tenthofjune

Check this video out:

Further to my post on Royal Mail’s new charges, my wife took a letter to the post office, but despite it being an A5 envelope, which fit through the slot on Royal Mail’s new postage guide and weighed less than 100g, (thus qualifying as a small letter) she was charged 44p (large letter rate) not 32p.

It would seem the post office doesn’t even understand the new rules.

This little creature’s built an impressive web in the front garden.
Even managed to catch something.

Hugh Laurie, who is currently starring in an American medical drama called House, has recently said of trying to sound American, “I have not identified a single word that is pronounced the same in America as it is in England. It is as if everyone else is playing with a tennis racquet and you have a salmon.”

Now I can understand this of most day-to-day words, but you would think that the trading names of multinational consumer product companies would be pronounced the same – not so: I was surprised to learn recently that the Americans even pronounce Nokia and Nikon differently to us. While we say ‘Nockia’, they pronounce the ‘o’ saying ‘Nohkia’. We say “Nickon”, they say “Nykon”. Even the television adverts for Nokia and Nikon pronounce it that way.

From today, the cost of sending a letter or packet in the UK is changing. Now I’m not getting involved in the reasons or justifications of this change, however, I can see it causing more than a few problems during the next few weeks.
There is much discussion about the lack of advertising regarding this change and that not all post offices are ready for it, but what happens from today for incorrectly stamped letters/parcels? Will the Royal Mail be applying surcharges to received post, or will it be returning it to the sender? What about those who don’t use the post office to send mail and choose to just go to a post box? I can see a lot of post being sent underpaid according to the new rules. Royal Mail say that “in the immediate post-introduction period Royal Mail will be flexible in terms of not surcharging customers who have underpaid postage”. Expect to get lots of cards through the door saying that the ‘local’ delivery office is holding an item of mail which requires payment due to underpaid postage.

Further to my previous post about Powerhouse’s lack of support for any browser other than IE, I decided to check if they had changed their attitude, but it would appear that they have gone into administration.

Sky have finally got around to launching their Remote Record functionality on Sky+.
Basically there are three ways to remotely set your Sky+ digibox to record a programme.

1. via Sky by Mobile, a small app running on your compatible mobile phone.
2. by text message “Programme title. Channel. Date. Time.” to 61759
3. and finally via sky’s web page, although this is not yet live

So far, I have only tried the first option. You need to register in the Customer Zone on Sky.com. Sky are then supposed to send you a wap push message to your phone including the address to download the mobile app to your phone, but nothing arrived, even when I tried resending it from the customer zone services area. I found a post on Digital Spy’s forums, which gave the download address for the 156 kbyte app. (the messages did eventually arrive about 2 hours later)

You then have to register your mobile number via your Sky digibox. Press the interactive button on your Sky+ remote and choose ‘Sky Active’. Then go to ‘My Sky’ and select ‘Remote Record’. Enter your mobile number and you should be set up. Note this step requires the phone connection on your digibox as it needs to dial in your registration.

The TV Guide has the same look as on the Sky+ EPG, however you cannot skip forward by typing the channel number as you can on the EPG. This makes finding higher channels a bit of a chore as the data is downloaded for each page.

When you set a program to record, a message says that it will be sent to your digibox in the next thirty minutes, but in practice it’s only a couple of seconds.

Not sure how well the text messaging option will work. What happens if you don’t get the programme name or channel number exactly right? Will the system guess? Also, this option atttracts an extra 25p charge for the confirmation text from Sky.

My Sister, Claire (along with Nick, Anoushka, Jharna, Tonya, and Anna) is running a 10k event at Tatton Park in aid of Cancer Research.
You can help by sponsoring her. If you are a UK taxpayer, an extra 28% in tax will be added to your gift at no cost to yourself.

Here’s an interesting article looking at gadgets now and then.

Regarding the removable storage, I always find it scary how today’s removable storage (USB disks in your pocket for example) compare to internal storage say 15 years ago. Most files nowadays (digital camera jpegs for example) won’t even fit on a 3.5″ floppy.

To be honest, I found the older video games much more addictive. You switched it on and started playing. Today, you have to spend a significant amount of time either learning all the various controls, or setting up the game environment before you even start. I get bored and switch it off.

Looking forward to part 2…

Ever wanted to find the negative comments on an ebay user, but don’t want to trawl through pages of otherwise positive comments, then look here.