Greg Egan is a “hard sci-fi” author. Hard sci-fi is a vague term referring to science fiction with a strong founding in complicated, plausible (if not real) science. He released a few really good novels that deal with several recurring themes including people living entirely as software (and the interactions between such people and those with bodies) some of the issues surrounding duplicating people if they exist as software and some exotic possibilities for life (some not even based on the idea of particle interaction).

That last part is mainly what is expressed in Schild’s Ladder - life existing based on the myriad of possible interactions between different quantum theories that are found to exist in what is originally thought to be a super-stable vacuum. Sounds confusing (and in points it is) but for anyone interested in technical mind bending sci-fi, it’s a must read.

Then go read Diaspora, another book of his following similar themes.

Google Mail (no longer Gmail) has a confusing feature.

I recently got a Google Mail account to test out Google Talk. Since I was already logged into my Google account it asked if I wanted my new email account to be part of it. I said yes. Then I couldn’t log into my Google Account for anything else. The problem is they’ve decided my new Google Mail email address is my primary address and that’s what I need to use to log in.

Ah well.

Julia is going to America next year on an exchange and she needs a student visa obviously (a J-1 if you’re interested). So we had a nice trip to London to the US Embassy this week.

The first problem we faced was finding it. Using Google Maps gives different results depending on whether you use the address or the postcode. I figured the address was right since it at least showed a road with the right name.

Speaking of the road, it’s blocked off. The whole road in front of the embassy is completely blocked to traffic and has armed police patrolling it. For various reasons we needed to find a bank so Julia asked one of the police officers. Somehow feels like misusing resource - asking someone with a gun that big for directions.

Then once Julia was in (I couldn’t get in without an appointment) there was a three hour wait. But they said yes. Even the page full of Arabic in her passport (following a recent trip to the United Arab Emirates) didn’t worry them.

Sky+ and Multiroom were installed this morning and everything works great :)

First I have to say the actual installation was done well and the engineer guy wasn’t even phased by the idea of connecting up to a computer instead of a TV. He did point out that they don’t supply an S-Video cable (which came with the TV card).

Anyway MCE is talking to my Sky box fine. The only niggle is that the IR transmitter is a little in the way (it’s picky about placement - get it wrong and it doesn’t always change channel). There may be a solution though. You can buy a cable that connects from the IR unit (the box that contains the IR receiver and that the IR blaster is connected to) directly to the Sky box. This works in exactly the same way as Sky’s own remote IR receiver. The device was actually originally created to allow TiVo boxes to control Sky boxes.

PACELink - rf2Link

I saw an advert for Bulldog Broadband today on the London Underground. In large letters it offers 16 MB broadband for £9.75 a month plus telephone line rental of £10.50 a month - “cheaper than TalkTalk”. That price is indeed less than TalkTalk, but what you pay isn’t. That price only applies for the first three months, after that it’s £14.75 a month. Not only that but you only have a 1 gigbyte/month download limit, that’s about 34 Mb a day.

Surely this is a more strenuous claim than TalkTalk’s “free boadband” and they were stopped from broadcasting that one on TV?

We are long time Sky customers and recently ordered Sky Multiroom so I could connect Sky up to my new Media Center PC. On Thursday they sent us two new viewing cards. I knew we’d need a new one but I didn’t expect two - I just figured that the change in our subscription meant the old one needed changing. Except on Friday they sent us another one. So now we have four, our old one and the three new ones.

This could lead to an interesting possibility since we actually have a spare Sky box. So we’ll have three Sky boxes (two normal and one Sky+) and three new cards. That’s a total of four signals required - exactly the amount that a single minidish can handle. Unfortunately after looking around the Sky site I found out that you need a separate multiroom subscription for each additional box. So why did they send us three new cards?

Some adverts for loans appeared recently, probably because I mentioned an interesting deal from Lloyd’s TSB.

So I wondered if I could make more appear by mentioning things likes loans, finance and mortgages. Just mentioning loans once isn’t going to do it so I should mention loans a few times. A stray mention of debt management might also help.

Of course my demographic isn’t really geared towards finance topics like loans or money lending. So just think of this as an experiment.

Cleverity? Something that is clever. If that word really exists I should get an award.

A lot of people love Firefox and seem to think that loving it is “obvious”. This is despite the fact that it just eats up memory. Not only that but it keeps it regardless (if you minimise most programs on Windows they free up most of their memory).

There are uses for it, most of them for developers. The DOM explorer and JavaScript debug consoles are absolute necessities. But another cool feature I’ve found is “View Selection Source”. Highlight part of a web page, right-click and you can view the source just for that bit. Yay :)

When I came up with the idea for mini themes it occurred to me that it could be a reasonable possibility for advertising. Reasonable in theory only since my limited traffic would be a problem. But that doesn’t mean I couldn’t affiliate stuff up :P

So here’s the first one: a fairly unobtrusive advert for a website of mine offering cheap international calls. I say unobtrusive simply because the layout of the content of the page is identical to before. And if you browse at a low resolution you don’t see the advert at all.

One quick note, you have to view the post specifically to see the theme. I intentionally stopped them from showing on the homepage.

My TV tuner arrived yesterday :)

Installation and Setup

Installation was straightforward - after putting the card in just pop the CD in and let Windows detect it as normal. It didn’t even have to restart (which is good because it installed drivers for about 6 different devices (audio tuner, digital TV tuner, analogue TV tuner, MPEG encoder etc.).

Then on to the MCE setup. Lots of questions, most of which had the correct default value so lots of clicking “yes”. The only sticking point is it asks you which transmitter you want to pick up if you choose to use the digital (Freeview) tuner. The first one I selected resulted it bad picture quality and a bunch of missing channels. I went through the setup again and chose a different one (I had a choice of three) and got much better results.

I say much better. Unfortunately a couple of the channels I especially wanted were still unwatchable, specifically abc1 and ft n. This isn’t really a problem with the card - the TV aerial going into my room goes through a large portion of the house first so signal strength and quality is an issue.

I decided not to bother trying to fix it since we’re about to order Sky+ with multiroom which will eliminate the problem.

Electronic Program Guide

It’s really cool at recording stuff :P The only other DVR system I’ve used is Sky+’s and I have to say MCE is a lot better. The best feature is it smartly looks for alternative showings in case of clashes. Which is cool since most programs are repeated at odd times on other channels (ITV and ITV2, Sky One and Sky Two etc.). It can also be set torecord new episodes only or new episodes and reruns.

Missing features

The most notable missing feature is the ability to properly handle two tuners. All the documentation says it will happily use two tuners allowing you to view one program while recording another or record two things at once. You can even get a TV card with two analogue tuners on board (Hauppauge PVR 500). Unfortunately for it to work both tuners need to have the same channel lineup. Which is a shame. If they sort out that ludicrous limitation (other PVR software I’ve seen doesn’t have that problem) then I’ll get a second TV tuner and have on connected to Sky and one connected to Freeview giving me an overlap on about 30 channels.

Missing review

Te one big thing that I haven’t been able to test is the IR blaster. The card comes with a cool box that transmits infrared signals to control set top boxes (like Sky). Once I get Sky I’ll let you know how it goes…