Sky HD box shows FAILED a lot, and broken picture

22 Dec 2008: My second gadget-related failure of the weekend was my Sky HD box, which had spent the last two days showing a couple of problems: scheduled recordings were showing “FAILED” even though their transmission time hadn’t been reached yet; and the picture was breaking up, but oddly only on certain channels. Of course, nobody buys Sky’s expensive warranties, and they charge £65 to come and take a look, so as ever with these things, it’s off to Google. This was a hard one to track down, because it’s difficult to describe the problems in the same way as everyone else, but it turns out that loads (and I mean loads) of people are having the same problem. It’s caused by some [...]

2nd Gen iPod Nano Red gets red hot

22 Dec 2008: Two electronic gadget failures on the same day, and in both cases the solution was online. I’ll blog about my Sky+ HD box showing “FAILED” recordings in a moment, but first, my second generation red iPod Nano from early 2007, which this morning showed a “Sad Mac” icon, something I hadn’t seen on an Apple product since an old Quadra 840AV back in the 90s. I assumed it would need some sort of hard reset, but the normal reboot (press the menu and select buttons together for 6 seconds) wasn’t working, so I thought it was probably discharged, and not even recharging via the usual USB connection to my iMac. Acting on some advice online, I tried recharging using a [...]

Best of 2008. No arguments.

21 Dec 2008: My cultural highlights of the year were probably the Saw Doctors at Cambridge, Roger Waters at the O2, Kylie (aw, bless) at the O2, Simon Day at Cambridge, Happy Go Lucky, Iron Man, Juno, There Will Be Blood, all of the great medal-winning performances at the Olympics, Ebbsfleet United winning at Wembley, England beating Croatia, Holland at the European Championships, the Wimbledon final, the end of the last Grand Prix of the season, Essex beating Kent to win the FP Trophy final at Lord’s, Cricinfo’s County Championship Fantasy Cricket, Gavin and Stacey, Outnumbered, The Apprentice, Little Dorrit (except the rubbish ending), Danny Baker on 6-0-6, Kermode and Mayo on Five Live, the TWTD Naked Football podcast, Stephen Fry’s podcasts, PhotoshopDisasters.com, [...]

Best live band in the world

17 Dec 2008: If there’s a better live band in the world than the Saw Doctors, I’d travel a long, long way to see them. I’ve seen great bands with fanatical local following (Ezio etc) and great bands with fanatical worldwide following (Pink Floyd, Bruce Springsteen, etc) but I’ve never seen a band make a crowd as happy as the Saw Doctors do. The last time I got as excited as I did at tonight’s Saw Doctors gig was probably a couple of years ago – the last time I saw them. They make you so happy you almost want to cry. Honestly, if you said I had only two hours to live and could spend it any way I wanted, this would [...]

Say it with Tommy. Or Ben.

10 Dec 2008: The more I think about this, the more I think it’s a great idea. Say It is a excellently-designed (technically and aesthetically) site with a really fun product too – what’s not to like? The site allows you to send a professionally-recorded poem or song to someone, and to have their name inserted into it as appropriate too. Sounds corny? Yep. Does it work? Oh yes. I sent a song to the missus and watched as she played it – and her expression went from “huh?” slowly to “aaaahhh…” (in a good way) in 20 seconds. It’s brilliant, and compared to the money people readily burn on ringtones, not bad value either. The next best thing to sending Tommy Blaize [...]