Y5G?

We are continually being sold 5G by every mobile phone network, but seriously who actually needs it? Yes it's faster but it's like telling your average punter that they need an HGV or Formula 1 Racing Car to get about. I'm not dissing 5G , and I can see that it can have many applications, but I remember streaming movies on 3G and 4G is generally more than adequate for all my needs. If my broadband is off I can use my 4G signal with no problem.

I can see possibly that when you are 5G you can stream very high definition movies but if you are watching on a phone or computer will you get any benefit from that?  Obviously your data usage will shoot through the roof but maube that's what the mobile phone companies are looking at.

The ads will tell you  you can download a movie or album in seconds, but given the amount who streaming platforms who is going to be downloading anything. I use Netflix, Amazon Prime , BBC iPlayer , All4 and lots of others to watch things on my 40" television , and I recently purchased "Dancing Tunes" by Edward II and "Chapter Zero" by Jordan Reyne from Bandcamp and downloaded them via my broadband , but 4G would have been fine. 

By the way a lot of Bandcamp artists make music available free such as the song "Dancing Girls" by Dead Eyes Opened (great goth band) or on pay what you want so a great source of music worth supporting if you can.

So given that I started on 5G and finished on Bandcamp here's "The Banana Boat Song" from "Dancing Tunes" by Edward II , it is a totally joyful album and if you can get a signal you can stream it over 3G, 4G or 5G.

There's Only One Thing Worse ........

..... than something not working is something (apparently) working when its shouldn't do. This happened to me this morning. Maybe my reactions were slow, maybe I was tired and if I'd have thought properly this wouldn't have happened.

I switched on my PC and it said there was no internet connection. Hmm I thought, then I thought "Ah My Phone is connected to my router via WiFi, I 'll check that" ... and of course it was working fine. It must be my PC, or the cable, but all my checks seemed to imply that the cabling was fine. I though "I don't want to have to install a new internet thing into the PC" but it was pointing towards the PC being the problem.....

... then I remembered  I had the switch on my phone set use 4G if there was no wifi connection, rebooted the modem and all was fine. I spent half an hour messing with wires and connecting and disconnecting when if I'd have just rebooted the modem all would have been sorted because I thought my phone was running off WiFi when it was really running off 4G. C'est la vie.

Also this is my 1200th post just thought I'd tell you that, there is probably enough stuff on here to actually work out a book from, I'm sure psychiatrists would have a field day ("He's a Very Boring and Uninteresting Person, Lock Him Up").

So as I write this I am listening to my Faces boxed set that my girls bought me, so I'll play a Faces song and what should it be? "That's All You Need" is probably my favourite slide driven rock song of all time, so I think we'll go with that.

Have a brilliant Friday night my friends, best night of the week, Monday is 48 hours away so plenty of time to relax and have fun.

Going Mobile With Entertainment

I was pleased to find that the latest version of BBC iPlayer now allows downloads to my phone, actually allowing the same as 4OD. This means that as well as music, and TED I can now watch quality TV on the move.

Mobile Phone History

A lot of mobile companies advertise how brilliant their service is, but it's only any good if you can maintain a constant signal. So it's fine if you are not moving , but when you are on the train very often there's a heck of a lot of signal drop out. That's why you need to be able to download what you want to watch and listen for when there is no signal. Devices these days have huge capacity that you can usually expand with an SD card (unless you go the Apple route) , so this week I am going to be really spoilt for choice.

Although annoyingly the 4OD app still demands you be connected to wifi when my EE 4G would be far better for downloading programs.

I thought I'd include an appropriate TED talk for this post. So Have a wonderful week my friends.

Lord Rochester Gets His Skates on

Nineteen days in and I had a great idea for todays post because of something that happened and now it's gone. I'm not going to have anything from Adele's "19" or Paul Hardcastle's "19" though. The summer is still here despite doom mongers forecasting rain , but it still looks extremely sunny to me.

Tonight I was waiting for a train at Darlington and was just shocked how people would rather cram themselves into a hot , airless carriage on an effectively four carriage train than wait ten minutes and travel in comfort. You find the same with drivers who have to overtake the car in front to save a few seconds on their journey. Impatience is not a virtue and just makes your life experience worse.

Sometimes a little waiting and chilling makes life so much more palatable. Well I'm going to The Schooner tonight where I saw the excellent Lord Rochester and as Rochester has just gone superfase the EE's 4G I think we'll have "Hey Bo Diddley" which is taken at speed:

Forgot Your Book .. Try TED

This is just a short post about what happened to me yesterday . Nothing special , but I usually take a book to read on the way to work , currently Simon Winder's Germania. Anyway yesterday I forgot it. I have a smartphone , a Samsung Note 2 , on which I have two E-Readers (Aldiko and Kindle) , internet access with 4G Speed if I'm in rage of a signal and the TED (Technology Education and Design not the Seth MacFarlane film , though I do love Seth MacFarlane's stuff)  app. This enabled me to download a few talks when I was waiting for the train in Newcastle , which served me for the journeys to and from work.

There's thousands of tals all of which are both useful and entertaing. The first was to save time when using technology , then there was one about tracking down the Kraken (giant Squid) . I've included them for your own extertainment but it's now time for me to get off to work.

Hook-a-Gate and iPad Annoyances

Well finally got to Hook-a-Gate yesterday and although there’s little phone signal (E at best certainly no 4G) the cottage does actually have free Wi-Fi.  However as usual the iPad refuses to acknowledge that the signal exists, so I can only access the internet through the iPad by tethering to my Samsung Note 2 with the weak mobile signal although I suppose I could tether to the wifi with the phone then tether to the phone but that might just tie it in knots.

Hook-a-Gate is a small village in Shropshire with a couple of pubs, one of which, The New Inn , is incredibly busy but welcoming and does superb food. While there is obviously money in the village the prices in the pub are extremely reasonable.

The Old Coach House where we are staying comes complete with cat who has an enormous sense of entitlement and seems to think it owns the place. You can check the details here.

Oh yes and the laptop has a Java update that insists on getting you to install the Ask Toolbar and McAfee PC Slow Down Software. I recently spent an hour decluttering  someone’s PC after telling them it was OK to install the Java update forgetting to tell them to uncheck the Ask and McAfee installs. There was another piece of software on there , apparently recommended by RBS which effectively wouldn’t let you uninstall it because it was “protecting” the PC. Most of this is the equivalent of fitting four Denver boots to your car and throwing away the keys to make sure it doesn’t get stolen and you don’t have a crash.

Anyway time to have something to ea.

Oh we're also currentlly watching The Wire with it's excellent opening Tom Waits penned credits song , "Way Down In The Hole".

Forecast Cloudy

The lyrics to the Joni Mitchell song are remarkable pertinent to to The Cloud we know todow.

I keep getting bombarded with offers of Cloud storage (Apple/iTunes) and Cloud Players (Amazon). These are all very well and each has offered me 5GB of free storage so I can listen to my own music anywhere. However these are dependent on a reliable internet connection , so it's fine if you are at home or at a friends , or maybe in an area with reliable free WIFI. In a 4G area it will also be fine and 10GB is a hell of a lot of space to play with.

But you have to remember it's only available when you have a connection. When 4G is ubiquitous speed will not be an issue for anyone , but remember that your daya and files will effectively under someone elses control.

On the numbers involved my first desktop computer had a 10 MB hard disc , (thats 10 minutes of normal quality MP3 music!) , but I could still play colour graphic games under the DOS operating system.

The amounts of cloud storage would enable you to store 400 albums of music , a dozen DIVX movies but there wouldnt be enough room to store a High Definition movie within the 5GB, although they do offer you more space at a price. Though I would rather watch through Netflix or Blinkbox and again you come down to the issue of having a permnent reliable connection.

You are not at the moment able to watch a streamed movie in a remote Scottish Glen on on the train from Aberdeen to London.

I still havent used my Cloud Storage yet ........

The Music Collection

My Music Collection

This is really a follow on from the vinyl question I posed yesterday about the nature of music collections. Wreckless Eric and Amy Rigby are playing The Central Bar on 8th March and I thought I'd track down my copy of their album , which I purchased when I was a subscriber to Emusic.I looked at the screen and thought thats how loads of people see their music collections . You will download stuff and maybe never listen to it because it goes onto your portable device and only gets played if the shuffle algorithm includes it.

This set in with the advent of CD which allowed you to skip , program and shuffle discs. Then you got the multi disc sets and eventually you could burn your own with just the tracks you thought you liked.

With vinyl you tended to listen to at least oneside of an album as track skipping meant lifting the needle and moving on to the track you wanted . You could also stack singles and create your own vinyl playlist, but the vinyl always got played all the way through.

You get broadband and 4G operators telling ius we can download a track in seconds . That may be but music is meant to be listened to not downloaded! Many people will have huge digital collections that they have bnever listened to. Below is an Amazon playlist consisting of cheap compilation albums each containing at least 100 tracks each. You can download these in next to no time but 100 tracks is around six hours listening time , that's a quarter of a day.

It seems that music to a lot of people is just something they collect making you wonder why they bother downloading. You see the bluetooth speakers which effectively recreate the transistor radio scenario of the sixties.



The benefit of a vinyl or cassette based set up is that you will listen to the music rather than just store it on a hard disc or a phone. a friend of mine Mike O' Brien asked what will kids today say when you ask them what was your first record? They will probably just gawp.

My first records were Jig-A-Jig by East of Eden on the Deram, label (single) and The Best Of T.Rex on the Fly lable for my album. Enjoy the playlist , and enjoy some real music.

The First Post

...of 2013 and hoping it will be as enjoyable a year as 2012. Seen some great gigs , including several nights at The Stand in Newcastle , as well as Lord Rochester's inaugural gig at The Schooner in Gateshead , that rarity , a Half Man Half Biscuit gig in Newcastle.

I finally got an iPad and have generally been impressed with it , though the app that sold it me was Garageband. I've also got a 4G Samsung Note 2 courtesy of EE and am impressed with that as well having watched the excellent Cockneys vs Zombies on it as well as a few episodes of Hebburn and getting my first taste of In-Betweeners via 4OD. Incidentally Hebburn features Steffen Peddie as Big Keith , and I met him at The Stand where he had the crowd in stitches laughing , he halso has a Monday night residency so is well worth checking out.

Was also impressed with Sky's "Young Doctors Notebook"  featuring John Hamm and Daniel Radcliffe . Black comedy of the highest order featuring sex and drugs and blood and tabs , if you missed it get hold of a copy one way or another. Harry Potter it is not.

As I say hope 2013 has as much to offer as 2012

4G No Ubiquity ... Yet

Just a short post on EE 4G. It is excellent to be able to stream TV on applications such as iPlayer , but you do need to have a constant signal. Cable provides and uninterupted flow , and did anaolgue TV and now Freeview through the airwaves.

BBCs iPlayer on the iPad allows you to downlaod episodes to watch when you are not connected , but the Android version I have on my Samsung Note 2 doesnt sem to have that option. This means that when you leave the 4G area in Newcastle on the way south your program stops , not a great customer experience caused by the face that you cant download when in the 4G signal range.

When 4G is ubiquitous streaming will be find , but even free media apps should provide the option of downloading when in a good signal area.

4G or Not 4G?

Well I eventually went for it. Basically 4G provides with faster downloads and uploads and will cause you to use a lot more data than you did under 3G. When you are in a 4G area you soon become used to fast response times which under 3G could take an age especially media rich web pages.


Youtube under 3G was always good , so I dont notice musch difference under 4G , but BBC iPlayer was virtually unusable on 3G , but on 4G becomes a very good media delivery channel.

I was going to do a series of posts of my experience with 4G  and this is the first . EE have given (well sold) me a a LTE enabled Samsung Note 2 , and it's an impressive device. I used my original Note to watch Cockneys vs Zombies , I see the new device with 4G being used to watch a lot more.

Today I am going down to London so I will see how it fares , when I get down there I am going to tether it with my iPad to see if that's a viable opyion. I have a monthly data allowance of 10 Gb , I have a feeling i this brave new data world that may not be enough.

To paraphrase Robert Shaw in Spielberg's Jaws :

    "We're gonna need a bigger data allowance"

50 Years Of Cassette

This Sunday 6Music have a celebration of 50 years of the cassette tape. Check it out here

Casette gave us both convenience and the ability to mess about with songs and sounds. I was a fan of Joe Meek and various experimental artists and spent hours recording to tape , splicing and and making a lot of not very impressive noises , but I enjoyed and learned a lot about the fragility and versatility of the medium.

It's small size meant for the first time you could take your own music with you . Previously the transistor radio was the only portable option.

Cassette was Vinyl's portable , personally recordable counterpart. It's main problem is that , like vinyl, it's a fragile decaying medium. Tape heads got dirty , tapes became unravelled , tangled , twisted . You don't get that with your MP3 player or iPod. However Sony's game changer , the Walkman was a godsend . It meant you could listen to music anywhere , and annoy people anywhere and some Walkmans had radios as well , best of both worlds.

It was briefly superceded by mini disc , another Sony innovation I think , which was eventually overtaken by hard disk players and finally solid state. If 4G becomes ubiquitous we may see the solid state players replaced by stream players , but for that you need a continuous reliable signal, and that is unlikely to happen because there are always places where you are unable to get a signal.

RPM in Newcastle has a stock of vintage music centres , along with cassettes and vinyl to play on them , which is excellent if you have the room and inclination for that.

It's unlikely that I will ever own another cassette player but cassettes certainly provided me with lots of fun , inspiration and convenience in their heyday and ironically the stadard tape length of 90 minutes was almost the same time capacity as a CD.

Accentuate The Positive

My third post today , just to make sure that the last post wasnt the first thing that people see when they get to the blog. Yes it'll get buried in the other pile of posts but really I wanted to say something happy and positive and end (or start depending on which way you look at it) the week on a high note and feeling good.

Last week was full of lots of things happening and next week , workwise will be even fuller with people off looking after kids for half term. The thing is , as well as your own work you have to cover for other people , which makes you aware of what they do , and appreciate them knowing they will do the same for you . The other thing is that when you are so busy time just flies by at work , and that makes you appreciate being , home , being able to go out and spend time with friends.

We are at the advent of 4G communication with EE (get your 4G phone here) which can bring people closer together as well puting a wealth of knowledge within your grasp. I know this internet thing has a lot of frivolous stuff , but it is  a wonderful reference library and also a source of entertainent. You hold a phone in your havnd and it can act as a link to friends and love ones , a reference library and a source of entertainment. Star Trek or Hitch Hiker's Guide To The Galaxy here we come.

Well I  am looking forward to this week , lots of great opportunities , a big party on Saturday , a few train journeys , maybe get to see Skyfall and lots of other things.

Most people can find something good in their life and if you concentrate on those things life definitely improves. Fighting and war does no one any good and is just destructive. Build something , enjoy something , have fun , Life is good.