Posts by Paul Campbell
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Speaking of "Six Months in a Leaky Boat" - it's what they played to me on hold when I was waiting to talk to NZ Post's parcel service recently - where's that fedex number ....
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And like my point above about torrents using a VPN doesn't mean that one is evading the law - one might just care about personal privacy or have commercial secrets you don't want flying free on the net - I use them all the time to work with client's software, to protect their commercial secrets something I'm bound to do by my consulting agreements
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For the record I sometimes use torrents as part of business to get around NZ's crappy internet connectivity - to send a gig or two of (my!) data offshore to more than one destination - say a client in the US and their Chinese manufacturing facility - it's faster to push a torrent and have the other destinations copy between themselves than to make 2 or 3 uploads out of NZ
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Ms Lee said last night the compilation was made of songs that were legally downloaded and paid for.
And so are all those songs on those illegal file sharing sites, they were legally paid for somewhere too.
I was thinking today about this idea that all file sharing was by default illegal - someone needs to ask the question "Does the honorable member understand that the downloading of files containing the text of NZ laws from legislation.govt.nz is file sharing but is not illegal?"
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Muse: Hey Greg O'Connor, Krup You!, in reply to Russell Brown,
In 1981, at the Gladstone Tavern in Christchurch, the Newmatics were playing at part of the legendary Screaming Blamatics Tour.The police, as they did in those days, entered, lined up along the back of the room and started eyeballing people.
They were doing that up and down the country - going into the pubs to show off their shiny (literally) new batons - a sort of pre-tour intimidation to make sure we all stayed in our places
It didn't work
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"Tank"->"Tink?
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Tim Michin's "Storm" finally came out in its animated form:
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Friday eye-candy - spot the local interest, I hadn't seen this one before - I'm sure it looks different now it's all shook up
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Time I'm afraid - there are specs for embedded codes in streams for ad insertion that could be used - whether these get passed through to you though depends on the broadcaster - you'd think the instream EIT (or in-PMT, depends on the spec) current and next program change could be used but they are usually generated elsewhere so they don't necessarily line up with the start of the program
In the US the networks have been accused of moving the start times around (by manipulating the lengths of ad breaks) to mess with PVRs - the PVRs solve this by recording a little before the beginning and past the end of a show - this causes problems when all your tuners are busy since if you have 2 tuners and want to record programs A&B that end at 2pm and C&D that start at 2pm the overlap means there are times when you are recording 4 things (you see mysky sometimes burp in this situation).
Smart PVRs will do the right thing if the back to back channels are on the same channel/qam/transponder - another reason why in general more tuners are a good thing - satellite tuners tend to be far cheaper than broadcast or cable ones (which is why mysky has 4 even though it never uses them all - probably due to peak disk bandwidth reasons - I haven't opened one but many satellite chips come in pairs these days which is probably why they have 4 rather than 3 )
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Series recording has always been a bitch to implement - at one end of the spectrum someone sits in a cubicle and tags every program that goes into the EPG - at the other you do it yourself in the box.
The first depends on someone being paid minimum wage, doing a boring job, who can't afford a PVR themselves, actually caring about getting it right. The other results in you running out of disk space after the kids series recorded The Simpsons and a local TV station did a 48 hour all weekend Simpsons marathon - I wrote a bug on our system over that - and another to add an option to allow one to delete ALL the recorded episodes of a program rather than deleting 100+ of them one by one
Mind you with a little tuning you can do a good job of series recording based on epg data without series tagging provided the stations don't mess with the epg data