Author Archives: Steven

About Steven

Steven Jackson is a web developer based in the North East of England

Goodmans GTVL42W15HD

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Just before Christmas I decided to upgrade my home cinema setup, starting with a 1080p LCD TV (to replace my old 43 inch Pioneer Plasma).

This Goodmans set looked like a bit of a bargain. I managed to get it from LX Direct for about £1040, once various discounts had been taken into account. Not bad for a 42 inch 1080p set, and initially I was pretty impressed.

Good points:

  • It wasn’t bad looking, and the build quality was OK for the price
  • The surround was black, which I much prefer over silver (less reflections)
  • It seemed to handle standard definition feeds quite nicely
  • It was happy to accept 1080p at 60hz over DVI with no overscan (nice with my Mac mini)
  • 1080p over VGA from the Xbox 360 was handled very well
  • Colours and blacks were quite good
  • No dead or stuck pixels

As I explored further (and followed the relevant thread on AVForums), the following problems became apparent:

  • The volume of the sound went very high (useful), but the increments were too far apart
  • There was a buzzing and crackling noise from the backlight (changing the backlight level affected the noise), which could be clearly heard across my living room
  • The set had “vertical banding” that could be seen on TV footage with significant horizontal panning
  • The optimum viewing angle was quite narrow
  • The RGB SCART sockets weren’t RGB, although to be fair, the TV handled composite signals very well
  • The DVI and HDMI ports seemed rather picky about resolutions and refresh rates (especially the HDMI). If you’re not too bothered about overscan (on HDMI) or forcing 50Hz vs 60Hz, it wouldn’t be an issue, but I’m picky about these things
  • No builtin Freeview, although I have to admit that this wasn’t really a big issue for me

To cut a long story short, I gave up on the Goodmans, and decided to try out a different set.

Nintendo Wii Internet Channel

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I managed to get a Nintendo Wii when it was launched in the UK a couple of weeks ago. I’ll probably post about it when I’ve had more chance to play with it, but I wanted to do a quick post on the Wii Internet Channel (basically a version of the Opera web browser) that was released today.

On first impressions, I’m very impressed. It renders Carsurvey.org very well, has reasonably useful zooming, and works beautifully with the Wii Remote (the vibration as you move your cursor over a link is great).

However, I’m beating round the bush here. All that matters is that YouTube works, including full screen playback. For some people, a small wireless device like the Wii, which shows photos and plays YouTube videos on their TV, will be well worth buying, regardless of the fact that it also plays games.

Carol Singers

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Possible Scrooge warning….

I’ve always loved this time of year (especially all the lights and decorations), but there’s a new trend that’s been annoying me this year – Carol Singers.

Not organised Carol Singers (I have no problem with them, especially as it’s usually for charity), but unaccompanied small children knocking on my door at night, singing a poor rendition of “We wish you a Merry Christmas”, and then looking puzzled when I say thank you and goodnight, and shut the door without giving them the money they’re obviously expecting.

I feel bad about doing this, but I’m not going to be party to encouraging them to knock on stranger’s doors at night, putting themselves at risk, and probably worrying some old people.

New Wireless ADSL Router

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I spend an awful lot of my life online (too much if I’m honest), so having a reliable ADSL router with builtin wireless is very important to me. Over the past five years or so, I’ve been through a range of routers, never quite finding the perfect device. I’ve just picked up my fifth router, and will discuss it in a moment, but first, some brief comments on my past devices.

  1. A PC running Smoothwall, and then IPCop, connected to a 3Com wireless access point and a Speedtouch USB ADSL modem: This was back in about 2001-2002, and while it worked pretty well, it was very complicated compared to the integrated routers we have these days.
  2. A Draytek 2600G: Expensive, but well built and was far easier to live with than the PC solution. Unfortunately support seemed to dwindle, and mine started freezing for ten or twenty seconds at a time, which I couldn’t remedy, despite upgrading to the latest firmware, and doing a factory reset. Which reminds me – it was very picky about accepting firmware upgrades. Often it would just refuse to accept a new firmware upload. Very good in the early days though.
  3. A Zyxel 660HW: Cheap, and handled wired connections very well. Pity that its wireless was slow and unreliable.
  4. A Belkin 7633: I was tempted by this because it had a very good reputation with ADSL Max services here in the UK, due to its Broadcom 6348 chipset. Wireless was supposed to be less than great though. Ended up very impressed with both the wireless and ADSL Max performance, but it seemed to freeze up occasionally, and wasn’t happy with talking to my Xbox 360 over wireless through a switch (wireless connection to a Belkin wireless bridge, connected to the Xbox 360 through a NetGear switch). No firmware updates for almost a year either…
  5. My latest aquisition is a SpeedTouch 585, purchased from DSL Depot for the bargain price of £30 inc VAT and delivery. Basically it’s a similar chipset to the Belkin, but it hasn’t frozen up yet, and plays nicely with my Xbox 360. Wireless is good, and it seems far more configurable than the Belkin, although the user interface is quirky to say the least. The only issue I’ve had is that the DHCP didn’t cope when I tried to change the IP address of the router (it kept on giving out its old address as the default gateway), but it wasn’t that big a deal to change my IP addressing to match its default setting, and I suspect I could have fixed the issue if I spent long enough fiddling around with its command line interface.

Lots more RSS feeds

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Carsurvey.org and related sites (motorcycle and mobile phone) now have the following new RSS feeds:

  • Site wide comments
  • Reviews and comments by region
  • Reviews and comments by manufacturer
  • Reviews and comments by model

Hopefully that should make it much easier for people monitor specific areas of the site that they’re interested in. The feeds are available through links, feedicons, and RSS autodiscovery on the relevant pages.

As a technical aside, these feeds are not being generated live, but are generated once an hour (for the site wide and region feeds), or once a day (for the manufacturer and model feeds). This is intended to keep to any rise in server load to a minimum.

Improved voting and ad layout

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I’ve just release a set of minor but linked changes to Carsurvey.org and related sites (motorcycle and mobile phone):

  • The review voting form has been replaced by a set of buttons. Now it’s only one click to vote rather than two, and the buttons take up less space on the page
  • The layout of ads near the bottom of the review pages has changed, with a skyscraper replacing the bottom footer ad

The World of Cars

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As I run a pretty large car website, with reviews of almost 2000 different models, I need to look up rare models from time to time.

On Friday I happened across the 2006-2007 edition of World of Cars in WH Smith for £6.95. I initially assumed it would be fairly limited in coverage, rather like the Daily Express car guides from years gone by. I couldn’t have been more wrong; although the guide only covers current cars, it claims to detail 8,500 models (including kit cars), and every model I could think of was there, including such rare beasts as the Pyonghwa Motors Hwiparam from North Korea.

I thoroughly recommend tracking down a copy.

I give up on Wireless Keyboards and Mice

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When I bought my Mac mini earlier this year, I bought the Apple Wireless Keyboard and Mouse so I could easily control the Mac mini from across my living room.

My experience with these bits of kit has been less than impressive; there’s a noticeable lag when making any input (especially bad with the mouse), and occasionally the keyboard and mouse have to be re-paired with the Mac mini.

My patience has worn out, and I’ve now paired a wired Apple keyboard with a wired Microsoft mouse, connected to the Mac mini via a cheap 3m USB extension cable. The extension cable is usually hidden beneath my TV stand, but it only takes a couple of seconds to retrieve it or store it, and the result is infinitely better than the old wireless solution.

If your room isn’t too big, I’d recommend this solution over a wireless keyboard and mouse. It’s not as elegant, but it’s cheaper and more responsive.