Geeky

As a seasonal Lovefilm customer (I tend to be out and about in the summer so I don’t watch any TV) it’s mighty frustrating that I can’t rent all the movies out there I want to watch. I wanted to add Kick-Ass to my rental list but I can only buy it, and I fancied Tarantino’s latest one too, but that was in a similar situation. Thankfully I can watch that one on Sky Movies.

I remember having this problem over winter last year with it being part of the reason why I cancelled the sub and re-started my Sky Movies sub again. In fact, in rejoining for the winter again this year, I nearly moved to Blockbusters until I heard that they’re about to file for Chapter 11 (here) which means they will probably close up shop if they’re that much in debt.
(EDIT – Since posting this, one of my work colleagues informed me that one of the Blockbuster bricks and mortar stores near us in York has closed up shop (and being close to the university, it was probably the more popular of the two we had in York), and I’ve also read this on the WSJ. Doesn’t look good for Blockbuster.)

A little digging (here, here, here and here) and it seems as though the problem is mainly any movies distributed by Universal Pictures, and it’s down to a little bit of a spat between them and Lovefilm (Lovefilm just cite ‘supply chain difficulties’ if you ask them) although as usual it’s down to one thing – money – and how much they (Universal) get per disc rented.

Well, that little spat might end up turning sour if Blockbuster do go under, because Lovefilm will end up being one of the only (if not *the* only) large Disc rental businesses. Maybe it’s time for Universal Pictures to grow up a little, and allow everyone to watch their films (why wouldn’t you?). And they wonder why torrenting is so popular when they’re putting up the barriers to people wanting to watch their movies legally.

Well, that was sort of painless. Have eventually migrated my blog to the latest version of WordPress, but did have to migrate my DB to MySQL5 in the process along with using the latest version of PHP. But, er, Woo!

Well I’ve had my new phone for around 4 days now and I have to say I’m impressed. It’s a huge change when you’ve been used to an iPhone 3G for two years.

I’ve moved from O2 to T-Mobile and now to Orange. I am sad to leave T-Mobile as they were brilliant as an interim SIM to keep my handset ticking over for the first 6 months of this year. Their tech support were also brilliant and texted me the PAC whilst I was still talking to them. However, they (T-Mo) *still* haven’t announced their pricing or availability yet and the handset’s been out nearly a week already. I reckon they’ll lose a few customers (like me) who wanted the handset sooner. I wonder if it’s because they don’t mind people defecting to Orange, seeing as they’re both the same company now, under the ‘Everything Everywhere’ banner.

The PAC process was pretty painless too – although a minor quibble with Orange would be that their system said ‘We’ll send you an email to tell you when your porting date will be’ which never arrived. When I rang them to check, the Orange person I spoke to was like ‘Er, let’s try your PAC again’ at which point they said it failed. A quick chat to the knowledgeable people at T-Mobile (including a very helpful geordie lady) and they confirmed that the port was due to go through and was cue’d up ready to roll that night (which it did perfectly.) Shame Orange couldn’t tell me that.

Anyway, Some good things I’ve noticed;

• The screen is stunningly sharp. You really notice the difference side by side – but older apps suffer more because they’re not the correct resolution, so they look a little more jagged. It’ll tidy up in time. Those apps written for iPhone 4 / iOS 4 really shine. Godfinger, for example, just looks stunning whereas it just won’t run at all on the 3G.
• The handset is alot quicker. Night and Day comparing it to a regular 3G with iOS4. Much more responsive and tactile.
• Sat-Nav (in my case, TomTom, but even in the maps apps) is just spot on. Very quick to pinpoint location.
• Data handling seems faster. Even on Wifi – downloading or loading items seems very very quick.
• Like the multi-tasking although sometimes it can be a pain. When you’ve been used to killing an app with one press of the home button, it’s a frustration when you re-enter the app for it to remember where you were sometimes. I do end up going in regularly and clearing out the task manager. There maybe needs to be a way to get back to the home screen and kill  the app stone dead without having to faff.
• It works as an iPod with the JVC head unit in my car where the 3G wouldn’t play ball and threw a ‘You’re not a supported device’ strop and the head unit would just sit and wait. This one just worked straight off. A great pluspoint for me.
• Bluetooth playback seems to be better, although it’s still *very* choppy. (Of course, now the car supports me plugging it directly in then I’ll not be using the BT audio again.) I did notice it supports obex through my head unit now so there is an option to sync contacts to my head unit which I don’t remember seeing on the 3G.
• Sorry T-Mobile – Orange’s 3G network is muuuuuch faster than yours. Very fast data rates on the new handset – although that could be HSDPA vs regular 3G at work there.
• 720p video is great, as is the 5 megapixel camera – I won’t need to take my Sony W270 around with me so much now.
  

  A Sample Image taken by my iPhone 4 - Click for Actual Size

Some bad things I’ve noticed;

• More applications crash than before. Normally without warning too. On the 3G they used to just hang. Now they just go ‘pop’ and you’re back to the home screens.
• I’ve found some errors in the iTunes music store on the handset. Some podcasts throw up application errors but then start playing in the background invisibly even though they’re not in the iPod app. In fact, nothing is shown as playing but it’s definitely playing. The only way to stop them playing is to go to the home screen and then double click and kill the iTMS app which stops it playing.
• The antenna issue, obviously. I can replicate it perfectly every time. However, now I have a nice Griffin Graphite case on it, it’s more of a non-issue, but it is still a bit patchy dependent on how you hold it.
• More of an iOS 4 upgrade issue, but when iTunes does it’s restore and first sync, it forgets you had the 128K downsample option ticked, and then overfills your iPhone and either crashes during first sync, or just misses half your music off and throws a strop. To fix, you have to untick almost everything to sync, and then re-tick it all and it works again, resyncing at the amended bitrate and filling it up properly.

So is it worth upgrading to? If you’ve a 3G and you can do it, I would recommend getting one. I’m sort of tied into the investment now as I’ve spend money on loads of Apps, which I’ve now got to a closed set of a few I use daily.

Yes, that’s viewing an email from Orange to tell me that the iPhone 4 has arrived, on my iPhone 4, on Orange.

Finally, apart from Tesla’s teasing of the Model S which seems overpriced but gorgeous (when will they *ever* release it?), there seems to be a practical e-car alternative.

Image Courtesy of the Register

The Register have a really good review of the Vauxhall Ampera, which looks actually really nice, and seems to fill that ‘reverse hybrid’ gap with a primarily electric driven car but with a petrol generator to top up the battery, which frankly didn’t seem big enough. Why don’t GM or Ford buy Tesla and do something magic, rather than sitting and watching?

You can read the full article here.

I’m doing the Great Yorkshire Bike Ride this year. It’s a 70-odd mile ride from Wetherby to Filey on the 5th June 2010. It’s the first of my two charity bike rides this year, the second one being a marathon 170 mile ride from Edinburgh to Newcastle in July, but I’ll post more details about that one closer to the ride.

The GYBR is a sponsored ride, so if you’re feeling generous, you can sponsor me here at the Virgin Money Giving site.

When I used to live out in West Lutton, we used to watch the ride every year go past, but I never thought I’d be riding in it.

Now I’ve got my rider pack, I also have the route. I have created a GPX and TCX of the route for my Garmin Edge using the Bikeroutetoaster site. I’m not going to post it directly on the site because I think John Taylorson (the organiser) doesn’t publish the routemap for good reason.

However, if you’re doing the GYBR and would like a copy of the GPX/TCX of the route for your Garmin device, then please drop me a message through Contact Me and I’ll email you a copy by return.

Reading the election pledges of the parties in the current election, I notice that everyone is trying to jump on the renewable energy bandwagon. I think this is a good thing, however, a couple of things have crossed my mind, partially prompted by a conversation at work recently and some other thoughts I’d had. I also just had a smart meter fitted and it’s interesting to see what does and doesn’t use power.

On a good day, usually a weekday, our household uses around 12kWh of electricity in total in a 24-hour period. On a bad day (2 TV’s running, raining outside (so no outside clothes line), doing laundry (washing and drying), cooking (electric), cleaning (music/TV), ironing and so-forth) we’ll use 17kWh. I don’t think we’re unusual in that respect. Looking at statistics on nPower and E.on’s website, we’re pretty much average, with a normal family with 2 adults and 2 children, using, on average, 14kWh per day.

The conversation at work was around solar panels – photovoltaic cells that you can place on your roof that give you electricity from sunlight. E.On have started selling a new product called ‘Solar Saver‘ for which you pay around £12,000 for them to install some solar panels on your roof. They also then install an inverter (as the power from a PV Cell is DC) and a special meter that not only shows your draw from the grid but also credits you for any surplus energy you put back into the grid – through what they call a Feed-in Tariff. They also claim that an average house will make enough back in their Feed-in paybacks, to pay for their installation in about 12 years.

However, knowing that they use Sharp 2.1kW panel installations, I’m not sure how that would work in the long run. A Sharp panel installation, over an average year, will generate 800kWh per household (figures from the Sharp Solar Brochure). That works out at 2.1kWh per day. So in my case, on an average day, I would still need 11.9kWh from the grid.

The tariffs show that exporting energy back to the provider you only get 2p per kWh exported. Bearing in mind it only generates power during daylight and on an average day you get 14 hours of sunlight, on a 2.1kWh day which works out at a constant stream of 150w. Bearing in mind my smart meter tells me my house uses 340W to 400W on a constant stream even when everything is turned off (don’t forget your fridge, freezer, digital TV boxes, broadband router and cordless phones all use power), so there would be no point where my house’s total power consumption, even on tickover, would drop low enough for me to get any export back unless the PV panels outputted more than 400w in a constant stream. You apparently also get a kick-back on the Feed-In Tariffs, but that’s assuming the change in government doesn’t kill that one off to pay back the debts run up by our wonderful banking sector.

So if my £12,000 initial outlay would pay for itself in 13 years – why don’t the energy companies put their money where their mouth is and fund the installation of the PV cells themselves, and just charge us for the electricity we use from the grid, make the local electric free, and just not pay us back the export payments / Feed-In Tariff payments?

That way they’d apparently make the cost back of the installation of the panel in 13 years and have the green agenda ticked by using people’s houses for electricity generation who wanted to be more green and would be happy to have free PV cells installed.

I get the feeling that would never happen!

Note – if I thought PV cells would make a difference I would have them in a flash – but at the moment they’re just not efficient enough for the cost. Make it £1k instead of £12k and I might consider it. The Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors figures conflict with the figures given by E.On, giving a payback period of 40-50 years. So in that case, with a lifespan of the panels of around 25 years, they would never pay for themselves, which is why the energy companies aren’t falling over themselves to give them away to you.

The boston globe has collated together some of the most fabulous photographs of the Icelandic eruption here.

I know it’s a typically British thing to use the weather as an icebreaker. Not quite sure why that should be the case, but we seem to be obsessed with it. That might be because usually it just is fairly dull – no change.

But sometimes the weather can be interesting.  There’s a great article on magicseaweed.com where Tony Butt has compared the 2009 and 2010 surf seasons from a meteorological point of view, and actually it’s a really well written look into why 2009/2010′s winter has been ‘upside down’ compared to the previous few years. Well worth a read even if you’re not a surfer.

I also read some information on Environmental Research Letters about some new research about Sun activity and the potential of a direct link to our climate. It was something we covered in an OU course a couple of years ago, but in typical OU style they just mentioned it in passing and sort-of glossed over it. This research mentions that we could be on course for the same type of colder winters as we’ve had so far this year going forward if their hypothesis is correct.

A fantastic image from the University of Dundee and the BBC;

The ash plume is clearly visible as the brown streak coming across towards north west scotland.

Plus a brilliant website here that shows aircraft positions live over europe. Note the gaping hole across the UK right now! (They’ve recently updated it to show an ash layer too).

EDIT – And ESA have now got an animation that shows the ash plume and it’s flow across europe here.