Yes, sprog #2 is going to be a boy. We found out earlier at the 20 week scan and it was a good job really that we wanted to know cuz the ultrasound lady slipped up a bit by saying ‘he’ a lot, then backtracking saying “ooh I always call the baby a he when I scan, did you want to know the sex?”. Anyway, we have four photos.. all looking slightly similar!
It’s been another gadget laden year for me so I thought I’d better sum them up here, the good ones and the bad ones. Now I need to mention that my Playstation 3 was purchased last year, but had it been a 2008 purchase would be firmly stuck at position #1. Not making the top 5 but worthy of a mention are the Nintendo Wii + Wii Fit which is essential for keeping Vicky quiet; the 46″ Sharp Aquos LCD TV taking pride of place in the living room; and the Hotpoint dishwasher which has achieved the amazing task of killing the ‘who is going to do the washing up’ argument and replacing it with ‘who is emptying/filling the dishwasher’.
#5: Sony DualShock 3 Playstation 3 Controller
Mmm, vibratory. I imported mine from Hong Kong early in the year before they were available over here and it was a good purchase – they are on sale now over here for a lot more than I paid.
Click here to buy one
#4: Casio Protrek PRW-1500 Watch
My birthday present… built in compass, barometer, thermometer, altimeter, auto-light, solar panel, tidal/moon phase, radio controlled time updates. And it tells the time too.
Click here to buy one
#3: Onkyo TXSR606 AV Receiver
The hub of my home cinema featuring HDMI upscaling from any video source and producing the best all-round sound I’ve ever heard from a TV.. before this toy I always had an issue with previous sound systems where the vocals whilst watching a film were too quite.. you’d pump the volume up then suddenly there’s an explosion or car horn on screen causing the real world floor to crack under increased dB.. no more is this an issue!
Click here to buy one
#2: Buffalo Linkstation Mini 1TB NAS
I’ve only had it a couple of weeks but so far I’m very impressed. Quiet and light on the power, it’s made the constant hum from the server in my study go away. It has loads of features I’ve yet to explore and there’ll be a blog update soon on that I hope.
Click here to buy one
And the 2008 Winner!
#1: Humax Foxsat-HDR (Freesat+ PVR)
This year’s winner.. allowing me to ditch Sky+ and watch and record high definition telly without a subscription. All hail Freesat+. As a further update to my previous review, copying files off the internal hard drive is easy (minimal fiddling required to deal with the .ts file format) but BBC-HD content is protected and can’t currently be (easily) copied. I would offer a link here so as you can go and buy one, but they are in such short supply and high demand at the moment that there’s really no point. Comet and Argos are the best bets if you wanted to try but you would be better off waiting a couple of months.
Now it’s time to discuss this year’s turkey – the one that I wish I’d done differently. It doesn’t happen very often, but I feel the need to impart with my learned wisdom to help others avoid the same pitfalls. And this year’s prize goes to the Asus X53SR laptop. Whenever anyone asks me the (frequent) question “What laptop should I buy?” I’m fairly consistent in recommending their first stop be Dell. I have yet to be disappointed with one of their machines… and I’m talking here about my opinion on their complete package consisting of the machine, price and support. Their machines aren’t the best in the market but their prices make up for that and you can always get drivers. So why… when I went to buy a laptop did I not heed my own advice and buy Dell? The reason was about £50. I saw the Asus in PC World for £50 cheaper than a similarly specced Dell. Now I’m not saying that the Asus is a really bad machine cuz overall it works with no problems, but I’m comparing it to the Dell which my father-in-law bought around the same time and without the same price difference. The Asus has half the battery life and the drivers on Asus’ web site are out of date (and buggy..). The Asus does have the advantage of a separate graphics card but I don’t need games on my laptop so that is useless and again, the drivers are ATI but strange and non-standard, you have to use Asus specific customised ones and therefore they are out of date. Buy Dell.
This is a buzz-word / phrase that I predict will become a big issue in 2009: Net Neutrality. The geek press has been banging on about this for a while so I’ll start off by explaining what it means. The Internet (aka The Net) is one big network spanning the globe, sections of it are owned by private companies (such as Google or Microsoft), sections are government owned, but most of it is owned by telcos and ISPs (Internet Service Providers). When you connect to the Net at home, you connect via an ISP.. that is, the ISP lets you use their part of the Internet to connect to the rest of the world in return for a small monthly fee. They often place a limit on your speed or give you a monthly data transfer cap which is their way of trying to keep some sort of control over dishing out their internet-flavoured cake. Now, along comes Google with their hungry YouTube video streaming… enter the BBC and their iPlayer TV catch-up service, hello to BitTorrent and all the other peer-to-peer file transfer / downloads services.. the ISPs networks start to creak at peak times with users downloading like crazy. ISPs decide that something needs to be done, so they start installing traffic management hardware and ‘limit’ certain types of traffic to ease the burden…. so a few customers who have been downloading loads of dodgy movies, games and music have to wait a bit longer to get their mits on the latest Beethoven release and no harm really done. The ISPs don’t need to spend money on more bandwidth which would impact on their already tight margins (well, we do want really cheap broadband don’t we?) and most customers are happy and able to carry on surfing and watching as they did before.
This is all sounding quite nice at the moment, until the ISPs realised just what they could achieve with their traffic management equipment. What would happen if a particular company (let’s call that company G) who owned a video streaming service wanted to make sure that their videos could get to the end user faster than a rival company (for argument’s sake.. M), well, the bandwidth goes to the highest bidder, the ISPs make a ton of cash and competition between video streaming services is squashed. Google, sorry, company G are campaigning for Net Neutrality which is defined as being against this type of behaviour… it’s bad for the t’internet apparently. At the same time however they are actually talking with ISPs to make sure they get the bandwidth anyway in case their moral stance falls on deaf ears. There are essentially two sides to stand on and I’m unsure. On the one hand we, as broadband consumers, could see prioritised services working faster, perhaps a price-drop in our monthly subscriptions due to the ISPs extra sources of income or at least a reinvestment of that cash in a better service. On the other hand we could be limited in the services we are offered as the smaller guys are squashed by the corporates with the cash causing us to become locked in to a single provider monopoly… imagine if Apple’s iTunes store was the only place you could get music from and their prices kept going up and up.
No, it isn’t child cruelty, although in years to come she may think it is. She had a great time dressing up as different nativity characters yesterday and we just happened to film it at the same time! Okay, so it was slightly co-ordinated and storyboarded but why not! Anyway, the video is up on Facebook for all those who are friends of us Shinglers and I’ve also decided to put it up on YouTube so as I can show it here too. Enjoy!
Yesterday we took Poppy to her first ever pantomime: Aladdin at the Porthcawl Grand Pavilion Theatre. She was most looking forward to seeing ‘Pwiss from Doodle-Do’ (aka Chris Corcoran from CBeebies) and had been practising her “Oh no it isn’t” and “He’s behind you” for many many weeks. It was very good, if a little haphazard due to it being their very first performance and Chris (Wishee Washee) held it together. My only regret was buying Poppy one of those multi-coloured seizure-inducing flashy wands… she nearly took the heads off surrounding theatre-goers a number of times and the flashing really hurts your eyes after a couple of hours.
