[blacklion1725]

In my experience even the mildest complaint/comment about non/late delivery to Amazon normally ends up with a month’s free Prime/extension. I use this link:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/help/contact-us/general-questions.html?skip=true

Polite and pro-Amazon tempered with mild disappointment seems to be the perfect tone to strike…..:)

 

[blacklion1725]

Instant reaction was surely not but looks like it can be done expensively from a display port

[blacklion1725]

Not a big fan of Android VLC – there is another ad-free player here if (only if) you want a simple player that plays on the basis of how you have your music organised rather than based on taggging. Similar to Folder Music Player (Free) but no ads.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.folderplayer&rdid=com.folderplayer

 

[blacklion1725]

Yep City fell on their feet – and then hit the jackpot when the owners bought the stadium outright and ploughed zillions in…..We got trainwreck of a stadium on HP for 99 years. To rub salt in the heralded “world class transport links” have turned out to be another myth. Stratford Station can’t cope (on the very rare days when trains are not cancelled due to engineering works), and they block off Westfield shopping centre so the walk back there is twice as long as it needs to be – with pedestrian stop/go contraflows all the way. Because it is not built for football there are three times as many ladies toilets as gents, and £4.60 for a tepid plastic bottle of beer….When you see up close how bad the stadium is – especially the upper tier (originally planned as temporary) – it is staggering to think that £700m+ has been done up the wall on it.

[blacklion1725]

I’m losing the will to live with football – my club has been ripped to shreds. We done well to get past the bond (debenture) scheme in the early 90s, but the Olympic stadium feels like the final nail in the coffin. Anyone who pipes up is told “there’s 50,000 on the waiting list” so lump it in other words.

Fans are definitely disposable customers now. I had a good run but watching a little oblong of grass plonked in the middle of a circular, badly built, ridiculously expensive stadium where you need binoculars to even tell what colour players are……no thanks.

Away games now I think…..but especially at PL level and double-especially at West Ham football as we knew it is a dead duck. It will all implode – fans are so old now – average is over 40 – and bearing in mind how many more young kids (not teenagers) go now – there is a massive generation (maybe two) gap that will see empty grounds within 10-15 years.

[blacklion1725]

Clough’s achievement’s were amazing at Forest (and to a lesser extent at Derby before) – that club winning the European Cup (read Champions League now) two years on the bounce is amazing.

Maybe time caught up with him but so did the booze – which killed him far too young. I was at the semi final in 1991 at Villa Park when Forest (including a particularly annoying young Roy Keane beat us 4-0 after Keith Hackett sent Tony Gale off) – there’s some great photos of Cloughie in (friendly/civil) discussions with some of our lot after the game.

An enigma of a bloke, football genius, but fell to the demon drink. Maybe he was past his sell by date anyway but I personally doubt it.

As an aside the City Ground – great away trip back in the day, and have always had a soft spot for Forest since they stopped Liverpool winning everything left right and centre (sorry Duke).

[blacklion1725]

Personally I would get the cables in while it is easy…..just finished wiring the last bits of my house (2 upstairs bedrooms) while running AV cables in (so floors up) – not using these cable yet but cost next to nothing and they are there if I need them – if not then no great loss. I also ran a Cat5e up to the loft to add a wifi Access Point on the upstairs ceiling if I feel like it – point is this stuff isn’t either/or – you can cater for all of it and might as well for minimal cost.

I can vouch for the Ubiquiti kit – have one serving my garden and the range, speed and stability are top drawer. My Wifi (Asus RT-AC87U router) covers the house fine without help……. but wired – especially for streaming – if you can do it then why not?

[blacklion1725]

Yeah I know what you mean. I don’t use it (Google) as a player, but as a means of tidying up your ripped (etc!) music it is superb. You get everything held online (or saved back locally) in (normally) much better condition than you uploaded (or whatever it does) is.

So much depends on how you want to access your music, I’m happy with the player I linked above for local, and with Spotify Free for “surprise me”. I also get Amazon Prime Music which is OK – but not full featured, handy though and lets you keep a lot offline.

I’ve got the paid PowerAmp which does loads but not (that I’ve found) just open a folder of music (say where you have saved an album) and play it back in the order of the folder…..seems such a simple and logical think but most players don’t seem to want to do it….including basic players like stick Android and ES.

[blacklion1725]

Ah right – still plenty (for me anyway). I went though a slow, painful but worth-it exercise to tag all my music as I want it before uploading – using Mp3Tag – so that the music appears on Google Play like it does on my hard drive(s) and SD card(s). Then after upload – the google cap allowed me to do my whole collection – downloaded it again, replacing the originals and as you say “happy days” !!

I’m half way through a free 4 month trial of full (paid) Google music – don’t think I’ve used it once – which reinforces I don’t need it.

[blacklion1725]

Play music is free – and you get (I think) 20GB free to upload your music (which miraculously is in much better shape when you download it again!). I’m very set in my ways, all my music is organised in a folder tree and the app Folder Music Player suits me. I stumped up for the pro – either to support the dev or remove ads – can’t remember.

A lot depends how your content is organised and tagged, but for offline playback in accordance with how you organised it the player above is my weapon of choice.

[blacklion1725]

Cheers – didn’t look right when I typed it – don’t think I’ve ever written it down before – never occurred to me how to spell it. Be a hard job to get the pronunciation changed in this house now! But I’ll keep the spelling for my word tin!

[blacklion1725]

I’ve got felt pads on the armchairs and poof (sp?) as well, my office chair up the other end of the room (same floor) I swapped out the casters for these and the floor is still looks good as new. I’ve actually had more grief from the fol pads trapping tiny pieces of grit and lightly scratching the floor. I need my chair to move, so opted for the replacement castors – the felt pads make sense just be sure keep the floor spotlessly clean!

[blacklion1725]

Good read and interesting project Dave – be interesting to see how this would have been done and how much more it would have cost if the government or prison service decided to do it themselves!

 

[blacklion1725]

People I know have had most grief with the miniboxes – especially if running over WiFi. Big improvement with homeplugs in a couple of cases. The main boxes seem to be prone to a freeze/lockup every now and then (like all sky boxes).

I think Duke called it right when he said Sky Q is the right solution at the wrong time – the fact that paid content is so fragmented now – Sky isn’t the one stop shop it used to be so basing your home AV setup round Sky makes less sense. If Sky lose the cricket they are gone!

[blacklion1725]

A few people I know have Sky Q with extra mini (multi-room) boxes and are finding it quite buggy. I’m not remotely tempted at the moment, even considering binning my 2nd (multiroom box) – and just paying £5 for SkyGo extra (currently included with multiroom).

Regards RF distribution and Q, mentioned on another thread this is possible for Q – but a bit of a one off outlay. Just finished mine (using old RF wiring) and helped a neighbour do similar at the weekend (they have Q without any extra miniboxes). You need to split the HDMI output of the Sky (Q) box for about a tenner, feed one output to your telly and one to one of these or these. The downside with Q is it doesn’t even support the IO RF adapter used on newer Sky HD boxes, so you need another solution for remote control. On good old Sky HD the magic eyes still work, but you just ignore the analogue channel and watch remotely in HD.

This is all dependent on good quality RF distribution, as the modulator channel runs at 16-19MB. You have to re-tune your TVs (and they need a DVBB-T2 tuner) but after that the modulated channel shows up as another Freeview(HD) channel in your line up (you can call it whatever you like).

I’ve actually shifted my setup so the modulator is on the output of my AV amp (default input is Sky), so can also distribute my Roku, Xbox and PC (all connected to the amp) to every room in the house – using apps to control the xbox and roku remotely. Very sad I know.

[blacklion1725]

Thanks Drezha not heard of that one before. I’ll have a play with my free Drive allowance and then consider if the paid option is worth it.

[blacklion1725]

Cheers for that PM – will have a nose.

[blacklion1725]

Interesting…I’m still based on OneDrive – which (with Home Premium Office 365) is very cheap for 1TB (x 5) – but slow….often very slow. What are the up and down speeds like on google drive?

[blacklion1725]

Fair play for how much data you use each month – I’m impressed 🙂 but not sure I follow your reasoning….

If you stream a 2GB film it will use 2GB of data, and if you download it it will use 2GB of data (probably in a shorter time). As Duke says streaming is downloading, but stored/cached only temporarily.

If you stream a lot more than you d/l, then that will account for a bigger bite out of your total data usage, but surely if you downloaded all that streamed content the data usage would be the same?

Only applying my layman’s logic here (so could have it all wrong)

[blacklion1725]

Stand to be corrected on all of this………

 

I think the film would be the same total amount of data, but likely to use different bandwidth….since the film will stream in real time (90 minute film will stream for 90 minutes) but would probably download a lot faster. If it downloaded 4 times faster than real time playback then it would be using 4 times the bandwidth for a quarter of the time. If a data allowance is caped at say 30GB then the impact of watching versus downloading the film would be the same (e.g. 1.5GB or whatever)

Not sure about Virgin they used to have a bad name for “traffic management” – not sure if that still applies or if they have a fair use cap on their unlimited service.

[Author]

Posts