Monthly Archive for March, 2009

OpenDNS

Published on 23 March, 2009. Closed Tags: DNS, Domain Name System, Internet, OpenDNS, Search, Shortcut, Website.

DNS. It’s that ultra-confusing thing that you use every single day, but you may or may not know it. Simply put, DNS is what helps the internet run. It’s the service that turns a domain name, such as google.com, into an IP address, such as 208.69.34.231. Whenever you visit Google, your DNS server(s) point you in the direction of the server you’re looking for.

Now, most of the time, DNS is pretty hidden. You won’t notice it, it won’t bother you, and it’s generally ignored by most people. However, due to the way it works, you can do some pretty nifty stuff with it. Almost always, your ISP will provide you with two or more DNS servers which you can use. They’re usually run by your ISP, and most of the time, they work fine. However, a lot of ISPs don’t have the most reliable DNS servers around (my ISP included!), and they can sometimes be slow during peak times, and even go down completely.

The good news is, you don’t have to use your ISP’s DNS servers. There are alternatives around, one of which is OpenDNS. Continue reading ‘OpenDNS’

Protected: I’m in ur internets, tracking ur lifestyles (ask me for the password)

Published on 19 March, 2009. Enter your password to view comments. Tags: Computer, conspiracy, gps, it's a trap!, keylogger, mum, packet sniffer, parent, phone, Technology, theories, tracker.

After the internet, all you can do is die…

Published on 18 March, 2009. View Comments Tags: Add new tag, Bored, Death, Die, Internet, Life Sucks.

<%William> I’M BORED
<+iwantanimac> try the internet.
<%William> Already have
<%William> bored of it
<+iwantanimac> lol
<+iwantanimac> wow. that was fast.
<+iwantanimac> i guess all you can do now is die…
<%William> hm, yeah
<%William> brb, dieing
<%William> lol
<+iwantanimac> lol

Conversation from the friendly banter of irc.fr3d.org #Fr3d

London / Thorpe Park

Published on 15 March, 2009. View Comments Tags: Amusement, Fun, Happy, London, Park, Rides, Rollercoaster, Theme, Thorpe, Water.

Tidal Wave

This past week, I asked dad if he’d like to go down to visit Thorpe Park to go on their new ride, “SAW”. However, he suggested that instead of staying at a hotel outside of London, we go and stay in London, spend Saturday there, and then go to Thorpe Park on Sunday. So, that’s what we did. We drove down on Saturday morning to London (dropping off someone in Cheltenham on the way), and spent the day in London itself. We did a few things…went to a few shops, went on the London Eye, rode the Dodgems at the Namco arcade near the Eye (which are fun, and only £2, so if you ever get the chance to, go have a ride ), went on the Underground, and so on. The usual London tourist stuff.

By then, it was about 5:30pm or so, so I went back to the hotel we were staying at (Radisson Edwardian), and watched a bit of TV (dad went walkabout somewhere I think)….then gave up on that (nothing good on) and watched something off the BBC iPlayer on my iPhone. Anyway, about 7:30pm we went out again to the “Pizza Express Jazz Club” in Dean Street, Soho. Annoyingly, you have to book to see the Jazz (which is downstairs), but the upstairs section was busy, but we managed to get a table without waiting. Had dinner, then went back to the hotel.

Sunday (today, as I’m writing this post), we woke up early, had some breakfast at the hotel, checked out, and drove to Thorpe Park. We arrived at about 9:30am, and had to wait for about half an hour, but we managed to get in early. However, the main reason I wanted to go to Thorpe was to ride SAW, and…annoyingly, the one day I chose to go there, they had a power failure to half the park!

So, the whole trip was pretty boring because of that. They were only running a handful of rides, including Nemesis Inferno, Tidal Wave, Samurai, Vortex, Detonator, Flying Fish, and Depth Charge (of which I rode all of them except for Detonator). Great fun.

Anyway, we decided to leave at about 2pm and go to Legoland instead, but that ended up being a big fail too. Because it only opens next weekend. So, we gave up and just drove home (note: I hate the M6). All in all, not a very thrilling day, so hopefully next time I’m in London, they’ll have the rides all open and running.

I still don’t understand why they don’t have some kind of backup system in place…after all, half the park had power (all the lights and vending machines and shops had power), so why not somehow get the coasters to use that power as a backup? Surely it doesn’t need that much power to run a chain lift and brakes? Oh well.

Oh, and when we drove down to London on Saturday, I went and met Fr3d in person, to pick up some stuff (a HDD and a Logitech MX Revolution mouse (which, btw, is win)) I had purchased from him. I still want to meet some of the other people off IRC, including Knucks, PJ, M4rk, and Chrissie.

Anyway, that’s my eventful weekend. Wheee.

Marley and Me

Published on 12 March, 2009. View Comments Tags: Cinema, Dog, Entertainment, Labrador, Marley, Marley and Me, Movie, Owen Wilson, Theatre.

I just got back from seeing Marley and Me at the cinema, and I must say, it was a brilliant film. Not because it had car chases (because it didn’t have any), gunfights (because it didn’t have any), corrupt cops (because it didn’t have any), a teenage superhereo (because it didn’t have any), or a superhero (because it didn’t have any), but because it’s one of the few hidden gems that come out of Hollywood these days.

It’s a great film about a man, his family, and the most hilarious Labrador that you will ever see which literally chews everything. I’d give the film a pretty nice 7.8/10, because it’s a great watch. Don’t compare it to other films like the Dark Knight, because they’re totally different. Compare it to other dog-related films. And go see it!

11 Features That Sky+HD Should Have

Published on 6 March, 2009. View Comments Tags: BskyB, Entertainment, HD, HDTV, James Murdoch, Media, Satellite, Sky, Sky HD, Television.

Sky HD, for those who don’t know, is the UK’s largest subscription TV provider. Similar to, say, Dish Network in the US, it provides HD and SD satellite TV for a monthly fee, and has all the usual channels you’d expect, such as entertainment, news, sports, kids, music, and so on. Anyway, Sky themselves offer three set top boxes:

Sky Digibox: Provides basic viewing-only access to Sky.
Sky+: Provides viewing of Sky channels, but adds an internal HDD so you can record and timeshift programs, and has two tuners so you can record one show while watching another…or record two shows and watch a previously recorded show.
Sky+HD: Same thing as Sky+, but with an HD decoder too.

All three boxes share the same EPG (Eletronic Program Guide) software, which, while it’s a decent and easy to use design, it’s showing it’s age now, is severely in need of a makeover. However, Sky have announced a makeover of the EPG for the HD box only, which is great news…when it’s out. It’s almost a year since they announced it, so hopefully it’ll be out soon.

Anyway, enough of that. This post is about the features that I wish the Sky+HD box had. So, on with the list.

eSATA HDD: The box has an eSATA jack on the back, but at the moment, you can’t use it for anything. Why not? The box has a stupidly small 320GB HDD (of which 160GB is reserved for Sky’s Anytime service), so why not open that up like the US services allow, and let me plug in my own 2TB drive? The current box, if you full it with HD movies, lets you have about two pages of programs, and then the HDD is full! In fact, this is perfect – put a 320GB minimum restriction on external drives, and then keep the internal HDD for Anytime, and use the eSATA drive for recordings!
USB Port: Again, this isn’t used for anything so why not let people use it for HDDs too? Or, just leave it unused, since eSATA is far better for HDDs.
New EPG: It’s already been done by Sky, so WHEN are we getting it? (According to Twitter, it seems to be out on Tuesday the 10th of March, actually. Fingers crossed!)
HD Swap: It’s a descriptive name for it…and I think it’s would be a useful feature. Basically, the Sky box should be able to detect when you’re watching something in SD (such as Nature’s Great Events) on, say, BBC1, and see that it’s being broadcast at the same time on BBC HD. It should then pop up a suggestion saying “This program is in HD! Switch to the HD version?”, and you can choose if you want to switch or not. This could be made even better by having two more options in the settings – first of all, a setting to automaticially switch over to the HD version without asking you, and secondly, the option to map the HD channel to the SD channel number (quick example: set the box to switch to 4HD whenever you type in “104″, since 4HD’s quality is much better then the non-HD 4…even on SD channels.
Commerical break skipping: Windows Media Centre already this this feature. It would have to be mapped to an existing button on the remote (I considered double-tapping “Play”), but it would mean you could skip forward a specific time (instead of fast-forwarding) so as to bypass the ad breaks. Again, this could be an option that you can set in the settings, allowing you to change how far forward it goes, say, 30, 60, 90, 120, 180, or 240 seconds. I suspect this would cause quite an uproar from the broadcasters though, so it’s probably unlikely this would ever happen.
Shared DVRs: The ethernet port on the back of the Sky+HD box is unused, so, this would be a great feature for it. As long as all the Sky+HD boxes are on the same gigabit ethernet network, allow them to share their programs with each other. I’m not sure how well this would work with HD programs, or even SD programs (though you could perhaps buffer them, like YouTube does), but if it works well, why not allow the Sky+HD boxes to share their content? For example, if I record the cricket downstairs, on our main TV, but my parents then watch something else on that TV, I should be able to watch the football, stored on the TV downstairs, from my TV upstairs. I believe you can do this already with AT&T Uverse in America.
Pizza ordering: TiVo can order Dominos pizza, so why can’t we?
On-demand internet TV: This may be a little harder to implement, but the technology itself is there (the H264 decoder(s)) – allow the Sky+HD box to use the ethernet connection to connect to the internet and download TV shows such as Revision 3′s Tekzilla. This would, of course, be trickey to do due to the codecs needed, but I’m sure if Sky crammed ffdshow or similar into the box it would work for most video podcasts/internet shows. In terms of adding shows, this could be done via the Sky website, or something similar.
While we’re on the topic of internet TV…YouTube? I’m sure it can’t be that hard. Other devices can do it, so why can’t Sky?
Remote Record v2 (which the Sky+ box could do with as well): The current method of remotely recording programs is rubbish, if you ask me. You can either do it using Sky’s flash-only website (which won’t work on the iPhone, because, well, it’s Flash), by text (which I’ve never bothered to remember how/what to do and where to send it to), or via their Java app, which, annoyingly, works on only a few handsets. Also, setting it up is a nightmare, and you have to record things at least 30 mins before they start. The NEW remote record, however, should have both the website, using both Flash (for PCs) and non-Flash pages (for stuff like the iPhone), text, a Java app that works on all phones, an iPhone app, and finally, setup an official API for it so other people can code apps and so on for various devices. Setup should be made easier – you should simply have to enter your viewing card number on Sky’s website, then enter a code on the box itself if necessary, and that’s it. Simple. Oh, and finally, I’d like to be able to choose which box to send it to if you have two HD boxes.
CSS: What is CSS, you ask? Cascading Style Sheets. Oh yes. I think it would be amazing if you could go onto Sky’s website, input your own CSS (or user-submitted CSS), and be able to customize the colours of the EPG yourself. Again, this would send itself to your box using the ethernet jack, over the internets. Wouldn’t that be awesome?

So, those are the features that I wish Sky+HD had. Most of them should be easy to implement, and several of them are already available in the US and on other platforms. If Sky added these features (oh, and Sky News HD too please! ), Sky+HD really would become the best HD service available outside the USA.

Opinions?