21 Apr 11 Taste of Paradise
Nipped into Asda today to get a few basics, like bread, butter and lunch meat. Picked up some hummous, and some pita bread too, which is a great snack in my opinion.
I quite often buy juice, although I tend to look for the ‘not from concentrate’ stuff. It might be more expensive but it tastes a whole lot better.
Anyway, I grabbed a litre bottle of Asda’s own brand ‘Pineapple, Orange and Coconut Juice’. When I got home, I didn’t want to wait until I’d drunk the OJ I have in the refrigerator already. Nope. My mum used to make me do that when I was a kid (quite rightly really, I know), and now I’m a big boy, I’ll do as a damn well please thank you.
Anyway, it’s really yummy. Very morish. How morish? I drunk it all.
A whole litre of it in one go. It’s only five hundred calories. Anyway, it’s gotta be a better five hundred than junk food.
A Taste of paradise indeed. Fiji comes to Hounslow. Well, perhaps not, but you get the idea. I’ll have to get me some more real soon. Perhaps I should go to Fiji too.
Tags: asda, bread butter, coconut juice, concentrate, hummous, junk food, litre bottle, lunch meat, oj, orange, pineapple, pita bread, refrigerator, snack, whole lot
15 Sep 08 Best Buy Gets Napster
I read this five minutes after I called Napster to cancel my subscription. It wouldn’t have influenced my decision in any way, even though I don’t have a great deal of regard for Best Buy.
When I first got an MP3 player, I thought it would be a good idea. $14.99 gave me access to a whole lot of music, and I didn’t have to fork out 99 cents a tune, like iTunes. Anyway, iTunes is no use for me, as I don’t have and don’t have any plans to buy an iPod. My little Sandisk mp240 was only $38.99 and does me fine.
Another reason for cancelling Napster was that DRM sucks. I knew that already, the same as most of you surely do, but I thought I’d give it a try anyway. I didn’t really build up much of a Napster library anyway, so the few dozen tunes that will now cease to work aren’t going to cause me to lose any sleep.
It was a pain in the butt playing DRM music on the computers anyway. You can use up to three on an account, but I dislike Windows Media Player, preferring Winamp, which didn’t like playing the Napster stuff, and I use linux machines for the most part anyhow.
I’ve already bought some non DRM music from Amazon, which is a far better proposition, as I can do whatever I want with them, including playing them on any of the computers in the home; the Sandisk, or my Blackberry. The Blackberry is really very useful, as I can get reasonable quality sound via a pair of Motorola HT820 Bluetooth Headphones, and I can also use it as an audio source in the car, as my car audio is AD2P equipped as well. The Blackberry isn’t DRM capable though, and that was the final reason for cancelling the Napster subscription.
Tags: amazon, audio source, best buy, blackberry, bluetooth headphones, car audio, five minutes, motorola, motorola ht820, motorola ht820 bluetooth, mp3 player, napster, napster library, pain in the butt, quality sound, regard, sandisk, tunes, whole lot, windows media player
29 Aug 08 Comcast Caps Coming
So it’s official.
Comcast have publicly announced what they’ve been denying they’ve been practising for ages. No, not blocking P2P traffic – but download capping.
From October 1, all residential customers will be subject to a 250GB cap. Ok, it’s better than some North American operators that have caps as low as 60GB in place, but in these days of audio and certainly video downloading it still stinks.
Comcast say that less than 1% of users will be affected. This again is perhaps true, but as more and more folks use online video, that is going to increase.
Surely it would be better to bring the network up to modern standards, rather than limiting users, but then that would encourage more users to download TV and video from the Internet, than pay for numerous premium rate channels.
My opinion is that everything will eventually come through the net. The technology is there already; it’s just the likes of Comcast that don’t want to see the true convergence of Television and Internet. If they did, it would be widespread now. There would be media centers in very many living rooms. After all, if a viewer can afford a 40-50 inch HD TV, then they can probably afford a computer with HD output to drive it all. It makes sense too. It’s still not easy to get the downloaded movie from your PC to your TV – not nearly as easy as it could be, for the majority of folks.
Meanwhile, the Twin Cities are getting 50mbps download speeds, with 5mbps upload, albeit at a price. The service is to come on stream shortly for $149.99 a month. Then again, if you have Comcast Internet, and all the TV channels they offer, the bill is currently around $200 anyway – so why not simply have a bigger pipe, and get the whole lot off the net? It would be easy to build charging model in – what’s happened to smart cards that go into your computer to unlock premium channels? Wasn’t there some law that mandated that a few years back?
Mind you, will these wideband users in the Twin Cities be subject to the 250GB cap as well? That would truly suck.
Tags: caps, comcast, comcast internet, download speeds, hd tv, premium rate, residential customers, smart cards, Television, traffic, true convergence, tv channels, twin cities, whole lot
