Virgin TV 360 — First impressions

I’ve just upgraded my V6 box to Virgin TV 360. I’m starting to think that was a mistake. When Liberty Global took over Virgin Media in 2013, it seemed likely that at some point in the future VM would stop using TiVo software to run its set-up boxes and switch to something based on Liberty’s… Continue reading Virgin TV 360 — First impressions

Year of Code on Newsnight

You’ve probably already seen the section on the government’s Year of Code initiative that was on Newsnight last Wednesday. But, in case you haven’t, here is it. We’ll wait while you catch up. Most of the commentary I’ve seen on this concentrates on Lottie Dexter’s performance in the interview that takes up the second half… Continue reading Year of Code on Newsnight

TV Licence by Email

I’m not the world’s most organised person. I’m forever losing important pieces of paper. Over the christmas break I went through some of what I laughably call my filing system and attempted to impose a little more order. One of the important pieces of paper I found was my TV licence. In an attempt to… Continue reading TV Licence by Email

Technology Hates Me

About ten days ago, I took delivery of a new toy – a Dell XPS M1330 laptop. I spent last weekend happily repartitioning and installing Fedora Linux and I was planning to write an entry this weekend about how well I was getting on with it. Except, I’m not. It’s stopped working. I did some… Continue reading Technology Hates Me

Recording TV Revisited

It’s over two years since I wrote my piece on ways to record TV programmes. Quite a lot has changed in those two years, so I thought it was worth writing an update. The biggest change for me is that at home we’ve dragged ourselves into the 21st century and have stopped recording programmes on… Continue reading Recording TV Revisited

Derren Brown – The System

Last weekend, Derren Brown presented another of his occasional television specials. In this one he told us that he had invented a fool-proof system for predicting the winners of horse races. To demonstrate this system he introduced us to Khadisha who had received anonymous five winning tips from Derren. On the basis of these previous… Continue reading Derren Brown – The System

iPlayer Announcement

It looks like the BBC are ramping up to make an announcement about the iPlayer later today. I’ll link to the press release just as soon as I can find it on their site. Update: Here it is. Looks like the iPlayer officially launches today. Update: I can’t read properly. It doesn’t launch today. It… Continue reading iPlayer Announcement

BBC Programme Credits

I’m a bit behind here, but I was just catching up on some newsgroups[1] when I saw someone mention Charlie Brooker’s Guardian column from a couple of weeks ago. In it he points to the BBC’s latest guideline for the production of programme credits. Basically they are laying down a far stricter set of guidelines… Continue reading BBC Programme Credits