Countdown to switchoff

It's only been ten days since the first area of the UK switched off its analogue television signal in Whitehaven, Cumbria - though I suspect that they can't have been too happy that it was a BBC Channel which is paid for by law! By the middle of November, the other four terrestrial channels will also switch off, and a British DVB aka Freeview box will become necessary to view any television whatsoever in the town.

The rest of the country has up to four years of watching terrestrial whilst recording digital before it has to follow Whitehaven's example. I've been enjoying Freeview since 2005, replacing that box at the start of 2007. It's good to see that Digital UK, the organisation created to oversee the changeover, has stopped being economical with the truth about being able to run your VCR into the ground if you wish to, albeit recording a single digital stream like 1990s cable or satellite TV. Until this year, its representatives had merely told everyone to run out and buy a shiny new digital recorder of any kind. I suspect VCRs were either still working or too small to be noticed when fly-tipped, though I saw my first widescreen CRT television dumped on the street last week.

So, the future - for those not willing to pay Rupert Murdoch or Richard Branson for satellite or cable - began on October 17th. Those who scoffed at ITV for launching three new channels were made to eat their words as the intention to carry on with normal programming but provide a home for ad-supported sports coverage became clearest this year with Formula One, the Champions' League soccer matches shared with Sky and the Rugby World Cup. The BBC has been criticised for its digital output due to the taxable nature of its funding but as usual, none of the criticisms are totally right or wrong, merely a matter of age and taste.

Since the BBC has a decade's worth of guaranteed funding to 2015 and is a 60 year old British institution, it will go nowhere. As long as Dr Who and dance show fans are catered to, it will change little on the outside. The real worry is when David Attenborough retires...

Long awaited upgrade

Overnight, the regular radio shows that I generally back up and dump to CD-R and Minidisc, broadcast two extra hours - but I missed them. Today, option one involved re-imaging to Vista to even hear those broadcasts because the BBC Radio player doesn't work in XP. The second option just finding somewhere else to download them online within the seven days that you're allowed to listen to them anyway, I found somewhere else.

The unnamed website hasn't been shut down due to copyright reasons yet (even though a TV Licence fee makes some contribution to the royalties of the artists concerned - despite the non-existence of a radio licence fee). Whilst it's still viable, I'll get the three shows I actually wanted, but that decision means that every videotape I used to use for radio can be disposed of. Now I can get on with recycling at speed and searching for a DVD Recorder, and move this VCR to the PC to get on with video capture.

With the joining of this new site causing a change in my habits, just as the BBC are planning to change the day and time of my favourite shows, I'll make sure I obtain a recorder with a hard disk because day-to-day television isn't going to be kept and I don't want to waste the laser on it. However, it would be ideal to have the decision to watch the programme again and make sure. Now we're two months away from the What Hi Fi awards issue.

Both the VCRs due for replacement were recommendations from the annual awards issues, in one case, from 13 years ago. Naturally its video heads are long dead, thankfully the NICAM audio heads are still in good enough condition to obtain excellent recordings.

It's good to upgrade when technology's reached the end of its useful life instead of just because the Joneses have done it.

I sometimes miss the hiss

There, I've said it. Compared to digital audio, old-fashioned analogue radio transmissions are at risk of interference and perhaps there would be some fuzziness which you could attempt to tune away. It depends on your tastes; interference isn't much of an issue with dance music, but may ruin the enjoyment of classical soundtracks. In the digital age, whilst the hiss has gone, any transmission issues will cause subliminal blips, or longer gaps of a second or two, to your broadcast.

The UK can still hear all three types of radio - analogue, DAB digital and online streaming. Give me the analogue hiss any day, because I can proceed to feed that audio into my computer and reduce or remove the hiss if I wish. Gaps are much harder to cover, and ironically, editing them out will recreate the effect of vinyl skipping. Once again, dance fans would appreciate the retro angle to it, but no-one else would.

When you "Listen Again" to a repeat of a radio show, you're a slave to the bit rate chosen by someone else to encode the streamed recordings. Thankfully Kiss100 has chosen a nice high rate for its shows from Armin Van Buuren and John Digweed, compared to that of early BBC broadcasts where the bit rate and resulting quality will vary.

At the present time, FM is such high quality if you have a decent hi-fi separate tuner, that you may as well enjoy it before it gets switched off. Preferably in the garden, on the seven days that make up an English summer.

The cure for Antivirus

I had reason to check my PC for viruses and other threats today. Apart from the fact that I now know that my PC has 550,000 or so different files on it across two hard disks, it took an hour and a quarter.

In the same manner that software backup is perceived as boring, checking your PC for viruses and spyware now takes longer and longer. Accordingly, many users choose not to perform regular checks. To be fair, users who re-format or re-image their machines regularly for performance reasons may view the scans as unnecessary. Every good Antivirus program, whether retail or free, carries the option to set a default scheduled time for virus checks, but, in the case of Symantec, Friday night at 8pm is hardly ideal. Personally, I'd be in the pub or cinema.

If I had lots of music files on my machine I would expect it to take a long time, but I wasn't expecting 75 minutes for a Vista installation that had the grand total of one game installed on top of its average 15Gb partition size, and a Windows XP installation on the other hard disk from a failed dual boot.

The option I believed to be the answer - to only install one game at a time, and minimize the music - hasn't worked. It's not about Vista per se, but I will certainly back up the computer with an image file and go back to XP for as long as I can get away with it, if I get the feeling that Vista's not sitting well on my two-year-old PC.

It's not going without a fight

So there I was, about to empty this flat of videotapes, when made that fatal mistake; "let's see what's on this one". That's how I watched the rest of Phone Booth which I'd taped a few weeks ago and started dumping The Essential Mix to my hard drive on the other VCR. Now I'm recording Dodgeball on its second showing on FilmFour even if I've missed the first ten minutes and will probably restart the recording on +1.

Is there such a thing as blank media rehab?

The Nuclear Approach

My previous entries have reflected on the issue of having too much of the same thing in a single format. This leaves you open to shelves of what becomes clutter if the standard changes later, like VHS to DVD to whichever format wins the next war. Some companies, notably Valve and Introversion, have their own method of resolving this question.

Valve's Steam requires the user to make their own backup of their games including saves and further updates from the box. The crash in the price of blank DVD media has made this option simple and affordable. Generally this approach is best executed with the episodic, single-player experience of Half-Life 2 than the pick-up-and-play multiplayer twitch gaming that is Counter-Strike Source.

When using Introversion's own downloading system, the demo can sometimes carry all the elements of the full game but you can subsequently purchase a key to unlock the full content - and they'll still send you the game on a CD. However, you can get playing straight after downloading, which is especially handy when a postal strike is approaching and the solid media will be delayed.

When the backups have been completed by the user, the discs in their boxes are not coasters but (just like mainstream backups) allow you to reinstall much more quickly. Conveniently, your savegames up to a certain point will remain when you reload.

It's good to see Steam increasing in reliability (or maybe, British broadband connections increasing in speed) to the point where Valve can strike deals with other publishers and allow a large variety of games onto the distribution platform. Clearly, games publishers have seen the value in redirecting the midprice-to-budget market for back catalouges of PC games, to this model, where the customer uses their own media to legitimately back up the old games they buy - cutting out reprinting and re-advertising costs for the company.

In the case of THQ and Supreme Commander, which only released in March 2007, the games are sometimes recent but set to be replaced by a standalone follow-up within the year.
My friends and I are big fans of Sup Com as it's known to fans, so we just bought it. It's another method of swaying undecided buyers if the game you're enthusing about can be downloaded at less than box price. Everybody Wins. Or in the case of Defcon, which someone bought me as a surprise gift today (cheers Hyssy!), Everybody Dies...

Imperfect Digital Future

When I amassed 50 DVDs five years ago circumstances forced me to sell them off. I did quite well out of it, so I have no regrets. I've kept all my movies on video, if I ever want to watch them I have video capture equipment to put them on DVD even if I'd need to buy a signal booster to knock out the Macrovision. with that hassle factor costing £40, when you can now buy a DVD player for quarter of the price most people chose to buy films again on DVD even with those terrible single featureless discs which are the first to end up in sales as loss leaders.

Overdosing on VHS, and that enforced sell-off of DVDs and games, did teach me something useful: never to get caught with too many films, games or too much music on a single type of media at a time. Now, whenever I hit 50 DVD movies, I sell some off to keep it at a constant level. I have a Cineworld film subscription pass and watch as many movies at the cinema as I can, and buy very little because it'll be on TV 2-4 years down the line if I don't have time to catch it on its first run. I have rarely bought a film on DVD after watching it on television because it was such a great and undiscovered gem that I should have seen it on the big screen. As well as the added social event dimension which the cinema can represent, it's a great way to preview your DVD collection.

My other policy which explained my relatively low number of DVDs was the fact that I didn't want that many discs without knowing I would watch them lots of times (this was 1998 when they were still expensive and featureless unless you imported them, and the infamous 'flipper' disc would end up on Watchdog). So the older discs in my collection are living and breathing and have been watched, which isn't something I could say for my video collection even now. Check your own DVD collection if you have more than 100 and see just how many are waiting to be watched, even if you loved them in the cinema - that's dead money.

Dear Mr Jobs, music is not software.

Or, "why I still have a Minidisc Walkman".

I'm watching Fight Club at the moment on Freeview - looks great so not bothered that it's in the wrong ratio. It had the best electronic film soundtrack of 1999 If I want to just listen to the music, I can go and get the CD I bought and listen to it. If I like it that much I could put the CD on Minidisc using my hi-fi separate recorder and listen to it on the move. Now to be fair, MD finally killed off my tape usage after I'd put everything I wanted on CD-R. However, along came Steve Jobs with the Ipod (yes I know I'm skipping over Napster and filesharing). Cue national music associations suing the heaviest pirates before Peter Gabriel pitched OD2 as a legal download concept and Apple came up with its own refined solution which has won them billions. In the words of a certain comedian, they resolved music piracy "through the medium of dance" in their adverts. (you could argue the toss of whether they were inspired by Intel's bunnymen all day). Whilst it's great that Apple's balance sheet has been improved, I have a big enough job dumping videotape to DVD, without re-ripping my CD collection and wasting space on this new half-terabyte hard disk I bought for video transfers.

So I prefer to stay one generation behind on music players and in an attempt to "feel" it, have stuck to music on solid formats like vinyl, CD and Mindisc. At the same time, I'm buying more CDs and teens are buying more vinyl now that it stopped costing £500 for vinyl to sound as good as CD, seven years ago. If you still want to stay up to date with dance music, you still need a turntable.

So music, whatever the format, is made convenient when digitally sorted. However, you still feel it most intensely, when you go and hear it live. It's natural that CD Buying slowed down in the 90s after the population went out and bought hundreds that they would never listen to again (the sole downside of "eclectic tastes"). Now though, I'm returning to buying CDs - at the price I want to pay. Once again, I picked up that Minidisc recorder secondhand, and it was the top of its range.

I used to make audio compilations all the time but if I can hear 4 hours of dance music per week on the radio, and catch it streamed off the net if I'm not up at 3am when broadcast, I don't want the extra work until I have enough music every couple of years. Compilations are a great bereavement coping mechanism but once you're over the death in question, why bother. Ironically it's never been cheaper to make a compilation of the kind that used to cost me up to £100 in CDs by using none other than...iTunes, where the price would be £8-12. Too late for me.

This blogging's quite addictive...but I'd better eat something.

"Buy me, Ken..."

Whenever I'm in WH Smith, that's what the magazines say to me and in the past five years I've answered the call without resistance, reading about computers, games, technology and music. At the end of the year, I choose to recycle a whole batch and begin again but this year something snapped.

Edge magazine, which I've read and loved since issue 1 aged 21, I cancelled that direct debit and there will be one issue left to go. In that instance, I'm playing the games and if I want to know more about them, I'll go out and get my own news online. What Hi Fi, I cut it right back to the annual Awards issue because I know which replacement amp and speakers I want, and don't need a magazine just to monitor the price.

Whether I bought PC Pro depended on the software on the disk and when it covered an OS launch or gave away web design software or had an update of their semi-annual website design feature. Perhaps in a throwback to my American comic-buying days, I also bought their 150th issue (anniversary multiples of 25 or 50, or 5 and 10 years, but all the rest of you childhood comic addicts knew that). Custom PC has a 50th anniversary coming up - I'll have it.

Every magazine buying hook worked on me (Future Publishing's silver-or-gold "dry-roasted peanuts bag" being a particular lowlight) and that started with Q magazine's free music CD in the 1990s - not every single time, but definitely at the end of the year. When Emap decided to rip people off by putting two different CDs on the same issue of Q at end of 2005 CDs to ensure a high circulation that month, that's probably when the spell was broken.

Magazines are no longer my crack cocaine, they have receded to become another medium that I enjoy, principally on train journeys. In some cases, recent technological upheavals have meant that I couldn't afford not to have read a magazine regarding certain subjects (like HDTV and why it's not so great without grabbing the latest generation). If a magazine does its job effectively you should be armed with the knowledge of the best item to buy - or when to buy nothing at all and just wait.

At least buying the wrong analogue item last century meant that at worst, the headphones with your Walkman were rubbish, which would in turn ruin your radio reception. Nowadays, there is a much higher price to pay for buying without thinking, killing usability or upgrade choices and nowhere is this more true than in the cuthroat modern PC/Mac market.

That's why Issue 48 of Custom PC, out in a few days, does a valuable public service in taking a Dell PC and measuring it up against one that they built themselves (sadly,this test came too late for every member of my extended family except my Mum, whose PC I built). It amazed me 12 years ago when selling PCs and then 8 years ago when writing about them that people threw around four figures on a computer, but when it came to less than a fiver to read about getting the best one, they would prefer to spend £995 more and regret the fact that it could not carry out the tasks they wanted to.

So if you're thinking about buying a computer, you know what? This internet blogger's telling you to buy a magazine. That's after working out why you want a computer in the first place.

Giving up giving up

I was a teenage magazine addict (wow, call the News of The World). It started because I was published in one at 13. They spelt my name wrong but paid me a fiver in 1985, and so began the addiction, and Computer and Video Games, then published by EMAP, paid me £5 for every filler and £25 for every map or solution to 8-bit computer games on my Commodore 64. That kept me in more games and I loved seeing my name in print as much as I loved the cheques coming through the door. Someone liked what I had written, and gave me money. I couldn't imagine a greater job when I was a teenager.

So after graduating, I chased after the job, got it (at Dennis Publishing) but continued to write for free. That job ended and it seemed like the end of the world. It's a big internet now though, and at one end of the business of writing and journalism, you have anyone who ever began a blog or kept a paper diary for nothing. At the other extreme, you have JK Rowling. Write something good and you have an audience, who might just pay you. Write a ton of self-indulgent nonsense...and you're making yourself feel good. The only thing that comes close to the buzz that I get from writing something that people care about, makes them laugh, or makes them think, is to read something written by someone else that makes me feel the same way.

Since I was told that editing was never my strong point (and looking at my first two entries, they could be right), I'll end this post here.

What's In A Name?

I have a graveyard of technology in this flat: 3 VCRs and way too many tapes, two televisions and monitors based on cathode ray tube (CRT), and more computer junk than I care to admit.

Out in the consumer marketplace, some items are affordable to the point of disposable. For example, Last year I purchased my second consumer level digital camera, secondhand, shipped to my holiday location in Canada from the seller in Australia. Whilst awaiting delivery I relied on my old single megapixel camera for one week out of the three I was there, and as usual, because I had used this older model for four years, but the 4MP model was a new arrival and I was learning it on holiday, some of those technically inferior snaps just look better.

Even if I had the money to throw away those four CRT-based TV and monitor screens and put a flat screen in every room, if these TVs cost me nothing to £30 and can last up to 15 years, and British DVB Broadcasting (or Freeview) has been introduced by way of set top boxes to keep them working in a digital handover which will not finish before 2012, I would need to be rich or crazy not to save money in the meantime. My family's unwritten motto for technology is "use to destruction", only replacing consumer goods of any kind when they died. That's how one of our fridges lasted 26 years.

However, returning to my digital camera example above, when I "handed over" from film to digital, I could no longer afford film processing costs but wanted to carry on taking photographs. It became cheaper to buy a memory card for a 1 megapixel camera, which was old hat when I started to use it, and carry on snapping for instant results. The ratio between price to convenience for the new technology had been passed, and I haven't returned to film despite my romantic attachment to celluloid. If I ever chose film again I'd just carry a disposable camera on holiday as a backup if the batteries for my digital camera(s) ran out.

Since I have the opportunity to recycle many of the blank videotapes in this flat courtesy of work, I'm taking it. If I ever needed a new blank videotape, they're now in Pound shops for, well, GBP £1, and most of them are manufactured by JVC, the inventor of the format. Unless it's a big concert broadcast where you need hours and hours at a time, it's now the right time to keep the environment in mind, recyle these things and reduce the clutter in my flat as a fringe benefit.

The challenge is to get digital, from a media point of view, in less than five years - that's how long it took me to put my audio tapes on CD-R. At least this time, unlike music, there are few video recordings which I want to save that haven't already been repeated more than twice through Freeview.

So that's the name of the blog, explained.

There's no such thing as a good start

If you were ever interviewed on television in Britain, everyone knows you have to say "Hello Mum!" in the UK. An equally good option would be to show off in the background with some kind of waving, sarcastic T-shirt or sign when a correspondent is talking to the studio, guaranteeing yourself 15 seconds of fame without the Reality TV auditions.

All over the world, you can cop out on the beginning of any fictional story you want to write with your country's version of "Once upon a time". However, I am so relieved to have checked the archives of a few blogs I read more than casually, to find that some first posts have stated "test" (ironically or seriously), or "Hi!"/"Hello World", "All about me" which makes you sound like a prize tosser or some other random wibble that they hope gets buried under three years of really great writing.

"In the Beginning" has apparently been done.

So, I believe that it's very hard to achieve a good start in many things - whether it's life in general, work, your particular brand of favourite cult TV or film (Even George Lucas started just after the middle) and certainly in this 21st century medium that an internet blog represents. Like life and work, once you're over that first day, it hopefully gets better as you over time. Maybe I should apply to be Jerry Springer's final thought writer with a line like that...