Sky offers movies and sport content to subscribers with a service they call Sky by Broadband (clever name). The downloaded content is DRMed and you can only keep it for 28 days but it’s good quality. The interesting thing is it uses a private peer-to-peer to distribute it.

It’s a smart move by Sky since it saves them lots of bandwidth. I was worried about whether TalkTalk would limit Sky by Broadband. It all depends on their reasons. If they truly have bandwidth problems then they should since it’s quite a large consistent bandwidth hog (since even after downloading it can continue uploading). If they actually just want to limit illegal behaviour with P2P file sharing then they’ll leave it alone since it’s legit.

Well yesterday I left my computer on all day (I wanted to try Orb from work). I didn’t realise that closing the Sky program didn’t actually stop it downloading. When I came home all the movies had downloaded (my bandwidth usage was up to 5 gigabytes for the day). Not only that but my download speed had stayed consistently at about 250 kb/s. Since my router is reporting my connection as 2.2Mbits/s that’s almost full speed. In the middle of the day.

So it seems TalkTalk don’t (yet) limit Sky by Broadband traffic. Of course it would be easy to reach their 40GB a month limit doing that every day…

Ever heard of Internationalised Domain Names? They allow you to register domains with non-Latin characters (i.e. Unicode). They actually do a bit of cheating but I’ll let you find that out. In the meantime check out these interesting addresses showing that just using Chinese or Arabic characters is not the limit IDNs.

• http://www.®.com/
• http://www.©.com/
• http://www.€.net/
• http://www.☎.com/
• http://www.♬♬.com/

Quick warning, they don’t work in IE without a plugin and to see them in their true glory you need Opera…

browsers, Unicode, Punycode

With my broadband connection came a wireless network. So I tried browsing with my PSP. And it is a lot better than I expected. Except when browsing my own blog :(

I figured the easiest way to make it work was to send it the XHTML Basic version. So you should now be able to browse my site with a PSP without any hassle :D

Detecting the PSP browser**

Detecting a PSP is really easy. It sends a custom HTTP header: HTTP_X_PSP_BROWSER which contains the firmware version. Just check if that header is set. In PHP you just need to do:

if (isset($_SERVER['HTTP_X_PSP_BROWSER'])) $psp = true;

You should have noticed that the area code 555 is used a lot in films. Hopefully you also know this area code does not exist. It’s there just to be plausible but not actually require a real phone number.

Well the film Silent Hill may have a funky alternative for the internet. When people browse the web in films you can often see file:// at the beginning of the address bar, a sign they’re loading files from a hard drive. The ones with a little more thought use a real domain that really exists that can also be used for marketing.

Well, Silent Hill went somewhere in between. In the film a character is seen browsing a website that ends with .web. It obviously doesn’t exist but it is plausible enough to not be annoying.

Have lots of video, audio and/or a TV card? Got a good internet connection (more importantly) with a good upstream connection. Going on holiday or otherwise away from your computer but still somewhere with access to the internet? Then get Orb.

Orb is a cool utility for streaming media from your computer to the internet. Essentially it’s just a program that acts as a web server and a web interface that connects to it. With it you can stream any media on your computer (including TV tuners and web cams) over the internet. Most legal problems go away because the media can only stream to one person at once.

I have plain old ADSL internet access with 288 Kbps upstream and it works fine. So go try it :P

Well with my various posts about problems with TalkTalk I should probably point out that I did sign up. Less than a month later and it’s now live. And contrary to my expectations everything seems fine.

My router reports a connection speed of about 2.2 Mbit/s and I’ve had a combined download speed of about 120KB/s (including about 50KB/s from a peer-to-peer program). The only negative thing is that my modem and start up pack hasn’t arrived (my official go-live date was yesterday) but since I have a router and I’m perfectly capable of setting it up that’s not a major problem).

Also, my upstream bandwidth is apparently 288 Kbit/s. Not wonderful but good enough to stream reasonable video (I’ll post more about a cool app called Orb some other time.

I recently posted about BackBase, an expensive (for commercial use) AJAX development thingy*. Well Google have produced something similar for free Google Web Toolkit.

Although the end results are the same (as far as the user is concerned) there are important differences. The BackBase software is entirely client side. You write server stuff as normal, output BackBase code and the browser with JavaScript handles everything. The Google system is client and server orientated and odes more work on the server. The server also has to be running Java. It also has better browser support.

This could be a reason for me to learn Java, something I’ve managed to avoid for quite a while now…

* It’s actually an XML based markup language combined with a real time JavaScript processing engine.

I said I’d write about it yesterday. Well I was so busy actually using it that I forgot :P

The first thing I should point out is that Microsoft do not officially support home users installing MCE themselves and as such I have an OEM copy. Despite that the installation was painless although it does have it’s oddities. Most notable is that the installation makes no mention of MCE, it just says “Windows XP Professional”. Also unlike other versions of Windows this comes on two disks, the second disk containing the media center stuff as well as some tablet PC stuff. One final comment about installing is the disks are labeled (system-wise) incorrectly). It will ask you to install “Windows XP Service Pack 2 disk” when it really means “Put disk 1 back in”.

Since I don’t yet have a TV card I can’t use much of the really cool functionality of media center, but I did try playing a DVD and immediately hit problems. My DVD drive came with PowerDVD which is not supported by media center. Or to be more precise PowerDVD 5, the version I have, isn’t compatible. If you plan to build an MCE PC it is vital you have a compatible MPEG 2.0 decoder (All the options I’ve seen have been software but I would assume older machines with hardware decoder cards will work). So I downloaded a trial of PowerDVD 6 (which uninstalled my OEM version 5) and everything worked. Unfortunately version 6 isn’t free.

I’ve created a clever German flip card gadget for Google homepage. It displays a German word for a few seconds and then shows it’s translation. And then repeats with a new word. The vocabulary is very small at the moment but it will increase by at least one per day.

At the moment it also limits itself to 5 words per viewing. That is after showing five cards it loops (if it didn’t you’d never actually begin to memorise them).

Google Homepage

To use Google personalised homepage, you must have a Google account. When you have one, go to “Personalised Home” (links for that and to create an account are in the top right corner of Google’s homepage).

Adding the Gadget

From your personalised homepage, click “Add Content”, then “Create a Section” and then put the following URL in the box: http://www.oliverbrown.me.uk/gadgets/flip.xml . Then just click “Go” and you’re done :)

If anyone is interested I might extend the idea to be more flexible.

LocationFree TV is one of Sony’s new ideas intended to revolutionise the way we watch TV. You buy a LocationFree base station, connect it to your TV and internet connection and then watch your TV on any internet device, say your PSP.

Well of course you could plug an MCE computer into the Base Station instead. But this is where it gets a little silly (but in an oh so fun way). The Base Station has an IR blaster that allows it to control other IR devices, in this case your media centre PC. Your PC is incidentally controlling your set top box with it’s own IR blaster.