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alanjrobertson

Listed below are comments made by alanjrobertson between Friday, 18th July 2008 and Monday, 6th April 2009.

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N is for networking 1:53pm on 06 Apr 2009 I'd support many other posters here - Cat5 is gold standard but a bit of a pain to install after the property is built (eminently do-able but not can be difficult to neatly).

The powerline technologies are definitely worth considering and I'd highly recommend it for your son, Rory. I've used a variety of Solwise adapaters with no issues whatsoever and found them incredibly easy to use.

I still find wireless useful, particularly for laptops/netbooks, etc. but completely agree re. using WPA2 or WPA.
Speed Diary: Day One 00:18am on 18 Feb 2009 Completely agree with post #3 from p5yt3k - you need to go for something that will actually stress the upload bandwidth. Have you got a Slingbox? That'd make great use of the extra upload speed :-)
Welcome to Selkirk, West London 7:10pm on 10 Nov 2008 Thanks for the further explanation, Andrew - it's interesting to hear the extra details. I suppose the Slingbox would check the final bit of the system to make sure the feed coming from London is definitely reaching the homes in the Borders ;-) (although I'm sure you'd have heard quickly enough if there were any problems!)
Welcome to Selkirk, West London 9:56pm on 08 Nov 2008 Can we get more details? - was it a redirected feed from the transmitter or just the output from a digibox in the Borders sent via Slingbox to London? ;-) What sort of things were you using it for?
BBC HD: DOGs Update 8:36pm on 21 Oct 2008 Thanks for posting, Danielle - this seems like a reasonable compromise.

I'd prefer it to stay at the top left for when it is there - if anything I think I'd notice it more at the bottom right as it would be different to all the other UK channels that have DOGs!

Agree with the comments re. scheduling problems (esp. shows moving on and off of HD), lack of clarity regarding which shows will be on HD and lack of film content!

Cheers
The latest on Coyopa, the Mayan God of thunderous noises 8:38pm on 30 Sep 2008 @digitalradiotech

"And if higher bit rate streams really did suffer such reliability problems, then the
iPlayer TV streams (which use 500 kbps for the normal quality and 800 kbps for the new higher quality streams) shouldn't work at all. Yet they do work, and the iPlayer TV streams have been the broadcasting success story of the year."

But as James mentioned in his article, the connection profile of iPlayer TV vs. Radio users is quite different with the majority of the former accessing streams via less congested home networks.

I'm all for automatic bandwidth detection (hopefully on a dynamic basis rather than just at the start of that piece of content streaming) - for those of us using 3G connections it would be excellent if iPlayer could dynamically adapt to changing connection speeds (including dropping the rate below even the standard iPlayer bitrate at times if necessary to continue streaming rather than continually rebuffer).

On the rebuffering point - the BBC implementation of Flash doesn't seem to work in quite the same way as Youtube - with it you can start a stream, pause it, and let it buffer the rest of the video file, allowing seamless playback. The BBC ones seem to only buffer a short amount of content even if left paused for a while, leading to continual rebuffering on lower bandwidth connections.
Digital music - who can beat iTunes? 8:05pm on 16 Sep 2008 Even though I've had an iPod for over a year I haven't bought a thing from iTunes - when I can get music DRM-free on a CD why would I want to pay more to get a DRM-restricted version of it from iTunes?!

I tried out Amazon's MP3 store for a few albums (before they blocked it for non-US residents) and it was a much better deal - full DRM-free albums (complete with high quality cover art) for less money than the CD (most seemed to be priced at about £5).
Olympics: Numbers Update 8:16pm on 11 Sep 2008 Interesting stats, thanks.

It was a shame that many of us using mobile broadband connections in the UK were blocked from accessing video content even though we can access iPlayer content!

Alan
(T-Mobile UK user)
Interesting Stuff 2008-09-09 8:21pm on 09 Sep 2008 Unfortunately even for those of us IN the UK the restriction of video news can be a problem. I'm accessing the web via T-Mobile's 3G 'mobile broadband' service and although I can access BBC iPlayer (both for streaming and downloading programmes, albeit slower than on my home broadband connection), I can't see any BBC News/Sport content.

Given any GeoIP database I've queried sees me as being in the UK and iPlayer of all things sees me as being in the UK, why won't the BBC NEWS website?! I've e-mailed the Beeb and T-Mobile about this but unfortunately they both blame each other!
BBC HDTV: "The BBC's Bold Trial Of Reverse Karaoke!" 01:15am on 18 Jul 2008 Very very thorough posting and really interesting to read about what's going on in the background - makes it amazing it works at all when you find out how complex it is!

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