Why I won’t be going back to Kwik Fit

Lincoln

Yesterday whilst driving around town my brakes started playing up.
So I drove straight to the nearest garage which was open on a Sunday, the KwitFit on Newark Road.
I arrived just after 3 and the sign on the wall said they closed at 4.
Speaking to the man inside the conversation went something like this.

Me: I think my brakes are faulty.
KF: What’s the problem?
Me: The brake peddle is different and the handbrake is going up much higher?
KF: Hmmm… problem is I close in 25 minutes and if I take the brake pads off and they fall apart….
Me: I’m in no rush, don’t really fancy driving the car.
KF: You can bring it in tomorrow, we open at 8.30
(I start work at 8am)
Me: Any chance I can just leave the car here.
KF: Hmmm…. Insurance… Already have some cars… Hmmmm…… You “could” leave it outside (looks suggest that this isn’t actually an option).
Me: Well I really don’t want to be driving tomorrow morning, the forcast isn’t great for driving.
KF: (more looks)

In the end I drove home, and parked the car, at which point the brakes just gave up.
With customer service like this I’m not going anywhere near Kwit-Fit again.

Zutons at the Engine Shed

Reviews

Wow, my second blog post in as many days.

On Friday night the David, Estelle the misses and me went to watch the Zutons at the Lincoln Engine Shed.
Whilst at best I recognised around 7 of their songs (really should have listened to their albums before going), it was a great night.

The highlight was the encore where they just jammed for around 10 minutes including a great drum solo.

If you get the chance they are great live, and if you live near Lincoln and haven’t been to the Engine Shed you should. It’s one of the best venues I’ve been to.

7/10

BBC iPlayer Streaming on the X1 (or even the Diamond or Touch Pro)

iPlayer, Mobiles

Edit: 11/12/2008 The BBC have annouced that the X1 is now supported, however it won’t run over Vodafone at the mo.

Since the BBC launched the iPlayer for the N96 I knew it wouldn’t be too long until it would be available for other phones. However I can’t wait, so spent today looking for methods in getting my X1 to stream the shows.
I managed to extract the RTSP stream of Buzzcocks and successfully got that working on my phone. My next step was to find a way that didn’t involve me using my PC opening a collection of random XML files in order, to then email a link to my phone.

Several hours of coding and I managed to strip out the opening the files on the PC to a simple web script, however I still needed the 8 letter/number code for the episode to be parsed to the page.
Then when looking at the BBC source I noticed something. They now support the Samsung I900 a Windows Mobile device.
The method for checking if your phone is a Samsung, a simple User-Agent check.

Knowing how to modify the User-Agent in Opera on my X1 I placed the code need to pass the check and BINGO my phone now loads the BBC page and plays the shows.

These are the steps for an X1i Vodafone UK Branded
Run Opera
In the address bar enter opera:config (no http://)
Scroll down to User Prefs and click
Scroll down to Custom User-Agent and at the end of the pre-filled text add sgh-i900
Scroll down some more and press Save. You will get a prompt which suggests you may need to reset the phone, but for this you don’t.

Now point your browser to http://www.bbc.co.uk/mobile/iplayer/ and enjoy.

If on your phone the Custom User-Agent is blank, try visiting something like whatsmyuseragent.com copying the User-Agent which your phone is currently displaying and then add sgh-i900 to the end.

WARNING: Please only use whilst on WIFI. I accept no responsibility for you running up HUGE bills due to large data downloads. Even if you have an “unlimited” add-on, check with your network for their Fair Usage (Vodafone’s is 500mb) as you can quickly exceed it watching TV on your mobile!

The quality isn’t exactly great on a WVGA screen as it’s been built for the Nokia N96. According to beebhack these are the specs.

Access Method: RTSP streaming
Video Codec: H.264
Video Resolution: 320 x 176
Video Bitrate: 128 kbps
Audio Codec: AAC
Audio Bitrate: 64 kbps
Overall Bitrate: 192 kbps

ps if you get a BBC 502 error, don’t worry. Looks like they are playing about with the site themselves. Just try again later.

iPlayer to allow downloads to mobile phones…

iPlayer, Mobiles

…sort of. The BBC have launched Sideloading in which you can now download programmes from the iPlayer in a lower res format to copy across to your phone or video playing handheld device.
The current restrictions are that your mobile must play DRM Windows Media files and that the downloads take place on a Windows PC.
This looks like another great bit of progress for the iPlayer project, just need to get myself a new phone which will play the files now.

FFS have you guys (and ladies) not heard of email?

LibDemBlogs

I’m just wondering, because when something goes wrong on LibDemBlogs, it seems that you no longer email me, but instead write blog posts. Which due to things going wrong mean I can’t see them!

I have now spotted the second “Am I banned?” post, which tries to make out that the blogger is a victim of a secret LibDem blogging conspiracy, whereas emailing me would have got the answer quickly.

Then when LibDemBlogs goes down because my webhosting company think it’s funny to display error messages instead whilst I’m busy at work, do bloggers think “I’ll just drop Ryan an email to let him know, I’m sure I’ve got his email address around here somewhere as I emailed him before about being added to the site”? Nope, instead they post on their blogs “Who has stolen LibDemBlogs”, or visit forums or cix and try to guess what has happen.

My email address and information about why your posts might go missing is included in the About (FAQ) section of LibDemBlog, I suggest some of you might want to read it.

Liberal Tweets

LibDemBlogs,

The eagle eyed of you may have noticed the “Tweets” tab on LibDemBlogs. With conference now starting (I’ll be there tomorrow), it though it was time to let the latest project go live.
Liberal Tweets is a sort of LibDem Blogs for Twitter and hopes to cover the micro-blogging experiences of those both at conference and away from the venue.
It’s still in quite an early phase, but hopefully will hold out whilst I’m away from ftping for the week.
Feedback and suggestions in the comments.

Liberal Democrats for Obama

focusFodder, ,

Liberal Democrats for Obama

A while back I sliently closed the focusFodder spreadshirt shop. However after looking at the Barack Obama site I decided that I wanted a nice Obama top.
Due to foreign donation laws I’m not allowed to buy direct from the Obama Store, and the graphics on CafePress weren’t that great. So I’m pleased to annouce that I’ve launched “Liberal Democrats for Obama” in five different styles for you to purchase.
Postage to the UK is only £2.20 and their turnaround should be around 5 days.

TV on my TV

Tech

Ever since I started watching DIVX / XVID versions of my favourite TV shows from the States I’ve always wanted to run them through my TV, instead of watching them on my PC.
Media Centre PC’s have been available for some time, plus streaming set-top boxes that read the files from over the Wifi. However these require extra money.

I had noticed that my DVD player would play DIVX files from disc, however only from a CD and not a DVD which meant only 2 episodes per disc, and I had no choice over which one it picked first.

However today I’ve installed some stuff on my Wii which allows me to watch files from either a USB stick in the back, or on the SD card.
The software also makes it possible to stream files over Wifi, however at the moment it’s just running a bit too slow, and it doesn’t have a browser for this option, all files names need to be hard written into a config file.

So what do you need to start watching the files:

  • A Nintendo Wii
  • A copy of Zelda, Twilight Princess (you can borrow from a mate or rental store for a day)
  • An SD card (2gb max for some reason)
  • A PC to download files
  • A memory card reader to put files onto the memory card via your PC

Now once you have the above, visit this site to download all the Wii Homebrew Software.
The boxes you need to tick are:

  • Homebrew Channel
  • Twilight Hack (correct for your region)
  • MPlayerWii (a newer version although can be found here)

You may have noticed some emulators, I’m not talking about those here, but feel free to tick the boxes to download them as well.
Once you’ve ticked all the boxes you want, hit the Create my custom pack button.

You will now have a ZIP file on your PC. You will need to extract this to the ROOT of your SD card.

Now pop Zelda and the SD card into your Wii. If you have never played Zelda on this Wii, start it up, and exit as soon as possible.
Have a watch of this video to see how you install the HomeBrew channel on to your Wii.

Once installed you no longer need Zelda, so put it back on the shelf or return it to whoever was kind enough to lend it to you.

Now open up the HomeBrew channel, run the MPlayerWii app and you should be able to select the SD Card or the USB Stick.

Minor LibDemBlogs Outage

LibDemBlogs

Some of you may have noticed LibDemBlogs going down today. Turns out after two hours of code checking and finding nothing odd, I discovered that my webserver had run out of file space. This meant that the dump file of all the blog posts couldn’t be saved in full, and in turn made LDB look ugly.
Luckily for me I only needed to delete some rather large temp files to get my file space back to normal. Hopefully future service will be a bit more realiable.