Tech, Gaming and Bile!
alphaxion
10 years of servitude in the dungeons of an IT department have twisted this bitter soul into the horror you see today.
Posts by alphaxion
App review: TVCatchup
Jul 25th
App review: TVCatchup.com
OK, so this isn’t an app, per say… it’s a website. But a damn fine site with an iphone and ipad version you can pin to your main page – so you don’t need to bother with the app store for it – and use whether you’re on 3G or wifi. None of that “You must be on wifi to use this service” crap, though with all the network providers switching to metered bandwidth it could be an expensive habit!
So what does it do? In a nutshell, it allows you to stream live Freeview (UK free to air digital) TV channels across the net on your PC or mobile. While there’s no mention of geographic restrictions, I’m guessing this one is a UK only affair. Sorry, but at least you Americans have Hulu!
There’s also no subscription, just sign up for a free login account and often you have to endure a preroll ad after selecting the channel you wish to view, regardless of whether the show is currently playing or not.
And those are the only caveats, really.
The standard web layout is refreshingly uncluttered and simplistic – minimal cruft! Just choose between the EPG if you are looking for something specific or a list of channels if you don’t need to know anything more than the channel name.
EPG View
Channel View
It’s even cleaner on your iphone and ipad, presenting you with just the channel list and no option to see an EPG, though the ipad version shows you the program name currently showing.
Once you select a channel, it’ll begin streaming and the quality isn’t bad at all.
Right now you’re limited to bandwidth saving “low quality” and the default “standard quality”, with “high quality” versions of BBC1, BBC2, ITV1, Channel 4 and Five in beta and restricted to certain ISP’s. No word on when the rest of us will be able to pick up the high quality streams.
Still, video quality we can access is perfectly fine in full screen for standard screen sizes and comparable to other sources such as standard def iplayer, 4oD et al. You can even change the aspect ratio to get the best looking picture for your screen.
It may lack the flexibility of watching past episodes on your time frame and no HD streams for now, but as a means of watching live TV on the go via your iphone, in a secluded room with your laptop or ipad or a cheap alternative to a tuner for your HTPC, this site takes some beating. Especially if you’re in an area with poor TV signal quality (like me) or you just don’t want to pay for an expensive satellite/cable subscription, proving once and for all that your net connection is king!
Verdict: If you’re UK based, why aren’t you using this service already? It’s a must!
A touch too soon?Kingdom of Loathing trailer
Jun 15th
I put together a trailer for one of my fav games on the net – Kingdom of Loathing.
Watch the vid, sign up to the game and join the clan (vertical slicers)!
End of line 
some thoughts on Rupert Murdoch’s actions
Nov 18th
One of the biggest stories unfolding right now, concerning the net, is the various websites that comprise the online media empire of possibly the most odious man on Earth – Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Lies News Corps – being walled off amid cries of “if we don’t start charging for online content, news media will die”.
Now, as much as I despise the guy, he does have a point that advertising alone just won’t cut it. It’s an uncomfortable point I’ve tried to address more than a few times and, if we want all this cool stuff to hang around for any length of time, there needs to be a more direct route for making money off of editorial content/media on the net than relying on the mcguffin we know as advertising.
With video and audio media, I certainly see the cable subscription and pay-per-view systems being introduced for the likes of Hulu, with user generated content sites remaining ad driven or cheaper ways of proving show concepts/pilots and of harvesting talent, with the media firms paying some form of agent’s fee to the open video sites for their use. It’ll end up as “same as it ever was” for this industry, hell the video-on-demand service of Channel Five here in the UK is already going down this route. It’s just the way for indie content producers to get into the “big time” could be made easier – and the cost of making that content for the big media firms could have a little downward pressure on it for a change.
However, print media is a trickier thing entirely.
The ease of crafting/delivery compared to audio/video media means, for them to stand a chance of survival; they’ll have to become “bundled services” you get for free with other media subscriptions. Kinda like the way you get free wifi for a year when you sign up to a contract with your iphone on O2.
Though, I’d always leave it open for buying a “single day pass” to the site for content published that day and older info should drop into a “free access” status with ads slapped on them, that way you can still keep residual linked traffic as well as making a little money off of those who still want yesterdays news for as cheap as possible.
Effectively turning a newspapers site into a hybrid model – a walled garden for breaking news, with diminishing costs after that when you drop into the archives.
I figure they’d make more money that way than simply walling it all off until you pony up for the keys. But then, the net would prolly be a nicer place without general access to anything spouted by Mr Murdoch’s insipid mouthpieces.
vertical slice… the data question.
Oct 6th
It has been roughly 36 episodes of the show now, and a fresh problem that was brewing has come to a head.
Storage.
Initially, when using my old webcam, it wasn’t so much of a problem… but then April came along and I switched to 1080p source and my storage pressures began to mount with every new episode.
You see, depending on how much I fluff my lines and amount of dialogue I spew out, an episode can devour between 10 and 30GB when you add the sources for each item. Despite my network capacity sitting at about 5TB, much of that is devoted to my rather large library of DVD rips and game ISO’s/maps/mods (all of which I own a paid for copy) – you see, I’m too lazy to compress them, and I now rue my penchant for “special editions”
Thankfully, I was forced to replace the 750GB HDD in my main rig due to bad sectors earlier this year and still had the buggered HDD to replace on warranty. So I raise the RMA and ship it off. Luckily, the store I purchased it from (since it was an OEM HDD) no longer stocked that model and was able to upgrade the 750GB into a 1TB for no extra cost – I really do love the pace of technology at times!
After a little pondering as to where this new drive was going to call home, I settled on plumbing it into my main windows rig – well, it can’t physically fit into my server (already sporting 2.75TB) and my NAS box is out of the question since it requires a pair of drives.
Drive in, formatted, shared and filled with the current archives with little trouble… until the 700GB is swallowed up at some point. Though, with any luck, I’ll have the cash to spend on a better and more long term solution. Think I need to start a Drobo fund >.<
The days nemesis has been vanquished!
Aug 18th
This might seem a bit lame to those who actually know what they’re doing, but I have been bashing my head against the wall trying to figure out how to grab and display more than one post in a category using the archive.php file.
I’m using the archive.php file instead of creating a specific category file because I want to keep the layout the same with the least amount of editing whenever I do need to make a change. Copy pasta maybe easy, but it soon gets tiresome and is needless extra hassle.
After some frantic “help!” posts on twitter (thank you @wpbeginner for responding!) and friendfeed plus a little searching of my own, all roads seemed to lead to this page in the wordpress codex.
Specifically, this solution:
<?php
$categoryvariable=$cat; // assign the variable as current category
$query= ‘cat=’ . $categoryvariable. ‘&orderby=date&order=ASC’; //concatenate the query
query_posts($query); //run the query
?>
Now, dumping this just before the while (have_posts()) : the_post(); line, ensuring you swap out ($query) with (’showposts=10&cat=’.$cat) will give you what you want – upto 10 posts of the category selected by the user.
Sadly, this will break the displaying of your tags, which simply won’t do! Off to the drawing board again!
My starter for ten was to try creating my own bunch of if statements to alter the query based on whether it was a category or a tag just before my while statement. No good, broke the whole page instead of just a specific functionality. Then a lightbulb flickered inside.
There’s already an if statement determining what to do based on the users actions right at the top… why don’t I just sneak them into there? I’m cutting down on additional if statements and making the code cleaner. So, I bodged together the code and got the following:
<?php if (have_posts()) : ?>
<div class=”item entry”>
<?php $post = $posts[0]; // Hack. Set $post so that the_date() works. ?>
<?php /* If this is a category archive */ if (is_category()) { ?>
<h2 class=”pagetitle”><?php single_cat_title(); ?></h2>
<?php
$categoryvariable=$cat;
$query= ‘cat=’ . $categoryvariable. ‘&orderby=date&order=ASC’;
?>
<?php query_posts(’showposts=10&cat=’.$cat); ?>
<?php /* If this is a tag archive */ } elseif( function_exists(‘is_tag’) ) { if(is_tag()){ ?>
<h2 class=”pagetitle”>Episodes mentioning <?php single_tag_title(); ?></h2>
<?php
$tagvariable=$tag;
$query= ‘tag=’ . $tagvariable. ‘&orderby=date&order=ASC’;
?>
<?php query_posts(’showposts=10&tag=’.$tag); ?>
Hit refresh and began testing…. it works! No breaking, no spooling out the wrong info!
Check it yourself at http://dev.verticalslice.tv by clicking on “News” on the left and playing around.
Not bad for someone who only knows basic HTML and lacks any knowledge of how wordpress functions internally. Tho, as I said, it’s still prolly lame to those who actually know what they’re doing – but I’m not them, and this was my victory
If you know of a better way of doing this or if this opens the site up to a vulnerability, please let me know in the comments.
The goggles, they do nothing!
Aug 17th
Well, as the dust settles on moving from Leeds to Sheffield, my attention returns to working on Vertical Slice.
Not only did I finally crank out a new episode
But I’ve also been tweaking the new website over at dev.verticalslice.tv, not to mention filling it with all of the episodes produced so far. The plan is to migrate dev into being the new www and sliding the old tumblr based one into being a blog for the podcast.
Of course this means setting up a host for it, which I’ll get round to later on.
I’ve also split off the videos into its own account on youtube, this way I’ll be able to keep vertical slice content on its own and let me continue to upload utter trash without getting in the way.
Then there is the facebook presence.
So far, it had only been a group… A poorly visited group.
So, instead I have set up a fan page and hope to keep that updated and running instead of the languishing group. Of course, I could always do with extra fans – especially when you can secure a decent URL once you hit 100 fans.
So lets see how things are… there’s the website, eventually a blog, facebook fan page, twitter account, itunes listing, youtube account, miro feed.
Anything I’ve missed?
many a movings going on
Jul 15th
Many apologies for no episode of Vertical Slice last week, this was due to my constantly being on a train to Sheffield and chasing round and meeting people in order to secure a new flat there.
That, and the “studio” (read: living room) also looks like this right now:
I do have a spotlight episode that I have been editing on and off as well as plans to record a quick episode outside, provided it stops bloody well raining long enough…. that, and if I can find somewhere that won’t have me drowned out by the traffic!
Date of moving into the new place is the 20th, which means I’m gonna be without the net for a week or so (will… not… cope!!!).
However, once I’m back up and running in the new place (which has better acoustics than my current locations, so it’ll mean better sound!) I should be getting right back to schedule once again.
There have, also, been a few developments behind the scene that I can’t talk about right now… but it will mean a boost to the show if I manage to pull it off.
And finally, I do have plans to move away from using tumblr as the grunt behind verticalslice.tv but development of the new site is very slow as there is only me pratting around with it right now and I have *no idea* what I’m doing in PHP!
If you want to see how things are shaping up just clicky clicky, if you feel that you can help just drop me an email and I’ll be more than happy to work with you. You’d also get a copy of the eventual template to use as you wish, as long as you’re not selling it to others.
Hmmm…
Jun 9th
Well, last night I suffered the C:\ on my main rig corrupting, guess that explains why the system had gone a little wobbly before I tried to reboot it.
This means I’m spending the day on my macbook while I have the HDD connected to my server for a little data recovery using Arax Disk Doctor, which has saved my arse a few times now (at a reasonable price too! No, I don’t work for them nor do I get any kickbacks!).
So, everything I was working on needed to migrate to there which means I discovered something… the text editor that comes with OSX sucks balls. Seriously, it totally screwed up the html/php I was working on causing the development site for Vertical Slice that I was playing with to break and not load. So, off I went hunting for a real editor.
I finally discovered a free one (since there are so many simple apps that people are trying to charge $70 and upwards for on OSX, definitely a better ecosystem on windows and linux). The editor I eventually decided upon is called Smultron. Well worth grabbing a copy if you want to edit html/php on your mac without paying stupid prices.
Oh, yeah… I kinda let slip about the next bit of news. I’m working on my own site for Vertical Slice rather than using tumblr to power it. This way I’ll be able to control how things look. Sadly, I don’t have any skills with PHP and SQL so I went on the lookout for an opensource CMS that lends itself to vlogging and came up with nothing.
There’s plenty of them for creating video sharing sites, but nothing specifically for a vlog. So, having had some experience with wordpress and being unimpressed with podpress, I thought I’d get down and dirty with a basic wordpress site.
The result is a totally stripped down interface crying for some tarting up sitting over at dev.verticalslice.tv. I’m trying to learn how to pick out parts of a post and arrange them into the site in the order I want – which is proving to be a difficult task when you lack a brain capable of writing code.
At the end of this endevour, I plan to release the theme for free so that there is a theme out there for a simple vlog site without having to pay a fortune.
Why bother with this when tumblr is doing a good enough job? Well, partly because I’d love to have the freedom to mod the site as I wish and partly because a friend of mine is offering to host it for me since they’re starting up their own business as a GSP (Gaming Service Provider). Basically they’ll have some servers in a datacentre, set them up with game servers and then rent them out. They’re looking to launch the service soon. I’ll post a link when I can remember what he said they were called >.<
While I have been stuck on my macbook today, I have done a couple of things. The first is to throw my hat into the ring for the Rocketboom Talent Search.
I think I’ve made a solid application and could certainly pick up where Joanne left off, though a little nagging voice in the back of my head is telling me “you don’t really stand a chance”. I guess we’ll see, I totally loved my time writing for them and feel I could add so much more than the other applicants, but then I would say that.. wouldn’t I?
The second thing was to finally get my interview with the code monkeys finalised and uploaded. This was my first ever interview and was the first time for Adrian, the guy I interviewed, so we both had nerves, lost our trains of thought and plenty of giggles at the camera (which I had placed in a very poor location).
The important thing for me, at least, is that I have finally conducted one and learned a hell of a lot from the experience. I hope you won’t be too savage when you do watch it – you will watch it, won’t you? 
So, aside from waiting to see how the talent search goes, I’m stuck with the horrors of reinstalling the OS onto my main system and setting it back to how I like it.
That’ll be 4 hours of my life I can’t get back again 
How Apple should respond to Iphone reception problems
Jun 30th
Posted by alphaxion in commentary
No comments
By now I’m sure you’ve heard of the problems facing owners of Apple’s latest and greatest phone – for those who need a reminder, here’s a video put together by the folks at engadget…
As I tested this out for myself with the on display models (didn’t happen for me, tho I did notice an uncomfortable tingle) one fully fledged member of the Cult of Jobs expounded “Just buy the bumper, the problem goes away” (not to mention one of the more decidedly PC fixes).
But hold on there, why should you have to buy an overpriced bit of rubber just to work around what is a glaring design flaw? This kinda thing gets lambasted in other companies, why should Apple be excused? Especially when said company is supposed to place you, the consumer, at the centre of the universe.
So, what should Apple do? Recall every unit with the flaw with a redesigned one that doesn’t have the cockup?
I doubt they would do that, so how about they take a leaf from another mega-corp who showed a lot more class when faced with such a problem and potential backlash?
Cast your minds back to the tech jurassic age – 2006. The ipod was dominating the pocket and the PS2 was just about to get a major contender for the front room – The Wii.
Basking in the glow of their all conquering DS and a return on the home console scene, Nintendo’s smugness started to slip more and more as reports of sweaty palms, thin strap strings and resulting airborne Wiimotes spread from rumour, to news to internet meme.
In response to a potential PR disaster, Nintendo offered free silicon grips to those who had already bought their Wii’s and began shipping them with every new Wii and seperate Wii controller. The complaints about the bodily and property damage by flying controllers simply faded away as a result.
Jumping right back to now, why is it that Apple – with an obvious design flaw – are greeting their problems with “You’re holding it wrong” or “Just buy a bumper“? That’s hardly the actions of a company who places their customer as their number one priority. Instead is smacks of arrogance and caring only about the customers wallet!
Would the Apple of even 5 years ago respond like this? I remember when you got all sorts of extras in your ipod box – covers, docks, power bricks… Now, they’re all separate purchases to maximise the amount of money they extract from you.
The right thing for Apple would be to say “OK, some users are having major problems with signal quality. If you’re one of them, pop into the Apple store and we’ll give you a free Bumper (Limited to one per phone, of course) and from now on, every new iphone4 will come with a bundled bumper.”.
So, what will it be Apple? Greed? Or a return to the customer service of old, you know the one that set you apart from the rest in the first place?