Random Stuff Category

Here’s something rather nifty… the opportunity to try on a watch and see what it looks like, in the virtual world.

Watch makers Tissot have launched a virtual shop window at London’s Selfridges, where you can use augmented reality to try on one of their watches. You can even try it at home. A novel idea.

No idea what we’re talking about? This video clip explains all…

Could interactive shop windows, and augmented reality home demos be the way forward for retail shopping?

The wait is almost over – Sky 1 tonight broadcast the last-but-one episode of Lost, and the ends are finally being tied up.

Here at FrequencyCast, opinions are mixed. Our Carl’s given up on Lost – he gave up around the hatch era. Pete’s still hanging in there, although he reports a headache.

After 6 years and 121  episodes, the finale’s just a couple of days away now – and it’s a mammoth 2 hour special. Typically the UK is a few days behind the US, but as a first, the final episode will be simulcast as it goes out in the US.

Serious Lost fans need to set an alarm for 5am on Monday 24 May. If you don’t fancy an early start – either Sky+ it, or watch the finale on Tuesday 25 May at 9pm.

So – How many of our listeners are following Lost? anyone planning an early start on Monday?

You have to laugh, don’t you?

There’s us, banging on in Show 47 about the importance of backing up your data, and this week, we lost a vital file.

The file in question was actually a transcript of the latest show, Show 50, kindly created by the team at Typing Angels. Foolishly, our Pete deleted the email with the transcript, and later, during some housekeeping, emptied the Recycle Bin.

Fortunately, each night, we take two backups of important files such as our Inbox. One copied to an external drive, and one backed-up to an online backup service (We use PCFort)

Irritating, the local backup is set to overwrite the previous day’s file at midnight, so when we came to look to the missing transcription, as it was deleted over a day ago, our local backup didn’t have the file either.

So, we turned to our online backup – which is set to keep the last three versions of backed-up files. The PCFort backup service sends us an email every day to confirm that the overnight backup worked, or reporting errors if it didn’t. We logged on to the backup service, found a copy of the Outlook file that should have contained the attachment we were looking for, and hit “Restore”. As our Inbox isn’t small, it took several minutes to download and decrypt… before reporting a problem decompressing the file.

After some faffing, we got onto PCFort support, whose support chappie told us:

“I have had a look and the backup for the 29th ran out of time prior to completion. As the .pst file was split into smaller pieces for upload the second part did not get uploaded. As the restore is expecting 2 parts that is why it is not restoring.”

Practical upshot – although the file shows as available to recover, does not appear in the “Failed Backup” section, and didn’t generate an error message of any kind… the file is unrecoverable.

The backed-up file, looking good to go

The lesson here – even if you think you’re doing the right thing – your backups may be less use than you think, and if you use PCFort, you may not actually be able to recover files that you’ve backed up.

Lesson learnt?

We’ve switched online backup providers (again), and we’re glad we did. Now, we’re using Acronis Online Backup. They offer 250GB of online storage, you can back up up to 5 PCs, multiple versions of files can be stored away, you can access your files from any PC, and it’s all secured using a personal encryption key of your choosing. Oh, and it’s under £40.

If you want to give Acronis a try, there’s a free trial available from www.acronis.co.uk/homecomputing

As a reminder, there’s lots of discussion of backups and ways to keep your data safe back in Show 47. And if you want to read the missing Show 50 transcript, it’s here: mp3 extras (thanks to Typing Angels who manage to keep things safer than we can!)

Happy Easter all!

Over the last 24 hours, Google has completed a major rollout of new Google Maps Street View data.

When the service launched in 2009, only roads in major cities were covered, but in today’s update, it seems that around 95 per cent of homes across England, Ireland, Scotland and Wales are now covered in high resolution. Apparently a quarter of a million UK roads are now covered.

The launch of the service last year raised a number of privacy concerns, and with this new data appearing, we can expect the second wave of this, as people see faces where they shouldn’t be, un-blurred car number plates, and people doing daft things.

Take a look at maps.google.co.uk – enter a UK address or postcode to see what was captured when the Google camera van visited your road. Drag the little orange person onto your target location and have a look around.

Found something funny? Let us know?

We’re after some listener help. We’re planning a feature on MP3 Players in an upcoming FrequencyCast show, and we’ve put together a short survey to get some opinions and stats.

Got two minutes to answer some MP3 player questions?

Fill in the survey at www.frequencycast.co.uk/limesurvey/index.php?sid=61754

Thanks in advance!

Trekkies of the world are about to unite as the Massive Multiplayer game “Star Trek Online” is about to go live.

The game officially launches on Tuesday the 2nd of February, but many Trek fans have been able to get early access to the online Trek Universe through a successful public beta and a “headsup” weekend for those who pre-ordered the game.

Our Pete has been exploring Star Trek Online for a few days now, and has been impressed:

“The game cleverly mixes first-person shoot-em up with role-playing and space battles for an immersive experience. I’ve seen a few glitches and stutters during gameplay, with will hopefully get ironed out along the way. First impressions are that this is a well-thought out online experience, and very immersive. All trekkers are advised to pick up a phaser and beam over to STO”

Star Trek Online allows you to create your own avatar (many races available), and after a few training missions, take control of a starship of your choosing. The levels (a.k.a. Episodes) seem pretty true to what we know of the Star Trek universe, and there are a few familiar voices that you’ll encounter along the way.

Pictured here is Pete’s rather heroic-looking avatar, and if you’re already signed up, you can find Ensign Pete on the aptly-named USS FrequencyCast.

You can get the new Star Trek Online from Game or HMV online – Note that a monthly subscription applies.

Well, dear listeners, we’ve been playing around with stats this evening and we thought you might be interested in a little information about who else is listening to our tech podcast.

Seems the average listener is between 35 and 44, a bit of a techie, running iTunes, using Internet Explorer on a Windows PC with nothing better to do at 7pm.

Sound familiar?

Fancy exploring some stats? See our FrequencyCast podcast stats page

Well, that’s the claim of our show’s presenter Carl in our latest update.

To hear the full discussion, or read the transcript, go to www.frequencycast.co.uk/pc_or_mac.html

We’re running a short survey to find out if you’re happy with the way we talk to you.

Got a minute? Please answer our questions at http://www.frequencycast.co.uk/limesurvey/index.php?sid=25112&lang=en

Do you want to be a record breaker? Share the gadget love this festive season by taking part in the Global Secret Santa.

Secret Santa is the tradition of swapping gifts anonymously amongst groups of friends or workmates. Those guys and gals at Firebox.com are attempting to get into the Guiness Book of records by creating the largest Secret Santa. Here’s how it works:

Go to the special Global Secret Santa site, pick a gadget gift from the section on offer, and write a quick message. Firebox will send your gift to a random person somewhere in the world, and you’ll get a mystery gadget from someone else in return. It’s a bit of fun, and you’ll get a gadget for your trouble.

All of the team at FrequencyCast HQ have joined in – so some lucky tech lovers out there will find a gift and a message from FrequencyCast.

Join in too, and share the gadget love at globalsecretsanta.com

American comedy TV series WKRP in Cincinnati is finally available in the UK.

If you’re not familiar with the series, it was first shown in the late 1970s, and it’s a US sitcom based at a commercial AM radio station. The largely dysfunctional staff show how not to run a station – the first episode shows how the station switches from elevator music to Rock-n-Roll.

The crew includes Breakfast Jock the burnt-out Dr Johnny Fever, stunning receptionist Jennifer Marlow, vegetable-obsessed newsreader Les Nessman, Programme Director Andy Travis, salesman Herb Tarleck, plus the spineless boss, Arthur ‘Big-guy’ Carlson.

The show was shown here in the UK now and again in the 80s and 90s on ITV, but has not been available here for quite some time. DVD releases have been an issue due to copyright royalty issues arising from the show’s use of original rock and roll tracks.

WKRP Series 1 is now available in the UK, after a long wait by the series fans. It’s available for download from iTunes. The 22 episodes will cost you just over £20. Some music tracks have been edited or altered to overcome the copyright issues.

Thanks to listener and forum member Speedrite for letting us know.

In Show 41, we talked about the demise of Kodachrome. The massively popular film type has been around for the last 74 years, and in June, Eastman Kodak announced that with Kodachrome accounting for just one percent of total sales, production is about to cease.

After show 41 was released, we heard from John from johnsalimphotographic.co.uk in Southend, with a little bit more light-and-shade on this story…

First off: “Film is NOT dead. Kodachrome is a transparency ( slide ) film that’s been around in different guises since 1935. It uses a phenomenally difficult process ( called K-14 ) to develop the ‘multi-layered B&W film’ into colour positive transparencies. The trouble is, people think it’s the only slide film out there – it isn’t.

The world standard slide process is E-6, and there are maybe 30 or 40 film types in different sizes available for this process.

The obvious problem with Kodachrome is the processing involved. Kodak shut down their last K-14 lab in 2006 and handed over all K-14 processing to Dwayne’s Photo Lab in the USA – this is the ONLY lab on Earth to still process K-14′s.

So, what for photographers? Well most slide film users switched to E-6 many years ago because of the improved film stocks available and the way faster processing times with many labs offering the service, and not having to wait for Kodak to forward your films to Dwayne’s then on return, post them back.

Bottom line is, Kodachrome has lasted a very long time and like the original Technicolor process with it’s own ‘special look’, will pass into imaging history.

Thanks for that John – We read out your email in an audio update released on 13 July. Click the link below to list.

 FrequencyCast Update - 13 July 2009 [7:54m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

We’ve heard a rumour that the Gadget Show’s Jon Bentley may be a listener to our humble tech podcast. Could this be our first famous listener?

Jon – If you’re reading, we gave you a shout in Show 39. Get in touch and say “hi”?