Flowers

There are some nice flowers in the garden. No idea what they are. Hope they aren't weeds.

Fuzzy England

Some things you just get sucked into. Like watching your national football team play not very well against a country you've never heard of. Trinidad and Tobago? Sounds like a circus double act to me.  Or a follow up to "Lilo and Stitch". Anyhoo, I only watched the last ten minutes (which in this game was probably the best thing to do).  The thing that struck me,  after I'd got over the rather lacklustre display of the our sporting heroes, was the poor quality of the video signal.

Now I know the signal is coming all the way from Germany,  but I've seen much better quality than this.  It looked like it had been seriously compressed. When the players started running their legs turned into a blocky blurr and when the camera panned quickly the screen really looked rough. I'm pretty sure it is not my telly though, 'cos I've seen some lovely looking pictures in the past.

The cynic in me is wondering if "they" are trying to push us all towards High Definition TV by making the standard offering look bad. Surely not....

EX Marks the Spot

Went to see "Xmen, The Last Stand" tonight. When number one daughter got back from it she told us "I don't think they'll make another one". Having viewed the film, I can see what she means.

The thing that struck me first was how many of the cast become "ex-men" so early in the show. Barely have the credits finished than staple members of the team are being sent off to various untimely ends. Things get so bad that we have to call up the reserves in the form of a nervous looking lass who can run through walls and a chap whose special mutant power seems to be the ability to wrap himself and others in tin foil. Useful on a Sunday when preparing the chicken, but not much beyond that I would have thought. When they finally resorted to getting Frasier and covering him in blue fur I'm afraid the movie lost just about all its credibility as far as I was concerned.

On the baddie side we had the newly arrived Vinnie Jones as Juggernaut, who had the power to act like Ant and Dec in the credits for their Saturday show. Actually, power to act is probably putting it a bit strong. As far as I'm concerned, the next time they let him get involved in a film he should just be permitted to stay behind the camera and make the tea very quietly.

Anyhoo,  pretty soon there was lots of mayhem and tear jerking in just about equal parts. Lessons about life were learned. And life for lots of extras was dramatically shortened. Things happened for no particular reason and then it went quiet again. And then the film ended, with a fairly stupid hint that there will be more to come. As if. 

Slightly less mindless than the Fantastic Four. Not in the same country (let alone street) as Spiderman. But on balance, worth a visit I reckon.

Slingboxing Clever

I bought another gadget last week. I'm selling a few bits and bobs on Ebay as part of the process of gadget turnover and so I reckoned I could afford a different toy. This one is called a Slingbox.  These things are all the rage in the 'states at the moment and were launched recently in the UK.

The name is a kind of clue to what it does.  It takes your TV and slings the picture round the world And it is a box. A rather ugly (to my eyes), silver box with writing on the top. However, how it looks is not a problem, since you never need to see it. I've got mine hidden underneath the TV at home.

When you buy a Slingbox you get quite a few wires as well. There is one to link your Skybox to your TV aerial (it has a Freeview Digital TV tuner inside so it can receive terrestrial TV), another to link to your Satellite or cable box (I've got mine plugged into my Sky+ box), a third wire to some remote control emitters so the Slingbox can control the Sky+ box, a power lead and finally a cable to go into your home network. 

What the Slingbox does is take your home video and make it visible on a network. You run the Slingplayer program in a PC and if it can connect to the Slingbox it can view a video signal that the box sends. So you can take your notebook PC into the garden and watch the Paul O'Grady Show via WIFI.

Things get even more interesting if you have a broadband connection.  By careful tweaking of the settings in your network router you can make your Slingbox visible on the internet (the instructions tell you how to do this and there is also an automatic method which might work for you).  Then you can watch your telly from anywhere in the world with a network connection. Including (possibly) at work.  Lots of people have bought Slingboxes with a view to doing this. Be warned though, that it doesn't always work. If your employer has any kind of firewall in place then you might find that packets don't make it from your front room to your cubicle. There are some sneaky configuration options that you can try which might allow the data to tunnel in to the corporate network, but this is a bit of a grey area. As is watching the telly in company time I suppose.

I really got the box so that I can watch stuff anywhere in the house, and also when I go away (public networks and hotel networks should not be restricted in this way). I also discovered that they will be releasing a player for mobile phones and pocket PCs which would be sooo cool that I just can't resist it.  Being able to watch TV on my Imate Jasjar sounds like a lot of fun.

For what it does, I reckon the Slingbox is good value.  There are other ways that you can get a similar effect, but these involve much a larger investment in computers, TV tuner cards and the like. I don't think that my Slingbox will be apearing on Ebay any time soon...

More ACE Students

We had another set of students here for our ACE events today. They were a great audience, and now they can call themselves programmers! Digby didn't behave as well as he could have, I don't think he likes standing on a green cloth.