June 2012 – Technology Stuff

28 June 2012

Music, books, movies and tan slacks

After announcing their new 7″ Google Nexus 7 tablet at the Google I/O conference keynote, Google released a video talking about the device and the benefits it provides users. After clicking play, make sure you turn on closed captions by clicking the “cc” button.

It was pointed out to me that Google have used automatic closed captions on their video and let’s just say the transciption of speech to text was not perfect, and in some ways quite amusing.

Thank you to Ron Mitchell for pointing this out to me.

23 June 2012

Lost my fibre…

Back in October 2010 I upgraded my broadband to FTTC and improved my internet speeds dramatically….

Finally had my broadband upgraded to FTTC and I am impressed. With 40Mb down and 10Mb up this is significantly faster than the 1.3 down and 0.6 up I had before.

It has already changed how I use the internet, whereas before I would probably not consider downloading a film from iTunes during the day, as it would soak up my bandwidth and would take hours to download; now it takes under five minutes to download! No problems with downloading large files and updates now.

This week I lost access to FTTC and dropped back down to those old slow ADSL speeds I thought I had left behind.

The reason was simple I moved house!

Though I only (really) moved down the road and even though I am still connected to the same enabled telephone exchange, it would appear that the cabinet I am connected to hasn’t been upgraded! So as a result no FTTC for me.

The first big issue was digging out an ADSL Modem to use, and alas the one I had, had probably been in the garage or a while, and didn’t work. You can’t use the modem that is provided with FTTC, hence the need for an ADSL Modem. Spent about an hour trying to work out why the old D-Link modem wasn’t working. Doing a hard reset didn’t work. So it was a quick trip to PC World to find a cheap ADSL Modem. In the end I got the Netgear N150 Wireless ADSL2+ Modem Router. I didn’t in fact need the wireless as I use Apple’s Airport Extreme for my wireless networking.

It was easy to configure via a web browser and it wasn’t long before I was connected and using the ADSL connection.

Back when I got fibre I wrote:

The other key advantage is streaming video, which was almost pointless before due to buffering, and like downloading, previous streaming would soak up my bandwidth, having 40Mb down means I can stream and do other stuff at the same time.

Now that I am back on ADSL (and slow ADSL at that) I am once again unable to stream video through my connection and do anything else. An experiment with BBC iPlayer resulted in a slow browsing experience and buffering video. Now that’s going to be annoying and frustrating. The first casualty looks like it will be my Netflix subscription… if I can’t stream video then what is the point? It will also become a hassle to download video files from iTunes too.

I also have concerns about webinars and Skype as I have a very poor upload speed.

Now don’t get me wrong, I love our new house, it’s great. I just hope that BT will get around to upgrading the cabinet soon so I can get FTTC. I also hope they can upgrade the cabinet…. would be doubly annoying if I could never get back on fibre.

12 June 2012

Voice Dictation

Hello welcome to another blog post. I’m using voice dictation of this blog post which means I’m talking to my computer now I’m in a quiet environment so as a result this should be quite easy computer to pick up my voice and also to understand what I’m saying. I’m wondering whether I should go back and get it this text is quite pickup want to say that’s one of the problems with voice dictation is that while he doesn’t always pick up well. Planning to say was that the problem of voice dictation ethernet typing text that you want people to wind is not quite the same and somebody listening to a voice and speak you send me realise that you don’t speak properly be using is like a B and then you guys know what I’m talking about. So if you speak clearly and reasonably slowly then voice dictation will accurately turn your voice into text if you talk about your computer as though it was somebody in a coffee shop drinking coffee and new words and change things here are that I have the honesty using going to be very useful. So as a colour that last paragraph and did not turn out as expected if you speak clearly and reasonably slowly invoice dictation will Aquitaine voice into text if you decide to talk to your computer in a way in the same manner for example that you talk to somebody in a coffee shop and then your computer will convert your speech into text Blatchley somebody really your blog post. With somebody reading your blog posts and they will think were you drinking something else other than coffee when you wrote that you would not want to bring you were speaking and maybe they may be a little bit understandable voice dictation has some way to go before it becomes taintedness. That lasts sentence should’ve ended become totally useful rather then becomes taintedness I’m unsure what taintedness he’s having that were prices underlined in rates is from the real world anyway so there is going to be a lot speaking very slowly for the computer was slowly and clearly I think voice dictation has some way to go before it becomes useful and usable. I think you might need a good microphone too.