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Switch it off

Article on BBC News highlights how much electricity is wasted by having devices constantly in stand-by. For the UK alone it’s the equivalent of the output of two power stations a year – that’s amazingly high and a lot more than I expected. I’m bad at leaving things on for convenience but more and more I’m switching things off, not just to standby but actually at the mains socket as well. The energy that we waste would only be brought into focus if we went through some of the power blips that California suffered over the last two years or the threat to our gas supplied turned into reality – who’ll know what Russia will do next?

It’s time that a sliding scale for paying for our gas and electricity came into use. Like the proposed new road tax where the more you drive the more you pay we should introduce higher unit costs for those that use and abuse energy. There would need to be a scale of when this kicked in i.e. a guy living on his own should use less than a family of four hence their increased unit charge would kick in at a higher level. Awareness alone doesn’t make a difference – hitting people in their pocket certainly would especially when most of the waste is due to our convenience led society.

It was a joke!

I laughed while watching the weather yesterday – not only was it to be a dry day in Glasgow but the presenter who was Scottish had a fun poke at Rangers by saying “wrap up warm if they are heading for Castle Grayskull”. For those not in the know this has been the slang term for Ibrox stadium for a long time. Pretty funny – nice one Kirsty.

I should have know there would be those who can’t see the funny side. Sunday Mail, page 5, outraged Gers fans. Twats – get a grip. Whats worse is the shoddy Sunday Mail reporting. Firstly it’s Grayskull not Greyskull. Secondly, and something I always thought was a bit odd – Castle Grayskull is where the hero’s are based in the He-Man cartoon, not the baddies. So whats the big deal? I’m more concerned about being 4th in the league than a throwaway comment on a weather report.

Pronto Marathon

I do love my Pronto remote but it takes ages to update. I had three new devices to add – new tele, new Freeview box and the 360. Thankfully I managed to find discrete off and on codes for the TV (Philips 32pf9830) and the Freeview box (Sony VTX-D800U) which means I’m now in macro heaven. One touch and all the devices will switch on and off as I please – the ultimate in couch potato laziness. The ccf file for the Pronto can be found below – I would upload to Remotecentral but I’ve set things up just so for me so I feel it’s a bit of a waste dumping it on their site.

downloadMy Pronto ccf

While I was updating the Pronto it struck me I would hate to replace this remote – it’s had a few knocks and mishaps but it’s just so expensive for what it is. A PDA with an IR port could do a better job and is more cost effective – just need the right software and a good range on the IR port.

Broadband Joy

Finally I have a fast and stable broadband connection thanks to NTL. It was installed last Friday and since then I have not had one disconnect. Contrast with Freedom2Surf’s LLU service which was flaky and prone to disconnects. I also seemed to suffer some accusations of lag while gaming online although I was never entirely convinced it was me. Saying that, there has been no lag at all since NTL was installed.

Secondly the speed is impressive – most impressive. About 30 minutes after the line was installed I took an ADSLGuide speedtest which you can see here. Almost a full fat 10Meg connection. Real world speeds i.e. downloading, streaming and general web surfing have also been very impressive. Web pages were a lot snappier than previous suggesting that NTL’s DNS servers are working really well compared to my last two providers.

Contention however can definitely be seen with NTL but not to the same extent as the ADSL network in my area. Yes I’m in a Glasgow on a big exchange (western) but to slow down at night to less than 50k/sec is pretty unacceptable. I should have been seeing 6Meg. I find NTL is dropping to 4-6Meg in the evening but at other times maintains the 9-10Meg speeds. SO after one week I can only recommend NTL’s cable service. I’ll update later in the year once I’ve had more experience of their long term performance.

Finally – Freedom2Surf have lost the plot. I cancelled with them last week but they had the cheek to phone this week and offer 2 free months connection and a promise to fix all my issues. I wasn’t impressed with this at all – why not fix the problem while I’m a paying customer and not when I leave. Sounded like they have had quite a few users leave recently. They also admitted today that they have been traffic shaping over the last weeks. I wish they had been up front so that people knew this was happening – it would have saved a lot of wasted time and money in contacting their support desks. Their reputed honesty and good support seems to have gone out of the window. In case you haven’t figured it out I didn’t take them up on their free months offer. Good riddance.

1 in 76,275,360

Thats the odds of hitting the EuroMillions jackpot. Did it stop our work syndicate placing 280 lines on tomorrows £70 Million jackpot? Of course not! Post New Year blues has a lot to answer for.

Think lucky!

*Update* We had 10 winning tickets which netted us a grand total of…….£77.30. For a £420 outlay. Still, gets some lines for next weeks Lotto.

Not convinced by PGR3?

Have a look at this gaming forum – http://www.xbox360-forums.com/viewtopic.php?t=593 – one of the guys was visiting Japan and took some shots of the places he recognised from PGR3. He then set up the same shots in the game. It’s amazing how accurate the game is – it’s a shame it all moves so fast as you rarely get chance to see the detail unless you watch a replay. Stunning.

Who’d be a politician?

Two Scots politicians made the news this week. One told some lies, was totally back stabbed by his party but then gained respect in how he finally stepped down. The other has also told some lies (but no one can really prove when), has also been back stabbed by his old party and could only find respect by naming his new party after the word.

…just a bit of a dick.

So a well done and sympathies to Charles Kennedy who suffered a pretty messy execution by his own party. I actually thought he did well for the Liberals and took them to places they could only previously dream about. It’s also a ‘wish he would just go away’ to George Galloway who entered the Big Brother house this week. I remember when he was MP for Glasgow Kelvin – I thought he did nothing for his constituents then – how can he be serving those in Bethnal Green when he’s on a TV show bathing in his own self publicity. Murial Gray summed him up nicely in today’s Herald – just a bit of a dick.

Beta Invites

Windows Live Messenger

Been using this for the past 3 days – this is the new name and new version of MSN Messenger. Interface is much the same as before with a bit more polish and easier to use features. You can search from within Messenger to including one option to search ‘Near Me’. Enter Games and a search window for Glasgow (which is near me) will launch showing a map and addresses for Game related stores near me – hello CA Games. You can also search your desktop from here – maybe time to switch back to MSN Desktop Search as having the search box in Messenger makes more sense than on the toolbar especially as I always have Messenger running.

There are also extra options to be had when chatting. One is Music Mix which allows you to share a music playlist with whoever you are chatting with. Sounds OK but in practise was slow to download my currently playing track and also made the Messenger app pretty unresponsive. Another allows you to share a map search, another allows you to watch a video together from MSN. All tat in my book.

One feature I did like was Sharing Folders. Turn this on between you and a contact and a folder will be kept in sync on each contacts PC. Drag a file onto your contacts name and the file will be synchronised into yours and theirs folder. Makes file transfer so much easier and you no longer need to wait for the contact to say yes to the file.

Newsvine

Think of Digg with less geeks and more general news and you’ve got Web 2.0 (blah) app Newsvine. Three main activities – Read, Write and Seed. Read articles and comment on them to your hearts content but also control the content – the community keep alive the stories they like by voting on them.

You can also Write your own articles and they will appear like other news stories so users can comment and vote on their favourites. Seeding articles is basically linking articles from the web. They will appear within Newsvine as well and be subject to the same voting and commenting as the previous two. The main difference from other sites is that authoring and seeding can earn you money. If you add value to the Newsvine site then you earn some dollars. Interesting concept – open up journalism to the masses but surely it will end in tears as wannabe journalists write up misspelled articles in the quest for fame?

A video from CBC that can be grabbed via bit-torrent shows the very same online mechanism in South Korea – it’s amazing the amount of money an amateur can generate but South Korea is the most connected place on the planet. Still – shows the potential that this model has. I’ve been pretty impressed so far with the content and the news that I’ve found.

The above apps are still in Beta but I do have invites left for both of them – if your interested leave a comment and I’ll drop you an invite.