is already unleashed. Websites are already able to frustrate attempts to copy text (to check reviews of a product they are selling, for example). An example of silliness can be seen on the Currys site. Just try copying text from the webpage below:

http://www.currys.co.uk/gbuk/clearance-photography-1902-commercial.html?intcmp=home~Camera-clearance~clearance~r4~half~c7~cp1902~070314

But hey, people are free to shop with someone else.