Every so often I make a purchase that others seem bemused or laugh at, but which comes to prove invaluable in day to day life. Possibly one of the most notable of these was the TiVo which has turned out to be an superb little box of tricks.

There appears to be a pattern with my discoveries, they tend to come from the states where they are very successful, but when launched over here in good old Blighty they receive little advertising and don't sell well, being eventually pulled from the limited space on store shelves they managed to muscle in on. And so it is with my Roomba robotic vacuum from iRobot.

When I got mine just over a year ago I had to order it from a bloke in the US of A via eBay. People laughed, but when it arrived it proved to do an excellent job and has been an incredibly useful gadget ever since, the only down side being that it's so interesting to watch that each time I set it off I tend to spend a while watching it before pulling myself away to do something more useful.

My mum watched the Roomba (known as Robbie - or rather Roberta since it does a woman's work ;-) ) and wanted one. She has bad Arthritis so this was actually an ideal gadget for her since pushing an upright around or lugging a cylinder takes its toll. At the time Argos started selling them in their stores for £399, not cheap compared to the American price, but what can you do?

Now however Argos seems to have stopped selling them, and can you blame them, I doubt many people bought one. When have you ever seen an advert for these things on UK TV or in the papers? The sad fact is people just don't know what they are, all they see is a small vacuum cleaner at an extremely high price. For that money you want something the size of a small car, not a box less than 4 inches high! Hell, I wouldn't have looked twice if I hadn't known what it was.

So, like the TiVo it's possibly another missed opportunity, but then I guess the size of the market over here was never going to warrant too much attention from the parent companies.

At least the TiVo boys managed to get their technology in the Sky+ boxes, and we all know how the associated advertising has helped them fly off the shelves.

You can see videos of Robbie in action here:

  Hi-Res | Lo-Res

See how he avoids falling down the stairs. There's no wires there, it has under body sensors. By criss-crossing through rooms it gets most (if not all) of the floor covered, and if it does miss a bit it will probably get it the next time you set it off (the idea being you can set it off more often than you'd do the vacuuming manually since it takes up little of your time), or failing that you can target areas with the remote control.

My advice: if you get the chance, get one.

Many moons ago, before the days when OnDigital was born I had NTL cable TV installed in my old house. This was pretty good for a while but then I started loosing channels and eventually the whole box would pack up. This happened a few times, each time it took several days before an engineer was available to come out and "fix" the problem, then within an hour after them leaving the box would fail again.

After this had happened a few times I asked for a new box and was flatly refused one and told an engineer would come over to fix the problem. Since I'd come to the end of my minimum contract period by then I told them he could just come and take the box away.

NTL tried their best to convince me to stay but still wouldn't give me a new box. I'd also just bought a Widescreen TV, and since this was now the early days of digital TV, my cable box was still sending the analogue TV channels so I wasn't able to get the widescreen broadcasts I'd paid extra for the TV to receive. The best NTL could tell me was that they were trialling digital and it would be coming soon.

So I said goodbye to the cable TV.

A couple of weeks ago I was browsing through my current bill from NTL and noticed an item on there costing me £14 a month that I had forgotten about. This was the Talk Unlimited 24 option that basically gave me free calls to landlines. I doubt I actually make £14 worth of calls each month, so I thought I'd phone up and cancel this. I then completely forgot about it.

Last week I noticed NTL are offering a free cable TV package when you take a phone line, and since I already have the phone I thought I'd give it a punt, so I called them up and took the Talk Unlimited option off, then I went through to the sales team to talk about getting the cable TV.

Why should I want cable TV when I've got more Freeview tuners than you can shake a stick at? Well the area I live in isn't officially covered by a digital TV service so I had to get a massive aerial installed in the roof to pick up signals from the Sudbury transmitter which is miles away. As a result I occasionally get interference with the channels, so I figured for free the Cable TV would at least give me an option when this happens.

While talking to the sales girl I mentioned I was also looking at the next pack up, the Select Pack being advertised for £5.99 a month and offering a few extra channels such as Sky One and UK Gold (the only channels I actually missed when moving to OnDigital from Cable originally). She mentioned that the free package would cost £25 installation, but the select pack would be installed for free and would actually only cost me an additional £1 a month (actually she took ages to describe this in such a way that it would confuse me and sound like a good deal if I were having doubts - fortunately I had already worked out the vitals before she broke into the pitch and decided to go for it, but it wastes her time more than mine so I don't care).

So next Friday I have an engineer coming over to install my cable TV, and I'm still paying £13 a month less than I have been.

The moral of this story, check your bills every so often to see what you're paying for that you don't need or what you could get for free in addition.

Next I'll be attempting to change my Gas and Electricity suppliers, just don't get me started on what happened last time I tried this...

When CDs were being touted many years ago they were sold with the promise that the new format was so easy to produce and would result in fewer breakages, etc. which would lead to music becoming cheaper than the alternative vinyl and cassette formats... and we all bought into it, literally.

Twenty five years on and the price of CDs is lower now than it was ten or even fifteen years ago in many cases, but this is a recent phenomenon for new release music bought on mainly by the fear instilled in the record labels of illegally downloaded MP3 files. Sorry, that should read "To remain competitive with downloads"... ahem.

Anyway, I still buy CDs. Actually I still also buy Vinyl, but that's a different story, but it's still mainly CDs that find their way into my shopping basket. I do "own" several thousand MP3s, but these are virtually all ripped from the music collection I have amassed over the years. I only own one album I've actually purchased on MP3, a Jake Slazenger album I couldn't find on CD, downloaded from the WARP records web site Bleep. These tracks are sold without and form of DRM, but, in my opinion, are still quite expensive. These are the main reasons why I don't tend to buy MP3 files more often.

Why would I choose to pay £7.99 for an album on MP3 that is poisoned with DRM when for the same price (possibly one pound more) I can usually get the same album on CD with the associated artwork, that will play around my house, and with a tool such as Easy CD-DA Extractor I can usually convert to MP3 and transfer to all my players in the house.

With recent news, however, I now find myself toying with the idea of paying for MP3 files on a regular basis. "What could lead me to such madness" you could well ask, well the introduction of a music store big in the US to our very shores, emusic

Avid readers will already know that I'm on the Rock n' Roll at the moment (= dole = out of work), and therefore I need to be extra careful with my finances right now. Even so, I'm still considering signing up in the next day or two. If I were working right now I'd do it without a second thought.

emusic run on a subscription basis, you subscribe to a certain plan each month, which allows you to download a certain number of MP3 files for that month. Additional files can also be purchased should you want to exceed your monthly limit.

The killer feature for this service is the fact that the files are in no way blighted by DRM, essentially if you cancel your contract you can still keep the music! Awesome!

Finally I think we've found a revenue model that is sensible. The music is kept cheap, and I can do with the files as I please (within the obvious legal constraints). For the first time I can actually see digital distribution having a future and being done properly.

 

No doubt I'll sign up soon and let you know how I get on.

I've just stumbled across and installed a tool that allows blog entries on Windows Live Spaces (and other bloggers too) to be created locally on the PC with spell checking (Yipee!), additional formatting such as apparently allowing pictures to be inserted mid text, as shown.

It's kind of like a (very) cut down version of Microsoft word and is called Windows Live Writer. The beta is available for download, more details can be found at: http://windowslivewriter.spaces.live.com/ (I guess you'd expect that team to run a blog really).

It even allows you to add MS Virtual Earth maps to your posting, below is a map of my old secondary school in Wootton Bassett:

 Well I guess it will help Jazz things up a little.

Anyway, I though at least a couple of people who read this blog may find this interesting. Apologies to the rest of you.

Am I the only person who doesn't give a damn when Tony Blair is stepping down? I never voted for him anyway. Come to think of it, I didn't vote for anyone in the last couple of elections.

Now I know that's going to upset a few people out there who'll be saying "People died to earn you the right to vote".

Yes and no.

People (arguably) died to give me the right to vote, but more importantly I believe they gave me the CHOICE of voting or not.

I'm not going to vote for anyone if I believe none of those standing represent my views, surely that would be worse wouldn't it? Do you seriously want me to vote for somebody whom I don't agree with? Perhaps secretly you're hoping I'll vote for whom you voted for, but what if my vote counted against yours? That's all part of the "game", but I'm sure you'd rather my 'throw-away' vote didn't negate your opinions that you may hold dear?

No, I think it's better I stand back and watch until there's something or somebody worth voting for. Just because I'm not voting, it doesn't mean I'm not watching.

Oh, and if you think I should be forced to vote perhaps you should stand back and take a look at yourself. It may be your belief that this would be a responsible and sensibly approach to combating voter apathy, but it sounds like something a whole lot more sinister to me. At the end of the day that would be forcing your beliefs onto me, and theres a word for that you know (actually several).

I could even go to the polls and show my despair by spopiling my ballot paper, but I don't believe this would achieve much more than wasting my time and that of those doing the counting. I've almost done it a couple of times, but on thinking about it realised it would probably be more productive watching paint dry.

Perhaps I should stand to represent my views and possibly those of some of the other silent (and indeed voting) massive? I don't think so, despite many politicians seemingly doing their best to portray politics as a part time "career", I'm sure it's actually extremely hard to do effectively and with the effort and care it deserves.

I also believe that most politicians went into it to make the world a better place, regardless of if some of them fall foul to the temptations laid before them along the way.

So for the time being I’ll rest on my laurels and let those with a stronger opinion than me shape the country. It might not be in the shape I want it, but for the most part it’s no worse than I would do myself.

Well, John is forever mentioning Last FM on his blog ( http://longthorne.spaces.live.com/ ) so I thought I’d have a look to see what all the fuss is about and made me way over to http://www.lastfm.com

At first I have to admit I wasn’t overly impressed, listening to a couple of tracks from the web site only played the usual short snippet, not exactly what I’d call useful. However, where I’d normally walk away at this point I decided to register this time, after all, I can’t imagine John raving over thirty second music clips.

Registration was painless enough, but I was instructed to download and install some software before finishing. I live in constant fear of DRM being installed on my machine (and debacles such as the Sony/BMG farce don’t really help my confidence here – in fact the only MP3s I have ever purchased were from WARP ( http://www.bleep.com ) who keep their tracks DRM free. As they say, “we like to treat our customers as customers, not criminals”), anyway, the software claimed to be under the GNU licence (meaning that everyone is free to inspect the source code) so I figured it shouldn’t be up to anything underhand and continued with the installation.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, I’m now able to listen to full tracks (full albums) for free, and despite the occasional interruption the quality is plenty good enough for me.

Navigation around the site and locating tracks to play will take a little getting used to (I’m being kind here), but otherwise my first hour of testing seems to show this is indeed a good site and well worth registering with.

I’ll let you know if my opinion changes.

Oh yes, thanks John!