http://james.webkanix.com A personal weblog from James Burrage on media, technology and web development Sun, 28 Sep 2008 15:20:14 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en Absolute Radio begins tomorrow morning at 7.45am, and all weekend the station's been on the 'Road from V to A'. If the past few days are anything to go by, I've got a feeling I'll be listening to the new station a lot. And despite living over 250 miles from Oxford, ... http://james.webkanix.com/2008/09/28/absolute-radio/ I've been thinking out loud about what to do about a new computer for some time - last September I was looking at a Mac Mini, and in Spring I started to look at the Eee PC. Almost a year on and this Dell Inspiron notebook is still fantastic. Whilst ... http://james.webkanix.com/2008/09/22/asus-eee-pc-901-first-impressions/ Each time I see my phone bill, the cost of the calls is getting less and less. In the last month, I used the land line to make five calls - everything else was done via mobile or Skype. Will there be a day when everyone (not just cable subscribers) can ... http://james.webkanix.com/2008/06/09/do-we-need-still-need-a-land-line/ Since setting up the indoor satellite dish, I'd been using a SkyStar 2 card to view and record satellite TV from Astra 1, 2 and Hotbird. This is alright, but quite uncomfortable and cumbersome - especially if you have a spare 10 minutes to flick through. I've been thinking of a ... http://james.webkanix.com/2008/06/07/review-smart-rapido-3-dvb-s-receiver/ For most consumers, I think so. To provide a little background, satellite signals are either encrypted (part of a pay TV package, or "Free to View" which requires a free, or low cost card to decrypt the signal) or unencrypted (or clear, or "Free to Air"). Applying this to Digital Terrestrial Television (commonly ... http://james.webkanix.com/2008/05/10/freesat-has-landed-but-is-it-any-good/ Last night I saw The Digg Reel - a video from Revision3 which looks at the most popular videos on social news site, Digg. The source of the videos is credited, but often just as YouTube.com or Break.com. I've noticed this in several places, especially TV news channels. Last year BBC ... http://james.webkanix.com/2008/04/18/credit-where-credits-due/ April marks changes for the UK's two main news channels; BBC News 24 and Sky News. Sky refreshed their graphics, and the BBC have been gradually introducing a new look to most of their outputs. I'll cover those two (and CNN, France 24 et al) over the next week or ... http://james.webkanix.com/2008/04/18/a-look-at-news-channels-part-1/ Just a quick post... The battery in my Dell Inspiron is fried. It's been my main computer for around 18 months now and the battery has given up - holding less and less charge every month. Now Vista says there's no battery at all - quite a pain if you ... http://james.webkanix.com/2008/04/04/an-eee-pc-or-new-notebook-battery/ Something getting blanket coverage in the media today is last nights earthquake. Whilst it was really very small in terms of damage, and thankfully a minimal number of injuries, it's a rare occurrence here in the UK and quite exciting. At around three minutes to midnight I was listening to BBC ... http://james.webkanix.com/2008/02/27/last-nights-earthquake/ Tomorrow the BBC launches its new home page. It's been available to look at for a little while though, and still is today at bbc.co.uk/home/beta. I think it's pretty good - it's nice to be able to move things around, do away with some of the content that's not so interesting ... http://james.webkanix.com/2008/02/26/new-bbc-home-page/