Neil Hopcroft

“85 per cent of consumers admit to being ‘too dumb’ to access or use mobile services due to increasing device complexity.”

Or did they get sold up to a handset that exceeds their requirements?

The Register today urged readers to “strongly consider running an alternative browser (to Internet Explorer), at least until Microsoft deals with the issue.”…following an IFRAME exploit it hosted.

The death of the video cassette recorder appears to be in sight after the UK’s largest electrical chain said it is to stop selling them.

Oh, and if anyone comes across “extreme theme.sis” in their travels I’d be interested if you could forward me a copy…

Have you ever bought something, excitedly unpacked it when you get home only to discover that it has a ridiculous defect which prevents it from actually being useful?

I’m looking for (true) stories about problems with high-tech products – what kinds of problems annoy you most? Is there something you no longer use because the problems annoy you too much?

As an example, many years ago I bought a video machine. I got it home and discovered that the clock ran at exactly 1/30th of real time, ticking two minutes per hour. Clearly someone had installed the wrong crystal, but you try explaining that to the 18year-old at Currys, eventually I said “look, I’ll be back in half an hour, you tell me how many minutes its ticked by then”. This defect even defeated the mechanism intended to save the device from inaccurate crystals, since the time corrector was triggered based on the local clock rather than the over the air clock it synchd against, meaning that it syncd every few weeks, rather than daily as it was supposed to.

This machine was replaced (when I later returned and asked what the time was) with another video machine. The new one had another, more subtle, problem. This one had an out-the-box self tuning mechanism. Which was great, except it got the channels in the wrong order. Thats ok, I can deal with that. But the programming mechanism can’t – PDC is watching the wrong channel so the program start code never arrives. The new machine *never* records anything on timer.

It was shortly after this that I gave up with television.

Tell me your stories.
comments screened in case you want to tell me about something you don’t want to make public, but I’ll unscreen unless you tell me not to

“They could have booked Cliff Richard. How boring would that have been?”

Anyone know anything about the bitrot characteristics of flash memory? Or where I can find out such information?

“Ok, put down your soldering iron, turn off your spectrum analyzer, and let’s play chess“

Tonight I headed (along with simonsatori and meme_me) over to a lecture at the Cambridge Institute of Astronomy (CIA?) about binary star systems. We knew we were in the right place when we found a bunch of geeky types hanging around in the lobby outside the lecture theatre.

The lecture was quite nicely presented, but I’d have liked a bit more technical content….perhaps it was pitched about right for the whole audience though….interesting to see the laptop/project/radio-mic setup, lectures have moved on somewhat since my day.

After the talk they’d planned to take us to one of their telescopes to view some of the stellar systems they were talking about, but we got word at the end of the lecture that there was nothing to see but cloud. So they took us to see some of the equipment instead. What amazed me was the balance of the first scope we saw, it was around 165 years old and has been pretty much in regular use for most of that time, it was set up by the guy who originally commissioned it and hasn’t been adjusted since (you can tell that its not been touched for a considerable time because to the many layers of paint of the adjusting screws), mounted on a large gantry, but still easily movable with one hand.

Then they lead us across the darkened field (their lights shone down onto the path from about knee height) to another, more *scientific* building housing what they described as a camera, with a 36 inch mirror. But the place was remarkable more because of its smell – it smelled of progress, of experiments going wrong, of damp but lived-in buildings, of intelligence addicted to discovery of new useless things, of the kind of crazy mishmash of architecture and machinery I’d love to live in given the chance. Its the kind of place where you find a door labelled ‘caution hazardous chemicals’ open just a crack so you can see the cat-basket beyond.

Finally, they took us to their Mersenne-Schmidt Telescope[0], an interesting construction using a donut shaped mirror rather than a conventional disk and optically adjusting the image to recreate a conventional picture.

The lectures themselves are a regular series on wednesday nights, if anyone is interested in this sort of thing, you don’t seem to need to register or anything.

[0] I wonder if he was the same guy who did the primes?

Do geeks dream of electric maids?

A review from jwz – “Shouldn’t your autonymous robo-maid be smart enough to clean up every monday at noon while you’re not home?”

Aside from spotting jwz pondering the viability of SimKafka, what have I been up to this week?

For some reason I didn’t really get into The Calling on tuesday – the music wasn’t lively enough, or maybe I wasn’t lively enough. It wasn’t helped by the presence of someone who brought back a whole bunch of my past that really isn’t stuff I want to get back to. I hope this was a freak occurence rather than a regular event, some things are best left in the past.

Wednesday was the Rome Burns gig at the Moon in the Man, but I had a meeting in town that finished at 6pm, so I headed down and started getting in the way early – usual pregig hanging around punctuated by occasional concern about where to balance Gregor so he’d be out of harms way, NFD, the main act, had filled up the stage with their kit to the extent that there wasn’t enough space for them as well (one of their guitarists spent most of the soundcheck in place where the pit should be).

RB themselves rode their technical difficulties well, with a little more information than necessary about their antics in the park while Gregor was being rebalanced following a disasterous mixing accident.

NFD indeed didn’t fit on the stage when their time came. But I’m such a lightweight that I had to leave after a couple of songs to fall asleep. Shame. They had a good sound, even if it was hardly groundbreaking.

Thursday night I completely failed to get to Octaine, I’m gonna have to make it to the next one…

Yesterday I went on something of a tour of the southeast, picking up a final part of paperwork, a delicious curry (from the place opposite the Mexican place by the square, triangle, whatever) and a round or four of grass (John didn’t really know what was going on since we’d not managed to coherently[0] explain the rule to him, but that didn’t stop him winning anyway).

Today I’ve been finishing with a hectic whirlwind of paperwork. The weekend has landed.

Anyone likely to be out and about in Cambridge tomorrow evening? Wanna meet up?

[0] Due to two parts forgetfulness, one part enebriation and one part illiteracy