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Technology | Web Development | Travel & family | Sport | Misc
| Posted | Comment |
| roj Sport 14 June 2010 |
DLC 1sts managed to stay up in div 3 for next winter season, but it went to the last match. Because I basically missed the first half of the season I have now carried on into summer league, our team and the opposition is pretty much the same, just some of the courts are a lot hotter! Its the first time I have played in the summer since my first couple of seasons in teh late '80s, so the extar bounce is taking some getting used. I'm sure it will make me a better player, certainly a fitter one anyway! |
| roj Sport 1 March 2010 |
After our move down south last summer and a season off squash (no time with the birth of the twins) I have now started playing for Didcot LC in the Oxford squash league, currently for their first team in Div 3. I last played Oxford league in 94/95 for Challow Country club and before that for my first club Regent SC, it’s been quite a few years away but I still am recognising the odd player. OSRA league site. |
| roj Sport 13 August 2009 |
Well never say never, I ended up playing a large part of the 2009 season for MBC, for the A's after a club reorganisation saw the A's once again become the first team and the Rookie Torrent team become the second team, with the for NL team, the Eagles being wound up after 10 years of play. My last game was the 28th June, fittingly the MBC derby of the A's v Torrent, and I finished my last at bat with a double of another MBC founder member Ian Marchment who was pitching for the Torrent. It was an extra special year because my eldest son Alex came to all the games with me. |
| roj Sport 25 February 2009 |
Well 2008 saw my last game of baseball or MBC (Manchester baseball), and I have officially retired as a player. In total I played 175 league games (plus 12 cup) for MBC over 11 years, collecting 263 hits (7 home runs) and 170 RBI’s. I also pitched in at least a quarter of those games, and for 2 years I was club president and first team manager as well. So it’s a shame, but it’s time to move on. When I have time again I may go back to village cricket - hopefully with my son Alex (but I will be teaching him baseball too!). Until then I’ll just grab a round of golf whenever I can. |
| roj Technology 25 February 2009 |
No w that the price of blu-ray players has reached the price of HD-DVD a year ago, and also are available as profile 2.0. I’ve gone dual format and bought a blu-ray player, the Sony BDP S350. I bought it just before Christmas to take advantage of the various free disc offers, in fact I ended up getting 8 blu-rays with it – one more free disc than I got with Toshiba HD EP30! So how is it? Well I like it, obviously the quality of the (picture) output is exactly the same as the HD-DVD, but the player is well built, has digital coax and optical audio outs (nice) and the sound quality is as good if not better then my EP30. For upscaling standard DVDs it’s probably not as good as the EP30, but Toshiba has always been better with DVD. However due to the S350’s quick boot up time (much quicker than the EP30) and the S350 taking the only digital audio connection to my home cinema surround sound setup, it is my DVD player of preference. I won’t be giving up my EP30 though, it’s a nice machine and I still have a lot of great HD movies picked up really cheap (eg. Blade Runner, 2001, Matrix, etc). I’ll buy a few favourites on blu and use it for rental, but won’t be building a collection yet. Prices of discs are coming down, but are still too expensive and we rarely watch films more than once. The only real question is where was this BD player a year ago? |
| roj Technology 11 August 2008 |
Well I've had my old SPV M700 (the rebranded HTC3600) mobile for a year so I was due an upgrade. I wanted to keep windows mobile and my sling player and I like HTC phones so I was thinking of getting the O2 XDA Orbit as an upgrade. That would require a switch of operators so I gave orange a call on the off chance they had a new phone coming out I didn't know about, and they did the HTC Touch Diamond, HTC's newest phone and one they are now putting their name to rather than allowing it to rebranded. This is a nice phone, windows mobile 6.1, 3MB camera, 3G+ and almost half the size of my SPV. I have the upgrade now and it really is a great looking phone, and good for browsing too (it has the new opera mini browser installed as its default browser). Funnily enough it came out on almost exactly the same day as the new iPhone, which also looks a good phone and I considered it for a minute, but settled on the new HTC. BTW HTC have installed its TouchFlo system on top of windows which allows the phone to really be used without a stylus (there still is one for when you want it). Its worth noting that HTC have been making touch phones for years, so this is not a iPhone rip off. The only negatives are that HTC decided not to add a SD slot for extra memory (4Gb is on board), and it still does not have a 3.5" stereo jack so you can't use your own head phones (you can buy an adapter but its not in the box). You can see the phone on orange here.
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| roj Technology 22 June 2008 |
I saw all the news about the Freesat launch recently, not immediately relevant to me because I have a skyHD box, the only new HD channel on offer via Freesat is ITV (which I never watch). However it did get me thinking about the spare satellite connection and my new powerful PC. I have tried DVB-T in the past in my PC and picked up a load of channels, but I ditched this once I got my Slingbox. However getting and recording HD (mostly BBCHD for now) via Freesat would be nice.
A bit of research later and I can see that if I get a DVB-S card I should be able to pick up Freesat, and for now that will include the HD channels, one day they plan to broadcast the HD over DVB-S2 but for now are on DVB-S. So I need one which will run with Vista 64 and two I narrow down on are the Hauppauge Nova S2 (DVB-S and S2 about £70)) and the Pinnacle 7010i (dual DVB-T and dual DVB-S about £35). The latter seems to be a couple of years old and is PCIe instead of PCI, but I have a spare PCIe port and I manage to pick one up from Play.com for £32 (they’ve now sold out and these are hard to come by). It installs a treat, Vista gets the drivers for me as soon as I boot up. I don’t bother to run the enclosed software, but instead try (a buy for about £10) a copy of DVBviewer, which is pretty easy to use and can scan about 500 video and audio channels over satellite). I can’t watch the HD channels because none of my H.264 codec (I had Nero and ATI) work, so I try (and buy for about £7.50) the Coreavc H.264 codec and I then pick up beautiful BBC and Luxe HD channels, the latter seems to have pretty average content, but BBCHD is worth the license fee alone. ITV HD at the moment still eludes me but I’m not losing sleep over it! I found 2 pretty helpful threads on getting this all running, one on avforms and one on digitalspy. |
NB: All views and opinions on this website are my own, and not those of any employer,
or institute related to my research.