Technology Category

Got a Freeview recorder made by DigiFusion, Inverto, Sony or Thomson? You may find that you’ve lost your 14 day programme guide.

Some boxes from the manufacturers listed made use of the 14 day EPG known at 4TV – a service supplied by a company called InView. It seems that the contract between InView and the manufacturers has expired and the 4TV service is no longer being transmitted.

So, where does that leave customers? Those with an affected box will now find that they are no longer getting anything other than the “now and next” information, effectively rendering their hard-disk recorder barely usable. Yo record a programme in the future, the user will have to enter the start time and date manually referring to some other form of TV guide (remember them?)

If you have an affected box, you might like to sign the petition to get 4TV restored, or add your comment here.

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?

It crashes our devices, it’s a security risk, it eats batteries, it’s slow, it’s closed to third-parties, it’s poor on touch-screen devices, and it’s not needed. That’s why iPhone users won’t be seeing Adobe’s Flash on their hardware any time soon, according to Apple.

For months, there’s been some ping-ponging between Adobe and Apple about the possibility of adding support for Flash to the iPhone, notably for the web browsing experience, where users will see only a placeholder when they hit a site that has some Flash content.

Apple boss Steve Jobs has just gone public with a full written reason why Flash is not suited to the iPhone platform, and it’s well worth a read. If you’re wondering why you can’t Flash on an iPhone, read “Thought on Flash“, posted yesterday on Apple’s site.

It’ll be interesting to see how Adobe responds to this tell-it-like-it is approach from Mr Jobs – We’re wondering if they’ll reply in the form of a Flash video that can’t be read by iPhoners. Watch this CyberSpace.

Any thoughts? Comments appreciated for our next tech podcast!

3D TV in the home is now a reality. For £1,800, you can now own a 40 inch HD TV that supports 3D.

In the race to bring out the first 3D-Ready TV, it seems that Samsung was the winner in the UK, releasing the Samsung UE40C7000 40 inch 3D Ready TV a few days back.

It’s am impressive-looking TV set, and it’s also very capable.

These TV sets use LED technology – LED lights use less energy than standard LCD, and offer more precise control of colour, contrast and clarity. The UE40C7000 has a built-in Freeview HD tuner, supports SRS Theatre Sound, offers full 1080p HD, supports streaming video (DLNA) and has Internet connectivity.

At the moment, this TV set is only available from John Lewis (online or instore). Link: Samsung 3D TV at John Lewis

Here’s Samsung’s new 3D TV commercial:

This first HD TV from Samsung uses Active Shutter technology – the 3D glasses switch on and off 50 times per second to create the 3D illusion, although you might want to check out the 3D Usage Notice issued by Samsung recently, which warns about possible side effects including seizures, strokes, altered vision ,muscle twitching, confusion, motion sickness, disorientation, eye strain and something called ‘decreased postural stability’.

3D TV is finally available for the home, it seems. Let us know your views on 3D, and we’ll cover the subject in more detail in an upcoming FrequencyCast podcast.

Looks like a bad week for anti-virus firm McAfee. On Wednesday the 21st, the released a virus definitions file that wrongly detected a Windows XP system file, svchost.exe, as a virus.

The result, thousands of PCs around the world crippled – either constantly rebooting, or failing to connect to a network. The company has issued an apology and a fix, but has a large portion of egg on its face, and taken a serious credibility hit.

Today, we’re hearing of a new problem, and it’s hit one of the FrequencyCast PCs.

Our copy of McAfee Total Protection updated itself this afternoon, and now displays the following:

“Your computer is at risk. Please check your status to you can address any security issues to keep your PC protected. To stay protected, make sure Real-time Scanning and Firewall are on, and that your subscription is active and up to date.”

The message has a “Check Status” and “Close” button, neither of which work.

Going into the Internet Security app the long way round identifies the problem with:

“Your Computer Is At Risk. Real-Time Scanning is Off”

Enabling Real Time Scanning with the “Turn on” button enables the scanner for two seconds, and then you’re back in “At Risk” again.

Trying to start the service manually returns: “Could not start the McAfee Real-time Scanner service on Local Computer. Error 2: The system cannot find the file specified”

Checking the McAfee forum reveals that others have been hit too, and at the time of writing, there doesn’t appear to be a fix.

If you’ve been affected, or if you know a fix, please comment in the box below. We may feature some of your McAfee comments in our upcoming Tech podcast…

If you caught our Gadget Show Live special released a few days ago, you may have heard us talking about EnigmaTAG.

We’ve now had a chance to give this impressive technology a try. If you’ve ever lost, or being worried about losing, one of your precious bits of tech, then you need to consider EnigmaTAG.

Essentially, you apply a dot of the magic liquid, and that item is marked with a unique code that can be read under UV light by the police. The micro-particles contain a code that’s linked to the UK Immobilise database, so if your lost or stolen device is recovered, the police can reunite your kit.

To see how this works, and to find out more, see our full review of EnigmaTAG.

Want £5 off? FrequencyCast listeners can use the following code at the checkout: EGSL15 for a limited time if you order online at www.enigmatag.com

As gadget-lovers will know, there’s a huge gadget show taking place now at the NEC in Birmingham. Our listeners asked us to attend, and so we did.

Our Carl and Pete were at Gadget Show Live yesterday (Thursday the 8th April), and we’ve been able to put together our review of the show in record time. Gadget Show Live runs until Sunday the 11th, but tickets are sadly sold out.

If you want to hear what we thought of the show, and details of some of the hot products on offer, take a listen to our 30 minute Special Report.

You can download the Special Report to your MP3 player, or listen online at www.frequencycast.co.uk/gadget2010

If you’ve been to the show, we’d love to know your thoughts. We hope you find our Gadget Show Special Report of interest!

 Gadget Show Live Audio Report [29:47m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Do you Joggle?

You may recall the TV ads for the o2 Joggler screened last year? Or our podcast coverage of this device? At the time, o2′s home communication device carried a £149 price tag.

o2′s shocked us by slashing this down to under £50, which now makes the Joggler hard to ignore for that price.

What does it do? How’s this:

• Internet Radio
• JPG photo frame
• MP3 and video player
• Shared online diary
• Live travel news, weather, news and  sport
• Games
• Audio streaming
• SMS text messaging
• … with more apps on the way soon via the new App Store.

All this from a full-colour, wireless touch-screen device that has a USB slot for expansion.

We’re not sure how long o2 will be able to offer this device at under £50, but it won’t be for long.

For more on the Joggler, check out our review in Show 41… or to get one, go to shop.o2.co.uk/joggler before the half-price offer ends.

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!

Got a car and a smartphone? Your country needs you!

We’ve been trying out a rather nifty little application that has some serious potential… that’s if enough people get involved.

Waze is a social navigation application that’s available for a range of GPS-enabled smartphones including the iPhone, Android phones, Windows Mobile and Symbian OS devices.

Rather than your standard sat-nav app where you drive from A to B on a specified route, drive with this app, and the data gathered goes to build an accurate map of roads, junctions and average speeds. If you see a jam or a traffic cam, press a couple of buttons, and other drivers can see what’s going on in real-time.

A great idea, and it’s working well in the US, but over here, the road coverage is pretty thin. You can pick up points for “munching” your local roads, adding to the map and picking up bonus cupcakes… you have to try it to experience the full Waze proposition.

FrequencyCast is doing its bit – three of our team have the Waze app installed and have already added over 80 miles of new roads… and we’re urging our loyal listeners to get involved.

Get the app from your phone’s App Store (iPhone users: Waze in iTunes)

Come on gang… get driving!

Carl and Pete were out and about this weekend at the Dabs.com Live Gadget and IT Show.

The show took place in the Great Hall at Wembley Stadium,and was showcasing a number of new products and gadgets.

We took our roving mic with us, and recorded a few interviews with some of the key players at the show. Our thirty minute review of the show is now available online for your listening pleasure.

For pics of the show and transcripts of our interviews, and to listen to our Dabs Gadget Show Special, go to:

www.frequencycast.co.uk/dabsshow.html.

If you have an iPod or iPhone, download and listen via iTunes: FrequencyCast on iTunes.

 FrequencyCast Dabs.com Show Special March 2010 [31:27m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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?

The iPad is out. We’ve been listening to a flaky audio stream live from Apple’s Keynote speech to find out what’s new, and here’s what we can report:

The iPad:

It’s a 9.7 inch touchscreen tablet – think of it as an iPhone that’s two and a half times larger. It has a 10 hour battery life, comes in 16, 32 and 64 Gig versions and is wi-fi enabled – a 3G version will also be available. Price for the iPad starts from $499 in the US (converts to £310). An iBooks (eBook Reader app and store) will be available, as will iWork (Apple’s new wordprocessing, spreadsheet and presentations applications). It’ll run existing iPhone apps. Looks like this will be available in the UK sometime from June onwards…

Other Stuff?

Many were expecting an announcement of a new iPhone OS, expected to be iPhone OS4. Sadly, nothing.

Our thoughts

Looks like a nice piece of kit, and it’s bound to be a hit with many. A little larger than we were expecting, but thin and sexy, as with all of Apple’s stuff.

Interesting to see Apple’s dipping into the eBook market, and their iBooks store could be a big hit, as Apple’s bound to make book purchase as easy as App store. Also, with the Apple iPad being available for $499 for a colour touch screen, Sony Reader and Kindle will have a struggle competing.

It’s going to be available in the US “in 60 days”. The 3G element will mean it’ll be several months before we see these in the UK.

Thoughts?

Vodafone has just relaunched their “Access Gateway” product as “Vodafone Sure Signal”… but what is it?

Well, it’s something called a Femtocell.

No clearer? Thought not. It’s actually a little box that you plug into your broadband router, and what it does is clever. For those living in a valley, basement, mine shaft, or miles from a mobile phone cell tower, a Femtocell acts as your own mobile phone base station, allowing you to make and receive calls on your mobile, as well as surf the mobile web. It works by using your Broadband connection to relay 3G connectivity to Vodafone, ending the reliance on a radio signal from a local mast.

As well as rebranding the service, Vodafone Sure Signal now has an attractive price point. A one-off £50 for the box if you spend £25 a month with Voda, otherwise a one-off £120 a month. Or you can opt for a less attractive £5 month contract.

Vodafone is the only UK provider offering a Femtocell at the moment, meaning that Voda may be able to grab a slice of the miles-from-anywhere market before the other net ops catch up.

Here’s a short video clip showing how Femtocells work:

More details: vodafone.co.uk/suresignal

Let us know if you’d be interested in a review…

Britain’s in the grip of some lovely weather at the moment, isn’t she? Snow and ice… record low temperatures, having to import grit and rocksalt from Egypt to keep our roads running? Madness!

Well, as it’s too cold to go out and play today, one of our team has taken the time to write a review of his home weather station – not surprisingly, it’s reporting that it’s pigging cold outside at the moment.

If this cold snap has piqued your interest in how the weather works, whether a band of low pressure coming in from the East requires you to wrap up warm, or you have a dying urge to collate data on what’s happening in your back garden… consider getting yourself a weather station. The basic ones will set you back little more than £15, or you can get a flashy PC-based solution for £100.

Interested? See our brand new Weather Stations page for the full story to warm your cockles…

In Show 45, we took a quick look at the Olympus LS-11, pictured here. This is a high-spec recording device that can record high-quality stereo audio on the move.

As we only had a few minutes in the show to cover this impressive bit of kit, we’ve put together one of our special “Unofficial Guides”, where we go out and about with the recorder capturing sounds and exploring what the LS-11 can do.

Carl and Pete had lots of fun playing with this recorder, and it gave Carl a chance to show off that he does actually know something that Pete doesn’t (which makes a change). have a listen to hear something of a role-reversal for our on-air duo.

The show lasts a little over 18 minutes, and can be downloaded now as an MP3 podcast.

Photos of the LS-11, a detailed review, and the original, uncompressed sounds, can be found at www.frequencycast.co.uk/olympusrecorders.html

 FrequencyCast Olympus LS-11 Unofficial Guide [18:41m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

At last – barcode scanning on a mobile phone that actually works. Despite some glowing reviews for the application RedLaser on iTunes, I must admit our hopes weren’t high.

We’ve tried barcode scanning apps for mobiles in the past, notably on Nokia Series 60 handsets, and the results have been dreadful – lots of faffing about to get the phone’s camera to capture the image of the barcode, then a wait while the code was decoded and sent to a database, followed by a “nothing found” type message.

Given that our iPhone 3G doesn’t have a flash or auto-focussing camera, we expected the results to be dreadful…

But it’s not! This is an amazingly well done application. Even without auto-focus, the app is able to get a pretty quick and accurate result. Here’s a shot of Pete scanning in a book’s barcode (and failing to scan his feet)…

It captures UPC, EAN and UPC-E barcodes (no, we didn’t know either), and then look up the prices on Amazon (UK, US, DE, etc) as well as via Google Product Search.

Practical upshot – when you’re out shopping, pick up something you’re considering purchasing, say a book or DVD, scan it, and 5 seconds later, you’ll see how much cheaper the product is online.

Searches are saved for later viewing, or you can order direct from your iPhone browser. We tried it on all sorts of things – books, DVDs, water filters, teabag boxes, Maltesers and a top end over recorder that we’ll be reviewing in a future show – all with positive results.

Yup – we’re impressed. This is one of those must-have apps for the iPhone, and could save you a fortune when shopping.

Update: RedLaser featured in our 15 Oct Audio Update. Transcript available

RedLaser, from Occipital, available for the iPhone, now out, and hot, on iTunes.

On Monday 19th October, the Kindle hits the UK.

If you’re not in the know, the Kindle is Amazon’s eBook Reader. It’s been big news in the US, and until now has not been available here in the UK.

Things have opened up, and it’s now possible to get a Kindle direct from Amazon – But it’s Amazon.com, not Amazon.co.uk

So, how does the Kindle differ from other eBook readers, such as the Sony Reader that we reviewed last year? Well, it’s a connected device, using 3G to get new books and newspapers (no need to hook up to a PC). It also has a keyboard, and buying books from the Amazon store is a lot easier than the Sony purchase route.

The Kindle has a mobile phone chip inside (to allow you to get books on the move), but there’s no monthly fee or data costs – just the purchase price of the Kindle, and books (more expensive in the UK than the US, sadly). You can also get UK and US papers on a Kindle.

Including import and delivery, it’ll cost £216 to get a Kindle here in the UK. For the full SP on the International Kindle, go to www.amazon.com.

To fight back, Waterstones has recently dropped the price of their Sony Reader collection.

More details on the Amazon Kindle on Amazon.com’s Kindle site.

Got an iPhone? Turn it into a Sat Nav for £27.

If you listen to Show 43, you’ll have heard us review the Co-Pilot Live satellite navigation application, comparing it with the TomTom and Mobile Navigator applications. CoPilot came out very well, especially given it’s half the price of the TomTom equivalent.

In our review, we had two issues with the CoPilot – the lack of speed cameras and the fact that it lost your route if you answered an incoming voice call.

Good news is… a free update has been released to address this. Well done to the team at ALK Technologies.

CoPilot, is now available from the App Store. Click the icon to open iTunes on the Co-Pilot Live page:

For a comparison of the three iPhone Sat Nat apps, see the FileSaveAs iPhone Satnav Apps Compared page.

Here at FrequencyCast, we’ve been playing with the new iTunes 9 released yesterday, and it seems that one of the key features for podcast listeners has vanished. The list of podcast categories no longer appears on the main iTunes Podcast page.

The new iTunes interface makes it easy to select from the top podcasts and editors picks, but not so easy to browse by category, as you could do with iTunes 8.

Here’s how it used to look on iTunes 8…

Podcast Categories from iTunes 8, mising in iTunes 9

… and here’s how you get to the Podcast Categories in iTunes 9 – Hover over the end of the word Podcast, and a tiny white arrow appears. Click the arrow and a pop-up menu appears…

Podcast Categories now hidden in iTunes 9

Which do you feel is easier and more intuative?

By the way, if you’ve not signed up to our UK TV and Tech podcast, and now can’t find us – here’s the direct link: FrequencyCast on iTunes